Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: Qimu cake

In January this year, Greta Tomberg, a famous Swedish "environmental girl", led thousands of environmentalists against the German energy giant RWE Group's expansion of coal mining, and was arrested by German police.

Two months later, Greta asked Norway to dismantle wind turbines and protect animal habitats, and was again taken away by Norwegian police, putting on a big show in front of a global audience.

Four years ago, Greta was nominated by three Norwegian MPs for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. Time magazine listed her as one of the top 100 people, and Britain's BBC channel made a documentary for her. Now that the global energy crisis has broken out, there is an urgent need for many countries to expand the exploitation of traditional energy. Greta's environmental argument has suddenly lost its market and has been abandoned by politicians and the media.

Some people praise Greta for her bravery and remain fearless in the face of authority. Others questioned that the two arrests were just an eye-catching drama directed and acted by her.

Because according to the live video, she was not taken away immediately after her arrest, but happily waited for the camera to shoot from all angles for a long time. It seems that he has found a photographer in advance, waiting to shoot his own arrest.

Whether the former "Environmental Girl" was abandoned, or whether the girl is directing and acting by herself, no matter which version of the story, at least it shows that "Environmental Protection" is far more than a social issue. In all areas of social life, many "environmental activists" are waiting for the opportunity to criticize.

Similarly, although most gamers don't think that their entertainment has much to do with environmental protection-"I'm just a gaming house staying at home and living the most environmentally friendly lifestyle in the world", in fact, the struggle for the right to speak about environmental protection has already spread to the game industry.

Just this month, a Green Game Guide (Green Games Guide), written by several game designers, industry representatives and academics, was officially released. One of the core ideas of the Guide is that "desktop games are bad for the environment."

The argument mainly comes from the fact that the operation of the board game industry is driven by offline sales, and packaging affects the choice of consumers to a great extent. As a result, board game manufacturers often use exaggerated packaging and fancy plastic models to attract customers; players are also happy to buy beautifully packaged board games, regardless of whether they are harmful to the environment.

In addition, the Guide also mentioned that most of the popular board games on the market are "Made in China", the production process and material sources can not be traced, there may be many problems. I have to say, this has some old stereotypes.

Although the Guide stresses that writers do not intend to blame players, but hopes to expose the problems of the board game industry, and calls on players to pay more attention to the earth, but the player community still feels an indescribable sense of weirdness between the lines of "over-inference that board games are bad for the environment." The guide was reproduced by Kotaku, a well-known game media, and was immediately criticized by many netizens.

In relaying the contents of the Guide, Kotaku also unexpectedly compared board games with cars: "with the climate disaster getting closer and closer, more and more people and enterprises are trying to reduce the impact on the planet. Cars are being fully electrified, straws are being organic, while the board game industry is still so backward."

Not to mention that board games, as a minority hobby, may not have much impact on the global environment. Comparing board games with cars is like comparing multinational fast consumer brands with local minority Zhonggu stores.

Even compared with other industries mentioned in the article, board games are a form of entertainment that is quite friendly to the environment. Even the board games, which contain the most plastic products, are produced by the "least environmentally friendly Chinese factories" and may not be on the same scale as the damage caused by cars to the environment.

The least environmentally friendly "board games" using recyclable materials to make board games are indeed more environmentally friendly, and local production can improve production standards and reduce energy consumption and air pollution caused by cross-border transportation. But the problem comes back-board games are undoubtedly a niche hobby compared to industries that really consume a lot of energy and produce environmental pollution, and the industry is far from reaching that stage.

More stringent production standards mean higher production costs, higher production costs will only make board games become more niche or even disappear, which is undoubtedly the wrong solution. In other words, this is not solving problems, but the people who solve the least problems.

In addition, although the quantitative criteria are not clear, it is as bizarre as putting board games and cars together. The Guide also compares board games with video games and concludes: "Big boxes and large amounts of plastic make board games far behind video games in terms of sustainability."

One of the bases for their conclusion is that the plastic shell of home game consoles is getting thinner.

The lead author of the Guide, Benjamin Abraham (Benjamin Abraham), was already criticizing the video game industry a year ago.

Last year, Abraham founded AfterClimate, a consulting firm designed to help small game developers develop carbon policies.

He believes that although the carbon emissions caused by making independent games are not as large as 3A games, they still produce a lot of carbon footprints. Today, thousands of new games are produced every day, and the number of people making games in the world is so daunting that Abraham is determined to help independent game studios embark on the road to decarbonization.

In the same year, he published a book called Climate change and Digital Games, which laid out ambitious plans for decarbonization in the video game industry.

With the exorbitant price of $109, there is not much interest in the book. To sum up the points in the book, there are nothing but platitudes: game console materials pollute the environment, the game production process emits carbon dioxide, and running games engulf electricity.

In the book, Abraham mentions that he dismantled the APU of PlayStation 4, dissolving the chip in strong acid and resulting in large amounts of harmful substances and rare minerals, such as nickel and cadmium. In order to get a better game experience, gamers will replace the game hardware when the new generation of game products are released, and the old game consoles can only wait for landfills in the landfill. At that time, harmful elements will enter the environment together with plastic products, causing pollution to the environment.

This is Abraham's point of view. However, it can be said that since General Motors designer Earl proposed a "planned abolition system", all commodity manufacturers have embarked on the road of "squeezing toothpaste". Compared with the update speed of electronic devices such as mobile phones, the update cycle of game devices is the longest.

Just like the Nintendo Switch has been on sale for more than six years, there is still no news of a new generation of game consoles. But in the eyes of Norman Brassa, another green game researcher, it turns out that "Nintendo has taken a different path in reducing energy consumption, providing players with a lot of fun without strengthening the hardware."

According to Norman's theory, although Swtich does not have cutting-edge hardware performance, it leaves a much smaller carbon footprint than its competitors, which is worth learning from other game manufacturers.

Probably only players know how much inconvenience Switch's weak performance has brought to them.

In addition, in the book Climate change and Digital Games, some inexplicable carbon costs are also included in the game industry. For example, game console chips require a series of rare minerals and materials, and the mining and refining of these materials are very harmful to the environment; carbon emissions caused by travel by employees of game companies.

Abraham mentioned in his book that according to the corporate social responsibility report of Angry Birds developer Rovio in 2020, the per capita emissions of flights taken by its employees are more than three times that of other activities combined. According to Abraham's theory, the most direct change that game companies can make for environmental protection is to reduce or give up employees' travel.

In his view, the global pandemic of COVID-19 has played a positive role in reducing carbon emissions, making telecommuting a common choice and reducing the need for employees to consume fossil fuels to go to work. Offline activities at exhibitions such as E3 were cancelled during the epidemic, which has also led to a significant improvement in carbon emissions in the game industry.

I don't know if he will feel that his views are "giving up eating for fear of choking", but if these theories can really become the law of carbon reduction, it is also the same law that applies to every industry. But we don't seem to have seen an environmental activist asking people in other industries to give up traveling.

At the end of last year, AfterClimat also released a snapshot of the 2022 carbon emissions of the game industry.

Abraham mentioned that in addition to making game consoles and games, another major culprit in the game industry's greenhouse gas emissions is playing games. Globally, billions of video game players spend an average of about eight hours a week in the game, according to Abraham's estimates.

The mainframe player is the largest power consumer among all players, and if TV and audio are taken into account, a Xbox Series X / S or PlayStation 5 player consumes about 100 times more electricity than a mobile phone player. According to Abraham's theory, although there are far fewer mainframe players worldwide than mobile players, this power difference means that mainframe players are still responsible for the overall power consumption.

Although gamers are indeed responsible for environmental protection, they are inexplicably nailed to the cross, which really makes many people feel confused.

After all, in recent years, there are many cases in which players participate in environmental protection through games.

In 32019, at the United Nations Climate Summit, more than a dozen game industry giants, including Sony, Microsoft and Tencent, joined the Game for the Earth (Play for the planet) program, promising to use the company's platform to take measures to deal with the climate crisis.

"my World" has been encouraging players to engage in environmental protection in the game in recent years, and Microsoft will donate money to relevant organizations according to the degree of achievement of the goal. Last year, the mangrove rescue plan invited players to explore the wonders of mangroves and donated $200000 to the Nature Conservancy to protect real mangrove forests.

In addition, some large game manufacturers are joining the environmental protection team one after another, and there are numerous cases. The United Nations Environment Programme also acknowledged that "video games have incredible influence, and the nudge in the game can strongly affect the behavior of players in the real world."

It is true that "promoting gamers' enthusiasm for the cause of environmental protection" is too right to pick out problems, but blindly blindly accusing game behavior is bad for the environment will still only make many players feel uncomfortable.

It can be said that most human activities are harmful to the environment. Two years ago, the California oil spill in the United States covered 34 square kilometers of sea; this year, waste water from Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant is about to be discharged into the Pacific Ocean. Plastic products are several kilometers deep at the bottom of the sea; clothing waste made by the FMCG industry is full of garbage pits.

In this context, the issue of "Let's limit the development of the game industry to fix the environment" is as weird as "Let's use paper straws to solve plastic pollution."

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