The 10 Weeks To Save The Games Industry campaign continues. Matchmade CEO Jiri Kupiainen and GamesForest.Club’s Maria Wagner are sustainably travelling around Europe spreading the message to games makers and communities that we all need to get serious about what we can all do to help save the planet.
The message is a simple one. Unless we all get smarter about the necessity and logistics of our business travel, the global turnaround in CO2 production that we’re all praying for simply isn’t going to happen.
The duo are now eight weeks into their campaign and each week they’ll be reporting into PG.biz and sharing a new video on their YouTube featuring comment from some of Europe’s finest game makers. Here’s the latest episode (with a video below). Be sure to subscribe to their YouTube channel here to keep up with their journey.
Jiri Kupiainen: This project has been a constant source of second hand cognitive dissonance – there’s probably a German word for that.
The other day, as the IPCC scientists delivered their “final warning” on the climate crisis and as we edited our Bratislava episode [below] (where we interviewed Elena Lobova, co-founder & CBDO at GDBAY, and founder at Achievers Hub, who’s had to flee her home twice now because of Russian aggression), I was also refreshing my LinkedIn feed to read an endless stream of postings from my European peers who just landed in San Francisco for GDC. That’s about nine tons CO2e for a business class return flight from Berlin, or six times the annual “climate compatible” emissions for one person.
After spending time with the Matchmade team in Helsinki and conducting a few interviews there, we jumped on the ferry to Stockholm. From an emissions point of view, these ferries are yet another source of cognitive dissonance – on one hand, each one of these gigantic ships sailing back and forth between Finland and Sweden every day is a line item in Finland’s annual carbon footprint accounts, but on the other the emissions per passenger kilometre are still estimated to be one tenth of flying. And realities of geography and geopolitics being what they are, it’s not like there are other ways to travel between Finland and “real” Europe. Maybe that train tunnel will get built by someone someday.
It’s been almost nine weeks now since we embarked on this trip, so just one more week to go. For the Bratislava episode above, we ended up completely cutting out a segment with great insights on difficulties in mobile UA in favor of significantly more political themes, which I guess is a way of saying that as the trip is approaching its end, we are definitely feeling the pressure to do something meaningful with the small reach we have.
The entire games industry seems to agree that someone should definitely do something about climate change, but for many of the companies their own responsibility seems to be limited to sorting out their recycling.
The Bratislava episode focuses on heavy topics like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the social and political responsibility that comes with being the biggest games company in Slovakia, and I sincerely hope as many people as possible watch this one despite their busy GDC meeting schedules.
Even though we’ll be making it home by the end of next week, the content train will keep on rolling, and we still have five or six episodes worth of time to find even better answers to the “who” and “what” of using the power of the games industry to fight the climate crisis.
To catch all the episodes so far head to their YouTube here and find out more about their journey so far here: Intro, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Week 7, Week 8.