“Warm and Stuffy” - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 172

of ecosystem welfare and environmental despoliation. More than an addi-
tion to the rights of territorially based citizenship, green citizenship is a
critique of them, a corrective that looks to save infrastructure, ecosystems
and heritage from capitalist growth. Greening these rights introduces the
right to biophysical health, to a body free from harmful biotoxins. Environ-
mental citizenship changes civil-republican notions of citizen duties, too.
If everyone had the right to biophysical health, this would be matched by
an obligation not to poison ecosystems, food chains and so on. By-passing
localism and contemporaneity to enter the sphere of universal, future obli-
gations, green citizenship transcends conventional political-economic space
and time, extending beyond the here and now toward a globally sustainable
ecology that refuses to discount the health and value of future ecosystems,
opposing elemental risks created by capitalist growth (Martín-Barbero
2001, 9; Miller 2007; Dean 2001; Dobson 2003).
CONCLUSION
Games seem to be everywhere we look, and we lap them up. But they are
not only sources of awareness, analysis, ecstasy, violence, imperialism and
education. They also share responsibility for climate change, pollution
growth, biodiversity decline and habitat decimation—core constituents of
our global ecological crisis.
What would happen to the discourse on games, if, rather than psy-
function pessimism, ludic optimism, amateur auto-ethnography, neoliberal
phantasy, textual criticism or promotional dross, it confronted the fact that,
for example, millions of cartridges of Atari's failed electronic-game adapta-
tion of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1981) were buried in a
New Mexico landfi ll, broken up by a heavy roller and covered in concrete
to consign them to history (Miller 2006)? Or that cables in Sony's PlaySta-
tion One consoles were found to contain deadly levels of cadmium, a fi asco
that cost the company US$85 million to fi x (Engardio et al . 2007)? If Game
Studies evaluated the environmental ef ects of media technology, would the
pain and pleasure of consoles, end-user license agreements (EULAs), gold
mining and reverse engineering be diminished? Would innovation be sty-
mied? Would all forthcoming analyses of games be green?
We hope that an abiding regard for the ecological context of media tech-
nology will change the discipline. The three levels of media studies—the
political economy of production, distribution, consumption and post-con-
sumption; the textuality of meaning; and the experience of audiences—
must be central, even as they are modifi ed to account for the specifi cities
of the medium. We need to connect the conditions of existence of games
and play—how they come into being, what they are and what they do—via
institutional, technological and labour history, stylistic and formal analy-
sis, audience research and environmental impact.