How Can Gaming Get Greener?

And are the UK industry’s attempts to tackle the climate crisis enough?

The climate crisis will affect all areas of our lives, whether that’s in the form of the changes we make to mitigate its worst effects, or in the consequences we’ll face for a lack of action. The way it impacts on our experience of videogames, and how it will reshape the industry, is one small part of that picture. The Green Games Guide, a resource produced by UK videogame trade body UKIE in collaboration with Games London and Playing For The Planet, is part of a nascent attempt to help the UK videogame industry do its part. The guide doesn’t pull any punches when laying out the threat that climate change poses and the scale of the challenge we face in addressing it. However, in an era when even fossil-fuel companies are keen to tout their environmental credentials as a means of “greenwashing” the impact of their industry, scepticism is healthy. Do the proposals made by the guide hold up to scrutiny?

The Green Games Guide focuses on voluntary actions game developers can take to mitigate their climate impact, pointing them towards tools they can use to calculate their carbon footprint and suggesting changes that can help reduce it. These include everything from commonsense suggestions – turning office heating down by one per cent, switching off PCs when not in use, moving to sustainable energy suppliers – to less common actions, such as looking into the efficiency and necessity of cloud storage and making game code more efficient by, for example, minimising the amount of processing power used by offscreen objects.