Call it World of Greencraft: At a recent climate change
conference at sponsored by Stanford University, Byron Reeves, a
professor there, proposed an unlikely marriage of online gaming
and consumer smart meters. Instead of just displaying
incremental changes in energy consumption on the homeowner’s PC
as raw data, what if it were incorporated into an MMOG (for
those non-gamers that’s a massive multi-player online game)? In
such a game, your energy consumption in the real world would be
linked to the game world — the more energy you save, the more
points you get. This demo video produced for the conference
demonstrates how that might work, showing different home owners
competing to have the most energy-efficient house in the virtual
world. While still a hypothetical game, it’s based on real
research of human behavior. As an expert in psychological
processing of media, Professor Reeves has studied the high
levels of engagement people invest in games like World of
Warcraft, which are avidly played by tens of mill