“Warm and Stuffy” - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 160

9 “Warm and Stuf y”

The Ecological Impact
of Electronic Games

Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller

This chapter focuses on the materiality of games as objects and processes of
physical, biological and environmental history. We reconsider games in the
light of their ecological context, rewiring the historiography of innovation
to indicate how they have deepened the world's environmental burden in the
same way as middle-aged and elderly media have. Our analysis side-steps
the norms and orthodoxies of Game Studies to examine the contribution of
games to environmental despoliation. We consider philosophical and activist
possibilities for a renewed Game Studies, via the prism of green citizenship.

Is it a new medium on a par with fi lm and music, a valuable educational
tool, a form of harmless fun or a digital menace that turns children into
violent zombies? Video gaming is all those things, depending on whom
you ask. (“Chasing the Dream,” 2005)

Sebeck was surprised at how warm and stuf y the room had become.
The AC hadn't been of that long. He glanced around at the dozens of
rack-mounted computers clicking away. That was a lot of BTUs [British
Thermal Units]. That's probably why they had an entry vestibule—
to keep the cold air in. He turned to the engineer. “What are these
machines for, anyway?”
“People playing games with each other over the Internet. My grand-
son plays.”
Sebeck had heard of this sort of thing. He had no idea it involved so
much hardware. (Suarez 2009, 18)

Producing and powering media technologies consumes and despoils nat-
ural resources and human life. These devices—virtually all of which now
include games as core parts of their capabilities—contain toxic substances
that pervade the sites and environs where they are manufactured, used and
thrown away, poisoning people, animals, vegetation, soil, air and water. For
example, in 2008, the proportion of the world's metals going into media
technologies was 36 per cent of all tin, 25 per cent of cobalt, 15 per cent
of palladium, 15 per cent of silver, 9 per cent of gold, 2 per cent of copper