Solar Media meets Green Software

On October 4, 2023, the Solar Media Collective collaborated with the Green Software Foundation and the Independent Video Game Design program at Dawson College to host the first Green Software Foundation meetup in Montreal. The event featured two talks and a freeform conversation with the audience designed to get people thinking through the theories and practices of green software design.

Janna Frenzel and Marc-André Groulx (Customer Success Account Manager, Microsoft) launched the event by introducing the principles of green software engineering. These are the core set of competencies required to define, build, and run sustainable software applications. Their talk covered the need for a holistic approach to making software less resource intensive, that accounts for energy efficiency, hardware efficiency, and carbon awareness. Pitfalls such as rebound effects and Jevon’s paradox, which can cancel out the benefits of efficiency gains, were also discussed.

Building on this core groundwork, Alex Custodio followed up with a case study of low-carbon game design for solar-powered platforms. Their talk, Greening the Game Boy, drew on work conducted with the Solar Media Collective to address how eco-critical modding practices have emerged in riposte to the regime of planned obsolescence. The presentation considered how low-carbon game design for energy efficient hardware intersect with larger conversations around greener software practices and concluded with some practical, hands-on strategies for reducing carbon emissions in gaming.