GTG Links no 5 – 2nd July

Last month Ubisoft released its latest update on its decarbonization journey and other environmental commitments.

Lots of detail in here and in the 2022 annual report (PDF) – including a method of calculating WFH workers energy consumption that might help others in a similar situation. Might be just what I was looking for the other week to calculate the scale of indie game dev emissions.

Ubisoft’s Environmental Commitment – 2022 Update

Ubisoft’s director of corporate environmental sustainability presents an update on Ubisoft’s Play Green strategy.

Ubisoft NewsNicolas Hunsinger

Bloomberg story on Axie Infinity – "A Billion-Dollar Crypto Gaming Startup Promised Riches and Delivered Disaster"

Pairs really well with Lars Doucet's in-depth analysis released the other week digging into the fundamentals of the Axie economy, claiming that it required an impossible degree of never-ending growth to be sustainable. Honestly, this should be a cautionary tale for anyone in the games-crypto crossover space, and that its not made more of a splash seems likely that someone, somewhere is going to try this sort of thing again and lose a whole lot more money.

Also on the topic of crypto – lot of bitcoin miners are getting close to being unable to pay debts on expensive hardware loans

Almost $4 Billion in Bitcoin Miner Loans Are Coming Under Stress

The prolonged slump in Bitcoin is making it more difficult for some miners to repay the up to $4 billion in loans they have backed by their equipment, posing a potential risk to major crypto lenders.

BloombergDavid Pan

Donald Norman returns to the question of Human Centred Design, arguing for a Humanity Centred Design

Norman describes the new approach thus:

The phrase “Humanity-Centered” emphasizes the rights of all of humanity and addresses the entire ecosystem (the term ecosystem includes all living creatures plus the earth’s environment).

Humanity-Centered versus Human-Centered Design

Human-Centered Design works well for mass-produced products and traditional products and services. But today, we owe our allegiance far beyond individual people -- we owe it to all humanity.

jnd.orgDon Norman

This is an important correction – if you've ever gone back furhter in the history of the origin of terms like affordances, originally coined by James J. Gibson, then you will be familiar with the explicitly ecological dimensions to that earlier conception.

In the NY Times – French Nuclear Power Crisis Frustrates Europe’s Push to Quit Russian Energy

Lithium-Ion Battery improvements at CATL  

One of the world's biggest battery manufacturers – China based firm Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL), the biggest manufacturer of EV batteries in the world – announced a new battery pack design that squeezes in even more cells than before. Bit of a marketing stunt, but its small efficiencies like these that keep pushing out the limits of what's possible with electric vehicles, given how long entirely new battery chemistries take to be commercialised.

A good example of the failure to ensure that the renewables boom is a just transition – VICE

Shifting America to Solar Power Is a Grueling, Low-Paid Job

Over the past decade, a low-wage workforce that chases solar installation projects from state to state for meager wages has proliferated around the country.

VICELauren Kaori Gurley

Technical progress on highly renewable grids is really progressing

More research needed on the subject of Gamer Goblin's carbon footprint

Have a great weekend.