A Fireside Chat from GDC 2047

[Our Scene: It's the main stage of GDC 2047, still being held at the recently renovated and flood-barrier-protected Moscone Convention Center! The room is almost but not quite full of game developers, mostly in the perpetual uniform of the Gamedev: jeans, muted t-shirts and hoodies, many clustering in tight groups sporting the same cool, futuristic game logos of maker collectives from around the world. We have arrived slightly late to a “fireside chat” in progress, hosted by up-and-coming digital AR-sports designer Jorge Albarez (28), designer of the smash-hit “Feed Your Friends” game for the Apple Lens. The other speaker (age approximately 60), seated across from him, is a figure who two decades earlier would have been described as a “Sustainability Consultant” but these days is considered an ecological harmony facilitator… please excuse the typos: this is live transcription]

JA: Okay, so it’s the final day of GDC, we’ve heard some great talks from the Tim Sweeney Eco-harmony stage this week – Christina Vela on getting the most out of optical transformers for server energy efficiency, and we had the fantastic keynote from Tencent’s director of gaming Chen Xichen on the future of gaming tools embedded into citizen ecogovernance. But you promised us a special announcement today…?

SC: That’s right, I did.

JA: So are you going to keep us waiting?

SC: So you’ll all remember that the Sustainable Games Coalition announced a few years ago that the games industry had reached the stage of addressing residual emissions. A key milestone for ensuring gaming is compatible with our ecological civilisation. We got there seven years early in 2043 and – I think – that's thanks largely to all of you here. So give yourselves a round of applause again for that.

[SC gestures out across the eclectic sea of men and women game developers, a few with brightly coloured hair, many with the first streaks of grey, as they break out into a light applause]

JA: But those residual emissions have been really quite stubborn, right?

SC: Yep, we saw Hollywood beat us to absolute zero last year. I know that disappointed a lot of you – it disappointed me too. The lack of hydroplane network capacity really hampered us from eliminating the very last business travel emissions. I know there are people not in this room today because they didn't get a ticket in the general lottery, which is always a shame, but the bottlenecks are slowly disappearing. This year is looking better, though, and now travel times are decreasing too. The other stubborn area has been the re-manufacturing process of game hardware, where some cover gases have still not been eliminated from wafer reconstruction - but we have some good news there, too.

JA: What's the news?

SC: Well it's a bit early to say for sure, but I am quietly confident that the Tsinghua research team's new process have really delivered this time. But really, though, what I want to emphasize is that it’s your collective effort to “bend the curve” of energy consumption across all of games that has made all this possible. It's something that you can all be really proud of. But “residual” was four years ago, and we have continued to make progress, so today I’m finally pleased to announce that as an industry we have achieved...

[SC pauses for dramatic effect]

SC: ... 95%+ certification status as environment positive! Give yourselves a huge round of applause for that effort.

[A huge wave of applause with some whoops and cheers goes up, as the room begins to brim with excitement]

SC: And what that means is that we’ve achieved all our remaining goals. It means that in 2048, we will face zero production limits, and for the first time in almost a decade, we’ve got a larger energy budget for users…

[The crowd cheers again; SC continues over the top]

SC: A larger budget for digital infrastructure this year than last.

[More cheers]

SC: And it’s thanks to your eco councils that we have been able to set the pace of this achievement. Your eco-credit investments in hardware repair have made this possible, and the focus on lean, efficient software tools and code libraries to deliver fast and efficient experiences has made this a win for us and for the future.

[Applause continues for a moment, before dying down]

JA: That’s fantastic news, I almost can’t stop myself from smiling. I am so excited to see everyone's plans for our part of that new budget.

SC: I can’t wait to see what you and all your players get up to with it, too. I think we’re going to see some really exciting new experiences. Some great new stories will be told.

JA: Tell us more about how we achieved this goal. What got us here? Because this has been a 20-plus-year journey, right? When I was playing games as a kid back in the great derangement, we were still selling games to people with the expectation that they would spend the equivalent of a monthly wage on a new GPU. And even then, we still expected that it might only last a few years, right?

SC: Yeah, it’s really amazing to reflect on the excess of that now. Thank goodness those days are well behind us. It’s sort of a wonder we even made it through the 2020’s in hindsight, with that kind of short-sighted approach to business. The headwinds that game-making faced back then were really immense. First the AI chip bubble, which threatened to take everyone down with it, and then the rolling energy crises as we stubbornly clung to fossil power... But above all, for games, it was the obsession with the visual dimensions of the experience that held us back. It seems ridiculous to us now, but we really did forget for a long time that games are just one kind of experience on the same continuum as books and sitting around a campfire telling stories. That games are not just a technology that you switch on and off, but something that exists both inside players' heads and between the player and the machine.

SC: I think of the history leading up to this incredible new milestone in terms of internal and external drivers. We needed a bunch of outside shocks to really wake us up and get us on the right track. The ecological revolution of the early 2030s was key in raising awareness of the need to do things differently. A lot of the energy for that came from the well-known string of climate disasters that began with the Super El Niño, the great LA flood, and then, of course, the first Greater Eurasian heatwave. Those terrible times really put things into perspective for a lot of us. The Green Spring revolutions in Asia and Latin America really shocked the owner class with the public’s appetite for violence directed at those profiting from fossil energy, and I think the secession of the Western Federated States moderated capital’s worst excesses, and in the process, and maybe ironically, saved a lot of wealthy people from the great asset stranding.

SC: We also can’t overestimate the importance of the coordinating role of the Ministry of the Future and their culture program, which finally channeled those external shocks and all that frustration into democratic governance. Right as the competition in the games industry was at its most cutthroat, along came the new international mechanism for industrial coordination and planning with smarter cultural markets and planning-informed prices. The Ministry’s cultural UBI helped ease a lot of the commercial pressure off mid-sized game companies, and helped nurture a lot of new talent. Also, the fact that, which we now know is obvious, but at the time was quite a new idea, that price signals don't work properly when enough of the population is too rich or too poor to care. All of the work of the Ministry and Mondragon and all the other national cooperatives that emerged then improved the Gini coefficient enough that we could start to use markets again properly.

SC: Maybe the most important thing that the Ministry’s cultural program leaders did for games, though, was to make getting our own ecological house in order essential. They really did understand that to use culture for public benefit, or education, or awareness, it needed to have the moral standing to make those arguments for our players to make changes. This seems so obvious to us today, but you have to remember, in the 2020s and even into the 30's, we suffered under a lot of very patronising and limited cultural expectations about how we should approach others. Like, when I was growing up, people in my part of the world used to be afraid to talk to their own neighbours.

SC: So the ministry ensured that we had to be already doing the best we could on our own environmental impacts. Product passports were a bit of a new idea, but the narrower "carbon footprint" was already there, but it was pretty limited. The whole of system view was really the insight that unlocked a lot of positive change. When Call of Duty X demoed its high-end graphics running on a mobile processor, and the industry realised that even the lowest-end hardware was capable enough of near-photorealism at a fraction of the compute, provided you had a tight design and understood the nature of the experience... well, I think most people now recognise what a turning point that was. You can look at the global aggregate energy demand from games, and after that point, it takes a few years, but then it starts to fall off a cliff.

JA: I remember everyone playing that demo when I was in college. It was such an eye-opening moment for me because it was obviously technically genius, but it was the nature of the experience that had a sense of inevitability. No one after that could think “we need better graphics”, could they? There was just no one under any illusions about that afterwards.

SC: Yeah, it was a real moment. And it was the Ministry’s culture arm that saw the window and went for it. They got all the big players in games and the other culture industries together under one roof with their summits, and the citizens’ assemblies sent their representatives to ensure the public interest didn’t get crowded out by entitled capital. That led to not just the CoD X demo, but also things like the first games hardware accord, which set the first maximum resource intensity of new devices, and the extended producer responsibility schemes, which we now know is the best way to ensure the remanufacture of old compute.

SC: It’s a bit ironic that such a simple program, which worked so successfully for decades for things like beverages, actually helped rescue the bottom line of hardware makers in the end. Adding some real value for consumers in hanging onto their hardware closed a really important loop. The rise of repair cafe chains and schools teaching classes in electronics repair helped a lot, too. Another thing that seems ridiculous now, but most people had never even held a soldering iron in the early 2000s. Getting the PlayStation 8 to an 80% circularity rate was a huge achievement, especially given the constraints on PlayStation after the forced breakup of Sony.

JA: What about the software efficiency side of things? What was the turning point there?

SC: Well, when the major engine makers, Unreal and what used to be called Unity, realised the future of gaming was basically battery-backed up in the late 20s, early 30s, those early energy measurement systems of the time suddenly got a lot of attention. Being able to plug those into ministry dashboards directly and see user energy budgets, and mapping onto individuals’ energy dashboards, with some lightweight AI prediction engines, was a lightbulb moment, I think. The direct feedback that we now have about our energy and emissions from lifestyle choices has been a key driver of sustainable use ever since. It helps that it keeps costs down, too.

SC: The other thing that tends to get left out of software efficiency histories is that more data accuracy meant more flexibility for games than we saw in most other culture industries. We knew where the saves we had to make were, and we let users make their own decisions about it. Not everyone loved that, of course, but we all had to make do during the lean years, and I am really excited about potentially having crossed that bridge. I really think the years ahead are years of abundance. Yes, the Arctic is still ice-free in summer, and the West Antarctic crack needs constant monitoring and refreezing, but things are temperatures are stabilising. REPEC just announced that the energy intensity of the EurAsian energy system last year averaged less than a gram of CO2 per kilowatt hour. And that includes embodied intensity.

JA: It’s a really exciting time to be making games again. One of the hardest things for me, and perhaps other designers... is how we're going to cope without constraints. I find the prospect kind of... terrifying? But also exhilarating? How will I know where to even begin if I don't know what the limits are? How long can players even play for? Unlimited server calls? It's like looking over the edge of a cliff, or flying by the seat of your pants...

SC: Yes, I can definitely see that. I’m a bit too old for most of the more active games these days, but my kids still play nearly every day. There’s a local designed retro game that’s doing the rounds in the Melbourne gaming communes at the moment, based on an old “jousting” game from the 2000s, which someone dug up a video of and tried to emulate.

JA: That sounds fun – is there a social distributive element to it?

SC: No, it’s very retro, it’s just playfully competitive. Pure social play.

JA: Of course. Amazing. What will the kids get up to next?

SC: Your guess is as good as mine.

JA: Well, we have about ten minutes left for questions, so please make your way to the microphones in the centre of the aisles if you have a question. And while you're doing that, please join me in once again thanking our speaker, and thanking ourselves – another round of applause for us as well.

[Our scene fades out to a satisfied smattering of applause... but we don't miss much, the Q&A is mostly comments anyway]

Thanks for reading this slightly off-piste edition of Greening the Games Industry – with apologies to Kim Stanley Robinson. Back soon!