Doing Our Bit IGDA Climate SIG

Clayton goes on a design deep dive with green game evangelist Andrew Brennwald, game director of up-and-coming foraging sim Out and About. Tracing the winding path that led him to that position, they explore a rewilding awakening, the exhilarating leap of starting up a green game studio, and the many joys and challenges of designing a game inspired by nature - one that can in turn inspire players to imagine a future worth fighting for.



References:

The Lakes with Simon Reeve: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16091378/

Yaldi Games: https://www.yaldigames.com

Out and About: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1671570/Out_and_About/

IGDA Climate SIG: https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq

In the first episode of our new season, we discuss climate resilience and how games can help prepare the world for what's to come. Clayton is joined by Shayne Hayes: newly elected co-chair of the IGDA Climate SIG and Associate Director of the Video Game Initiative at the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock).


This episode was brought to you by our host: Clayton Whittle, our producer: Hugo Bille, and our podcast editor: Sabrina Fedele.

Invitation to the IGDA Climate SIG: https://www.igdaclimatesig.org/take-action


Learn more about Shayne Hayes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shayne-hayes/



The Environmental Game Design Playbook can be found ⁠here⁠.

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 Manifesto for Environmental Game Design, can be downloaded here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.2020.1765557

Alenda co-edited this themed issue of Ecozon@ called Green Computer and Video Games which helped kickstart the study of environmental depictions in games. It's free online:
https://ecozona.eu/issue/view/124

Read more of Alenda's excellent work in her book Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games or listen to her talk about it in this episode of Super Gamer Podcast:
https://supergamerpodcast.com/2020/03/30/new-super-gamer-podcast-6-our-virtual-natural-world-with-alenda-chang/

The excellent interview with Frankie Myers of the Yurok Tribe on How to Save a Planet that I mentioned, can be found here:
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/5whko6o/the-tribe-thats-moving-earth-and-water

Join the conversation, and help us build the design patterns database and other resources, in the IGDA Climate SIG discord:
https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq

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 games industry in the Climate Councils workstream. Are we ready to get this party started? Actually, it was ending it that turned out to be the problem.

LINKS
The blog post chronicling the first months of the SIG and the workstreams is now live, along with an awesome video:
https://theclimatesig.medium.com/not-game-over-game-developers-tackle-the-climate-crisis-8fb2ae45674d

Confused about the workstreams? This is a neat illustration (followed by all the detail you could ever ask for):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tme06zzQybH9v3lRe-0RjrSsgVovHHqiGc6JLxYpbC0/

(sorry future listeners, I imagine that link might be a bit stale)

Space Ape Games' carbon offsetting guide that Mark mentioned can be found here:
https://spaceapegames.com/green

Join the IGDA Climate SIG! Dive into the discord here:
https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq

Or get in touch here:
https://igda.org/sigs/climate/