Besides its slightly controversial feature story, the latest issue of Wired has another interesting item in the form of a question that was asked of Mr. Know-It-All, aka Brendan I. Koerner. A reader wanted to know how to green up his or her WoW addiction.

That desire may come from this guilt-inducing statistic regarding Second Life.

According to Julian Bleecker, cofounder of design think tank the Near Future Laboratory, the average Second Life avatar requires 1,248 kilowatt hours of electricity to "exist" for a year — 153 kWh for the servers and 1,095 kWh for your PC. In terms of carbon emissions, that's roughly the equivalent of driving 1,800 miles in a BMW 750Li. No one's made similar environmental calculations for WoW, but Mr. Know-It-All can't imagine the game being appreciably cleaner than its competitors.

The answer, by the way, is to purchase carbon offsets. Though in my opinion, players also have some options. If you're not hung up on the absolute fastest framerates, you can play on a decently specced laptop/desktop replacement with discreet video subsystems. You can also research efficient PCs or individual components and build one yourself.

On the part of game companies, it would be nice for them to disclose (or *advertise*) what, if any, steps they are taking toward datacenter energy efficiency.

Happy questing!