Leveling Up for the Planet: Green Gaming Event in Katowice
On 9th November 2024, the event ‘Green Gaming Seminar for Katowice City of Science’ was held. It was co-organised by STRATEGIES, The University of Silesia in Katowice, and the Silesian Museum.
Green Gaming was the culmination of the gaming week, part of Katowice 2024 European City of Science. Its aim was to educate and engage the public on the connected issues of sustainable gaming and cultural heritage. The event drew on expertise from academics, industry professionals and cultural leaders to explore how gaming media both contribute to and can mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis.
The goals of the event were:
1. To share knowledge about the ecological impacts and potentials of gaming
2. To promote of cultural and scientific knowledge, achievements and initiatives, as well as provides a space for discussions that will contribute to the scientific community
3. To create collaboration between Katowice’s Silesian Museum and Gaming-Technological HUB, Guido Coal Mine in Zabrze, game developers, international academic experts on climate and gaming, and regional educational leaders
4. To promote local heritage and benefit conservation efforts in Silesia
Our speakers were Piotr Budzisz, a digital innovation expert for the Gamng HUB and the Coal Mining Museum in Zabrze, Dr Ruth Eggel, a post-doctoral researcher with the STRATEGIES project and Cologne Game Lab, Professor Sonia Fizek, lead researcher for STRATEGIES Work Package 2 (People and Planet) and head of research at Cologne Game Lab, Professor Paweł Frelik, from the University of Warsaw, and lead researcher for STRATEGIES Work Package 5 (Game Design for Sustainability), Dr Chloé Germaine, and Professor Paul Wake, co-leads of the STRATEGIES project and of the Manchester Game Centre, Mateusz Hyla, producer at Jujubee Game Studio, Aleksander Kauch, Senior Technology Lead at 11 Bit Studios, Drs Agnieszka Kliś-Brodowska and Michał Kłosiński, from the Game Studies Research Centre at the University of Silesia, Dominik Koziarski, Founder of the Little Bit Academy, Jiri Kupiainen and Maria Wagner, co-founders of the Sustainable Games Alliance, Matthes Linder, Project Manager at Spielfabrique and STRATEGIES researcher, Adam Pisarek, researcher at the University of Silesia, Karol Makles, Director of the Silesian Museum, Trevin York, Founder of Dire Lark studio, and Wojciech Maroszek, Deputy Director for the HUB at Katowice.
Above: Images from the Green Gaming Seminar for Katowice City of Science
The event began with an overview of the aims of the STRATEGIES project, led by Sonia Fizek and Paweł Frelik. They were keen to point out that our project originated from the need to move away from a cynical view of the “game industry” and to listen to game developer communities, especially those involved in activist work on the climate. They acknowledged the scale of the emissions problem for the game industries, of course, but also considered the ways in which smaller game developers are often first movers in terms of sustainability commitments, as well as in innovative game design for climate change communication. The speakers noted the pertinence of the venue of the event, a former coal mine, and asked the workshops to consider the biggest issue of the day: the materiality of games and their impact on the environment.
This topic was taken up by the first panel, ‘making games in a time of climate crisis’, led by Dr Ruth Eggel. She began by asking the panellists to state what they felt the most pressing issue was for game developers. For Jiri Kupiainen, co-founder of the Sustainable Games Alliance, it was clear that green activations within games would not be enough to meet the challenge. For the SGA, a decarbonisation of the whole value chain is a key priority. Aleksander Kauch, of 11bit studio, the developers of popular games such as Frostpunk (2018), noted that many developers were doing more to engage players with political and environmental messaging in entertainment games, without detracting from the entertainment value of games in any way. He also added that smaller developers have less control over material conditions than the companies developing hardware and platforms. It was noted that industry alliances, such as the SGA, have a role to play here in generating dialogue between smaller developers and other parts of the industry. Jiri offered the example of the SGA’s advocacy work between coders and the Unity platform, which had resulted in the addition of features to make coding more energy efficient.
For Matthes Linder, project manager at Spielfabrique, the key to greening games lay in their unprecedented reach among citizens. Matthes argued that games are a powerful medium to (re)write cultural stories. The climate crisis is, among other things, fuelled by a lack of stories that we can tell ourselves about how the world could be better in the future. Games have a big role to play in addressing this aspect of the crisis. Everyone agreed that this was the case. However, the industry is craving actual evidence about how games impact on players. It was felt there was a danger of falling back into simplistic ideas about cause and effect, such as those that had fuelled moral panics in the past concerning the way games might turn young people violent. The panel highlighted as a priority the need for research into the mechanisms through which games impact their players’ beliefs, attitudes and actions. From a design perspective, Mateusz Hyla, of Jujubee Studio, the makers of Realpolitiks (2017) and Deep Diving Adventures (2019), felt that the key was to avoid didacticism and build environmental decision making and agency into gameplay.
Maria, the Managing Director of the SGA, agreed that games are a powerful storytelling medium, but emphasize the need for better awareness through the industry of the material costs upon which game development is built. Currently there is a dearth of data about material impacts of gaming, including no exact figures on carbon emissions, nor on the energy consumption of individual games. Different companies employ different approaches to sustainability reporting and smaller developers are prey to ‘sustainability consultants’ who offer expensive and unproven solutions to the problem. To solve, the SGA have been engaging in education efforts across the industry and advocating for an industry standard for GHG emissions reporting. In this they are joined by STRATEGIES Work Package 3 researchers, and members of the Playing for the Planet alliance.
Trevin York, of Dire Lark, a games for change studio, and key participant in the influential International Game Developer Association Climate Special Interest Group, concluded that all the actions discussed by the panel would be needed at once for games to meet their green potential. Trevin argued that technology, society, art and culture are not separate spheres, acting independently of one another, but an entangled network. Those of us interested in a green transformation for games need to work together across sectors to make change happen.
Finally, the panellists noted that it has not yet been agreed on the definition for a ‘green game’, nor on the best way to go about decarbonising the industry. They welcomed further opportunities for cross industry discussion, and exchange with academic research, to begin filling knowledge gaps, to work through the evidence and data, and to begin making proper comparisons in order to create a standard for reporting and approaches to decarbonisation. They echoed comments made in the opening address about the importance for dialogue, and for the opportunity for developers to share their expertise and not to have initiatives or agendas imposed upon them. Finally, the question of whether ‘green games’ was a useful label was considered by the panel. We do not talk of ‘green music’, for example, and it might be counterproductive to create such a category for gaming. The question was reframed from ‘what are green games’, to ‘how can we green games in a comprehensive way’? This could be done without, as developers were keen to argue, insisting on didactic environmental messaging within games, and would emerge more from building community, both within the industry and among players. Everyone agreed that in terms of greening the game industry, we are just at the beginning.
The second panel of the day covered regional initiatives for a green transformation through gaming and technology. The panel was chaired by Michał Kłosiński and focussed on efforts within Silesia to transform this post-industrial region into a place for digital and cultural innovation. The panel began by discussing the role of the iconic Silesian Museum in the transformation of Katowice. Games have been key to this work, helping heritage professionals and visitors reimagine the space of the previous coalmine anew. The transformation was not only a material one, Michał noted, but also cognitive. It involved changing the way people think and feel about their region.
Piotr Budzisz, a digital innovation expert, talked of the role of new technologies in these efforts to reimagine the city. He described the ongoing efforts to digitally map, scan and archive of old buildings, former coal mining sites, and artefacts from Katowice’s past. The purpose of this work is twofold. First, to preserve heritage for the future, and to allow researchers to explore the region’s history. Second, digital mapping and scanning has allowed aspects of the city’s history to be reused and reimagined in new forms of culture, especially games. The panel noted that Katowice’s gaming hub has been instrumental in people reimagining the region and the character of their city. There was also a discussion specific examples of gaming technology being used to engage citizens with the green transformation of the region, including through the use of a game that was helping with efforts towards river restoration in Katowice. Through gameful intervention, the river has been reimagined as a green space.
Dominik Koziarski, founder of Little Bit academy, an edtech initiative, discussed how teaching coding and game making skills to young people would also be part of the region’s transformation. Coding and game making skills foster creativity and also help embed digital skills early in education, which would be a vital aspect of the region’s economic transformation. More than this, the gaming projects run by Little Bit were also about world building, allowing young people to take part in social problem solving and to have their say about how society and the region should move forward. The growth of the gaming sector in the region was held by the panel to have been a positive development for Katowice, not least because games have been a wonderful way to begin citizens together to reimagine the future of the region.
The day concluded with two hands-on workshops. The first showcased innovative methods developed as part of the STRATEGIES project, around game hacking. In this workshop, students of Silesian University’s game design programme worked with Chloé Germaine and Paul Wake to critique and reimagine the mechanics and stories of board games. They started by playing the popular board game, Forbidden Island (Matt Leacock, 2010). Following the hacking method as set out in their paper, Imaging the Future: Game Hacking and Youth Climate Action, participants engaged in a lively critique of the games’ environmental storytelling by deconstructing its mechanics. The group then set about remixing the game, creating new, playable, versions, using the same and additional components. The results were a range of innovative and thought-provoking games that drew attention to the extractive nature of gameplay, and offered searing critiques of how we imagine nature, and human society, as a site of zero sum competition.
The whole day was incredibly rich with discussion, engaging a varied audience with expertise from across the game industry, cultural sector and academia. STRATEGIES were honoured to be able to participate in the Gaming Week as part of Katowice City of Science and thrilled to be working with researchers at the University of Silesia in Katowice. We are looking forward to more collaborations in the future.
