This article works out a logic for trash in videogames through its consideration of the ludic artifact. It also addresses the correlation between technical capability and a graphic verisimilitude that generates trashscapes. Examining videogames from Super Mario Bros. Historically, the lack of trash in videogames has been a symptom of limited graphical horsepower, since it becomes computationally costly to render dropped weaponry, discarded refuse, or the corpses of defeated enemies indefinitely.
But design considerations dictate that an environment, however lugubrious or hostile in its outward affect, ought to be mechanically devoted to the player; that is, relatively tolerant of exploration and the confrontation of threats. If not merely constitutive of local color and atmosphere, the artifactualβthat which is ontologically as well as strategically apart in a videogame and can be recognized as suchβtends to take the form of obtainables or obstacles, monsters of course being a kind of hurdle varying in their degree of mobility.
Because my interest is videogames, I gladly leave to new-media scholars the discussion of excess within hypertext, file-management systems, and the emergent cross-pollination of digital culture with archeology and discard studies.
For most gamers this is temporary, a matter of the proverbial learning curve Schmalzer. Is the lesson then to embrace what is insoluble about trash, to drag it into the open? Suddenly the dump took on a new light.
Some objects were intricate, things people had put care into making. Many were no more than a few months old. It took up territory that the remaining players wanted to use, and was also an eyesore. In the latter, one is tasked with investigating the lives of community members by way of the personal effects they left behind en route to the hereafter.
