Examining the game industry’s hidden impacts on climate change

Amid the stress of living on a warming planet, playing video games is an escape for billions. Whether you're inhaling mystical doodads in Kirby and the Forgotten Land or cruising through Guanajuato in Forza Horizon 5, games offer a digital retreat that feeds our fundamental need to play. Unfortunately, the scope of climate change is such that we will need to rethink almost every element of global society—including the game industry. Ben Abraham has been thinking about the need for that kind of change for a long time. Speaking with 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) hemorrhaging heat inside. Today, Abraham links the memory of that heat-filled room to the future of games. His recent book, Digital Games After Climate Change, summarizes years of research focused on the environmental impact of digital games and includes detailed estimates of the industry’s carbon footprint and suggestions for what the industry can do to reduce it.

The scale of the problem

The true magnitude of climate change defies comprehension. To have a hope of staying under 2º C of warming over pre-industrial levels, we need to reduce our output of CO₂ by almost 10 percent every year for decades—and likely even faster. It's the very scope of climate change that, some believe, causes us to lose sight of solutions and often misunderstand what the real issue even is. While comparisons between climate commitments and World War II are generally overused, the scale of both undertakings is similar. As with World War II, meeting climate commitments could require quick and nearly universal changes in land use and rationing of basic goods. Video games (and the hardware on which they are played) are closer to frivolous luxuries than basic goods. And if we want to avoid any talk of rationing those games for the “greater good” of climate change, individual action isn’t enough. It will require a holistic, industry-wide mobilization that acknowledges the externalities of the creation and consumption of games.

Hidden conflict

Games have a lot of hidden, built-in carbon costs that tend to get lost in the playing. The powerful computing chips in game consoles, for instance, require an array of rare minerals and refined materials whose extraction can be tough on the environment and on human life. Abraham tested the PlayStation 4's APU, the chip that handles almost all of the console’s computing functions. After dissolving a piece of the chip in strong acid, he ran the result through equipment at the University of Technology, Sydney to analyze its chemical composition. He identified 17 elements that have deep connections to brutal, authoritarian regimes and conflict-heavy resource-based economies.

Abraham arranges those elements into a “Periodic Table of Torture,” an attempt to organize the problems with extracting those elements from the Earth in the same way Dmitri Mendeleev organized the original periodic table based on chemical interactions. Nickel, for example, one of the most abundant elements in the APU, is also the fifth-most-abundant element on the Earth as a whole. But it's available mainly in the planet’s core. Near the surface, where we can get to it, it can be about a hundred times more scarce. Because of that scarcity, it can take an enormous amount of power to produce a meager amount of usable metal. It takes more than a week of an average American’s personal energy use to equal the amount of power needed to refine one kilogram of nickel, and that refining releases sulfur dioxide, which can cause localized acidic rain. The viciously toxic heavy metal cadmium is also found deep in the heart of the PS4, likely used in doping silicon to enhance and harness its natural semiconducting properties. But cadmium is the kind of toxic element that tends to hang around in living tissues, meaning that even a few exposures can push you over a toxic limit. That doesn’t make the system toxic to play, but it does mean that cadmium could be leaching into the ground if those consoles don’t get properly recycled at the end of their life spans.

Stop traveling so much

With the exception of the consoles, the process of making games is relatively easy on the planet. But the climate impact of game making is surprisingly tough to quantify with any precision, thanks to a slew of confounding variables. The scale of the studio making the game has a remarkable effect on the scale of the emissions involved, for instance, with larger studios enjoying some efficiencies that come with economies of scale. Local power grid infrastructure also has a major effect on a studio’s climate impact, especially in US municipalities that offer renewable energy plans. Major publishers like Ubisoft and Nintendo get a majority of their energy from renewable sources, as do many others of similar size. Microsoft goes even further, not only using 100 percent renewable energy but committing to offset or recapture all the greenhouse gases it has ever emitted.

While power sourcing for offices can have a huge impact, employee travel is usually the single biggest variable in determining a studio’s carbon footprint. Rovio, the Finnish developer of the popular Angry Birds franchise, included detailed climate targets and emissions data in its 2020 Corporate Social Responsibility report. Those figures show that flights accounted for more than three times the per-employee emissions than all other sources combined. Rovio offsets these with the UN Carbon Offset platform, but the disparity between what employees produce as a consequence of work and what is emitted for travel is staggering. That kind of data highlights how one of the most powerful and direct changes gaming companies can make for the environment is simply reducing or eliminating employee travel. The COVID-19 pandemic has perversely helped a bit on this score, increasing the prevalence of remote work options and reducing the need for employees to burn fossil fuels to travel for work. The cancellation of in-person events like E3, and its partial replacement with virtual announcement events, has also caused a major shift both in the industry’s culture and its travel emissions.

The greenest way to play

More than console or game production, Abraham’s figures suggest that playing games represents the biggest chunk of the game industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. In much the same way that it’s difficult to count up exact developer emissions, though, per-player emissions can span a large spectrum. In addition to issues of local power production sources and infrastructure, player behavior, usage patterns, and various console settings can affect the climate impact of an “average” hour of gaming. Worldwide, each of the billions of video game players—ranging from hardcore addicts to casual tinkerers—average about eight hours of play per week, according to Abraham’s estimates. It’s a safe bet that a significant chunk of that time is spent on mobile platforms, given industry trends, and while phones aren’t power gluttons, their energy use isn’t negligible, either. London-based Space Ape Games has industry-leading best practices here. The company collects player data, which it uses to estimate carbon emissions from those phones, then purchases offsets to account for the downstream emissions of that gameplay. In 2018, for instance, the studio’s games were played for about 4 million hours in the UK, resulting in an estimated 5 tons of CO₂ emissions to power those game-playing phones. Expanding this across their global player base (but using UK figures for average CO₂/kWh), Space Ape came to a total of 181 tons of CO₂ it needed to offset (or roughly the total annual emissions of a dozen average Americans).

These figures have several more asterisks attached, though. Average power use figures for mobile games can be surprisingly difficult to nail down, for instance, ranging anywhere from about 2 to 5 Watts. That might not sound like a big range, but across hundreds of billions of play hours, the difference on each end of that range can dwarf the total power draw of many countries. But total mobile gaming emissions pale in comparison to those of consoles. The Xbox One Series X/S and the PlayStation 5 can use about 100 times the energy of a smartphone to play games, once the TV and speakers are taken into account. And while there are many fewer console players than mobile players worldwide, that power-draw difference means consoles are probably still responsible for more power consumption overall.

Don’t despair

As the global reality of the climate crisis continues to settle in for policymakers, regulators aiming to hit essential emissions goals could begin targeting non-essential computation. California in particular has been forward-thinking here, implementing regulations that require consumer electronics to stay below a certain yearly draw or be banned from sale. In order to adapt, hardware manufacturers will need to be aggressive in setting their targets for the next hardware generation now and be ready to push for a reduction in total power used. There is some good news on that front, though. While gaming consoles are getting more powerful every few years, they’re also getting more power efficient, in terms of the levels of computational power and graphical fidelity available per Watt of power. And there are plenty of cases of code optimization yielding higher performance per clock cycle, too, which can have a large impact on power draw. That means the game industry might be able to avoid the so-called “Jevons Paradox,” where users tend to increase their usage of a product to offset any gains in energy efficiency. That’s good, because while players may take graphical fidelity into account when choosing what games to play, most likely won’t spend a lot of time analyzing how much energy is needed to create those graphics.

If gamers do start taking carbon emissions into account in their gaming decisions, Abraham suspects they would largely focus more on the business values of the companies involved (i.e., the offset agreements or other green policies various developers and publishers put into place). Broad goals to improve console and phone efficiency paired with developer intentionality in requesting users’ computational resources are essential tools moving forward. There is a lot of paternalism inherent in many of the conversations about the changing climate. So often, we conceptualize it as simply a problem of convincing a few more people that it’s a problem before cajoling them to some vague action. When it comes to the future of gaming’s impact on the climate, though, Abraham and others working in the space broadly conclude that our only hope left is hope itself. Despair and helplessness and the feelings of futility that they engender are a poison to action.