“Warm and Stuffy” - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 162

dozens of poisonous chemicals and gases in these machines. When the U.S.
recycles e-waste domestically, it often does so via its internal slave popula-
tion, i.e. imprisoned people of colour and the working class (Herat 2007;
Conrad 2011).
Game Studies basks in and even boasts of the repeated innovations guar-
anteed by cutting-edge technologies, from the exponential growth in annual
computing capacity to how state-of-the-art gaming design helps meet U.S.
military-industrial needs. It blithely ignores environmental by-products
and gaming's role in rapidly rising energy demand and massive accumula-
tion of electronic waste around the world. Like players of World of Dark-
ness or Command & Conquer , most of us are in the Land of Nod when
it comes to such matters (but see Moore 2009). Even those who valorize
pro-environmental games such as Eco Shooter , Global Gladiators or Awe-
some Possum are of target. The otherwise estimable http://greengames.
org focuses on games to elevate awareness of environmental risk but does
not interrogate them as environmental actors, whereas the controversy over
whether LA Noire causes PlayStation 3 to freeze by overheating (the mix-
ing of metaphors is a bonus) passed without comment other than as an
unproven inconvenience (Parfi tt 2011). In reality, it was an egregious but
revealing metonym for the industry and academia's neglect of this subject.
Given the contribution of electronic gaming to e-waste, environmental
destruction and occupational maladies through mining, electricity use,
console construction and destruction and the production and post-con-
sumption lives of computers, consoles, and cell phones, it seems incredible
that virtually no one within Game Studies discusses such matters—at least
openly. We've scanned relevant blogs, journals, books and reports in three
languages. From our reading, Game Studies is, to quote a phrase, missing
in action. Why is this so?
We suspect it is a consequence of Game Studies' governing binary. At
one antinomy, the psy-function positions omniscient, omnipotent tech-
nocrats plotting to turn young people into malleable consumers, workers
and killers. The psychologists who construct this model replay their bale-
ful attacks on the popular that have stalked media innovations for over a
century (a typical example is American Academy of Pediatrics, Council on
Communications and Media 2009). At the other pole, cybertarianism posi-
tions omniscient, omnipotent players outwitting the ef orts of capital, the
state and parents to understand and corral them. The new-media savants
who construct the latter model routinely invoke pre-capitalist philosophers,
dodging questions of state and capital by heading for aesthetics (see, for
instance, Cogburn and Silcox 2008). Both halves of the binary line up at
the trough of private and public money to fi nance and promote rent-seeking
nostra of pessimism or optimism. These reductive denunciations and cele-
brations of games rehearse a febrile yet familiar oscillation in scholarly and
public debates about media audiences (Miller 2009) that ironically mirrors
spectatorial positions in the games themselves.