Doing Our Bit

Clayton sits down with Dr Patrick Prax of Uppsala University to soak up his deep critical thinking about the systemic causes of and solutions to unsustainable practices in the games industry. Why aren't things moving faster? Who (or WHAT) is pushing in the other direction? What does it take to affect change not just to a game, a player base, a company, but an entire industry?

Clayton goes on a design deep dive with green game evangelist Andrew Brennwald, game director of up-and-coming foraging sim Out and About. Tracing the winding path that led him to that position, they explore a rewilding awakening, the exhilarating leap of starting up a green game studio, and the many joys and challenges of designing a game inspired by nature - one that can in turn

In the first episode of our new season, we discuss climate resilience and how games can help prepare the world for what's to come. Clayton is joined by Shayne Hayes: newly elected co-chair of the IGDA Climate SIG and Associate Director of the Video Game Initiative at the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock). This episode was brought to you by o

BONUS EPISODE: In this quick-fire episode, Hugo digests the adventure that was last week's Green Games Summit by UKIE and Playing for the Planet, alongside fellow summitgoers and IGDA Climate SIG members Mélanie Christin and Trevin York. What were our biggest takeaways from the summit, what did it accomplish and where do we go from here? Apologies for the sound quality in the begi

Ryan Boudinot is an author and technologist who has spent the COVID-19 pandemic diving deep into geospatial data and the ways it can be used to not just improve games, but to make game-playing improve the data, and the world itself. On this episode, he tells us all about this concept which he calls the World Integration Loop or WIL. Ryan's startup website is here: http://machinesan

In this episode we catch up with leading ecocritic Alenda Chang to learn about how game worlds can be just as delightful and important as the action that takes place within them, and how deepening our simulation of worlds and ecosystems can help players reconnect with nature. After years of writing papers and books on how games portray ecology, last summer Alenda published an hones

In this special episode we get all of the spokespeople for the new IGDA Climate SIG workstreams together in a virtual room spanning three continents. Arnaud Fayolle tells us how we can get involved in crafting and promoting the actions that will shape future game design in the Design Patterns workstream, Mark Videon gives us the lowdown on how to monitor you studios' carbon footpri

Narrative game designer Inari Bourguenolle has been on an ecological journey ever since she first played Final Fantasy VII. Incidentally, our host Hugo Bille has recently obsessed quite a bit over the climate stories embedded in this classic game and especially its recent remake. Their conversation takes us to toxic masculinity, gender roles, individualism and the monomyth, and beg

We kick off the new year with a conversation with Dr Dargan Frierson, an actual climate scientist, director of the EarthGames program and total rockstar. When we're not singing and dancing, we ask ourselves how games can promote climate justice, how we know if it's working and how scientific climate models can make themselves useful inside of games. Visit EarthGames and play all th

In the final episode of the year we come back to Dr Jackson Ryan and look more closely at his recent article researching the power use of our favorite Christmas presents, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series consoles. To do that we have enlisted the invaluable aid of Dr Ben Abraham! Together they begin to draw a portrait of how the gaming industry might move towards sustainability