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The gadgets were evaluated via three criteria: toxic substances, post-con-
sumption producer responsibility and energy inputs. Real progress emerged
over time, other than in corporate responsibility for e-waste (Greenpeace
2011b). When the three reports in Greenpeace's series came out over the
last decade, gaming sites generally featured them, sometimes along with
bitter denunciations of any obstacle to selfi sh pleasure. Game Studies, how-
ever, was silent. Consciousness and productivity remained its focus.
Utopic gamers proclaim the cloud as the end to their responsibility for
pollution (Energy Rebels 2011). But the allegedly minimal environmental
impact of cloud computing as opposed to consoles has been brought into
question. The data in “clouds” are stored in material places that require vast
amounts of electricity to send them to phones and tablets. When we combine
all known cloud centres, they use as much electricity as any country in the
world bar the top four. Forty per cent of these server farms are in the U.S.,
where companies like Apple and Facebook use the dirtiest power sources
imaginable to cut costs, from coal to nuclear plants (Greenpeace 2011a).
Meanwhile, anti-regulatory bodies paint any changes needed as matters
of consumer responsibility, in their preternaturally reactionary way.
Planet
Green
of Discovery of ers “5 Ways to Green Your Video Game System”
(Peterson 2009).
Gamespot.com
provides a graphic that compares power
usage and cost by gamers in various U.S. regions: on average, the energy
cost for gaming in Alaska and Hawaii is two to two and a half times as
much as in other states and three times as much as in Idaho (see
http://
of this information is useful; most of it is meant to encourage hardware
upgrades. None of it addresses the rising environmental costs of gaming.
We hold out little hope of the industry doing the right thing along the
global chain of gaming, from production to distribution. Stringent regula-
tion and critique from the state, social movements and academia are neces-
sary. Microsoft and Nintendo, for instance, have appalling game console
environmental records, in terms both of obsolescence, having sold seven gen-
erations of frequently non-interoperable home consoles in forty years, and
components, because they use poisonous fl ame retardants, plastics, chemi-
cals and heavy metals. All this is legitimized through a “utopian mythology
of upgrades” (Engardio et al. 2007; Chiang 2010; Moore 2009).
The dependence of these supposedly
laissez-faire
corporations on state
aid provides a way in. The game industry in the U.S., for example, receives
monumental public subvention. Such corporate welfare of ers potential
environmental leverage (Kocieniewski 2011). In addition, as we write, a
path-breaking piece of legislation is making its way through the U.S. Con-
gress (S. 1696) that would require the secretary of energy to study video
game console energy ei ciency (see Committee Reports of the 112th Con-
gress, Senate Report 112-018;
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?&d
=TOC _ 58895&).
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