Waste Eater
Donald Everhart, Contributing Editor
What if there was a technological solution to environmental disaster? Capitalists often make headlines with speculative claims about how they could engineer their way out of our current, worldwide situation. They claim that what they have already created, from superfund sites to global warming, is nothing to worry about. Corporate scientists and their bosses are going to find solutions that bring value and profit. Nothing needs to change, nobody is responsible or accountable, and everyone should keep calm and keep consuming, going into debt and living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Waste Eater considers the human costs of technocapitalist solutionism. It asks a crucial question that should always be put to these capitalist visions: who will do the work? Author, artist, designer, and programmer Cain Maddox also considers how the organization of that work might separate those who do the labor and those who benefit from it. In other words, Waste Eater is a game about class difference and class conflict.
The Waster sits upright on a thorn in a field of them. The image is reminiscent of those in nuclear waste warning images. A word bubble reads, “It had just rained. Drops of sulphur hung off the thorns like morning dew, baking in the sun. Iridescent.”
In Waste Eater, players see the end of the story. The solution to environmental disaster, it turns out, was to modify human bodies to be able to consume and thrive on toxic waste. The trouble is, when all the waste has been eaten and the world restored (or perhaps another world made possible), the Wasters find themselves starving to death. Or maybe that’s not so troublesome, at least to the capitalists. In a particularly tragic line, the last Waster says that it would have been trivially easy to have made a way to reverse the mutations and implants that allow Wasters to subsist on the likes of irradiated dust and acid rain. But that wasn’t a priority. Waste Eaters are an expendable class of people, monstrous people, who have no place in the future that resulted from their labor.
The script is short and the story told with great economy. Much is conveyed through small but affecting details in color and animation. The Waster convincingly heaves their last breaths. Their body is magnificent, but also magnificently broken. Like Roy Batty, they’ve seen things we wouldn’t believe. But unlike the heroic replicant, the Waste Eater lives in a world in which there is no need to forbid a class of beings from setting foot on Earth on pain of being hunted and “retired.” While Blade Runner may be read as a commentary on the similarities between modern police and slave patrols, Waste Eater has other capitalist bacon to fry. What need do the capitalists have for executioners when the systemic conditions of society will bring about the deaths of the inconvenient, redundant class? After all, once your labor is done and you can no longer consume, perhaps the most convenient thing would be your death. What an elegant solution to environmental disaster that would be.
GwG Recommends provides a spotlight for games that catch our interest, with short explanations as to why the author is intrigued. We prioritize self-published, short-form experiences. For other recent pieces in this series, check out Tof Eklund on Walk With the Living and Roger Whitson on We Become What We Behold.
