Landfill: Designing for Low-Carbon Pleasures

"Landfill: Designing for Low-Carbon Pleasures" presents the design rationale and production approach behind Landfill, a durational deck-building videogame hosted on Solar Server, a solar-powered web server built to host low-carbon games. The paper argues that videogames, a leisure activity with substantial carbon emissions, can help envision a post-growth future by pairing renewable energy with deliberate design constraints. Its central thesis draws on degrowth theory, particularly Kohei Saito's argument that green economic growth can still increase emissions, and Kate Soper's concept of "alternative hedonism," which frames reduced consumption as a source of new pleasures rather than sacrifice.

The paper's key conceptual claim is that a genuinely eco-conscious game is defined less by persuasive or educational messaging than by how it is created and shared. Landfill's environmental intervention lies in its modest carbon footprint and autonomous, solar-powered infrastructure, which the authors use to redirect attention toward the pleasure of play rather than the social outcomes players might be nudged toward. The game itself reimagines the deck-builder genre around composting and land renewal, begins players with an excess of cards that they compost to refine a personal deck, and ties in-game ability modifiers to real-time local weather via geolocation.

Scope and method are primarily qualitative and design-based. The paper is a DiGRA 2026 proceedings contribution describing one game's development and its design iterations; it reports no survey data, player sample, or quantitative emissions measurements. Its durational structure, which limits play to a few rounds per day over a week, and its cumulative scoring are presented as deliberate techniques for slowing engagement and resisting binge-play patterns common in digital games.