Digital games are quickly growing, a shifting blend involving desktop PCs, laptops and consoles, mobile phones and tablets, physical and digital distribution of the games, and cloud gaming service. An overlooked aspect for digital games are their consequent carbon emissions worldwide, and their demands on electricity networks.
STS:are sökes till exjobb kring TV-spel och dess energi- och miljöpåverkan
In Sweden, gaming currently accounts for perhaps 0.3% of electricity demand; and a conservative estimate is that this will rise to about 1.2% by 2030. Or, 2.5% if 4K-capable cloud gaming services take off. As gaming continues to grow, we must shape this growth in sustainable ways.
This is a broad and challenging topic, involving a variety of participants, stakeholders, and data. As such, a master's project could take any number of approaches, for example: interviewing people that play games about what, when, and how they play; talking to games companies and developers to understand how energy, resources and sustainability fit in (or not) to their system designs; analysis of existing media or datasets to find out more about gaming's impacts (e.g. game-related content livestreamed or posted on YouTube and Twitch); performing network and power measurements of games devices to better understand their potential impacts.
There is already some quantitative work on this topic, so students interested in doing some qualitative work are particularly welcome. Another challenge is that due to pandemic precautions, we cannot visit participants in their homes to collect quantitative data directly.
Diversity and inclusion: Gaming has a broad following. And yet parts of the games industry, and online discourse about games, have gained a poor reputation for diversity and inclusion, particularly in their treatment of women and those identifying as LGBTQ. The master's thesis would need to specifically situate itself with respect to this problem, and if appropriate account for it through the empirical work (e.g. participants recruited, interview design, qualitative/quantitative analysis).
Supervisor: Mike Hazas, mike.hazas@it.uu.se
Initial reading:
Marsden, M., Hazas, M., Broadbent, M. (2020). From one edge to the other: Exploring gaming’s rising presence on the network. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). 247-254.
Read on ACM Digital Library.