Incomplete Gamer

How environmentally friendly are your videogaming habits? Unless you’ve got your own wind farm in the back garden or a bank of solar cells on the roof providing all your energy needs and spitting the excess electricity back into the national grid, then probably not at all. Even if you have managed to build your own eco-friendly power station in the burbs, the eco warriors still won’t be happy knowing you’re squandering that energy on mindless fun when you could just as easily be providing the energy needs of a modest sanctuary for giraffes with cataracts.

Don’t think you’ll earn brownie points simply by choosing the most energy efficient current generation console on the market. That’s the Wii for those keeping score. Nintendo’s Wii uses only slightly more power than a jack-in-the-box.  So little power in fact that you might mistakenly imagine it must come with a crank handle…until you see the graphics it puts out, at which point you’ll be absolutely convinced. Just kidding. Seriously. Come back. I repeat, there is absolutely no correlation between a console’s power consumption and the power of a console.

Again, just for those keeping score, according to the folks at the National Resources Defence Council, the PS3 consumes at least four times and as much energy as the Wii and as much as 13.4 times more depending on energy usage patterns (usage patterns being a polite term for saying ‘people too dumb to turn off the console when not using it). The study published by the NRDC found that the United States could reduce its electricity bill by $1 billion dollars and cut back on 7 million tons of CO2 every year simply by introducing more user friendly power management features.

As little power as the Wii consumes, choosing a Wii over a PS3 won’t earn you any friends at Greenpeace. As PALGN reported earlier this year, Greenpeace take a big picture approach when ranking electronics companies, not simply looking at the electronics, but at the companies themselves. Is Sony boss, Howard Stringer turning off the lights when he leaves his office, and what are the company’s policies on climate change and recycling? Measured thus, Sony came out on top, beating out Microsoft and Nintendo, which despite creating an energy friendly console, might inadvertently be consuming the power of a million suns in its ongoing quest to pave planet earth with Nintendo branded consoles.

If being hammered, assaulted and preached to by the greenies wasn’t bad enough, now industry are getting into the act as well. Nexway, a European outfit in the business of digitally distributing video games and software is proudly crowing the environmental benefits of downloading products online over purchasing the very same products in stores. Gilles Ridel, the CEO of Nexway is proud that his company distributed over one million products last year.

“Simply put, this represented a million less journeys. The maths is quickly done to reflect the amount of CO2 preserved. Downloading is a positive gesture for the planet.”

Really…a million journeys? I’m not so sure about the math. Last time I checked, games publishers weren’t shipping games individually in really tiny trucks. Not the successful publishers anyway. Still, Gilles makes a good point. Digital distribution is saving on a considerable amount of energy, cutting out on game production, storage, handling, packaging and transportation.

But how much? Not content simply to brag, Nexway have launched an eco-calculator so gamers can see for themselves the CO2 emissions that can be reduced simply by downloading a game instead of buying it the old fashioned way. Simply punch in the size of the video game and you’ll find the amount of CO2 cut down on by following the digital distribution path. The calculator even equates the CO2 emission to travelling by various modes of transportation – trams, a Toyota Prius, and quite helpfully for TIG staffers, a Ferrari 599. Downloading all 2.9 GB of Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box, saves us the equivalent amount of CO2 emissions generated by driving our Ferrari 290 metres, which we think means we can now feel less guilty driving the short trip down to the Cafe on the corner to pick up a caramel latte, rather than simply walking.

If Nexway’s eco-calculator leaves you a little cold, you’ll be even less impressed with a report in Wednesday’s Herald Sun.  When Nintendo announced the Wii Vitality Sensor accessory for its market-leading Nintendo Wii game console, I was frankly a little underwhelmed. The way I see it, you could travel back in time fifty years, lower every one’s expectations and the vitality sensor would still fail to leave much of a mark. Now the Herald Sun’s Richard Conrad doesn’t agree. He thinks that equipped with a vitality sensor your Nintendo Wii could do double duty as a lie detector. The vitality sensor clips onto your finger and measures your pulse along with skin conductance, in much the same way that a polygraph measures skin conductivity changes and pulse and blood pressure to determine whether someone is telling porkies.

Says Richard, “Imagine the embarrassing consequences such games will have – ranging from catching out a child’s fibs to revealing a partner’s infidelities.”

Call me crazy but who the hell would want that? What’s the market for combination games console/polygraph machine? Detention centres? Suspicious wives? Who could possibly need it?

Sadly, a Marshall County Sheriff in northern Mississippi could have used one on Wednesday last week, after an 11 year old boy accidentally killed his nine year old brother following an argument over a video game. Sheriff Kenny Dickerson said “The younger brother allegedly got mad because he got beat at some video games and got the gun.”

As reported by Sky News, Darius Finley was shot once in the chest after the pair struggled with the weapon at their home in Marshall County.

Sheriff Dickerson said “Upon arrival we found a nine-year old child laying face down in the bedroom of the home. The shotgun was near where the child was laying, and casing to the opposite side of where the child was laying.
Initially the older brother, De-Andre Finley, claimed never to have touched the gun, but after more questioning, he admitted the weapon accidentally went off as the two were struggling over the gun.

What ever happened to simply hiding the controllers and storming off in a huff?

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