“Warm and Stuffy” - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 168

These consoles, televisions, computers and phones arrive with parts
assembled and packaged from materials that have been excavated and man-
ufactured through an array of electrical and electronic technologies. Then
electricity, cable and airborne networks make playing games possible. Like
the buildings, classrooms, houses, subways, cars, farms, forests, jungles,
deserts, planes, trams, boats, apartments, gaols, cities, towns, villages,
trains, buses and campuses where people play, the physical foundation
of gaming is machinery. That machinery is created and operated through
work and power and has an enormous impact on the Earth.
The material origin and function of game technologies is easily forgotten
because of the symbolic power of the technological sublime: enchantment
with the seeming magic of smartphones, fl at-screen high-defi nition televi-
sions, wireless communication, mobile computing and so on. But gaming
technologies generate waste in the environment, exploit workers deployed
to harness mechanical-chemical and electronic technologies and processes
and leave a residue of ecological harm.
We know that gaming is an increasingly central function of cell phones
amongst young people in China, the U.S. and Russia, and that Gringo inter-
est in mobile applications is dominated by gaming. A quarter of all U.S. tab-
let owners are forsaking their consoles, whereas others are using consoles
as “entertainment hubs” (NielsenWire 2011a, 2010b, 2010c, 2011b). U.S.
residents in general spend about 10 per cent of their time gaming online
(NielsenWire 2010a). It was taken as a sign of the times when the giant U.S.
retail chain GameStop began accepting second-hand iPods, iPhones and
iPads for store credit in 2011 (Smith 2011). Nevertheless, claims that con-
soles are on the way out due to online gaming seem overblown (Toivonen
and Sotamaa 2010; Stevenson 2011; “DFC Intelligence Forecasts World-
wide Online game Market to Reach $29 Billion by 2016,” 2011).
After the NRDC published its 2008 study on gaming, corporations were
shamed into acting somewhat more responsibly. For example, Sony reduced
the energy needs of PlayStation 3 by 55 per cent and PlayStation 2 by 70
per cent. New versions carry power-down options and use less plastic than
their forebears, and the company has a pan-European program that recy-
cles consoles from homes. In 2010, Ubisoft announced it would no longer
print instruction manuals for retail game boxes, a major step forward in
reducing the industry's carbon impact. However, Eurogamer.net surveyed
other major publishing houses and found no such intentions, although some
use recycled plastic for DVD cases, Activision Blizzard favours soy-based
ink for printing manuals, and Electronic Arts makes Bioboxes in Europe
(Purchese 2010).
In 2010, Greenpeace requested the world's leading twenty-one electron-
ics companies to of er their most ecologically advanced devices to be rated
in its third Green Electronics Survey . Eighteen corporations participated,
including some leading gaming fi rms. No consoles fi gured in the green list,
although many machines were put forward on which games are played.