Material Infrastructures of Play: How the Games Industry Reimagines Itself in the Face of Climate Crisis

This chapter is an exploration of the materiality of digital play. I want to discuss how it relates to environmental sustainability and how the video game industry addresses the issue. The chapter will provide a hermeneutic analysis of selected parts of the Green Games Guide in a wider ecocritical media context. One of the most crucial questions this chapter wants to address is how the industry responds to the climate crisis and how to read this response vis-a-vis the neoliberal culture of exponential growth, optimization, and planned hardware obsolescence. In other words, are green game-making commitments and self-regulatory initiatives rhetorical PR stunts or could they be read as catalysts of a deeper cultural and political shift within the games industry?