Folks, the term “EcoGeek” officially has new meaning. Oliver Goh, founder of startup company Shaspa, has created a video game which allows the players to control their home energy and water consumption.

Ok, maybe calling it a “video game” is a little misleading. Really, the OpenShaspa Home Energy Kit is just a program (plus a hardware kit) for remotely controlling all of the different power, water and gas consuming devices in your home. Plenty of other companies are rolling out programs and hardware that will do the same thing.

In this program, though, rather than executing these commands by clicking buttons, users get to control a little avatar which walks through a Second-Life-esque 3D environment. When your avatar turns off the porch lights, your actual porch lights turn off. And there’s a level of interaction with other players, too – your energy consumption is displayed for everyone else to see, bringing some competition into the picture.

This strikes me as the kind of thing that is 90% likely to fade into obscurity, but 10% likely to catch on as a fad. It certainly taps into the Second Life crowd, and even offers them something that they have never been offered before – the ability to actually use their avatars to manipulate things in the real world. Granted, turning the water up and down isn’t exactly high throttling action, but it’s more fun to do it in a virtual world than through a plain old display.

Via Earth2Tech
Image via seriousgamesinstitute’s Flickr