But I sorta do... excessive gaming is a waste of human potential and GPU's.
I honestly regret spending a lot of my teen years playing games, I know that sounds ultra-boomer but the only thing games ever actually did for me was learning how to mod them and getting programming experience from that, something that simply doesn't exist on consoles and sadly many of the most popular games on Earth.
For a time/experience ratio that's not the best way to go about it. I would have been better off surfing and chasing girls with a bit of coding on the side.
If I could go back in time for ten minutes I would berate younger me for spending too long on an xbox, likely to the mocking amusement of my younger self.
A lot of things humans do don't produce anything, but are just done for fun and are unfortunately bad for the environment. That would even apply to surfing if you want, it produces plastic waste in the end.
> but the only thing games ever actually did for me was learning how to mod them and getting programming experience from that
Isn't that just a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence"? You're dismissing the fact that it lead you to learn programming, which is a valuable skill for many careers.
Are you sure younger you would have been the surfer dude? I think there is nothing wrong with just not being that extroverted as a teen, not being the cool guy girls flock to. That's not something you just decide to be. Now you can obviously say it would have been better to be the cool dude and be really good at coding at the same time, but that's just hindsight and assuming an ideal outcome, and that's just not how it usually works. there's probably a lot of people in their 40s who have partied way too much, had girls and enjoyed life and now regret not having been more of a nerd instead because being in IT seems the foolproof way of making a lot of money, while they struggle.
And just for fun, let's imagine you'd have gone surfing once a week as a teen and taken the car to the beach, how much would an half hour car ride mean for environmental impact, compared to a gaming rig at 300W?
Fermi estimate: 10 million latest Xboxes, used for 1 hour per day.
Power estimates seem to vary from 120 W to 315 W, let's say 200 W including display. That's 2 GWh/day. Probably similar for Playstation, or at least close enough for a Fermi estimate. I'm going to guess similar for PC gaming also.
Smartphones are what, about 1 W? But a few billion of them? 1 hour per day makes that another GWh/day?
So probably about 7 GWh/day for Xbox + Playstation + PC + mobile, 2.5 TWh/year.
Bitcoin is estimated to use 131 TWh/year according to Wikipedia.
Yeah, you're right, it's not even close.
Anyways my main point was that a lot of things people do for fun are more or less directly bad for the environment, like for example creating dozens of silly images with stable diffusion. But it's still better than crypto mining imo, as doing "fun things" usually benefits you/your mental health.
Gaming is not an activity that produces something, likewise any form of entertainment for that matter. So in the sense that nothing comes from the electricity and time used, gaming is an "anti-environmental" activity.
I personally don't agree with any of this notion, because life is worthless if we can't accept life is pointless, but if we are striving for a world where consumption must always produce something then gaming is one of many things that must be eliminated.