[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 1: Is green gaming an oxymoron?

[Jeff Watson]

Hello Empyre, and thank you Alenda for orchestrating this. It's a
privilege to be posting here.

Following on Alenda's introduction, I'd like to begin with a few
thoughts about videogames as they may be considered through the lenses
of performance and materiality. Videogames and other forms of
electronic entertainment can do many things. They can represent real
world places and systems. They can make claims about things. They can
communicate ideas, liberate minds, distract, enlighten, excite,
torment, and much much more. These are the kinds of terms—terms that
ultimately hinge on the player experience—that those working in the
business, at least on the design and software side, prefer to use when
they talk about what they do. But what electronic entertainment is
also about—and perhaps what it is most fundamentally about--is
extraction: resource extraction to construct and power the streams of
machines necessary to support an industry built on planned
obsolescence and endless growth; and data extraction from
players/users, to use in arbitrage schemes and/or to improve the
attentional efficacy of the products themselves. These terms are
rarely discussed at events like the Game Developers' Conference or the
Electronic Entertainment Expo.

But what does all this have to do with "green gaming?"

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