JAN 15

Stanford University professor Byron Reeves thinks that the key to getting people to actively reduce their home electricity use is to make it a competition. At the Behavior, Energy and Climate Change conference, he proposed the idea of combining smart meters with online gaming.

His idea would feed a home's smart meter data into a massive multi-player online game where the more you reduce energy consumption, the more points you gain. All homeowners in the online community would be competing, but also working together for a common good. The concept is based on hugely popular games like World of Warcraft and Second Life. A demo video is available here.

Reeves is an expert in psychological processing of media and he believes this game would work because people work hardest towards goals where they have an emotional investment. Both the feeling of competition and the sense of community that an online gaming platform would provide, would cause people to be more engaged in reducing their home energy use.

Reeves said that the Department of Energy and utility companies have expressed interest in his idea. Personally, I'd love to see this game come to life. Not only would it be a motivator for people to save energy, but competition breeds new ideas. Who knows what players would come up with to one-up their virtual neighbors? Some really useful tricks could come out of this!

via Earth2Tech

Comments (8)

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I have an idea
written by Space, January 15, 2009

Let's just make those "points" in the game convertible in cash.
To achieve that, all we would have to do is measure energy consumption and make people regularly pay a sum of money in proportion with the energy they consume... wouldn't that be nice?

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written by Wes, January 15, 2009

This seems like a great idea! But I do see a couple privacy issues with it and there would be the fear of people becoming too competitive to the point of violence.

Simple statutes could be put in place to prevent any such occurrences. I'm not sure how far along this project is but I think people should only be able to see friends who need to accept friend requests (similar to Facebook).

Of course, these fears could be unfounded. Nonetheless, I'm very interested in seeing where this goes and I hope to be seeing this in my neighborhood soon.

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: (
written by Clinch, January 15, 2009

I don't see this doing that much good. I've heard similar ideas to this before, trying to improve the world by making a game of it, but that's not how gamers work. Games designed around gameplay are going to be far more popular that ones designed around making the world a better place.

The way to get people to conserve is to make it easier and cheaper, not make it into a game

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Proffesor mungleberry
written by seamus O'Byrne-Inglis, January 15, 2009

If they design a game exactly like world of warcraft or one of those, but then use this enviromental reduction thing as a way of gaining "extra credit" then it could work, an nice idea would be setting a carbon limit on each player and if they go over it they start to lose in stats or whatever, this would mean that players could buy and sell carbon tokens to keep them under the limit

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Energy Competitions
written by gmoke, January 15, 2009

There's a web and public access TV show called "Energy Smackdown" which pits one town against another to reduce their carbon footprints. MIT and Harvard are currently in competition with each other to do the same thing. This stuff is already going on.

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Carbon tokens?
written by Bobby J., January 15, 2009

Carbon tokens as virtual currencies similar to that of gold in World of Warcraft? That sounds like an interesting idea... and could even work. It could be better if they make real life rewards for their in game achievements. For example, if they are able to gather enough Carbon tokens in the game, they could use them in real life to get some real reward, like some tax deduction or something. This way, the game could attract those people who aren't even into gaming and stuff.

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I like it
written by Royce Fullerton, January 18, 2009

Energy efficiency is by far the cheapest way to cut emissions and most of the measures to increase energy efficiency have a financial payback of 0 days. Other ways that require an investment can pay themselves back fairly quickly when compared to investing in solar or wind. I like this idea...smart meters for all!

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Games for motivation and feedback
written by Pamela, January 29, 2009

I agree that making conservation cheap and easy is key, but I think what Reeves is trying to do is use a game as a way to make the behavior and it's consequences more visible. Games just up the engagment aspect of getting the feedback to the user so it can be more easy for them.

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