BONUS EPISODE: In this quick-fire episode, Hugo digests the adventure that was last week's Green Games Summit by UKIE and Playing for the Planet, alongside fellow summitgoers and IGDA Climate SIG members Mélanie Christin and Trevin York. What were our biggest takeaways from the summit, what did it accomplish and where do we go from here? Apologies for the sound quality in the beginning, it gets better after a few minutes!

Ryan Boudinot is an author and technologist who has spent the COVID-19 pandemic diving deep into geospatial data and the ways it can be used to not just improve games, but to make game-playing improve the data, and the world itself. On this episode, he tells us all about this concept which he calls the World Integration Loop or WIL. Ryan's startup website is here: http://machinesanddreamland.com/ As always, join the conversation with IGDA Climate: https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq

In this episode we catch up with leading ecocritic Alenda Chang to learn about how game worlds can be just as delightful and important as the action that takes place within them, and how deepening our simulation of worlds and ecosystems can help players reconnect with nature. After years of writing papers and books on how games portray ecology, last summer Alenda published an honest-to-goodness manifesto, and it is, well... rambunctious. LINKS The paper in question, Rambunctious Games: A...

In this special episode we get all of the spokespeople for the new IGDA Climate SIG workstreams together in a virtual room spanning three continents. Arnaud Fayolle tells us how we can get involved in crafting and promoting the actions that will shape future game design in the Design Patterns workstream, Mark Videon gives us the lowdown on how to monitor you studios' carbon footprints in the Industry Benchmarking workstream, while Paula Escuadra plots how we use all this to take over the...

Narrative game designer Inari Bourguenolle has been on an ecological journey ever since she first played Final Fantasy VII. Incidentally, our host Hugo Bille has recently obsessed quite a bit over the climate stories embedded in this classic game and especially its recent remake. Their conversation takes us to toxic masculinity, gender roles, individualism and the monomyth, and begins to grapple with how they all exacerbate the climate and environmental crises. LINKS Hugo's article, Those...

We kick off the new year with a conversation with Dr Dargan Frierson, an actual climate scientist, director of the EarthGames program and total rockstar. When we're not singing and dancing, we ask ourselves how games can promote climate justice, how we know if it's working and how scientific climate models can make themselves useful inside of games. Visit EarthGames and play all their games here: https://earthgames.org/ Dargan mentions a "baby climate model" that you can tinker with in...

As a new generation of consoles begin their reign in the games industry, Hugo sits down with Jackson Ryan, science editor at CNET, to muse about the console cycle, its environmental impact and where we can go from here. Jackson has just put out a new article on CNET where he tests the electricity use of the new machines. You can read all the juicy details here: https://www.cnet.com/news/ps5-xbox-series-x-and-the-climate-crisis-facing-next-gen-video-games/ Some other articles mentioned in...

In this first episode, Hugo sits down with Paula Escuadra, co-chair of the newly formed IGDA Climate Special Interest Group, who tells the story of how the warring giants of the games industry came together to fight the climate crisis and how, finally, we can all be a part of the effort.  LINKS: For more about the UN Playing For The Planet alliance, here's the website.  And for the IGDA Climate SIG, here's that website. If you want to connect with other games industry people who are...