Live stream: The Sustainability Nexus Conference
– climate, green solutions, best-practices
Slowly but steadily, we have come to understand that we cannot tackle the range of alarming societal and environmental issues in silos. They are all interconnected. Not surprisingly, in this spirit there is an increasing number of pioneers in the gaming industry fighting for the protection of the environment, of human beings, of their diversity, their health and equal rights. And while we may not solve any sustainability issues ourselves, we have the power contribute to making a positive impact.
Sustainability Nexus Online Conference serves as a dynamic meeting point for global industry leaders, rallying to address pressing challenges around environmental impact, social issues, inclusion, and diversity. Year-round trainings, network meetups, and workshops put ideas into practice and spread innovations to a large scale.
This hybrid conference will be hosted online and at physical events in Cologne, Berlin, and Stockholm at Game Summit Sweden.
Location: ETB, Game Summit Sweden
10:00 Sustainability Nexus Online Conference Intro
10:20 Games for Systemic Sustainability - From Dead Ends to Real Possibilities
This keynote is an inspirational talk on barriers to sustainability for games and the intersectionality of issues related to sustainability. A motivational call for action and expression of desires for what results this conference should yield, presented by Patrick Prax associate professor in Game Design at Uppsala University.
10:45 On the Materiality of Digitality. What are VG made of and why should care?
Sonia Fizek is a games and media scholar. She holds a professorship in Media and Game Studies at the Cologne Game Lab at TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences. Fizek is also a visiting professor at the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw (Poland) and a co-editor-in-chief of the international Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. In her latest book Playing at a Distance (MIT Press 2022), she explores the borderlands of video game aesthetic with focus on automation, AI and posthuman forms of play. Fizek’s current research concentrates on the environmental sustainability of video games. She is a principal investigator of “Greening Games” (www.greeningames.eu), an international project on the sustainability of video games (2021-2024, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service EU/DAAD).
11:00 How Great Climate Games are Made
Trevin York is a transformational game designer, and the founder and director of Dire Lark, an Edinburgh-based game design for change studio and consultancy. He has spent the past decade leading game projects focused on effecting lasting change within complex contexts, working with massive international institutions, local non-profits, and tech startups alike. Trevin has a degree in Design for Change (MA) from the University of Edinburgh, and his latest work builds on these studies, focusing on the research and design of pro-environmental impact games and interventions. Trevin is a co-author of the IGDA Climate SIG’s Environmental Game Design Playbook, a first-of-its-kind research paper that explicitly connects environmental psychology to best practices in game design, written to be accessible and actionable for game developers.
11:15 JYROS, a Carbon Footprint Calculator for Game Devs
Currently CSR project manager for the French National Gaming Industry Consortium, Geoffrey has been leading since the beginning of the year the JYROS project. JYROS is a tool designed to calculate the environmental impact of video games companies. Prior to working on this project and the CSR world, Geoffrey has worked for 15 years in the UK as an R&D engineer in TechnipFMC, a subcontractor for the oil and gas industry.
11:30 Meet the Experts: Interactive Panel With Trailblazers – Q&A
12:00 - 14:00 Replay of All Sessions Above
14:00 Can Games Save the World? – Workshop on Sustainability in the Games Industry
The planet and our society face a range of alarming societal and environmental issues that are all interconnected. Not surprisingly, in this spirit there is an increasing number of pioneers in the games industry fighting for the protection of the environment, of human beings, of their diversity, their health and equal rights. And while we may not solve any sustainability issues ourselves, we have the power to contribute to making a positive impact.
Sustainability Nexus hybrid conference, based in Cologne and all across Europe, serves as a dynamic meeting point, rallying to address pressing challenges around environmental impact, social issues, inclusion, and diversity. This workshop is the Stockholm based Breakout session, where we will talk about how Swedish game devs and companies can contribute to a more sustainable future.
