Climate change is a nightmarish reality that we can no longer ignore or deny. Extreme weather events are happening with increasing frequency, water temperatures are rising and we are nearing the point where the damage we’ve done is irreparable.
While individuals look for ways that they can reduce their climate impact, such as recycling, using mass transit and decreasing consumption, the real effort needs to come from corporations with governmental oversight. Corporations are responsible for the majority of emissions and for the destruction of the natural landscape in pursuit of resources.
We often look at digital options as more eco-friendly than their physical counterparts, but this can be a misguided view since the energy consumption used can have a massive environmental impact. Recently, the negative impact of cryptocurrency mining was exposed, causing people to rethink how the digital can become more green.
Gaming is one of the industries where we could see moves towards a greener tomorrow. In this article, we’ll look at some of the ways that the gaming industry can be eco-friendly.
Incentivize going green
One of the best ways to shape customer behavior is to incentive the behavior you want. Making the greener option preferable will lead to more customers choosing that option, which will then push developers to make more eco-friendly options.
Online casinos provide us with a good example of how incentives work in the gaming world. The best Canadian online casino bonuses can include free spins, deposit matching and no deposit credits. These bonuses, and the loyalty or VIP programs that some online casinos offer as well, are a major factor in helping people decide which casino to create an account with. Bonuses are one of the leading incentives for account creation.
If online casinos could reward players for choosing a greener option, that would combine an incentive that players are already familiar with, alongside one that can make a difference. The same would work in the traditional video game industry as well.
Repurposing server energy
The servers used in producing video games, storing them on the cloud, running them and everything else associated with creating and playing video games produces a massive amount of heat. Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) gives a great visual of the amount of heat a server bank gives off by showing the massive fan needed to keep them cool.
Solutions like running a fan constantly simply use more electricity and increase the overall problem. Finding ways to repurpose that heat is a great way to make the gaming industry more eco-friendly.
Some companies have already begun to find uses for this heat. The obvious answer is to use the heat to warm the entire building. Transferring the heat to a liquid medium gives businesses even more options because the liquid can be moved farther without losing heat.
One company has used their server heat to warm an on-site swimming pool, which is a lovely perk for employees! Another has constructed greenhouses adjacent to their servers so that they can grow plants through the winter using the server heat. These kinds of solutions might seem small scale, but if every server bank contributed to making the world better, it would have a massive positive impact.
Use renewable resources
Video game studios and developers use a huge amount of electricity during the process of creating games. One step that they can take to reduce their carbon footprint and become more eco-friendly is to use electricity generated by renewable sources and to employ technologies that require less electricity to function.
Instead of using electricity produced through the use of fossil fuels, game companies can use electricity from an alternative source. The leading forms of renewable electricity sources are solar, wind power, geothermal and tidal.
Embrace the cloud
There is a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in the experience of going to the game store, picking out a game, cracking open the case and popping the cartridge or disk into the console. Sadly, physical disks might have to be one of the casualties of climate change.
Digital editions of games remove the need for making plastic cases and disks. Cloud gaming services also have the additional benefit of reducing the amount of memory space that gamers need on their devices.
The other possible alternative for gamers who need to have a physical copy of every game is to make the cases out of a natural material instead of plastic. Whether a bio-plastic or cardboard sleeve would be a workable alternative would need to be tested with gamers.