Next-Gen Gaming Is an Environmental Nightmare

IT’S A SAD truth that escapist pursuits are not truly separate from real life, and some even have a nasty tendency to exacerbate real-life problems. And while gaming offers a reprieve from thinking about dooms both personal and global, it threatens to bring at least one of them—climate disaster—closer to reality. What with plastic casing, mined-metal circuit boards, guzzled power, and e-waste, gaming has for decades been an industry unfriendly to the environment. Now, in line with more meta trends in tech, gaming’s technological underpinnings are becoming smaller and more invisible. Cloud gaming has arrived alongside digital consoles like the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition and Xbox Series S, where games are buttons on menu screens. You’re not going to see the equivalent of 700,000 Atari 2600 E.T. cartridges buried in the New Mexico desert. But while many gamers will ditch the discs, experts say that less visible tech in no way equals less damage to the planet, and that the games industry as a whole is not on a path to reducing its carbon footprint. Right now, US gaming platforms represent 34 terawatt-hours a year in energy usage—more than the entire state of West Virginia—with associated carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to over 5 million cars. And it’s only going to get worse. “Total emissions are going up,” says Gary Cook, global climate campaigns director for Stand.Earth, an environmental nonprofit founded to challenge corporations’ climate practices. “There’s a real reckoning that needs to happen.” Two features define next-gen consoles: digital services and big-daddy specs. You might pick up Microsoft’s $300 all-digital Xbox Series S and, downloading games off the cloud, live a life free of disc clutter. You might forgo a console entirely and sign up for Google Stadia, Xbox’s Game Pass Ultimate, or any number of smartphone-based cloud gaming services. Even if you do opt for a specced-out PlayStation 5, you’ll likely still be downloading very big video games from data centers in northern Virginia, Las Vegas, Chicago, and beyond.

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How to Build a Spacecraft to Save the World

OUR BEST HOPE of saving the planet from a killer asteroid is a white cube the size of a washing machine that’s currently in pieces in a clean room in Maryland. When I arrived last week at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, a sprawling R&D facility where most researchers are working on government projects they can’t talk about, the spacecraft was missing two of its side panels, its ion drive was being cleaned, and its primary camera was in a refrigerator down the hall. Ordinarily, the sterile high bay would be a hive of activity with technicians in white clean suits doting on the spacecraft, but most of them were on the other side of the glass trying to get the half-built cube to talk to a massive radio dish on the other side of the country. Next summer, that same dish in California will be the spacecraft’s main point of contact with Earth as it blitzes through the solar system on a first-of-its-kind suicide mission for NASA. The goal of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is to slam the cube into a small asteroid orbiting a larger asteroid 7 million miles from Earth. No one is exactly sure what will happen when the probe impacts its target. We know that the spacecraft will be obliterated. It should be able to change the asteroid’s orbit just enough to be detectable from Earth, demonstrating that this kind of strike could nudge an oncoming threat out of Earth’s way. Beyond that, everything is just an educated guess, which is exactly why NASA needs to punch an asteroid with a robot.

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More Video Games Featured Women This Year. Will It Last?

IF 2020 HAD been a normal year, then the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo would have happened this past summer in Los Angeles. If E3 had taken place, then some of the gaming industry’s biggest studios and publishers would have held press conferences watched by millions of gamers around the world heralding many of their biggest upcoming releases. And if that had happened, then for the sixth year in a row, we at Feminist Frequency would have compiled data on the announcements to determine whether or not female representation in video games is actually getting any better. However, 2020 has been anything but a normal year, and Covid-19 necessitated the cancelation of E3. The expo’s relevance was already in decline, with companies increasingly relying on direct video presentations they could release to eager audiences of gamers at any time of year; but this year, studios wishing to reach prospective players during the summer months had no other option. So we, too, have adapted. This year, our collected data

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