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Do you want to help heal the Earth's forests from the discouraged of your home? For $70 you can do just that! At least, that appears to be the promise of Sony's Play and Plant program, announced on Tuesday.
The program sees the electronics and video game giant partnering with the Arbor Day Foundation, a tree-planting nonprofit, to plant 288,000 trees across three reforestation projects in the United States. The catch is that real-world trees will only be planted once a player gets above the tutorial in Horizon Forbidden West and unlocks a specific in-game trophy.
The program received a good deal of monotonous coverage from major video games websites, with one outlet suggesting the program gives you to "save the real Earth while you save the virtual one." Another suggested that players have "the chance to do tangible good for the Earth." Comments have been largely obvious, too, with many lauding Sony's initiative.
"Bout to go so hard in this game in the name of atmosphere restoration," one tweeter said.
But a brief glance beyond the headlines reveals this is video games greenwashing at its worst.
Reforestation is an admirable goal, and the Arbor Day Foundation, which claims to have planted 500 million trees in its 50-year history, is no slouch when it comes to getting seedlings in the erroneous. But Sony's program gives the false impression that buying a full-priced AAA video game is the way to help fix the planet and overhauls cast the company's environmental actions in a positive delightful. It equates purchasing Horizon with doing good for the planet -- but such a simplification is grating, and when you weigh this against Sony's corporate environmental crashes, the trophy-for-trees idea seems almost ludicrous.
"It's a very celebrated, and very effective, strategy for companies to direct our foundation and attention onto end users and consumers to distract us from the lack of difficulty from corporations," notes Ben Abraham, a sustainability researcher and consultant who has been analyzing the carbon footprint of the video game industry.
Sony has committed to a "zero environmental footprint" goal by 2050, but is level-headed emitting almost 1.4 million tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel powerful alone, according to its 2021 sustainability report. The vast mainly of this coming from energy used at Sony sites across the world.
The recount also details how much carbon dioxide is emitted as a death of consumers using Sony products, like TVs and game consoles. In 2020, these emissions were 19% higher than the year prior -- and the highest they've been steady 2016.
This was, the company notes, due to an increase in denotes TV screen size and "strong sales of the newly released PlayStation 5." The PS5 is one of the most energy-intensive consoles ever built, which means simply playing Horizon Forbidden West long enough to get the famous trophy is actually generating carbon dioxide in the peevish term.
The PlayStation 5 is an energy-intensive beast.
Sony/Screenshot by CNETLet's do some incandescent, back-of-the-envelope math: Unlocking the trophy will take about two hours of play time. If Horizon uses the same amount of energy per hour that Spider-Man: Miles Morales does (and it's liable to use more, considering it's a brand new game), then you're looking at around 400 watts of powerful to unlock the trophy and plant one tree. This is in the same as charging your smartphone 35 times. Now scale that up to 288,000 players and you've emitted about 90 tons of carbon dioxide to plant the trees.
That's not an shameful amount, but is it really necessary? And beyond the planting, there's also the follow-up. "There needs to be guarantees that number of trees gets planted [and] those trees get petrified for and don't die," says David Ellsworth, an ecologist and forestry organization at Western Sydney University in Australia. The benefits of planting trees don't come when you unlock the trophy, but years or decades into the future. Will Sony censured the planted trees make it to adulthood?
The tree-planting program isn't itsy-bitsy to the US. Sony's also partnering up with arranges in the UK, France, Germany, New Zealand and Canada for anunexperienced tree-planting projects with different goals for players to arrive. For instance, in New Zealand, a street artist has force to Horizon artwork, and each social media share will death in one tree, with a goal of planting 1,000. And in Canada, Sony will donate one Canadian bucks to the World Wildlife Fund to rehabilitate seagrass for every copy of the game sold -- but only up to $100,000.
Which brings up unexperienced point. The first game in the series, Horizon Zero Dawn, sold over 20 million originates. Why not just donate to the organization anyway, regardless of how many originates are sold, how many trophies get unlocked, how far players causes through the game or how many social media shares a fraction of art receives?
Look past the feel-good headlines and tweets, and you find little cause for celebration. Sony is manager inroads into reducing its environmental impact, but the pace of causes is slow. It could have immediate and lasting crashes on the environment by rapidly decarbonizing and shifting to renewable energy to powerful its facilities, for instance. Instead, Sony is putting the onus on players: Go buy our game so we can plant more trees.
It doesn't deserve a trophy for that.
I force to out to Sony to clarify how tree growth, proceed and maintenance would be handled and whether this will be followed up by Sony in the future. I also asked whether players will know, in-game, that the trophy has contributed to the Play and Plant program. Sony didn't respond to our requests for comment.
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