Episoder
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Every job is a climate job, or at least can be transformed into one. Few people exemplify this better than Lisa Pak, who gradually transformed her role as user acquisition manager at mobile games giant Wooga until she was the head of operations at Playing for the Planet.
In this episode, Clayton talks to Lisa about her journey and how to empower all the passionate individuals working within large organizations that are still too often moving too slowly on climate and the environment. How do we build the alliances that accelerate change and move mountains?
Also stick around for an update on Playing for the Planet projects like the ongoing Green Game Jam and their new carbon calculator for games companies.
Learn more about Playing for the Planet here: https://www.playing4theplanet.org/
Subscribe to the P4P newsletter here: https://playing4theplanet.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=5f3611da422a19cc72e366960&id=f4c7c53e14
And as always, find the IGDA Climate SIG here: https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq
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Professor A.R. Siders, Director of the Climate Change Science and Policy Hub at the University of Delaware, is the teacher of climate adaptation policy and climate fiction who this year found herself organizing a climate game jam.
Clayton called her up to discuss how games can help make the future concrete enough that we can plan for it, what it means to set up an academic game jam and how games can be judged not just on their reach and appeal, but how well they teach their subject matter.
Since this recording, the game jam winners have been announced and can be found here:
https://itch.io/jam/climate-change-game-jam
You can find more of A.R.'s research here:
https://www.udel.edu/faculty-staff/experts/ar-siders/
And as always, here is the IGDA Climate SIG:
https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq
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Manglende episoder?
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Friend of the podcast Trevin York and his colleagues have interviewed dozens of game studios across the world grappling with a wide variety of climate-focused game designs. We grill him about the findings; what obstacles are we facing out there in the wild, how can we overcome them, and what seems to be working?
Read the full report, titled Gaming for Climate Action, here:
https://onebillionresilient.org/gaming-climate-action-strategy-guide/
Trevin also called out Yale and Unity's study on gamer environmental attitudes, which you can find here: https://blog.unity.com/games/what-do-gamers-think-about-global-warming
And as always, dive into the IGDA Climate SIG here: https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq
For more from Trevin, visit https://www.trevinyork.com/
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Clayton sits down with Dr Patrick Prax of Uppsala University to soak up his deep critical thinking about the systemic causes of and solutions to unsustainable practices in the games industry. Why aren't things moving faster? Who (or WHAT) is pushing in the other direction? What does it take to affect change not just to a game, a player base, a company, but an entire industry?
LINKS:
The Story of Stuff: https://www.youtube.com/@StoryofStuff
IGDA Climate SIG: https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq
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Clayton goes on a design deep dive with green game evangelist Andrew Brennwald, game director of up-and-coming foraging sim Out and About. Tracing the winding path that led him to that position, they explore a rewilding awakening, the exhilarating leap of starting up a green game studio, and the many joys and challenges of designing a game inspired by nature - one that can in turn inspire players to imagine a future worth fighting for.
References:
The Lakes with Simon Reeve: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16091378/
Yaldi Games: https://www.yaldigames.com
Out and About: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1671570/Out_and_About/
IGDA Climate SIG: https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq
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In the first episode of our new season, we discuss climate resilience and how games can help prepare the world for what's to come. Clayton is joined by Shayne Hayes: newly elected co-chair of the IGDA Climate SIG and Associate Director of the Video Game Initiative at the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock).
This episode was brought to you by our host: Clayton Whittle, our producer: Hugo Bille, and our podcast editor: Sabrina Fedele. Invitation to the IGDA Climate SIG: https://www.igdaclimatesig.org/take-action
Learn more about Shayne Hayes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shayne-hayes/
The Environmental Game Design Playbook can be found here.
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BONUS EPISODE: In this quick-fire episode, Hugo digests the adventure that was last week's Green Games Summit by UKIE and Playing for the Planet, alongside fellow summitgoers and IGDA Climate SIG members Mélanie Christin and Trevin York. What were our biggest takeaways from the summit, what did it accomplish and where do we go from here?
Apologies for the sound quality in the beginning, it gets better after a few minutes!
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Ryan Boudinot is an author and technologist who has spent the COVID-19 pandemic diving deep into geospatial data and the ways it can be used to not just improve games, but to make game-playing improve the data, and the world itself. On this episode, he tells us all about this concept which he calls the World Integration Loop or WIL.
Ryan's startup website is here:
http://machinesanddreamland.com/As always, join the conversation with IGDA Climate:
https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq -
In this episode we catch up with leading ecocritic Alenda Chang to learn about how game worlds can be just as delightful and important as the action that takes place within them, and how deepening our simulation of worlds and ecosystems can help players reconnect with nature. After years of writing papers and books on how games portray ecology, last summer Alenda published an honest-to-goodness manifesto, and it is, well... rambunctious.
LINKS
The paper in question, Rambunctious Games: A Manifesto for Environmental Game Design, can be downloaded here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.2020.1765557Alenda co-edited this themed issue of Ecozon@ called Green Computer and Video Games which helped kickstart the study of environmental depictions in games. It's free online:
https://ecozona.eu/issue/view/124Read more of Alenda's excellent work in her book Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games or listen to her talk about it in this episode of Super Gamer Podcast:
https://supergamerpodcast.com/2020/03/30/new-super-gamer-podcast-6-our-virtual-natural-world-with-alenda-chang/The excellent interview with Frankie Myers of the Yurok Tribe on How to Save a Planet that I mentioned, can be found here:
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/5whko6o/the-tribe-thats-moving-earth-and-waterJoin the conversation, and help us build the design patterns database and other resources, in the IGDA Climate SIG discord:
https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq -
In this special episode we get all of the spokespeople for the new IGDA Climate SIG workstreams together in a virtual room spanning three continents. Arnaud Fayolle tells us how we can get involved in crafting and promoting the actions that will shape future game design in the Design Patterns workstream, Mark Videon gives us the lowdown on how to monitor you studios' carbon footprints in the Industry Benchmarking workstream, while Paula Escuadra plots how we use all this to take over the games industry in the Climate Councils workstream. Are we ready to get this party started? Actually, it was ending it that turned out to be the problem.
LINKS
The blog post chronicling the first months of the SIG and the workstreams is now live, along with an awesome video:
https://theclimatesig.medium.com/not-game-over-game-developers-tackle-the-climate-crisis-8fb2ae45674d
Confused about the workstreams? This is a neat illustration (followed by all the detail you could ever ask for):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tme06zzQybH9v3lRe-0RjrSsgVovHHqiGc6JLxYpbC0/(sorry future listeners, I imagine that link might be a bit stale)
Space Ape Games' carbon offsetting guide that Mark mentioned can be found here:
https://spaceapegames.com/green
Join the IGDA Climate SIG! Dive into the discord here:
https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq
Or get in touch here:
https://igda.org/sigs/climate/ -
Narrative game designer Inari Bourguenolle has been on an ecological journey ever since she first played Final Fantasy VII. Incidentally, our host Hugo Bille has recently obsessed quite a bit over the climate stories embedded in this classic game and especially its recent remake. Their conversation takes us to toxic masculinity, gender roles, individualism and the monomyth, and begins to grapple with how they all exacerbate the climate and environmental crises.
LINKS
Hugo's article, Those Who Fight Further: FF7 and the Climate Crisis, can be found on Gamasutra:
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HugoBille/20200917/369001/Those_Who_Fight_Further_FF7_and_the_Climate_Crisis.phpInari mentioned The Forge which was a community for tabletop RPG design overseen by designer Ron Edwards. It was active from 1999 to 2012
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.phpJoin the conversation in the IGDA Climate SIG. Hop in the discord:
https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq -
We kick off the new year with a conversation with Dr Dargan Frierson, an actual climate scientist, director of the EarthGames program and total rockstar. When we're not singing and dancing, we ask ourselves how games can promote climate justice, how we know if it's working and how scientific climate models can make themselves useful inside of games.
Visit EarthGames and play all their games here:
https://earthgames.org/Dargan mentions a "baby climate model" that you can tinker with in early prototype form here:
https://atmos.uw.edu/~dargan/EarthGamesUW/climatefuture/Climatefuture.htmlJoin the conversation in the IGDA Climate SIG discord:
https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq -
In the final episode of the year we come back to Dr Jackson Ryan and look more closely at his recent article researching the power use of our favorite Christmas presents, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series consoles. To do that we have enlisted the invaluable aid of Dr Ben Abraham! Together they begin to draw a portrait of how the gaming industry might move towards sustainability over the course of this generation.
LINKS:
Read Jackson's article on energy consumption in the new generation here:
https://www.cnet.com/features/ps5-xbox-series-x-and-the-climate-crisis-facing-next-gen-video-games/Jackson mentioned a self-regulatory initiative between the console makers on energy efficiency. Read more about that here:
https://www.eesc.europa.eu/resources/docs/games-consoles-self-regulatory-initiative.pdfAnd a final Christmas treat: Ben briefly mentioned Joshua Aslan and whole-heartledly recommends his PhD thesis for anyone wanting to dive deeper into the power draw of gaming: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/853729/
As always, check out the Game Devs For Future discord to get acquainted with the IGDA Climate SIG and hopefully find your place in the fight for a livable future.
https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq -
As a new generation of consoles begin their reign in the games industry, Hugo sits down with Jackson Ryan, science editor at CNET, to muse about the console cycle, its environmental impact and where we can go from here.
Jackson has just put out a new article on CNET where he tests the electricity use of the new machines. You can read all the juicy details here:
https://www.cnet.com/news/ps5-xbox-series-x-and-the-climate-crisis-facing-next-gen-video-games/Some other articles mentioned in this episode:
"The Environmental Footprint of a PlayStation4" by Lewis Gordon:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20985330/ps4-sony-playstation-environmental-impact-carbon-footprint-manufacturing-25-anniversary"Xbox, PS5 and the climate crisis: Next-gen video games could be worse for the planet" by Jackson Ryan:
https://www.cnet.com/news/xbox-ps5-and-the-climate-crisis-next-gen-video-games-could-be-worse-for-the-planet/"The first battery-free Game Boy wants to power a gaming revolution" by Jackson Ryan:
https://www.cnet.com/features/the-first-battery-free-game-boy-wants-to-power-a-gaming-revolution/And as always, please drop into the Game Devs For Future discord server to discuss the show and get involved with the IGDA Climate SIG:
https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq -
In this first episode, Hugo sits down with Paula Escuadra, co-chair of the newly formed IGDA Climate Special Interest Group, who tells the story of how the warring giants of the games industry came together to fight the climate crisis and how, finally, we can all be a part of the effort.
LINKS:
For more about the UN Playing For The Planet alliance, here's the website.
And for the IGDA Climate SIG, here's that website.
If you want to connect with other games industry people who are passionate about fighting the planetary crises, don't miss the Game Devs For Future discord server, which is also home to much of the SIG's activities.
And for a great primer on the youth movements changing the face of climate politics in the past two years and honestly setting the stage for initiatives like all of the above, here's the appropriate episode from awesome climate action podcast How To Save A Planet: The Green Wave.
