Nicolas Carr has an interesting post on his blog regarding electricity usage by Second-Life avatars. His claim is that “Avatars consume as much energy as Brazilians”.
First, let’s get through the objections. Most importantly, this is only true while the Avatar is alive. (I.e. if you are logged in). I have an ‘Avatar’ on Second Life since at least two years ago, and I’ve never played her -so I’m fairly certain she is mostly a bunch of bits on a hard drive.
Second, his numbers are slightly off. He over-estimated the server count by a factor of four, owing to a confusing way Second-Life counts them. Then again, he underestimated the PC power side of the equation. As later clarifications in the comments thread show, the client side power usage actually dwarves anything that happens on the server side.
But a discussion of all these objections obscures the main issue here – running a computer is quite power-intensive, and using the Internet has an additional power footprint. If you played SL 24/7, it’s the equivalent of driving an SUV for 2300 miles. At the same time, it is not as intensive as many other tasks – if I drove an SUV 24/7, you’d hardly notice if I was playing SL all the time while driving it. (Well, except for my erratic driving…)
And this is where the main mistake with this piece lies – it’s easy to assume we wouldn’t use any energy if we weren’t playing SL, but we do. So the real question we should ask is this: “Are games a net-positive or a net-negative in terms of energy use?”.
I do believe that at least gaming with a social component (i.e. online gaming) is a net positive. You stay in contact with all your friends without needing to be there physically – and seeing my friends on a regular basis, for example, would take a lot more than 2300 miles. Online worlds like SL might fare even better, since many people also use it as a business place, they conduct meetings there, etc.
But what about playing locally? Is that still a net-positive? Not if I were a TV viewer instead – gaming requires me to switch on the TV and a game console. But let’s at look at the marginal increase over TV only:
The average gamer plays around 7.6 hours a week, according to an ESA study. The XBox360 – my poison of choice, and probably the most power-hungry console around – uses 160 Watts. That’s a total of ~63 KWh per annum. Or 1/30th of the annual electricity usage of a Brazilian.
Tags: SecondLife,Environment, VideoGames
what of those of us who use two computers at once, to manage two avies?
You’re destroying the earth
Seriously – I think it’s still the better alternative to physical attendance…