A Videogame Politics for A Burning World: An Interview with Ajay Singh Chaudhary

Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the Executive Director at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR), where he is also a core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. Chaudhary’s excellent book The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics of a Burning World (Repeater) was released in 2024. Unwinnable spoke to Chaudhary about the book, and we discussed how the videogame industry is affected by climate change politics. Our discussion touched on topics relating to Chaudhary’s work and research, his history with games, how Nintendo is “almost” a mercantilist company, and what is the best-case scenario for the videogame industry in our time of crisis. We also talk about the current state of the discourse around climate change and its politics.

The Exhausted of the Earth marks a turning point for public writing about climate change. For Chaudhary the book took years of “research, writing, and research and rewriting.” He believes that public writing is where “you put the good stuff”, the forum where ideas matter most. It is where hearts and minds are won and lost. Where new possibilities for the future are brought forth and nurtured. He doesn’t “like to think of public writing as dumbing things down.”

In Chaudhary’s own words, “the book is meant to be a serious and real confrontation with the politics of climate change.” He stayed clear of the overly pessimistic doomsaying regarding climate change, a perspective well reflected in the discourse. Yet, he also doesn’t dispense a sunny optimism either. Instead, “the book is supposed to be a who, what, where, when, why, how, for climate politics” very much concerned with the “right now!” The complex and ongoing crisis that is anthropogenic climate change is creating a reality many of us must now contest with. To reverse it – if this is even possible – will take time, a luxury we are increasingly short-on. “We can’t wait today and fix it tomorrow” proclaims Chaudhary.

In the book, the best-case scenario we can work towards is a sort of Left Wing Climate Realism. For Chaudhary, this might look like “a minor paradise”, a term he borrows from his BISR colleague Rebecca Ariel Porte. “If we get that right, we’re still talking about revamping or redesigning, rethinking so many aspects [of our world].” Chaudhary states that people’s primary preoccupations around climate change are focused on complex systems/structures. “Energy production, transportation, and agriculture.” Add to that also, “the way in which we conduct and produce culture.”

The reasons why The Exhausted of the Earth deliberates on culture is in part because many of Chaudhary’s students at BISR have expressed more prosaic concerns. “We work for the public, we work with adults, workers and some of the questions I get about climate in fact are not necessarily about atmospheric carbon concentrations, or about which coalition is going to win. ‘Wait, am I gonna have videos in the future? Are we all going to have to wear sackcloth and ashes?’ And so, I try to open up our imagination just a little bit to see what is sustainable and actually what our current systems are preventing from being sustainable.”

Chaudhary shares that he is working on a follow-up book that will cover more of the cultural side of climate change. This will serve as a good companion to The Exhausted of the Earth.

———

Much of the talk about climate politics at present is that we are in a make-or-break moment. This framing usually arises from a naive liberal perspective which posits that we (working class people, billionaires – literally everyone) are all in this together. From this a kumbaya moment will germinate due to us having to prioritize our collective future through fixing the crisis at hand. Wishful thinking. The reality is that there are people who are content with the status quo and have refocused to simply mitigating the impact of anthropogenic climate change. They, those who profit from extractive industries, want us to be “resilient” and to adapt to the new climate reality and the potential hell being brought, regardless of the effects this will have – is having – on billions of people, and the planet. All for profit the many should live in hell.

Thus, we are not all in it together. In The Exhausted of the Earth, Chaudhary goes to great lengths to lay it bare. This is something that has been almost completely absent from the popular discourse around climate change. The historian Mike Davis for example foregrounds this in his work for decades, but outside of the niche of leftist academic circles this is seldom discussed. Everyone else gets fed futile talking points. The futile and necropolitical shift towards mitigation that verges on the rejection of our climate reality is spreading.

Chaudhary adds, “It is conspicuously absent. It is funny, I wrote an essay version of that we are not in this together chapter for The Baffler in 2019. So, before the pandemic and then in the pandemic everyone was doing the ‘we’re in this together’ commercials.” The COVID-19 pandemic made this fact hard to ignore. The expansion of sacrifice zones, from places where environmental degradation for the sake of consumption to human life in the metropole – grocery store employees, Amazon warehouse workers, etc. All labeled “essential workers” and thus making them expandable for the sake of the economy. We are all expendable now and due to the climate crisis entire populations and vast geographies will become part of sacrifice zones.

This is why the beginning of the book aims at “trying to refocus folks from thinking about climate change as this apocalyptic event that’s coming in the future, and just being like ‘look around you, things don’t seem so hot, right?’ No pun intended, but instead of thinking about it as this apocalyptic future, think about it as the present. All the things you hate about the present getting worse and then being stuck that way, which is a really horrifying prospect, but not as attractive as the apocalyptic narrative where people at least are like ‘huh? I guess we’ll all die together.’” We won’t.

This is a problem with the current state of our imaginations and cultural production. In popular media a disaster, or the “end’ – the apocalypse – can be blissful. Some not only find this prospect attractive but also create cultural and social bonds around such millenarian beliefs. There is a huge disconnect between popular narratives and calls to action around climate change. The reality is the ‘end’ takes place in the present. And it is ongoing. Some people, due to their wealth, influence, and resources will be better prepared to live through ongoing and still to come catastrophes. Take for example the use of private firefighters used by wealthy residents of California (a subject covered by Chaudhary in the book). Their houses stood as others burned to ashes.

According to Chaudhary, one of the reasons why we find zombie apocalypse movies attractive is “wouldn’t it be neat if things stopped being the way they are, even if that meant zombies were trying to eat you every other day. Everyone gets to go to the grocery store and it’s almost beautiful, joyous scenes of everyone taking everything they want.” He remarks that he includes himself as an apocalypse movie enjoyer.

———

As the evening passed, the conservation shifted to videogames and how the book’s framing fits within the wider context of the game industry. Chaudhary’s introduction to games came through computing. “Both my parents did PhDs. My father immigrated to this country from India [to] Minnesota. He met my mother there, who was also pursuing a PhD in physics and whose family immigrated as well earlier in the 20th century.”

Born in 1980, he and his siblings “always had computers in our house. A Zenith was my first computer, which could log into the server at Rockefeller University. I would play Zork or early ASCII based games. My parents were fairly strict American immigrant parents, very focused on education.” Maybe because videogames were played on a computer “they never considered computers or games to be [a waste of time]. So, they both were very happy for us to be playing around with games.”

“We were very into tinkering and since we would have technology parts around the house we would do everything, from tinkering with computers to trying to make our own games with very simple coding. Games have been a part of my life for a long time.” Though he stopped playing for a time in college. I had a similar experience during my time as an undergraduate. Notably only playing Final Fantasy IX in thirty-minute sessions over a two-year period due to my busy schedule and shifting priorities. Chaudhary was focused on his studies. Politics, political theory and political economy took over his life. “Coming towards the middle of my PhD, I was like ‘oh, it’s time to get back into gaming.’”

The aesthetics of games are important to Chaudhary. “I have always been really interested in games as an art form; as an aesthetic experience. I feel like some people want to approach games the way you would review an air conditioner or a heater or something. ‘How much BTUs does it put out?’ [l laugh]. I try to approach games as cultural objects that a lot of people are really interested in and that are an important economic and social force in our society.”

The first reviews of videogames were very much consumer product reviews, which personally I enjoy more than the current trend of influencers working as independent marketers for the industry on social media. This presents an ill prospect for the critic discussing games as cultural objects and as aesthetic experiences.

I ask Chaudhary how he sees the politics of climate change as it relates to the game industry: “There are two aspects I think are really important: one is critical, and one is, let’s call it quasi-utopian. The more critical side is, I would love there to be more consciousness around how damaging the industry is ecologically.” Outside of the work of Benjamin J. Abraham and Brendan Sinclair before he left gameindiutrys.biz, it is rare for the ecological effects on the industry to be covered in the games press.

He continues, “I try to be very synthetic. It’s very hard to separate society, economy, and ecology. These things all feed into each other. When we are talking about the amount of conflict minerals or… servers, the amount of energy it takes to run the Xbox Game Pass,” a service that Microsoft advertises as a way to play anywhere and with everything, since all is “an Xbox” now comes at a steep cost to the planet. “The amount of water and electricity that is eaten is astronomical. Most of the new graphics cards are being driven by crypto mining and AI, not by the needs of artists and designers wanting to get their visions onto computer screens.” He finishes the thought with a question: “Who really wants to update to a PS6?”

Chaudhary sees hope in the pushback coming from consumers to “the degradation and exploitation of natural resources and all the horrors that come with sacrifice zones in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo. You also see burnout from exploitation of degrees that are completely unsustainable [in the videogame] industry, both in its production and in ballooning costs for game development for things that people don’t even seem to really want. This is something that I’m really interested in.”

This is highlighted by Steam Decks purchased to play indies like Stardew Valley and other less hardware demanding games. “They play Hades on it. Games that could run on a toaster. What is the world’s most popular videogame? Fortnite, a game that runs on phones from ten years ago. When I think of the more critically successful games: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom or or the utilization of full motion video in Alan Wake 2 which is almost like twenty/thirty-year-old technology. None of that actually requires something much fancier than the tech you had ten years ago.”

Both Nintendo’s and Remedy’s (the maker of the Alan Wake series) recent success also speaks to the type of games people want to play. These are not the ultra “premium” graphical experience. “I don’t know how much awareness there is in the larger games community, but I think within the engineering design and artist community there is a really growing consciousness of ‘why do we need this shit? Why do I need this amount of teraflops [I laugh] – power that is so destructive?’ We don’t have to buy a new graphics card to enjoy videogames as an artistic medium.” He adds “I can get the best physics-based puzzle adventure game possible on a device that is essentially a ten-year-old tablet,” speaking of Tears of the Kingdom, a game that will be remembered best as Nintendo’s crowning game/software utilizing “withered” technology (more on this later).

Chaudhary finds it “interesting to see that there are whole regions of the world where no one is adopting” modern consoles or graphic cards like “the Xbox Series X or the latest AMD or NVIDIA cards. They’re just sort of getting by and being like, ‘I don’t know if I even care.’” Some simply can’t afford it as brilliantly discussed by Felippe Pepe, though there are people, myself included, who fit Chaudhary’s analysis. I just don’t care about 4K graphics or 120fps. “You look at companies doing these massive layoffs and doing massive crunch and all this stuff and you start seeing the team sizes. For example, some games that were made in the 90s and 2000s are remastered for HD and then 4K displays and the teams doing the remastering will be six times larger than the original teams.” How sustainable is this as a model for the game industry?

We discussed the rumored over two billion dollars production cost of Grand Theft Auto VI. “My understanding of this from a business point of view is they are in fact… hoping that something like GTA VI will be the system solver.” I like this phrase, “system solver.” It brings to mind not just a seller of consoles/systems, but also how GTA VI is being positioned as a panacea for the current ills of the AAA industry.

Let us take for example the Final Fantasy VII remakes. Square Enix has said that Rebirth was not successful though it sold millions of units. One can easily surmise the lack of “success” is due to the project’s behemoth cost of production. If a game like Rebirth isn’t “successful” though it sold millions of units, the industry is in a crisis of its own making. Chaudhary adds, “They did throw everything but the kitchen sink into Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. There comes a point at which there are diminishing returns. I don’t know how much better it can look than it looks.” He believes Square Enix (named Square Soft at the time of the original’s release) “took the wrong lesson from the success of the original Final Fantasy VII.” They fooled themselves into thinking that “hi-fi graphics” games and making “things always look prettier and better and bigger” would guarantee success, a self-defeating loop. “I think what people really enjoyed about that original game were the story themes and the characters and some of the systems. Square Enix didn’t really get that lesson.”

One potential alternative to the need for more powerful hardware according to Chaudhary is sharing consoles. Honestly this is something I have a difficult time imagining. “We could be sharing consoles if we were less focused on power and more focused on the aesthetic qualities and the experiences that people seem to actually want to have. We would be more focused on the games themselves.” Chaudhary in this regard looks to libraries or tool libraries. “You basically could have a library as a hub for consoles, lending out one at a time for X period of time (let’s say 2 weeks or one month, etc.). Thus, people could have access to consoles without the need for everyone to own one. (Dramatically decreasing the need to produce so many but also inculcating a different social relationship one would hope.) Incidentally, one of my favorite obscure pieces of Marxist commentary is Lenin on the New York Public Library because at the time many people still really didn’t think such a public system would work for books.”

We pivoted to discuss the little yellow console that could, the Playdate. Chaudhary and I share admiration for Panic’s system. As a console, the Playdate, offers an interesting and attractive alternative to game enjoyers and developers from the wider industry. “I love that shit! When I first saw it, I was hoping you could literally crank it for power. I hope if Panic ever hears this interview, I hope they consider cranking for power at some point.” I told him that when I first held the console in my hands, I wanted a radio app where I can crank to change the radio stations.

Panic’s approach with the Playdate shares similarities with Nintendo’s old philosophy put forth by Yokoi Gunpei of lateral thinking with withered technology: the use of old readily available technology to innovate. “The Game Boy is a famous example of that. Funny. I thought about them [Nintendo] a lot while writing those aesthetic parts of the book. Some contemporary Marxists call this salvage communism. Contemporary capitalists call this lateral thinking with withered technology.”

Chaudhary sees Nintendo as “an interesting case because their whole strategy is based on longevity. They’re almost mercantile. They just pile up these giant stacks of money. Other companies look at that and they are like; ‘you are crazy.’ Nintendo is like ‘It means we can fail, for eight years, and it doesn’t actually matter. We don’t have to fire our people. And I think they’re correct. Other companies with a more modern twenty-first century approach would be like ‘No, fire all that dead weight.’” He clarifies, “When I say ‘almost mercantilist’ I specifically have in mind [Nintendo’s] approach to cash reserves. Don’t get me wrong; Nintendo is a capitalist firm which invests a portion of profits in R&D, expanding production, to realize further profits, etc. It’s just a slightly weird one. If you think of early theories of capitalism (The Wealth of Nations is the most obvious example) part of the argument for capitalism is also an argument against mercantilism; so [Adam] Smith will point out that countries which just try to build up more and more gold in their treasuries are never going to be as wealthy and dynamic as those which invest in productive capacity (as opposed to hoarding). Now Nintendo just piles up these massive amounts of money in a way that very few firms do. They have been around for over a century, and through some very rough periods, and view their own sustainability and survival as paramount.”

For Chaudhary “games are these heavily technical objects. They are also these heavily artistic and aesthetic objects.” Discarding those that make them is a symbol that executives don’t value games as artistic or aesthetic objects, no matter how much work developers and artists put into making them. “I think that part of what people miss in the perennial successes of Nintendo” and confused with the company’s focus on “the general audience,” is that “they overlook the long buildup of creative talent, which means most of the games they produce are pretty good.” At least for now, we joke. But to their credit Nintendo has not produced a game like Concord or has adopted a live service model, so ubiquitous in the industry. Chaudhary wants to make clear that he is not naïve of the fact that employee retention is concentrated “in Japan and in studios; they fire people all the time in publicity, management, etc. in their overseas offices… They’re very protective of designers/engineers/etc. who tend to stay on (from their volition) there longer too.”

Nintendo and Panic are not the only ones deserving praise. For Chaudhary, a game like Balatro offers “glimmers of hope in the industry, and more sustainable practices combined with less server use.” He returns to muse about shared use of consoles and graphics cards. Which for him are some of the “… million ways we could have nice things. The question is, what’s stopping us from having them? And even something like the Playdate. It is so great. But I’m gonna be realistic about it. That little guy also has ecological costs in its production.” He acknowledges that Panic to their credit “don’t claim otherwise… whereas Microsoft will throw these stickers being like ‘we’ve planted a million trees.’” This is a common act of greenwashing in the industry that Benjamin Abrahams highlights in Digital Games After Climate Change. Microsoft makes profits through ecological destruction. They plant trees as a smokescreen. We are all in it together.

Well informed and to the point, Chaudhary soberly states “people forget that even something that’s a low powered piece of technology, most of its ecological, economic, and social costs come in the production and not in the power that runs it. [The use of servers, cloud computing, and increasingly, generative AI are exceptions.] Maybe I’m too optimistic here. I do see a lot of awareness amongst games journalists and amongst many, but probably not all, gamers. Go on to gaming sites and message boards and see. A lot of people are aware. I think they’re less so aware of what it does to the planet, but people are aware of what it does to devs and seem to be agitated or deeply concerned about how unsustainable those practices are.” Though this is true, more work on this is urgently needed in criticism and coverage of the industry. I definitely want to see more. I personally want to do more work on this topic. This interview, for example, is a pivot for me as a journalist towards covering this topic to a greater degree. This and preservation go hand in hand when it comes to the game industry, they cannot be ignored nor dismissed.

———

I look at the clock. It is late. We begin to wrap-up our conversation. I ask Chaudhary to talk more about left wing climate realism. “To bring it back around to the climate side of the literature, I think there are a lot of people who often think of [the] bare minimums or these kinds of romantic visions of going back to some kind of imaginary bucolic past where everyone’s a pastoralist. I do think that those things are very untrue, and not desirable, and not really possible. When I say realism, I mean it is political realism. I actually try to explain it in almost a textbook way in the book. How much power do you have? Where is it going to go? Where does it come from? That’s realism to me. But, I also use realism in the book to realistically consider biophysical constraints. These things are real. We can learn about them. Natural science now gives us access to things that we didn’t have years ago.”

He concludes, “I think aesthetically. This is where my thinking has turned. BISR does a podcast series called Pop Cultural Marxism, where this comes up all the time. There are many central arguments in the book – but one of them is for those who consider ourselves historical materialists, or Marxists or whatever – you should have your climate politics theory informed as best you can. It doesn’t mean totally uncritical, but informed by what is the scientific consensus, as well as looking deeply within issues in engineering, planning, and design.”

In The Exhausted of the Earth Chaudhary talks a lot about the reality climate change puts a lot of people in. The desperate situations, the existential threats, the exhaustion we all feel. We can use this to organize. “I try to talk a lot about that in the book. That was really one of my major goals because I don’t see it in the literature enough. You have to make connections between folks.”

To a certain degree, I can relate to specific situations that somebody in the global South is feeling because of the precarity of the politics of climate change. This comes through brilliantly in The Exhausted of the Earth: A Politics for a Burning World. These stress points have the power to connect us.

———

Luis Aguasvivas is a writer, researcher, and member of the New York Videogame Critics Circle. He covers game studies for PopMatters. Follow him on Bluesky and aguaspoints.com.