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Saltsea Chronicles’ creators tracked the game’s climate impact — and now hope to change the industry
12.10.2023 - 17:39 / polygon.com
Saltsea Chronicles is set in a world rebuilt after ecological crisis and planetary flooding; it’s a world that’s not our own, but could someday be. The mythology of the game recalls a time when a group of people called “hoarders” took too much from the land, building up its treasures far too high. The seas became jealous and rise to meet these treasures, leaving only islands across the saltsea.
Developer Die Gute Fabrik’s take on Earth’s current climate crisis is easily recognizable in Saltsea Chronicles. It’s not the first game to take on our environmental impact on the planet, but it is one of the first — if not the first — to build out and publish a report explicitly detailing the studio’s impact on the climate across its development period. “Saltsea Chronicles is set on a flooded world, after a great climate crisis. I’m a storyteller by trade, and that story is easier to tell to the world than ‘a year in [Die Gute Fabrik]’; here’s a game after a disaster, here’s how its production impacted our own,” Die Gute Fabrik CEO Hannah Nicklin told Polygon in an email interview.
The studio hired AfterClimate (a company that helps studios reach climate impact goals) and games researcher Dr. Ben Abraham, who wrote Digital Games After Climate Change, to author the report and put a number on the studio’s CO2 equivalent emissions from January 2020 until October 2023 — the span of Saltsea Chronicles’ development. The results are an in-depth look at the climate impact of a small, independent developer with a work-from-home structure. It’s also a call for studios to make change. As Dr. Abraham puts it, the way things are now can’t go on forever.
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“Fundamentally, if you care about video games, you should care about the long term sustainability of game making,” Dr. Abraham told Polygon over email. “It’s no secret that there are aspects of the game industry that are deeply unsustainable from the perspective of work-life balance: from crunch, to unpredictable layoffs, the uncertainty of funding for the next project. But there’s an even wider sense in which games are unsustainable ecologically.”
In an interview conducted over email, Nicklin and Dr. Abraham explained why Saltsea Chronicles’ climate report is crucial step for video game development.
[Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
Polygon: Why commission this report? Why is the studio’s climate impact important?
Hannah Nicklin: The obvious answer, of course, is to better understand Die Gute Fabrik’s impact on climate crisis. As you may read in the report, I’ve been an activist and advocate for climate action ever since I can remember — one of my earliest memories is learning about flooding in my home county of Lincolnshire, U.K…
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