Paper Short Abstract:

Facing legislative demands for climate neutrality, the game industry struggles with opaque value chains and distributed planetary costs. This paper explores developers’ local strategies for navigating sustainability frameworks and examines the socio-environmental relations and material complexities of game production beyond climate metrics.

Paper Abstract:

The game industry, as a global phenomenon, significantly contributes to environmental and social harm through extensive value chains, precarious labour practices, and resource-intensive technologies (Abraham 2022; Gordon 2019). Facing legislative pressure for climate neutrality, the industry struggles to generate quantified metrics to establish credibility and urgency (Porter 1995). Intransparent value chains and distributed planetary costs complicate efforts to provide "global numbers" (Pasek et al. 2019). While climate neutrality frameworks often fail to capture these decentralised impacts, localised metrics and smaller-scale interventions offer actionable pathways for sustainability.

This paper examines how developers' local bottom-up strategies enact varying relations of planetary care and global impact. Drawing on empirical research from the Horizon Europe project STRATEGIES – Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries (2024–2028), we investigate how climate neutrality is institutionalised, framed, and negotiated within the gaming industry.

We trace how industry practitioners navigate competing sustainability frameworks—from EU-level policies to grassroots movements—revealing conflicting urgencies and priorities. Developers’ efforts to challenge entrenched capitalistic and technocultural logics expose the socio-environmental implications of gaming, which remains rooted in extractivist logic (Cubitt 2016) that perpetuate the decoupling of economic activity from environmental degradation (Parrique et al. 2019).

By analysing the entanglements of hardware production, energy consumption, supply chains, labour practices, and workplace cultures, we conceptualise the materiality of digital technologies as multiple (Mol 2002). To unwrite the hegemonic framings of carbon neutrality, we argue that sustainability in gaming must extend beyond carbon metrics to explore situated socio-environmental relations and the material complexities of digital production.