Electricity and Network Demand in Everyday Desktop PC Gaming : An In Situ Study of Digital Constellations in Swedish Households

Sammanfattning

Desktop PC gaming is a widespread domestic digital practice with sustainability implications, yet little is known about how everyday gaming in real homes translates into electricity use and network demand. This thesis examines what electricity consumption and network demand patterns emerge from everyday PC gaming practices, and how these patterns relate to session duration, hardware configuration, game type, mode of play, and participant expectations. The study uses an in situ mixed-methods design with six participants in Sweden, combining router-level NetFlow/IPFIX telemetry, DNS correlation, plug-level power measurements, participant activity sheets, and post-study interviews. Across 43 recorded gameplay sessions, the analysis covered approximately 79 hours of gameplay, 79 GB of network traffic, and 16.9 kWh of gaming-window electricity consumption. The findings show that gaming-related demand was highly uneven across participants and sessions. Electricity consumption was shaped most clearly by session duration and active system power, while network traffic was more event-based and influenced by multiplayer activity, updates, downloads, streaming, communication tools, and background services. Participants generally expected their electricity use to be higher than measured, suggesting a gap between perceived and operational demand. The thesis argues that desktop PC gaming should be understood as a situated combination of hardware, software, platforms, services, and routines rather than as a single application workload. By doing so, it contributes to sustainable HCI by showing how privacy-preserving in situ measurement can make every day digital resource demand more visible without reducing gaming to device specifications or aggregate usage estimates.