For three years now, I feel like I’ve been writing the same story about the Green Game Jam: great efforts are being made but where are the companies making blockbuster games? Why aren’t they part of this, and what will it take to get them involved?
It’s frustrating because the potential for impact is there, as witnessed in the few blockbuster games that have been involved. In 2022, the first year I was a judge in the Media’s Choice category, Sony ran a plant-a-tree campaign for Horizon: Forbidden West that fit the brief perfectly and resulted in trees being planted in real life. That same year, Ubisoft set a Riders Republic map ablaze to raise awareness about the devastation of wildfires – a dramatic event players couldn’t help but be drawn in by. This year, PUBG Mobile did something similar of its own, transforming a verdant map – with the help of an expert climatologist – into a dried and withered husk, representing what it would look like as a result of climate change. Imagination, reach, impact: these examples had them all.
But entries like the above are few and far between. In fact, those games are perhaps the only times triple-A, or even double-A games, have featured in the Green Game Jam. Most entries come from games in the social, casual, and mobile gaming space – all of which are huge and impactful in their own right. But when it comes to reaching the more traditional gaming public – the likes of you and me, for example – there’s no denying a household publisher could bring more clout to the whole endeavour. It’s telling that this year’s PUBG entry was for PUBG mobile only; what I wouldn’t have given to see it realised in PUBG on PC too. More worryingly still, there’s a slightly backwards trend of fewer triple-A entries appearing than in previous years; I don’t think I saw a triple-A anywhere on the nominations list this year at all. What gives – do triple-A game makers just not care?
The answer is complicated, as I discovered while speaking to Sam Barratt, one of the leaders of the Playing for the Planet Alliance, which organises the Green Game Jam. Playing for the Planet, in case you didn’t know, is a United Nations initiative that aims to bring games companies together to help them to make meaningful changes to the environmental impact of their work and operations. It was launched in 2019, and more recently, you may have seen project director Lisa Pak on stage during a brief segment in this year’s Gamescom Opening Night Live show.