The Play After Tomorrow
What will our consoles do without us?
Where do game consoles go when they die?
Some are sent back to their manufacturer, where bad parts are exchanged for good, and reassembled into refurbished machines. A few are recycled. However, most of them will eventually find their way into a landfill, where they will sit for a very long time, retaining their physical dimensions, even though the hardware is dead. In fact, many of these boxes will be identifiable long after their owners have died. It may be a stretch to imagine people very far in the future uncovering these artifacts and questioning what on Earth they were used for, but not because remnants of the plastic and metal boxes won’t be around.
According to Alan Weisman, the author of the best-selling nonfiction book The World Without Us, mankind will disappear before game consoles do. We called him up to find out why our Xboxes and PlayStations could outlast us all.
