In what is probably the oddest story of the day, Harrison Ford and Conservation International is making a game with a developer named Talkie. The game is called Ecotopia, and it will be available on Facebook on April 4, 2011. It’s a free-to-play game that puts an emphasis on creating a green world. By green, I mean environmentally friendly.

There’s always a lot of talk about how much game consoles cost to purchase but some information compiled by the Natural Resource Defense Council suggests you might want to consider how much they cost to run.

The NRDC is a nonprofit environmental action group with a staff of 300 policy experts. According to their numbers, a PlayStation 3 left on 24/7 costs as much to run annually as two brand new refrigerators, $124 a year. The Xbox 360 is only slightly better, blowing $103 per year. The Nintendo Wii is reportedly the most efficient at $10. This also supports a 2008 report by nonprofit Australian research company, Choice.

Unless you missed out on An Inconvenient Truth – or just about any piece of mainstream media in the last five years – you know that “going green” is not only “in”, but it’s essential. Though it’s rare that games let you save the world in the more realistic sense (that is, from the evils of over consumption and pollution, rather than from aliens or super villains), but I’ve run across a few in my green-oriented travels. The following titles are not only environmentally oriented, but they come in at a wallet-friendly price of free – making them just as easy on your green as Mother Earth’s.

Here’s the second, supposedly far sexier installment of our list of Earth Day, green and otherwise earth-themed apps available that we could find.

This is the second of two parts so please enjoy the first as well.

You know with so many applications in Apple’s App Store there has to be a few Earth Day themed things to download. Here’s a look at the green, Earth Day and environmentally themed apps available that we could find (at the rate the App Store is growing, expect this to be outdated before you finish more »

Gaia Online just announced the release of celebrity-inspired items for Gaia users. This week’s items now allow registrants the opportunity to dress up their avatars as Snoop Dogg or The Incredible Hulk with hairstyles, purple pants, green fists and more. This marks the first time fully licensed celebrity-branded virtual items have been sold in the virtual world.

In a partnership with virtual goods sales and distribution system Virtual Greats LLC, Gaia Online will allow users to collect or “snare” quality celebrity items each month to create…

For those of you who remember the Gaia Online announcements from Boston Anime 2008 in March and zOMG! closed-beta announcement in July 2008.

I was tickled pink to take a personal tour of the upcoming zOMG! MMO game with senior producer and director of zOMG!, Dave Georgeson. The game looks amazing. Don’t let those little saucer-eyed marshmallow puffs of cuteness fool you. From the preview demonstration Georgeson and his team gave, its nothing I’d wanna hug or hang around with but its a world I can’t wait to explore.

If you think Gaia Online is amazing, you will be more than pleased with their newest game scheduled for the end of Summer 2008…

These days conserving energy is a top priority especially with the amount of power the Xbox 360 and PS3 can consume on a daily basis. Although we have yet to see a serious attempt to make an environmentally friendly console, one device is planting the idea of wireless game controllers without batteries.

The Wind-Up Remote Control uses hand power instead of battery power. It works by rotating a wheel at the bottom of the remote until the controller…

As if responding to my previous post concerning the price of videogames and the cost of a tank of gas, KansasCity.com has posted an article concerning the energy consumption by videogame consoles…

It’s Earth Day 2008 (April 22, 2008) and the average price of gas around my town (near Cincinnati, Ohio) has finally reached $3.60 per gallon. That means a 14-gallon fill-up now costs $50.40. Yep, the price of the average console videogame.

Which will you try to spend less on, games or gas? Will gamers across the country buy one less game a year to have enough money to drive to work one extra week?

Consider this: Staying home and playing videogames means less time on the road which translates into less time quickly consuming automobile fuel (and polluting)…