Xbox’s Director of Gaming Sustainability, Trista Patterson, joined the Xbox Podcast this week with a very clear message:
“Sustainable gaming is something Xbox is very proud of and is making great strides in. But with the climate [change], You can’t beat your competitor. In each category you have to compete against yourself. And just as we say “when everyone plays, everyone wins”, the same is true of “when everyone reduces energy and emissions, everyone on the planet wins”. There’s no doubt about that.”
Appears in the podcast after the announcement of a new suite of developer tools to reduce energy consumption and emissions Through Game Code, Patterson explained how she and her team have made groundbreaking strides to help the entire industry adopt more sustainable thinking and “do mighty good with the gaming industry.”
It wasn’t an easy task. “For a long time the industry has maintained that there is no gain in greening game code,” Patterson explained. “And that’s because there’s a tremendous amount of complexity between the hardware, the software, the electrical and other engineering, the design, and then the game code itself, which generates the power needed to create the gaming experience.”
“Broadly speaking, the industry decided that this was a completely unsolvable problem – in fact, within the UN’s Playing for the Planet Alliance it was considered an unsolvable problem even a month ago.”
The solution to this seemingly impossible problem was to create resources for developers to identify “energy bugs” – previously invisible problems created by coding that can unintentionally consume more power – at the source and fix them quickly. While Xbox has already made progress reduce power consumption in the consoles themselvesthis new effort will help developers reduce the power consumption caused by the games they play on them.
“You can have fun destroying things in a game. And now we are not have fun destroying the planet. Have fun repairing it.”
At GDC, Xbox announced the launch of a new developer sustainability toolkit, a power monitoring system, certification reports, power consumption dashboards, guides, case studies, and a pilot program that provides expert support to game developers looking to work on their games’ energy consumption. The goal is to “precisely develop the visual and analytical feedback game developers need to make changes to their code that allow them to lower the power consumption on the consoles in every gamer’s living room in the world.”
This openness that this isn’t unique to the Xbox platform is key here: “What I find really remarkable is that when a studio sees how easy it is to fix so many of these energy bugs, they do it Fix them in a way that not only reduces emissions on the Xbox console platform, but introduces them [them] to the entire game code. And that game code will then be released on almost every other platform they will be released on in the future.”
The work won’t stop at Xbox developers either: “We empower and invite the rest of the industry to use these insights, these case studies and these tools, and also stimulate their own investigations to make an impact. no matter how small or big your gaming studio is.”
The overarching goal here is to make the massive size of the gaming industry part of the solution rather than a sustainability issue – and to capitalize on the inherent positivity of this creative space:
“In the environmental sector, things go haywire to the right and left. It’s a depressing field. When society focuses on everything going wrong all the time, and we encounter stories of loss and destruction, it’s true that statistically there are many challenges ahead, but gaming opens up all this remarkable, creative problem-solving… There’s a lot you can do Fun breaking things in a game. And now we are not have fun destroying the planet. Have fun repairing it.”
