Exploring Waste and Garbage Through a Digital Game: The Case of Stardew Valley

This study examines how waste and garbage function within Stardew Valley, approaching the topic through ontological and biopolitical lenses rather than a purely ecocritical one. The author argues that while the game's core farming routine is largely wasteless, garbage nonetheless shapes gameplay and the constitution of the gameworld. The analysis positions waste as a category with ontological complexity, one that can contribute positively to both game studies and theories of waste, which the author frames as in need of perspectives beyond the dominant environmentalist emphasis on purity.

The paper's central observations concern how waste is peripheral to the player character's main activities. Garbage originates mainly from marginal sources such as NPC trash cans, seasonal natural processes, bodies of water, and restorable ruins. Within the game's biopolitical regime, the player character figures both as an agent of biopower, managing the farm, and as its object, constrained by health, energy, and day-night cycles. The most pronounced disciplinary mechanism tied to garbage is social ostracism resulting from scavenging, an activity the player may choose to avoid. The analysis also identifies three functional categories of garbage: retrievable items in trash containers, objects like boulders and logs that can be transformed into materials, and debris recoverable through recycling machines. Gameplay pleasure is further linked to waste temporality, as devastated locations shift between "waste time" and "use time," expanding mobility and the gameworld.

The conclusions argue that studying waste in digital games is productive in two directions. For game analysis, tracing a game's waste management scheme, or its absence, reveals its biopolitical logic and environmental paradigm. For waste studies, games foreground functionality and affordances in defining waste, and illustrate how objects move fluidly into and out of waste categories, highlighting the relativity of the concept and its creative potential.