The average August high temperature in Tokyo is 88 degrees, with humid days in the mid to upper 90s not uncommon. Normally that’d be no problem, but after the catastrophic March earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis in Fukushima, much of eastern Japan is being forced to conserve electricity at a time when the air conditioners would normally be whirring away. The Japanese government has asked companies in the areas TEPCO serves (including greater Tokyo) to reduce consumption by 15 percent this summer during the daylight hours — a pledge that affects the game industry, which relies on computers and servers and other power-hungry equipment for its livelihood, much more than others.
How are studios over there responding? Take Capcom, for example. The company’s Tokyo office reported to Famitsu magazine that, among other things, they’re setting the AC to 28 degrees Celsius (about 82 degrees Fahrenheit), encouraging workers to use the stairs instead of elevators when accessing nearby floors, and enforcing at least one day per week of no overtime. Sega’s measures are even more elaborate: in addition to distributing desk lamps to staffers and switching out a thousand desktop PCs for notebooks, the outfit is moving extra holidays into the summer months, relying on a rotational staffing system to make up the off-days later on in the year when things cool down.
“All the fluorescent lights are off in the office, and everyone’s using desk lamps to work instead,” Sega producer Toshihiro Nagoshi told Famitsu “We turn on the lights whenever we go to the bathroom and turn them off again when we’re done. It was annoying at first, but we’re all used to it now. To me, having the office seem darker isn’t so bad, but I do worry a little that having our surroundings less well-lit could affect us mentally to the point that it’d have an impact on the games we’re making. I’m sure it’ll be fine in the end, though.”
