ABSTRACT
The United Nations Environment Programme launched the Playing for the Planet (P4TP) initiative in the fall of 2019, closely followed by the International Game Developers Association’s (IGDA) Climate Special Interest Group (SIG) in the fall of 2020. While the P4TP alliance has focused on company-level interventions, the IGDA Climate SIG has worked in a more grassroots fashion to develop both game and design-patterns databases. These parallel efforts invite important philosophical and practical questions. What are sustainable games? Are they the same thing as sustainably developed games? Are they games with overt environmental messaging, or oneswhose production or consumption carbon footprints have been minimized? Or, most radically, are they the games we refuse to play?
