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.
This story is from the July 2021 edition of Edge.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the July 2021 edition of Edge.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles
Anyone familiar with the concept of kitbashing is already halfway to understanding what Tomas Sala’s open-world builder is all about.
Children Of The Sun
René Rother’s acrid revenge thriller – an action game with its limbs broken and forcibly rearranged into the shape of a spatial puzzler – is at once a bonafide original and an unlikely throwback. Cast your eyes right and you wouldn’t blink if we told you this was a forgotten Grasshopper Manufacture game from the early PS3 era (we won’t be at all surprised if this finds a spot on Suda51’s end-of-year list).
Post Script
What does Rise Of The Ronin say for PS5 exclusivity?
Rise Of The Ronin
Falling in battle simply switches control to the next person up, and then quick revive fixes everything
Post Script
The pawn and the pandemic
Dragon's Dogma 2
The road from Vernworth to Bakbattahl is scenic but arduous. Ignore the dawdling mobs of goblins, and duck beneath the chanting harpies that circle on the currents overhead, and even moving at a hurried clip it is impossible for a party of four to complete the journey by nightfall.
BLUE MANCHU
How enforced early retirement eventually led Jonathan Chey back to System Shock
THE MAKING 0F.... AMERICAN ARCADIA
How a contrast of perspectives added extra layers to a side-scrolling platform game
COMING IN TO LAND
The creator of Spelunky, plus a super-group of indie developers, have spent the best part of a decade making 50 games. Has the journey been worth it?
VOID SOLS
This abstract indie Soulslike has some bright ideas