Though many games develop themes of environmental preservation (and in fact, in one of the most beloved games of all time, Final Fantasy VII, you actually begin the game as an environmental terrorist. How weird is that??? Ok.), the crossover between gaming and the environmental movmenet isn’t notable. 

But consoles are becoming more efficient. While the Wii U is capable of roughly the same performance as the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, it consumes much less power:

In terms of performance per watt, Wii U is the clear winner, providing an equivalent graphical and gameplay experience using less than half the power consumed by the other consoles.

So how did Nintendo create a system that performs like a PS3 but purrs along coolly? Well, it doesn’t have as many horses in the engine, a fact that developers will need to get used to:

Gains in the efficiency of the design and the inclusion of features such as out-of-order execution will – to a certain degree – make up for the lack of dual hardware threads and the lower clock speed, but there is a dip in raw computational power that cross-platform devs are going to need to work around.