Playing video games can have negative impacts on sustainability. It may look unbelievable that having fun in digital lands influences reality, but the problem is about the bone and flesh that support the digital lands. Computers, consoles, electricity, the internet, and everything that provides humble service to the gamer community is expensive in the way they deplete energy and resources. Playing video games is unsustainable because gaming depletes energy, game production damages nature, and the massive size of the gaming community amplifies the costs. The sustainability problem with the gamer community reveals a bigger pattern of the damaging internet economy, and people still ignore the dangers.
The gamer community is a tremendous group of energy consumers, reflected by the high energy consumptions in gaming PC and consoles, the standard equipment of a gamer. In general, gaming devices in the United States cost energy consumption that surpasses West Virginia in a year (D’anastasio). The huge demand for electric energy stems from the pursuit of graphic performance in the modern gaming industry. In addition to the video games that aim to present extremely cutting-edge graphics, even regular online games can become an energy eater. Overwatch, a multiplayer first-person shooter, requires approximately 220 watts of energy usage on a PC set that has 160 watts benchmark usage (Millis 161). Regardless of its terrible power usage, Overwatch is still a fairly low graphic demanding game since its minimum requirements for a graphics card is GTX 460, a 2011 product. If Overwatch, the median in modern video games, can become a significant power user, imagine the shocking amount of energy torrent in the frontmost and future PC sets. The situation doesn’t look good on the side of consoles either. The popular gaming console PlayStation 4 Pro (PS4 Pro) produced by Sony is a representation of the current generation of gaming devices. PS4 Pro can cost about 200, even 300 in extreme, kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity usage annually (Millis 164). While PS4 Pro is already a nonnegligible electronic device, to actually play a game on gaming consoles comes with other companion devices like high-resolution TV and displayer. Just to make it worse, next-generation gaming, represented by PlayStation 5, is on its way to popularization, and the energy efficiency of a technological breakthrough in gaming consoles can only be even more costly. Gaming devices symbolize the gamer community as well as their high energy consumptions, and gaming’s devastating effect is also involved in the production of game and devices.
Producing gaming devices and developing video games damage the environment by creating significant greenhouse gas emissions. Take the globally known gaming console PlayStation 4 (PS4) as an example, the production and shipment process of one PS4 is already massively harmful. According to Yale engineering department specialists, purchasing every PS4 creates 89 kilograms of carbon dioxide emission into the atmosphere (Gordon). While the harm of greenhouse gases is thoroughly discussed, the number still reveals a cold truth of industrialized assembly line production. In the day-to-day workflow of PS4 production, it is ineffective and inefficient to take care of the carbon emission of products. Plastic, metal, and alloy are all necessary PS4 materials, and they are guaranteed to be carbon expensive in the industry. While the gaming device is fearful in its emission, the game development is also competent in emission. Space Ape Games, a mobile game studio, conducted their own investigation on studio carbon footprint and reached a result of 748.4 tons of carbon dioxide emission in 2018. Appealing to a global market, game studios like Space Ape create huge and inevitable carbon emissions in transportation like flights. Since mobile games often require online services, another promised channel for carbon emission would be server arrays that communicate with mobile gamers. There are for sure many similar game studios like Space Ape, and they are in no way producing significantly less carbon emission than Space Ape. These figures in the video game industry are merely the pieces of an entire puzzle. Since the gamer community is relentlessly pursuing more enjoyment in video games, the producers of games and devices are also unstoppable on their carbon pathway. The interlocking chain of seller and customer is an infinite carbon machine beyond its profitable appearance.
Though the resource cost of the case study on a single game or PS4 may not look alarming, the magnitude of the gamer community is amplifying the effect exponentially. Although playing video games still feels like a sub-culture behavior, the gamer community is a huge one. According to The Verge’s Senior Editor Tom Warren’s report, Sony has sold 100 million PS4s by June 2019. As one PS4 is creating a big mess to the environment in its production and transportation process, the effect has to increase by 100 million times in a conservative estimation. This number is still a baseline carbon emission that doesn’t involve gaming itself. Once the gamer community starts their games, the electricity usage of PS4s is also guaranteed to be 100 million times greater. PS4 users are only a small group in the gamer community. In a 2018 research, gamers take up two-third of the U.S. population (Nielsen). The U.S. population is estimated to be 328 million, resulting in roughly 200 million gamers in the U.S. (United States Census Bureau). 200 million people in the U.S. are actively contributing to all the energy consumption and carbon emission that are brought by video games. Gamer community is not only a huge part of the U.S. population, but also an internationally prevalent one. Sam Barratt, the Chief of Education, Youth, and Advocacy at UNEP, said, “gaming have the potential to reach 1 in 3 people on the planet.” The size of the gamer community is so large that the resulting environmental damages are unimaginable. Therefore, sustainability in gaming urgently needs address and advocate before it is irreversible. Having an enormous community, gamers have to raise their awareness immediately.
The sustainability problem with the gamer community is even more important because it implies a broader issue in the global internet economy. From the development stage to the actual gaming experience, modern video games are tightly connected to internet services. As demonstrated in Space Ape Games’ carbon footprint report, about half of their annual carbon emission comes from cloud services. Video games can’t live without an internet connection since every well-developed cloud function has become essential to games, including online shopping, cloud backups, multiplayer games, and other countless services. Beyond the serious harms of gaming, the broader picture of internet harms follows the same pattern. Bitcoin mining, a trending internet economy, emits 23.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year (Irfan). Running multiple computers to conduct online encryption, Bitcoin mining is an internet-based activity in every way. Bitcoin mining resembles gaming services since it depletes multiple resources like energy and rare materials from the production of devices to the mining itself. Bitcoin mining is only a representative and a little piece of mankind’s daily base usage of the internet.
Fig.1. Still from ClimateCare
Any activity online leaves a little bit more carbon footprint, and the collective emission can be horrible. Every move costs nature something; this is the exact harmful chain effect happening in the gaming industry. Gaming’s environmental impact yields a pattern of how the internet can be damaging as well. Their threats function hand in hand under the cooperation of every user.
The unstoppable environmental impact of gaming is reflective of a striking trend: public internet users and gamers fail to pay enough attention to the underlying cost of their digital services. It may look unbelievable that when the internet and gaming economy constantly pollute the earth, billions of users can’t notice the potential environmental impact. This invisibility is because the harms of electronic devices is a subtle and unique one comparing to other forms of environmental issue like air pollution. In the case of air pollution caused by automobile exhaust, all the harms are directly observable like the ominous black color and the choking smell of tailpipe exhaust. Smartphones and PS4s don’t seem to be producing dangerous smoke, and the harms are not directly observable. People can hardly notice environmental impacts without any sensual cues from devices. Ensmenger provides a similar analysis, saying, “we experience only the positive benefits of information technology, in large part because the labor and geography associated with the construction, maintenance, and dismantling of our digital devices have been rendered largely invisible” (S10). Without adequate people noticing the problem, the possibility of fully addressing or solving the environmental impact remains low. Therefore, raising awareness, a fundamental goal, of the invisible damage caused by the internet and gaming economy is still in need of effort.
Whether in the video game or internet economy, there are unsustainable chains like invisible use of energy and carbon emissions behind the colorful screen that people use on a daily basis. They cost significant amount of energy, leave a carbon footprint in production, and possess a big community that actualizes all the damages. Video games are depicting interesting fantastical future that allows gamers to interact with, but it is also destroying the future of real earth if its threats remain hidden. People should pay attention to the environmental impact in reality, because “as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also the only place that you can get a decent meal” (Ready Player One).
Work Cited
ClimateCare. “Infographic: The Carbon Footprint of the Internet.” ClimateCare, 7 May 2018, https://www.climatecare.org/resources/news/infographic-carbon-footprint-internet/. Accessed 8 April 2021.
D’anastasio, Cecilia. “Next-Gen Gaming Is an Environmental Nightmare.” Wired, 15 October 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/xbox-playstation-cloud-gaming-environment-nightmare/. Accessed 8 April 2021.
Ensmenger, Nathan. “The Environmental History of Computing.” Technology and Culture, vol. 59 no. 4, 2018, p. S7-S33. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/tech.2018.0148.
Gordon, Lewis. “The Many Ways Video Game Development Impacts The Climate Crisis.” The Verge, 5 May 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/5/21243285/video-games-climate-crisis-impact-xbox-playstation-developers. Accessed 8 April 2021.
Irfan, Umair. “Bitcoin’s price crashed, but it’s still devouring an obscene amount of energy.” Vox, 6 February 2018, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/18/16901422/bitcoin-price-crash-energy-emissions. Accessed 8 April 2021.
Mills, E., Bourassa, N., Rainer, L. et al. “Toward Greener Gaming: Estimating National Energy Use and Energy Efficiency Potential.” The Computer Games Journal, 8: 157–178 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40869-019-00084-2.
Nielsen. “U.S. GAMES 360 REPORT: 2018.” Nielsen, 24 May 2018, https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2018/us-games-360-report-2018/. Accessed 8 April 2021.
Ready Player One. Directed by Steven Spielberg, performances by Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2018.
Space Ape. “We’ve gone carbon neutral.” Space Ape, https://spaceapegames.com/green. Accessed 8 April 2021.
United Nations Environment Programme. Playing for the Planet Annual Impact Report. 2020. Nairobi.
United States Census Bureau. “Population and Housing Unit Estimates.” United States Census Bureau, 2018. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest.html.
Warren, Tom. “Sony has sold 100 million PS4s.” The Verge, 30 July 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/30/20746712/sony-playstation-4-sales-100-million-milestone. Accessed 8 April 2021.
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