Afterclimate helps game developers fight climate change

Earlier this year, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Dr. Benjamin Abraham that he faced a discouraging scene. The climate-focused researcher and author took the stage for his lecture “Making Room for Climate Justice,” only to be greeted by a sea of ​​empty seats.

“I was hoping this session would be as packed as the NFT sessions,” he told attendees at the time.

But a presentation – even at one of the largest game makers’ gatherings in the world – was always only a small part of the plan.

In late August, Abraham launched AfterClimate, a company that aims to help smaller game developers on their decarbonization journey by figuring out how to cut emissions for them. But why do video games like industries like transportation and energy (literally) pollute a storm? Because right now — with UN reports grimly reporting and extreme weather flooding a third of Pakistan, driving millions of people out of their homes — every little bit counts.

“I look at the floods in Pakistan and I wish they were a surprise,” Abraham said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But that’s exactly what scientists have been saying for decades is going to happen, and it will happen to more people. … The game developers I’ve spoken to are some of the most socially conscious people I know. I think they’re starting to say, ‘Okay, what should we do?’ ”

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AfterClimate offers different levels of service depending on how ambitious developers want to achieve with their decarbonisation efforts. For starters, the company will collect data from electricity bills, power sources and conversations about a studio’s work/workplace to determine its overall emissions and how they compare to video game companies of a similar size. If emissions are on the steep side, AfterClimate will make suggestions, such as reducing how much a studio relies on specific power sources or switching to renewable energy in some places.

If a developer or studio is particularly committed, AfterClimate also offers a full audit of all up- and downstream emissions, including the purchase of new equipment – the production and delivery of which causes emissions – and players accessing a game, with both power is drawn on players’ ends and potentially taxing data centers.

“We can look at that and say, ‘What’s the full scope of that? How do we best reduce those emissions?’ Abraham said. “Is it by making hardware last longer? Is it by changing the way the game works? Is it shifting more and more computing power to the cloud? It could be streaming games, or it could be the other way around.” It depends on where people are in the world, where the players are, the whole world has different levels of emission intensity for the electricity we receive.”

Despite the firm belief that climate change became an ‘everyone’ problem decades ago, Abraham chooses his battle. As in other industries, the heaviest hitters — in this case, the Microsofts and Sonys — are almost certainly spitting out more CO2 than the little guys. But many of those companies are already working (slowly) towards net-zero emissions targets, and according to recent GDC surveys, small teams collectively make up a large part of the industry. The result of this, on a grand scale, is almost mind-boggling: thousands of new games appear on PC and mobile platforms every month, most of which come from smaller teams rather than Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Tencent, or any number of other household names.

“Indie gaming will not have the same footprint as Triple-A gaming, but it will still have a footprint,” Abraham said. “And just the sheer number of people making games today is intimidating. I don’t know what the answer is for those people, other than that they have some kind of service that they can use to help them reduce emissions.”

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The rest of the equation is simple for Abraham: large corporations have the resources to invest in this problem; small teams do not. That’s where AfterClimate comes in.

“Game developers don’t have a lot of free time,” Abraham said of an industry where overtime remains a pervasive problem in studios large and small. “So instead of having every single indie developer in the world spend a few months figuring out what to do to cut their emissions, I’d be happy to do it for them.”

Since the project is just getting off the ground, AfterClimate is currently working with just one client: a Melbourne-based studio Paper House, which itself is making a game about climate change called “Wood & Weather”. It was challenging because Paper House staff often work from home, making development-related emissions difficult to measure accurately. But in an industry increasingly embracing work-from-home and hybrid models, that’s exactly the kind of data more creators need.

“We’re trying to figure out a way to use smart power meters to measure the devices they’re working on — to get an idea of ​​what the footprint of home games development is,” Abraham says. “Because at the moment we really only have a few estimates.”

This is not to say that Abraham set his sights exclusively on the indie end of the pond; he just believes it’s a different kind of job to wrangle the video game industry’s biggest fish. He thinks companies like Unity – which has hired renowned sustainability expert Marina Psaros as its head of sustainability – are making good faith efforts to improve.

But if companies like Microsoft and Sony fail to meet the carbon-negative targets of 2030 and 2050 respectively, or turn the worrying energy-guzzling cloud gaming data centers into renewable energy, Abraham believes only a collective effort will get them back on track. .

“We can hold them accountable,” he said. “If they don’t hit their targets, we nail them to a wall.”

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Abraham also hopes to use AfterClimate as a vehicle to advocate for bigger, more systemic changes in the video game industry and beyond. With a problem, these big, greening individual companies — even on what Abraham hopes it will eventually become on a large scale — will only get you this far.

“We’re trying to piece together some of what we can do when we really should have overarching frameworks that allow us to do more structured interventions,” he said, pointing to California’s Title 20 regulations, which limit the amount of power gaming. and computer systems, among others, can be used as an example in a particular year. “I think regulation will be one of the most important ways we [solve this problem]. Otherwise we cannot rule everyone. People don’t just voluntarily change their way of life.”

However, one thing the video game industry can’t afford is to wait any longer. Abraham has spent years watching well-meaning developers make games about climate change without putting into practice what they preach. The time for that sort of thing, he says, “was twenty years ago.”

“There’s a long history of wanting to use games to convince players, to change their minds,” he said. “We could be wasting a lot of time doing those things when we really need to reduce the millions of tons of CO2 that games produce every year, rather than trying to spend time on greening players’ lives – whatever that means. We can do both, but we have a finite amount of time and effort.”