Kara Stone shows Landfill at the Art Gallery of Ontario
After seven straight weeks of daily playtests, the upcoming game reached Walker Court for Video Game Arts Appreciation Night, on its way to a solar-powered server.
Walker Court is the Art Gallery of Ontario's marble heart, and on Oct. 23 it was full of screens. One of them ran Landfill, Kara Stone's upcoming game, playable on the museum floor for Video Game Arts Appreciation Night; Stone's photographs from the evening show pale game maps glowing through purple museum light.
Stone’s final dispatch from seven weeks of daily Landfill playtests.
The night itself is becoming a quiet institution. The AGO runs it with the Game Arts International Network, and Jim Munroe, the museum's former artist-in-residence, picks the lineup and walks visitors through why each game is there.
Landfill arrives with unusual momentum. Stone just closed out seven weeks of playing it herself every single day, posting a dev log each time and keeping a spreadsheet of every win and loss, to simulate the daily play she will ask of players. The testing changed the game. She reworked art and weather abilities, found what she calls “a million bugs,” and dropped a cap of three composts a day, so a player stuck on a day when the weather fights their deck can still earn a stronger pod. She plans to keep the daily playtests going until Landfill has a release date, just without the vlogs.
The game is headed for solarserver.games, the solar-powered web server on the artist's balcony that already hosts Known Mysteries. The question behind it, Stone says in the video, is “what pleasures we can create alongside being low carbon and climate conscious,” and how to practice environmentalism without feeling that something good is being taken away, even in a pure leisure activity like games.
Stone, who teaches at the Alberta University of the Arts, keeps returning to games as a medium for climate and care, from Ritual of the Moon to UnearthU. Killscreen has followed the thread before, in a conversation about the environmental weight of a rendered frame and a Montreal biennale that gave experimental games a month. Landfill has no release date yet; the server is already soaking up light.
Walker Court during Video Game Arts Appreciation Night. Photographs via Kara Stone.
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