Examining the game industry’s hidden impacts on climate change

Enlarge / Water water everywhere, and all the [circuit] boards did shrink… (credit: Getty Images | Aurich Lawson)

Amid the stress of living on a warming planet, playing video games is an escape for billions. Whether you’re inhaling mystical doodads in Kirby and the Forgotten Land or cruising through Guanajuato in Forza Horizon 5, games offer a digital retreat that feeds our fundamental need to play.

Unfortunately, the scope of climate change is such that we will need to rethink almost every element of global society—including the game industry.

Ben Abraham has been thinking about the need for that kind of change for a long time. Speaking with Ars, Abraham recalled how, as a teenager, the top floor of his parents’ split-level Australian home would become a grueling sauna thanks to a combination of the summer sun outside and a gaming PC (with cathode ray tube monitor) hemorrhaging heat inside.