Electricity isn’t that expensive, especially if you have renewables. Stuff and transportation is. The biggest cause for co2 at the top is consumerism.
Remember that, once you have your electronics, the entertainment you get from it is competing against entertainment from physical things, or travel, or something else.
In addition, in winter that electricity is turned into heat, which you need anyway to heat up your home. And heating has always taken much more electricity than video games in my experience.
All things considered, video games are a fairly efficient form of entertainment. You can do everything digitally (cheap), and hardware can be made to be very power efficient (it just isn’t because electricity is cheap).
IIRC the thermal efficiency of a PC/console is basically the same as most electric heating implements. I.e an electric radiator or a computer converts something like 80% of the energy it draws into heat. So theoretically, if you’re heating a room with electricity, you’re not polluting more when using a computer or console in it (apart from the servers/Internet consumption for online stuff)
Computers and electric heaters turn near-100% of the power into heat, as do most other things. Heat is just a waste product, electric heaters work by effectively “wasting” the electricity into heat.
Electricity isn’t that expensive, especially if you have renewables. Stuff and transportation is. The biggest cause for co2 at the top is consumerism.
Remember that, once you have your electronics, the entertainment you get from it is competing against entertainment from physical things, or travel, or something else.
In addition, in winter that electricity is turned into heat, which you need anyway to heat up your home. And heating has always taken much more electricity than video games in my experience.
All things considered, video games are a fairly efficient form of entertainment. You can do everything digitally (cheap), and hardware can be made to be very power efficient (it just isn’t because electricity is cheap).
IIRC the thermal efficiency of a PC/console is basically the same as most electric heating implements. I.e an electric radiator or a computer converts something like 80% of the energy it draws into heat. So theoretically, if you’re heating a room with electricity, you’re not polluting more when using a computer or console in it (apart from the servers/Internet consumption for online stuff)
Computers and electric heaters turn near-100% of the power into heat, as do most other things. Heat is just a waste product, electric heaters work by effectively “wasting” the electricity into heat.
Resistance heating is 100% efficient, all the power you pull will be converted to heat.
If you heat with a heat pump then it will have >100% heating efficiency and you’ll be worse off to heat with your computer.