Is Xbox really the first "carbon aware" games console?

Your latest digest of video game and climate change news from the past two weeks.

Welcome to the latest edition of Play Anthropocene!

Today is Tuesday, January 24th, and we’re covering the latest developments in the world of video games and climate change. Happy reading!

Latest Xbox patch takes Microsoft one baby step closer to carbon-negativity

A new system update for the Xbox Series X/S has Microsoft labelling its hardware as the “first carbon aware” console, just three years after claiming to have manufactured the “first carbon neutral” games console with the Xbox One X.

The patch, available now for Xbox Insiders and rolling out soon for the rest of us, is headlined by what Xbox calls “carbon aware downloads”, a new feature explained by Technical Program Manager Blaine Hauglie in the following extract from Xbox Wire:

“When your console is plugged in, connected to the Internet and regional carbon intensity data is available, Xbox will schedule game, app, and OS updates for your console at specific times during the nightly maintenance window that may result in lower carbon emissions because a higher proportion of electricity is coming from lower-carbon sources on the electric grid”

In other words, Xbox is now smart enough to demonstrate the same kind of behaviour that we’re all advised to follow with our white goods, booting them up during quieter periods of the day (or, indeed, the night) in order to ease the burden on the local energy grid.

The update also now automatically sets Xbox’s “energy saving” power mode, which shuts down the console almost entirely when turned off, as the default option on the system; a change which organisations like the Natural Resources Defense Council have been calling for since discovering the console’s “Instant On” power mode used around ten times as much energy to operate.

This, in addition to an “Active Hours” setting that allows owners to determine when their console switches between sleep and energy saving mode, altogether makes for a welcome suite of common-sense features; one which will no doubt avoid buckets of unnecessary energy usage across the millions of Xbox consoles being used around the world every day, even if “carbon aware” does sound like another silly corporate buzzword in the global greenwashing race to the bottom.

Xbox’s efforts are part of a wider strategy across Microsoft to reach full carbon-negative status by 2030; an ambitious aim even before you consider some of the lingering questions around how it plans to get there. The very basis of carbon offsetting, for instance, is mired in misinformation that allows the rich and powerful to circumvent their actual carbon accountability, while CNET’s Jackson Ryan has expressed doubt over Xbox’s much touted climate goals by pointing to the company’s immense plastic output as an enormous gap in its sustainability strategy.

Xbox has, at least, committed to making all of its products, accessories, and packaging 100% recyclable in OECD countries by 2030, but - as Ryan’s article argues - there is always more that can and should be done from an industry leader as big as Microsoft. For the time being, however, this latest update can at least be considered an admirable first step for Xbox in a year where it ought to be taking plenty more.

With a single tweak to its source material, The Last of Us highlights a terrifying side-effect of our warming world

HBO’s TV adaptation of The Last of Us, the critically-acclaimed survival horror game, premiered earlier this month, and is already taking significant deviations away from the source material, some of which is rooting its fictional apocalypse further in the real world dangers of global warming.

Mild spoilers for The Last of Us season premiere are discussed below, so skip to the next section if you haven’t seen it yet.

The series cold opens with a chat show in 1968; the same year, incidentally, that glaciologist Dr John Mercer first warned the world about melting ice caps and sea level rise as a result of climate change. In the scene, an epidemiologist expresses his fears over the dangers of a fungal pandemic and, with two sentences, raises a scarily prescient concern about the relationship between disease and the climate crisis:

“It’s true that fungi cannot survive if its host's internal temperature is over 94 degrees, and currently there are no reasons for fungi to evolve to withstand higher temperatures, but what if that were to change? What if, for instance, the world were to get slightly warmer?” 

It might sound like the stuff of science-fiction, but this correlation between global warming and global pandemics is all too real. A recent study found that over half of infectious diseases are exacerbated by the effects of climate change, while outbreaks like the Coronavirus pandemic are expected to become far more likely, and potentially more severe, as the crisis continues to escalate.

Speaking on the series’ official companion podcast, The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin explains how this scene also acts as an allegory for another dimension of the climate issue; namely our inability to act on the problem despite knowing about it for decades.

“It was important to me that this opening takes place many, many decades before Cordyceps was around,” says Mazin, “because I like the idea that these things that come and get us don’t just show up. Somebody knew thirty, forty, fifty years ago […] it was waiting out there and we were told. It’s a very kind of Chernobyl thing that I’m obsessed with; the idea that we know things and we agree that they’re going to happen and we pretend that they’re not.”

Read generously between the lines, and you could have always interpreted The Last of Us' unique depiction of a global pandemic as a shallow comment on the volatility of 21st century socioeconomics. It wasn't exactly screaming from the rooftops like the game's infected enemies, but it was there for those who wanted to find it. 

For the show, however, Mazin and co-writer Neil Druckmann have breathed fresh relevance into The Last of Us’ outbreak within the space of a single scene, one that foregrounds its eerie, real-world parallels as a precursor to the entire story. It’s a masterful stroke, and one that hopefully gets some of the show’s 4.7 million viewers thinking more acutely about how we heed the warnings of the well-informed before it’s too late.

New story details for Season promise meditations on the profound paradox of climate grief

With the release of Season: A Letter to the Future just one week away, developer Scavengers Studio has published a new post on the PlayStation Blog, elaborating more about what to expect from its painterly narrative adventure, where players take the role of a young woman cataloguing stories of a world about to be decimated by floods.

“Most of the themes of Season are expressions of the anxieties of our age,” writes Creative Director Kevin Sullivan. “We’re heading towards a future we know will be worse than the present. As this becomes more certain, it has an attendant thought that feels even darker: These awful years are also the good times. The story exists to give some kind of poetic expression to these thoughts and feelings, to defamiliarize them, tear them up and put them back together in a fantasy world.”

In this way, Season looks set to tap into the many, complicated feelings surrounding eco-anxiety, but also the emotional resonance of Solastalgia; a term coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the human response to “your endemic sense of place is being violated”.

As Sullivan alludes to, one ingredient within Solastalgia’s bowl of emotional soup is our compulsion to cherish what we have in the natural world before it’s completely gone; a renewed appreciation for the present sparked, and thus tinged, by a lament for what’s to come. For you and I, practicing Solastalgia might involve taking some extra time to enjoy birdsong in the morning, knowing that it’s getting quieter with every Spring, or soaking in the colours of an Autumn flower that really shouldn’t be in bloom at that time of year.

This paradox, of finding the sweetness to savour in bitter times, is a uniquely human experience, and one that a game like Season, with both feet firmly in the realm of the poetic and the sensory, is well poised to elevate. Games such as Outer Wilds and The Forgotten City have already given us opportunities to explore a world on the brink of decimation but, by holding a more direct mirror to the state of our own planet, Season looks set to deliver a particularly resonant emotional journey for players who pick it up on PlayStation or PC this January 31st.

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