Global video game use is roughly as much energy use as Bitcoin, (which only very recently reached parity) according to some cursory googling I just did. This is also an activity that is growing rapidly. Video games are merely a source of amusement and therefore just a hobby of little importance to society (wrong place to make that argument I suppose) that could be replaced with other forms of amusement that consume less energy. (after all, the world is ending, it's the least you can do) If nothing else, crypto could be considered a hobby. What makes my hobby unworthy of power consumption but yours is? My hobby also just happens to shelter my wealth from theft and debasement, grants financial sovereignty, and enables novel forms of financial instruments and payment networks such as payment streaming of tiny fractions of a penny. "I don't use it therefore it's useless and should be banned because, energy" seems to only apply to one thing for some reason.
Consider that the vast majority of energy use from video games is actually just to increase the fidelity -- you can run the same games on weaker hardware just fine. Hell I bought a handheld emulation device recently (RG351P, would recommend) and it'll run Playstation 1 games for 6 hours using a battery half the size of a phone battery. Cyberpunk runs on Ryzen APUs at low settings. Where is the shame for raytraced minecraft players?
This argument is before the mitigating factors such as energy mix and renewable subsidization which just make the whining much sillier. If the 'resource wasted' is a resource that would have gone to waste anyway (i.e. surplus hydro power) then there is no consequence. Even the chips used in the ASICs are the lowest priority at TSMC so they're not preventing iPhones or desktop CPUs from being made. The halvings every 4 years dramatically reduce the energy consumption so it's possible in the future the rate will be less than it is now even with a much higher BTC price.
