The High Cost of Virtual Living

Nicholas Carr, on his blog Rough Type, has calculated the average energy expenditure of a single avatar in SL. I'm not enough of a numbers guy to confirm that his math is correct (though the many commenters of the article go over the numbers with a fine-toothed abacus), but it's an intriguing notion. Mr. Carr claims that " ... your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian."

Of course we're all aware that avatars are merely pixels on a screen, pulses of electricity in the guts of a server somewhere in San Francisco, and that everyone spends a wide variance of time ranges with their avatars. This is an academic exercise at best. Still, it does give some thought to the accompanying notion that we're choosing to burn this energy by staying at home with our computers, rather than, say, enjoying a similar output of energy in the form of sound and lights from a nightclub, or watching a game in our local, brightly-lit stadium. However, I know that such ideas are water off a duck's back with this audience; if we were the type to feel guilty that we might be spending too much time in front of the screen, we wouldn't do it. Regardless, it's nice to know that, regardless of considerations of race, religion, gender, sexual identity, or political affiliation, we can count on one aspect of our Second Lives to remain constant: the energy it takes to maintain our virtual biologies.