Greening Games – Sustainability Kit
Author: Greening Games
Publication Date: November 2024
The Greening Games Sustainability Kit is a toolset for teaching topics related to environmental sustainability in game design and game studies university courses. It is the final outcome of the three-year-long research project “Greening Games Building Higher Education Resources for Sustainable Video Game Production, Design & Critical Game Studies” ( 2021-2024). The Kit contains an overview of didactic resources that may help teachers integrate green gaming into their curricula and expand on the materials developed within the project so far. It also offers a consolidated and enriched version of the Greening Games Education Report, Teaching Guide and the Pedagogical Framework. Our hope is that the research carried out during this project will inform future studies and facilitate the development of both new pedagogical resources and other forms of transnational cooperation.
Nature Playing: On the Experience of Contemplating Technologically Mediated Nature within the Game World of Riders republic
Author: Sonia Fizek
Publication Date: 28.08.2024
This contribution explores the practice of contemplative play or what the author proposes to call “nature playing”. This concept marks a continuity between the literary genre of “nature writing” and the way nature may be contemplatively experienced in video games, especially those with open-world natural landscapes. The author will discuss modes of nature playing within the mediated environments of the sports simulation game Riders Republic (Ubisoft, 2022). Nature playing will be analyzed as an aesthetic practice which may be fostered by purposeful design, or it may emerge from the player’s own nature-driven sensibilities triggered by the aesthetic qualities of the game world. The author frames contemplative nature playing within a variety of concepts such as in-game wandering, slow play as well as ludic boredom. The article culminates in three autoethnographic ludic interventions, in which nature playing is captured in three contemplative pieces of nature writing.
Fizek, S. (2024). Nature playing: On the experience of contemplating technologically mediated nature within the game world of Riders Republic. Games and Culture. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120241273329
Spielen für die Zukunft / Playing for the future
Author: Sonia Fizek
Publication Date: 27.03.2024
Can video games help us rewrite the future in times of the climate crisis? Sonia Fizek explores how games can inspire players to engage in combating the climate crisis, emphasizing the need for both future-oriented and critical gaming skills. Written for the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education).
Fizek, S. (2024, March 27). Spielen für die Zukunft. Retrieved from https://www.bpb.de/themen/kultur/digitale-spiele/546959/spielen-fuer-die-zukunft/
Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis
Chapter Title: Material Infrastructures of Play: How the Games Industry Reimagines Itself in the Face of Climate Crisis
Author: Sonia Fizek
Publication date: 2024
Sonia Fizek explores the materiality of digital play and its connection to environmental sustainability, investigating how the video game industry responds to the climate crisis. Through a hermeneutic analysis of segments from the Green Games Guide, the chapter raises questions about the industry’s reaction. Fizek queries whether green game-making commitments and self-regulatory initiatives are genuine shifts or merely PR tactics within the context of neoliberal culture’s focus on growth and planned obsolescence. This chapter is part of the publication “Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis, 2024,” spanning pages 525-542 (18 pages).
Fizek, S. (2024). Material Infrastructures of Play: How the Games Industry Reimagines Itself in the Face of Climate Crisis. In Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis (pp. 525-542). DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.10819591.28
Games: Research and Practice
Chapter Title: Teaching Environmentally Conscious Game Design: Lessons and Challenges
Authors: Sonia Fizek, Mikhail Fiadotau, Hanna Wirman, Maria Garda
Publication Date: 12.03.2023
An increasing number of higher education game design and development programs are integrating environmental considerations into their curricula, reflecting a broader trend towards responsible game production, consumption, and education. This article introduces two ongoing European inter-university projects: the Erasmus+ Greening Games project and the Nordplus-funded Nordic Alliance for Sustainability in Gaming network. Using them as case studies, the article reflects on lessons learned and challenges encountered during the projects’ pilot stages, and discusses their implications for environmentally conscious game design education.
Fizek, S., Fiadotau, M., Wirman, H., & Garda, M. (2023, March 12). Teaching Environmentally Conscious Game Design: Lessons and Challenges. Games: Research and Practice, 1(1), 1–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3583058
Greening Games Education Report
Author: Greening Games [revision needed]
Publication Date: 2023
The Greening Games Education report maps out the green gaming research, related didactic offer and the initiatives of the games development sector. Based on interview and survey material, the analysis of selected literature and games industry’s outreach projects, we are providing a comprehensive picture of the current needs of higher education as well as the industry. Hopefully, this report will allow you to better understand and contextualise existing pro-environmental initiatives, identify gaps in current knowledge, and most of all to embrace the variety of voices and attitudes towards these issues across the field.
The report is divided into three parts: Mapping out Teaching and Research, Mapping out the Video Games Industry and Summary and Next Steps. In the Appendices section, we are sharing the question sets and supporting visual data behind the semi-structured interviews and surveys that we conducted amongst higher education experts and game developers.