In part one, we talked about companies. Companies – including some of the big players in video games – are improving the efficiency of their data centres, their data transmission, and their content delivery networks. But whether they’re doing this fast enough is debatable, varying quite a bit from one company to the next.
They’re also improving the carbon emissions directly, by “decarbonising” – sourcing renewable energy – for those data centres and services. But again, whether they’re aiming high enough, or acting fast enough, using the right methods, depends from one company to the next. Even governments – perhaps unsurprisingly – are struggling to act fast enough in decarbonising their national grids. The UK’s carbon budget, for instance – the amount of emissions it can emit before surpassing the hard recommendations of the IPCC – actually runs out at the end of 2024, in just three years.
In other words, we have to keep the pressure up on governments and companies – but we also have to think about what we can do ourselves, because while we can’t, directly, decarbonise the national grid, or triple the efficiency of a server, or set up a wind farm next to a data centre, we can think about what our choices do to affect the demand for that energy itself.
The question for us, then, is this: what’s the least carbon intensive way to play games?
For console and PC players, we basically have a choice of three options for playing games: buying a physical disc, installing a digital download, or more recently, streaming a game via the cloud. There have been a few – although crucially, not many – attempts at answering which one of those three is better. Polygon looked at the environmental case for choosing disc or digital gaming back in 2015, but things have naturally changed a lot since then. And last year, in a piece titled “Why cloud gaming could be a big problem for the climate”, Polygon cited a study by Matthew Marsden et al., which looked at several possible scenarios for the future of gaming in 2030, relating to cloud gaming specifically: one where cloud gaming stays niche, similar to how it currently is; one where it grows moderately to become a “hybrid” model of some cloud gaming, some as it is now; and one where it becomes the dominant form of gaming overall.
The results here were pretty bleak: according to the study, the “hybrid” future resulted in a 29.9 percent increase in emissions compared to the current situation, and the cloud-dominant future a 112 percent increase. As the authors concluded: “If streaming at 4K resolution becomes widespread, then it may well be game over.”
But this isn’t the whole story. As George Kamiya put it to us, “There is always a counterfactual.” Naturally, there’s only so much that can be taken into account in a single study, but speaking generally about the question, Kamiya suggests a number of examples of what you might need to bear in mind. “I think you could try to understand the footprint of cloud gaming, and then try and compare it to: what if we didn’t have this? What would the alternative be? And what would the impacts of those be? You would have to then start to include transportation of the disc, manufacturing of the disc, all those materials, and then the commute for the person as well, [or] if you have it shipped to your house. If you have to go and pick it up, you’re using a car – the impacts are going to be quite high compared to downloading even a hundred gigabytes. There’s just so many uncertainties and sensitivities.”
“There is a straightforward answer to the question ‘which method of gameplay has the lowest carbon footprint’, which is, ‘it depends’.”
Dr. Joshua Aslan, in his 2020 study into the climate change implications of gaming.
There has, in fact, been one study into exactly that, and notably it was commissioned by Sony. Authored by Joshua Aslan, initially as a PhD thesis, the study was written under the guidance of several other researchers, including Dr. Kieren Mayers, who is head of environment and technology compliance at Sony Interactive Entertainment, and other renowned experts Dr Jacquetta Lee and Professors Chris France, Richard Murphy, and Jonathan Koomey.