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Whether exploring the weird world of Death Stranding or shooting their way through Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, gamers in the US are collectively using more energy than all the freezers in the country鈥檚 homes.

The first effort to comprehensively map the energy use of gaming in the US found that it produces carbon emissions on a par with Sri Lanka鈥檚 total annual carbon footprint, at 24 megatonnes of carbon dioxide. Better graphics, a move to 4K monitors and TVs and growth in streaming games are to blame, according to Evan Mills at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and his colleagues.

The researchers looked at energy use for 26 gaming systems including all consoles released by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo over the past 15 years, as well as PCs and media-streaming devices such as the Apple TV.

They asked 20 testers in California to run dozens of trials of 37 popular games, including Minecraft, Call of Duty and Skyrim, to check for differences between systems and the way people played. The team extrapolated the findings to the whole of the US, based on the country鈥檚 134 million installed gaming systems.

The results show that cloud-based gaming, of the sort Google is promising with its Stadia platform launching next week, is by far the most energy-intensive form of gaming via the internet compared with downloading games or playing them online. That is down to the electricity consumed by the networks streaming the data.

Electricity costs varied hugely, from $5 a year to $1000 year, based on average US energy prices. Altogether, gaming consumes 34 terawatt-hours a year, or 2.4 per cent of electricity use by US homes. Carbon emissions varied greatly depending on the local electricity grid鈥檚 energy mix.

The genre of the game didn鈥檛 seem to determine its energy use. A seemingly simple puzzle game such as Candy Crush might still consume roughly as much energy as a more complex massively multiplayer online game such as League of Legends.

Future energy use and carbon emissions may hinge on what platforms win out: greater use of consoles rather than PCs is expected to lower energy use.

The environmental impact of gaming is probably even larger than the study found because it doesn鈥檛 account for mobile gaming, says Matthew Marsden at Lancaster University, UK.

鈥淚 think a likely future scenario is that mobile gamers, who expect a 鈥榩lay anywhere鈥� experience, would be more likely to move over to cloud-gaming services and so would end up with a higher energy footprint than regular mobile gaming because of associated energy usage of data centres and networking infrastructure,鈥� he says.