“Warm and Stuffy” - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 161

and 1 per cent of aluminium (Global e-Sustainability Initiative [GeSI] and
Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition [EICC] 2008, iii, 24-26, 34-36).
There are about forty-one hundred major mining companies, although
the top 150 control 80 per cent of global output. The metals supply chain
is a globally dif use informal sector of artisanal and small-scale mining
(ASM) undertaken in notoriously harsh, low-tech, poverty-driven enter-
prises (Grossman 2006). The International Labour Organization (2010)
estimates that upwards of thirteen million workers are directly employed
in ASM worldwide, but the number is closer to two hundred million if we
include those whose jobs depend on it (porters, buyers, transporters, smug-
glers, exporters, executives and so on).
An electronic game's life cycle begins in the extractive industries and ends
in the salvage and recycling dump. This sheer materiality can stymie and
astonish neophytes and experienced players alike, who tend to assume elec-
tronic games are the product of a few wires and pieces of plastic allied to
creativity. Consider the overall energy use of electronic cultural and commu-
nications equipment, which will amount to 30 per cent of the global demand
for power by 2022 and 45 per cent by 2030, thanks to server farms (data
centres with servers, storage machines, network gadgetry, power supplies
and cooling technology) and the increasing time people around the world
spend staring at screens (televisions, consoles, laptops, desktops and phones).
The screens themselves are responsible for 70 per cent of computer energy
use over their lifetimes. That's why they are known as “electronic vampires.”
The portion of energy usage directly devoted to gaming is alarming. The U.S.
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) (a non-government organiza-
tion) and Eos Consulting conducted the fi rst major study of gaming consoles'
energy use (2008). They found that 40 per cent of U.S. homes had at least one
console, which together consumed sixteen billion kilowatt hours annually—
equivalent to the overall power “needs” of San Diego, California. Much of
this was due to players leaving consoles connected to electricity when not
using them (also see Brigden, Santillo and Johnston 2008; Mouawad and Gal-
braith 2009; International Energy Agency 2009, 5, 21; The Climate Group
2008, 18-23; Hancock 2009; Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and
Development 2010, 19; ShawnS 2008).
Then there are the by-products. Best estimates are that in 2007, a combi-
nation of media technologies and production accounted for 3 per cent of all
greenhouse gas emitted around the world (Malmodin et al. 2010). Between
twenty and fi fty million tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) are generated
annually, much of it via cell phones and computers, which wealthy people
regularly throw out in order to buy replacements. E-waste has historically
been produced in the Global North—Australasia, Western Europe, Japan
and the U.S.—and dumped in the Global South—Latin America, Eastern
Europe, Africa and Asia. It takes the form of a thousand dif erent, often
deadly, materials for each computer. Disposal in landfi lls in the Global
North is illegal because of risks to soil, water and workers posed by the