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Dear Umbra,

Does the increasing use of video games as a form of recreation bode well for the environment? Fewer people using real resources means less of an impact on the world.

Tadeusz
Rockville, Md.

Dear Tadeusz,

Now that is an interesting spin on things. No one knows the complete answer, and we won't know until we fully assess the footprint of our electronic age.

Make that 51 simple things you can do.

Photo: ansik

Playing video games is similar to home computing in obvious impacts: electricity, electronics manufacture and disposal, increased entertainment coupled with less person-to-person and person-to-outdoor interaction. I hazard that, at this point, any pundits who might be holding forth on the topic are more influenced by their own relationship to gaming than by any quantifiable information linking video gamers and environmental issues.

Gamers, like people on computers, are using real resources. As I mentioned, the components of video gaming -- the monitors, the consoles and handheld devices, the discs and packaging -- all have their trails of planetary destruction. Coltan, for one example: another toe on the footprint of our electronic age. Coltan (the nickname of columbite-tantalite) is a heavy ore used to control the flow of electric current in tiny circuit boards. Coltan is almost exclusively mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the demand for it, and the Congolese desperation for survival, is wreaking social and environmental havoc. Miners have pushed into national parks, destroying gorilla habitat and even apparently eating the gorillas. The coltan "market" is characterized by violence, gangs, and economic links to the area wars. Hey, why play fake wars at home when you have actual complicity and involvement in the Congolese war? But non-gamers can't point fingers at gamers. Coltan is in virtually all our small "personal electronics," including the very computer upon which I write these words.

What you meant, I think, is that gamers may have less of an impact on the outdoors in person, because they presumably stay inside all day and night, Leaving No Trace. And perhaps, by squirreling themselves away at home all day, they avoid driving and its negative impacts. It's an interesting argument and one not normally seen in the general "Today's Yoot is Going to Heck in a Video Console" folderol. We have seen studies exploring whether gaming leads to environmental disinterest. A Nature Conservancy-funded study correlated the rise in indoor entertainment, including video games, with declining use of national parks. Correlation is not causation, though, so we shouldn't get too excited, especially since declining park visits were also correlated to the rising price of gas.

I've never seen any studies exploring whether staying at home is good for the planet because we leave the natural world alone. You could lead the way. Our imagined home-bound gamer might drive fewer miles, yes. But I don't see why a gamer would eat less meat, or more organic foods; in fact, stereotypes dictate that our gamer eats Archer Daniels Midland corn-based snack foods. And a home-bound gamer would probably use more electricity and heat than the imaginary out-and-about socialite or hiker.

As I said, however, we don't know whether video games are actively helping or harming the general environmental cause. We can only speculate. And since games are a bit addictive, appear antisocial, are mysterious to the general taste-makers and largely played by teenage boys, there is quite a lot of negative speculation. Whether or not the cultural concerns play out, we do need to be cautious about over-consuming personal electronics in general. In a previous column I wrote on video games, a reader bemoaned my focus on the small stuff. I don't fault him; I do focus on small consumer choices, perhaps too often. But personal electronics are small only in a physical sense. From all we know so far, this little toe of the electronic footprint is linked to environmentally dangerous resource extraction and disposal all across the globe. As with all things, moderation should be our watchword. Or, as we like to say, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

MMORPly,
Umbra

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Reactions to Al Gore’s book o’ solutions, “Our Choice”

The must-read solutions book by Al Gore

Dear Umbra,

After reading some heart-rending, gut-wrenching articles on global warming, I've decided that I want to do something about it. I've started by vowing never to buy a car, or get a driver's license. But I happen to love video games. Nothing is going to make me stop playing my video games. As I am painfully aware, a consumer lifestyle is what contributes to global warming and the ecocide of our planet, so how can I be an environmentally conscious video gamer?

Phillip Miner
Sodus, N.Y.

Dearest Phillip,

First, plenty of people are environmentally "conscious" -- the struggle is to be environmentally effective. You could drive your Hummer all over town and think about the environment as you shifted from second to third -- environmentally conscious. But switching to a more efficient car -- or no car at all -- would be environmentally effective.

Don't give up the fight.

Photo: iStockphoto.

Video games are not inherently violating your environmental principles. I think they're probably on the better end of the electronics spectrum. We can work together to limit the damage they cause, and you can continue to have a great time.

The main trouble with video games is that they are played on computer equipment. We can't make computer chips and consoles out of wood or butter; instead, we use heavy metals such as lead, beryllium, and mercury. When we buy computerized objects, we are asking people to build us a fun machine filled with carcinogenic, toxic, handy substances.

From a consumer standpoint, therefore, purchase your computerized gizmos the way you should buy a car. First, test the gizmo -- the new Xbox, por exemplo -- and see if you even care for it or "need" it. Then, gizmo-pool if you can -- share the dang things with friends. You'll avoid asking for toxic substances, and you'll be doing something vaguely social with an actual in-person person. Unlike writing an online advice column.

Your next active environmental moment is when obsolescence comes in its dark cloak and scythe to claim the PlayStation. "Consumer electronics" cannot go to the garbage dump because their component parts must be kept away from the general air and water supply. Some computer manufacturers will take back their machines. Sony, whose PlayStation makes up 70 percent of the global console market, offers product take-back in Europe and in a demo project in Minnesota. The company promised to expand to nationwide take-back in the U.S. in 2005, but here it is 2006 and I could uncover no news of follow-through. With most gaming hardware you'll need to find a decent general e-waste reclamation site. But I've been told by my gaming consultant that old consoles can circulate in a retro-gaming market. Unlike film and television production, game design does not use any materials except electricity and computing equipment -- no elaborate sets or fake snow. And the discs, packaging, shipping, and advertising must be equal to DVDs and CDs. So the hardware is truly the big problem.

I believe that if you consume responsibly, not excessively, and spread the all-important word of electronics recycling within your gaming world, you can have a clear conscience while dorking out in Vice City.

GTAly,
Umbra

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Confess: You've played more than one hand of solitaire on company time. Tetris anyone? Maybe you've even been a MYSTic or a QUAKEr.

If you happen to work for the Dutch Ministry of the Environment, playing computer games is now part of your job description. Or at least playing a computer game -- the world's only computer game designed to solve the problem of nitrogen pollution. The Netherlands is home to intense agriculture and industry, and is, not coincidentally, one of the world's hot spots for nitrogen pollution.

Nitrogen is a confusing bad guy because it's everywhere -- and often a good guy. You just inhaled a lungful. You ate a bunch for breakfast, then relieved yourself of a bit more. Nitrogen fertilizer radically shaped the course of the 20th century, increasing agricultural output to help feed a growing world population.

The smoggy side of nitrogen oxides.

Photo: NREL.

But then there's nitrogen's dark side: Your car combines it with oxygen to form NOx, a component of smog. Nitrogen pollutes surface waters, and in drinking water, it can cause birth defects. We have substantially changed the flow of nitrogen on Earth, and the natural systems of the planet are responding with acid rain, suffocating air, and a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

That's bad news, but it's hardly the kind of arch-villainy that makes for pulse-pounding, swivel-kicking, search-and-destroy arcade action. But that didn't deter the computer programmers. At the Second International Nitrogen Conference, held outside of Washington, D.C., last October, the otherwise technical proceedings were spiced up by the official unveiling of NitroGenius, an environmental computer game commissioned by the Dutch government. The hype was palpable; teen-aged boys with nothing better to do than await the Christmas release of the Nintendo Game Cube and Microsoft's X Box lay siege to the conference.

Okay, that's stretching it. But to give you an idea of how much nitrogen matters to those in the know, the conference was held barely a month after Sept. 11 and was still attended by more than 400 participants from around the world. And if the plane trip wasn't enough of a test of faith, we were convened at a Washington-area U.S. Postal Service facility just as the anthrax scare took off.

NitroGenius was born 18 months earlier and 30,000 feet higher, when Stan Smeulders of the Dutch Environment Ministry and Jan Willem Erisman of the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands were winging their way toward the U.S. to help plan the October conference. The pair had helped convene the first such meeting in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands, in 1998, thereby beginning the essential but difficult process of getting people who worry about pig farms and manure retention and people who worry about tailpipes and emissions trading to talk to one another.

Image: Play2Learn.

It was a long flight, and somewhere in the middle of it, Smeulders had his big idea: Let's do something new, he proposed to Erisman, something totally unheard of in nitrogen circles. Smeulders started imagining a game -- a game that would help everyone understand the problems associated with nitrogen and the equally thorny challenges of making policy to address those problems; a game everybody could play, perhaps even by joining through the Internet.

"It was a huge idea, of course," Erisman says. He should know, because it fell to him to implement it. This brings us to the point in the story where many of us proud Americans wish, just for a moment, that we were Dutch. Unfazed by a half-million dollar price tag for a computer game to save the world from nitrogen, the bosses up the political ladder bought in.

Fittingly, playing NitroGenius is a little like sitting at a starship console and deciding the fate of small planets. Only, instead of just pointing and shooting, you have to make myriad decisions, taking into account the potential environmental impact of various business and social decisions. It's a four-person game, with each player representing one sector of the Netherlands: industry, agriculture, government, or society. Each sector can do more or less what it can do in real life: Government can tax, spend, and make policy; society can eat organic and join advocacy groups; agriculture can build green stables or change tillage habits; industry can invest in research and new technology.

Conference attendees playing dirty.

Photo: Play2Learn.

On every turn, each player has a budget and 90 seconds to choose from a series of behavioral options. Graphs show general levels of happiness, employment, and economic health, alongside maps of pollution levels plotted by region. The instruments are recalibrated after every turn.

But beware: Just as you lean in to check your readings, a tomato may hit the screen with a pixilated splat. The first time this happened, we were all startled -- even the society representative who "threw" the tomato by exercising her veto power to nix exploratory drilling in a wetlands.

The game is full of pleasant quirks like that, including fake news articles about the discovery of "celestial backspin" and even the occasional advertisement -- "Drink Spaz!" -- which, when I sat down to play, served to break the ice and get the contestants chatting. From there it was a manure-covered slope to serious gaming. While everybody playing knew something about nitrogen pollution, nobody could go it alone. And nobody seemed to have trouble getting into their roles. "This guy's spreading cow shit all over the place," complained one player. Another, a U.S. EPA administrator, declared, "I want to be a radical environmentalist!"

Despite the giggles, the science is hardcore: NitroGenius incorporates state-of-the-art nitrogen modeling by pollution planners in the Netherlands. "The idea of having a game came from the scientific community, and they were focused on providing the right models," emphasizes Erisman.

But he also got professional game designers involved. "It was a constant struggle between the scientists who wanted to do it right, and the gamers who are not as interested in science. They wanted to play and have fun. What you see here is a compromise."

Some pig.

Take pig high-rises, for example. I nearly fell off my chair when one of my choices was: "Give permission for a high-rise filled with pigs overlooking the Rotterdam harbor with a central manure-treatment facility and windows with tree paintings for animal welfare. Free of charge!" Sounds funny, but it's been suggested, says Erisman. "If you look at an aerial photo of the Netherlands, you see all those pig buildings next to each other. It takes up a huge amount of space. So why not build them [up], and place them near the harbors where all the food is imported, and place them near an electricity facility in order to process the organic waste and get all the energy out of it?"Logical, perhaps. But be warned: Build them and the pigs may come, but you'll take a minus-four image hit.

Erisman won't be jumping to Nintendo, but he does hope to make a single-player version of NitroGenius available for public download soon. And he dreams of virtual reality: "Suppose you could walk through a forest, with the smell, the touch, and the view, and you can change the forest by putting more nitrogen in it. You can see the biodiversity loss. The smell will change. The view will change."

I like the game the way it is, but then, I won. I even have a windmill trivet to prove it. I'm not expecting an offer to play Nitrogen Czar for the Dutch government, but NitroGenius sure beat the usual conference routine of networking, drinking bad coffee, and fighting the hypnotic influences of PowerPoint.

And that, after all, is the point. Says Erisman: "For me, the strength of the game is not the dataset, it's not the models. It's the people who will play it and talk to each other and interact and get an understanding of why someone makes a choice."

After spending a long, frustrating time trying to get people to look at nitrogen pollution in an integrated fashion, Erisman seems to have finally found the right tool for the job. "It's the first time they comprehended and saw the need for getting people together," he laughs. "That's perfect. Two years of lobbying and talking didn't do anything. And a game -- it works."

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