Earth Day 2007: Gaming in the Green
When it comes to saving the environment there’s not a lot of ways for gamers to take a stand. Loading up the eco-friendly Awesome Possum or Global Gladiators for a game of recycling awareness isn’t too helpful. In fact, powering up your PC to run the emulator to run the ROM probably sucks up around 150 watts that’ll just have to be replaced by burning more fossil fuels at a distant power plant. Way to go, jerk!
I have found one way to balance my decked out game room with my love of the planet; power strip management. After reading up on the Xbox 360 last year before finally buying one I happened upon an old article from C|net divulging the console’s power-sucking tendencies.
“Playing Xbox 360 for an average of four hours a day will eat up about 233 kilowatt-hours per year. Depending on where you live, that’s an annual bill of $10 to $35 for the Xbox 360 alone.”
And that’s just the time I spend using it. When powered down all electronic devices with more than a few microchips continue suckling power from the wall. The living room alone is filled with starving components; Xbox 360, original Xbox, PlayStation 2, GameCube, DVD player, LCD TV, and stereo. Hell, USA Weekend just revealed that even your cell phone charger is wasting electricity (and costing you money) just by being plugged in.
Ok, I admit my motivations weren’t completely eco-centric; any money I can save this easily just makes me happy. What I did was position the power strip behind the entertainment center so that it’s switch is never out of reach. A couple small nails and a load-bearing piece of tape later and I now give and take electricity like some kind of twisted tech god!
Coupled with our complete changeover to compact fluorescent light bulbs all of our gaming, web surfing, and general living yielded a meager $80 electric bill compared to some of our equally geeky friends’ that topped $100 a month. As a gamer it may be the easiest way to help out the planet and save some cash aside from recycling all those Atari cartridges you’re holding onto.
