Based On Electricity Use, A Second Life Avatar Uses As Much Energy As A Brazilian

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The virtual world of Second Life, which hit one million residents back in October, is one of the most popular online games of its kind. To even call it a game is perhaps inaccurate. It's a full-fledged virtual world, complete with crime, sex, commodities, and real-world advertising. (Don't miss BusinessWeek's journey into Second Life or its great "Old Fogey's Guide to the Online Universe.") It goes way beyond the traditional online games of old: These days, politicians like former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner hold town meetings and musicians use music streaming to stage "live" concerts in Second Life in order to be heard.

So, it's fascinating to see blogger Nick Carr (also a former exec editor at Harvard Business Review) calculate whether avatars consume more energy than their human counterparts. He found that the thousands of avatars "living" in Second Life at any given moment, given the servers and computers needed to run the virtual world, use about the same amount of electricity as a comparable number of real-life Brazilians. So, here's my question: Has anyone done any research on whether avatars are much more wasteful than their human counterparts? Say, in terms of energy: Do avatars not bother to turn off the lights?

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http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/2544

EDIT

If there are on average between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars "living" in Second Life at any point, that means the world has a population of about 12,500. Supporting those 12,500 avatars requires 4,000 servers as well as the 12,500 PCs the avatars' physical alter egos are using. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Throw in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals:

(4,000 x 250 x 24) + (12,500 x 120 x 24) = 60,000,000 watt-hours or 60,000 kilowatt-hours

Per capita, that's:

60,000 / 12,500 = 4.8 kWh

Which, annualized, gives us 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they're in the same ballpark.

Now, if we limit the comparison to developed countries, where per-capita energy consumption is 7,702 kWh a year, the avatars appear considerably less energy hungry than the humans. But if we look at developing countries, where per-capita consumption is 1,015 kWh, we find that avatars burn through considerably more electricity than people do.

More narrowly still, the average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.

Which means, in turn, that avatars aren't quite as intangible as they seem. They don't have bodies, but they do leave footprints.

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http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/avatars_consume.php

:hi:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epmxlfile1_1_a.xls

The other 90% of the solar electricity generated in the US is devoted to keeping up web-sites that tell us how solar energy will save us from climate change disaster all by itself.

Isn't a bit like saying that my groceries for this month cost $500 to transport home?

It's an interesting topic - the energy consumed to provide internet services but it's a little misleading.

On the other hand, it's good to know that the energy consumption of all those servers, air conditioners and workstations have been attributed to Second Life so we at DU can operate with a clear conscience.

to one game.

4000 servers dedicated to 12400 PCs, response time must be fantastic. I may have to check out this Second Life myself.

From a while back:
http://news.com.com/Second+Life+Dont+worry,+we+can+scale/2100-1043_3-6080186.html

The bet was certainly ambitious. After all, "WoW," as fans call it, currently has more than 6.5 million users. "Second Life" has 240,000 registered users. But whether Linden Lab's virtual world can catch "WoW" isn't the most pressing question about the virtual world's future for some people familiar with its computer network.
...
"Second Life" currently runs on 2,579 servers that use the dual-core Opteron chip produced by AMD. Each server is responsible for an individual "sim," or 16 acres of virtual "Second Life" land. At peak usage that means that each server is handling about three users.

More recently: http://news.com.com/2061-10797_3-6143909.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=news

No one knows how many Second Life users there are. Estimates range from 200,000 to 600,000, and Linden Lab, the virtual world's publisher, posts regular updates about how many users have logged in within the last 60 days. As of Thursday, that number was 809,960.

Anyone fancy taking a guess?

no wonder they use so much electricity...
http://kleduc.wordpress.com/2006/12/28/sexing-up-the-virtual-world-of-second-life