Guardian UK article: secondLife energy consumption

you may have all heard this already, but pretty surprising...



Avatars "don't have bodies, but do leave footprints" - carbon ones
December 5, 2006 1:49 PM

Nick Carr must get lots of letters, because he's done a back-of-the-envelope calculation and figured out that Second Life avatars "consume about as much electricity as your average Brazilian". (That's Brazilian person, not beauty treatment.)

He picks up on a post by Tony Walsh who wonders 'Is Second Life sustainable ecologically?'

There's a certain amount of approximation, but it starts with Linden Lab having 4,000 servers, all running all the time, which "house" (embody? virtualise?) about 15,000 avatars in Second Life - though the number is growing.

A quick bit of totting-up (we haven't checked his numbers, so corrections welcome) and reckons that

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.

And then he goes on...

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 Brazilian 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.

Not the wax kind, either. If there's one topic that's going to be increasingly important in the coming years, it's going to be processing power per watt - and, I suspect, whether the consumption of that watt is actually necessary.


http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/2006/12/05/avatars_dont_have_bodies_but_do_leave_footprints_carbon_ones.html

and a talk by Trebor Scholz

"(Un)ethical Capitalism and Sociable Web Media"
(video cast, download m4b file, 11.4mb-- open in Quicktime, resize, duration: 40 minutes)

http://www.molodiez.org/podcasts/episode_20070301_203115-0500.m4b

interesting iDC post on Second Life

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 12:46:06 +0100
From: " Ana Vald?s "
Subject: Re: [iDC] Virtual Worlds, Education, & Labor
To: "Trebor Scholz"
Cc: IDC list
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; format=flowed

That's really interesting and I really wish more researchers could be
engaged in the studio of Second Life's conditions and behaviours.
A world without democracy, where the individual is constricted to
"mature contempt" islands, where the discussion made in official
forums is controlled by the omnipotent and omniscent Linden Lab.
I read the headlines from last week's turbulence in SL. "terrorist
attack in Second Life", "cyberterrorism". What is virtual terrorism?
It reminds me about Julian Dibbell's excellent book "My tiny life",
where a virtual rape was discussed and put on trial.
And about precariety and workers rights we should discuss Anshe Chung,
the real estate broker avatar for Ailin Graef, is known to use workers
from her nativev China to make virtual wares in places similar to
sweatshops.
Virtual sweatshops are also used for games as Everquest or Ultima
Online, where macros can be used to generate or reproduce objects who
can be sold or traded in the games or outside the games.
The virtual sweatshops (or more clear, the real sweatshops) are in the
real life and populates av real workers, they make virtual wares but
they are treated as all other precarious workers: they work day and
night in dangerous conditions, exposed to datasmog and radiation of
the screens.
Many of them are in the maquila zone between Mexico and the US, Graafs
are in China.
Ana

Participatory Story Making?

Here is a link to the article I read about the game Eve Online. I did not do so well in paraphrasing the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/arts/television/28eve.html?_r=1&oref=slogin