“Warm and Stuffy” - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 165

way as middle-aged and elderly media. This chapter therefore focuses on
the materiality of games as objects and processes of physical, biological and
environmental history. Forgive us—and join us—as we side-step the norms
and orthodoxies of Game Studies in order to examine consumer electron-
ics, information, cultural and communication technologies and environ-
mental despoliation; the contribution of games to this destructiveness; and
philosophical and activist possibilities for Game Studies to change via the
prism of citizenship.
ENVIRONMENTAL REALITIES
In the 1970s, the average UK household had just 17 domestic elec-
trical appliances. By 2006, this had almost trebled to 47 appliances,
which includes computers, DVD players, digital set-top boxes, mobile
phones, power tools, juicers, cappuccino makers, ice-cream makers
and games consoles. While the ei ciency of homes and the products
we use improved by 2 per cent per year since 1970s, between 1972 and
2002, electricity consumed by household domestic appliances in the
UK doubled. (New Economics Foundation 2009, 21)
The presumption that electronic games and related media deliver a cleaner,
post-industrial capitalism has been continually reinforced by the “virtual
nature of much of the industry's content,” which “tends to obscure their
responsibility for a vast proliferation of hardware, all with high levels of
built-in obsolescence and decreasing levels of ei ciency” (Boyce and Lewis
2009, 5). In addition there is the impact of the Jevons Paradox outlined in
the epigraph to this section.
Rapid innovation and planned obsolescence accelerate both the emer-
gence of new electronic hardware and the accumulation of obsolete media,
which are transformed overnight into junk. Today's digital devices are
made to break or become uncool very rapidly. This planned obsolescence
reinforces consumerism and animates the ideology of growth that says
technological innovation is necessary and good. Immediacy and interactiv-
ity induce ignorance of intergenerational ef ects of consumption, including
long-term harm to labour and the environment. Constant connectedness
diminishes the ability to dwell on interconnections between the media and
the Earth: that from phones to computers to consoles, gaming technology
leaves an environmental legacy of poisoned waterways, sickened workers
and toxic habitats.
In the context of ASM, for example, we can trace electronic games to a
nasty corner in the global political economy of information and communica-
tion technologies. ASM is concentrated in Africa, Asia and Latin America,
where about a million children labour in mines. In Democratic Republic of
Congo, which has a third of the world's columbite-tantalite (coltan) over