Skip to content

Exploring the hidden effects of the gaming industry on climate change

    Water everywhere, and all [circuit] boards have shrunk...
    enlarge / Water everywhere, and all [circuit] boards have shrunk…

    Getty Images | Aurich Lawson

    Amid the stresses of living on a warming planet, playing video games is an escape for billions of people. Whether you inhale mystical doodads in Kirby and the Forgotten Land or cruising through Guanajuato in Forza Horizon 5games provide a digital refuge that feeds our fundamental need to play.

    Unfortunately, the magnitude of climate change is such that we have to rethink almost every element of global society, including the gaming industry.

    Ben Abraham has thought long and hard about the need for that kind of change. Speaking to Ars, Abraham recalled how, as a teenager, the top floor of his parents’ split-level Australian home would become a grueling sauna thanks to a combination of the summer sun outside and a gaming PC (with cathode-ray tube monitor) heat inside.

    Today, Abraham links the memory of that heat-filled room to the future of games. His recent book, Digital games after climate changesummarizes years of research focused on the environmental impact of digital games and includes detailed estimates of the industry’s environmental footprint and suggestions on what the industry can do to reduce it.

    The scope of the problem

    In his book, Abraham analyzes the climate effects of the game industry, from development to consumption.
    enlarge / In his book, Abraham analyzes the climate effects of the game industry, from development to consumption.

    The true magnitude of climate change is beyond comprehension. To have the hope of staying below 2ºC of warming from pre-industrial levels, we need to reduce our CO2 emissions2 decades at nearly 10 percent per year — and probably even faster. It is the magnitude of climate change that, some say, makes us lose sight of solutions and often misunderstand what the real problem is.

    While comparisons between climate commitments and World War II are generally overused, the scale of both companies is comparable. As with World War II, meeting climate commitments may require rapid and near-universal land-use change and rationing of basic goods.

    Video games (and the hardware they’re played on) are closer to frivolous luxuries than basic commodities. And if we want to avoid talk of rationing those games for the “greater good” of climate change, individual action isn’t enough. It requires a holistic, sector-wide mobilization that recognizes the externalities of game creation and consumption.