I once jumped into a nearly empty dumpster to get a piece of scrap wood. I had just started learning woodworking after reading Nick Offerman’s Good Clean Fun. I spent my money on tools, which meant I couldn’t afford wood. I broke down pallets, collected scrap offered in Craigslist posts, cut IKEA bed slats to size, and yes, jumped in a mostly empty dumpster in ninety-degree weather. I seemed silly to my coworkers and friends, getting excited about free wood in my office parking lot. I wasn’t even trying to make something in particular. I was just excited by the potential of the materials. My real-world behavior was eccentric, to put it generously, but now I notice how often games have us similarly gather and repurpose other people’s garbage through crafting. I’ve made a toy from a tire in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I’ve fashioned explosives from an old tin can in Rise of the Tomb Raider. I’ve built underwater bases from scrap metal in Subnautica. We’ve all done it for years. In my favorite game Mega Man Legends, I gave Roll Caskett, Mega Man’s mechanic, a blunted drill to create to create the “Drill Arm”—it’s exactly what it sounds like—and I used it to explore the underground ruins of Kattelox Island. It may seem like a tenuous connection. The crafting systems in all four games have obvious differences, but if we focus on something as specific as how each game uses garbage as a material, we can give texture to the mechanics. The rewards structure in each game hints at the different player interactions they value, and after reflecting on these systems, we may even feel differently about the things we make in real life.
In Animal Crossing, players need to discover recipes to build things, so the recipe is the reward, and the item is (usually) optional. It surprises players with D.I.Y. recipes in glass bottles on the beach or from gift boxes tied to balloons and floating across the island, and we’re excited. But these pleasant surprises also apply to the garbage you find around the island. When I caught a tire instead of a big, potentially rare, or valuable fish, a lightbulb appeared above my avatar’s head, and I learned to make a “Tire Toy.” It was a clever subversion of the frustrating experience of catching garbage (a feature of other Animal Crossing titles), but rather than run out to catch more tires and make more tire toys, I went back to fishing because I didn’t want to put down a tire toy in my town. But the new recipe helped soften the blow of missing out on a big fish. New Horizons is as much about discovering what you can do to express yourself as deciding what you’re going to do to express yourself. I may not want to turn my island into a trash covered wasteland, but it was fun to learn that I could.
Like Animal Crossing, the early hours of Subnautica are about gathering materials and unlocking new recipes (or blueprints, in Subnautica), but the subtle differences between how the games use garbage illustrate what a change in genre does to a crafting system. In Subnautica, rather than earning new creating recipes through inspiration or receiving them from neighbors, players unlock blueprints by scanning damaged equipment. Garbage is more than a passing curiosity; it is the best source of information about crucial survival technology.
“Scrap metal” provides arguably the most important material in the game: titanium. Of the 184 blueprints I discovered in my play-through, 86 required titanium, and my tally doesn’t count blueprints that require ingredients made from titanium. Early on, players only find titanium by breaking small limestone rocks or gathering scrap metal, and scrap metal provides four times as much metal as limestone. Limestone rocks are also your primary source of copper in the first few hours of the game, meaning players can’t guarantee they’ll get titanium. One of the closest sources of scrap metal is the “Kelp Forest,” but the underwater forest only has an abundance of scrap because “Stalkers,” one of the first aggressive enemies players can encounter, gather up the metal and drop it on the ocean floor. Subnautica creates tension with its resource distribution, forcing players to take on more risk if they want consistent access to titanium early in the game. Most materials have a risk/reward relationship between access and danger.
If Subnautica takes “survival” as its genre, the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy uses survival as an aesthetic, with its crafting system primarily serving as a upgrade tree. Players don’t create new weapons from the generic materials they discover. Instead, they gather different materials to upgrade their weapons. Some upgrades providing stat boosts, while others provide useful bonuses like allowing Lara to pry open doors faster with her pickaxe. In the first game in the trilogy, Lara Croft fights to survive on a remote, hostile—though not uninhabited—island, much like Subnautica’s alien planet. However, in Tomb Raider, the “salvage”—bits of scrap metal the player collects—serve as upgrade points rather than allowing players to build bases and create new tools. By the second game, players gather and stockpile hardwood, hides, herbs, oil, ore, metals and feathers and cloth–all of which still function as currency for upgrading weapons–but the game also peppers garbage across its maps as objects Lara can weaponize. Unlike the other materials, Lara can’t store cans and empty bottles for later use. After making Molotov cocktails, shrapnel grenades, and smoke bombs from bottles and tin cans mid-fight. Crafting is quick, done in a few seconds behind cover before a fight can continue. She doesn’t just use these items as weapons, though. She can throw bottles and cans to distract enemies—usually so she can sneak up behind them for a stealthy assassination.
Lara always uses trash in service of violence because the action genre mandates violence. Despite some light environmental puzzles, most of Rise of Tomb Raider’s gameplay focuses on surviving small skirmishes, so garbage must either kill or enable killing. Surviving, in this case, is all about creating a tool to get Lara (and yourself) out of a sticky situation through the use of an improvised garbage bomb.
In every example I’ve presented, the player controls the crafting system, and the use of garbage as a material to create something new is clear and defined for the player. Players learn how they can use a tire in Animal Crossing by getting a tire. They know what scrap metal becomes in Subnautica because the item fabrication menu tells them. The first time the player creates Molotov cocktails in Tomb Raider, a pop-up explains which button crafts the bottles into a bomb. While they craft one, a semitransparent rectangle shows up to tell them which materials they will use, and it displays a helpful Molotov cocktail icon to remind the player what they are making. In contrast, Mega Man Legends doesn’t give the player character—Mega Man Volnutt—the ability to craft. The game doesn’t even tell players what they’re crafting.
Players in Mega Man Legends craft by asking Roll Caskett, Mega Man’s friend and mechanic, to do “Item Development.” After asking Roll to develop items, the screen goes black for a moment, and when Roll appears again, players may get something new, if they had the right materials in their inventory. The crafting system hides most of the necessary information from the player, and while only a few items are literally discovered in garbage cans, four are described as broken, two are from recently destroyed enemy robots, two are described as old. Every item players pick up is mysterious—even the garbage—and because the player doesn’t know what any item will become, each piece of trash or scavenged robot part is imbued with potential, much like the wood I dove into a dumpster for.
But each of the games I’ve mentioned makes garbage seem valuable in different ways. Roll Caskett and her relationship to Mega Man, though, sets Mega Man Legends apart from this subset of games. Like Lara Croft, Roll mostly creates weapons, though hers are used to give her friend an edge over Reaverbots, the omnipresent enemies in Legends’ ruins. Unlike Lara Croft, Roll’s crafting is key to understanding who she is and how she relates to the player character. When you bring Roll the “blunted drill,” she makes the drill arm, and instead of expressing pride, she is tentative, saying “You can't use it in combat unless you get right next to your opponent... I don't know... Maybe you can think of another good use for it...” She isn’t sure this item will help him fight or earn money, the two things he is trying to do when he goes digging in ruins. She wants to make things that will be useful to Mega Man, but she doesn’t always know how her items will help him (or the player).
She builds the most powerful weapon in the game, the Shining Laser, from a “Laser weapon—batteries not included” (which Mega Man traded a comic book for), a set of weapon plans literally found in a hole in a wall, and a crystal in the shape of a woman. They aren’t exactly garbage, but they sound like things you could find at an antique mall. Her reaction after building such a powerful weapon is telling: “I had no idea I'd be able to make a weapon this powerful... It almost frightens me...” Yet she continues… “This is an arm-mounted laser!” Even with the jarring tone shift, the dialogue shows her ethical misgivings.
Comparing Roll to the player characters in Animal Crossing or Subnautica would be unfair because they are avatars. The animal neighbors in Animal Crossing give out different recipes based on their personalities, but they are split into broad character personalities (“Cranky” villagers give out the boomerang recipe, but “Smug” villagers give out the acoustic guitar recipe) rather than tailored to each individual. Lara Croft, though, is a character independent of the player. In a therapy session the player can access through audio logs, a doctor asks if Lara “enjoyed taking control” of her situation in the first game—protecting herself from violent cultists by killing them—and she responds, “You mean killing don’t you? Did I enjoy killing? I did it because I had to!” I can’t say whether she enjoyed the killing. I only know that she’s good at it, and she doesn’t stop to reflect on her actions very often. Lara and the player may feel empowered by their IEDs, but I think Roll feels more rounded as a character because she actually considers the implications of what she does, however briefly.
I never used the wood I fished out of that dumpster. I dreamed up a lot of ideas—a workbench, a mallet, new handles for my grandfather’s tools—but I built none of them. I did use the IKEA bed slats to make a small stand for my CPAP machine. My girlfriend’s bed was in the corner of a room, and I slept against the wall when I stayed over. She preferred to sleep by her nightstand, and we needed the outlets for the light and to charge our phones. The stand hooked on the end of her bed to hold my machine up, and she didn’t have to rearrange her room when I came over. In Good Clean Fun, Offerman says the first thing his father ever made was a box for Offerman to stand on so he could reach the toilet. He describes it as “born from a parenting need.” Just like in real life, the things we make from trash in games are part of how we relate to the worlds we inhabit and the people we encounter, and even simple systems can help create complex, interesting relationships with characters. There are all sorts of articles explaining why crafting has become such a common mechanic in modern video games, but instead of asking why so many games have adopted crafting, ask yourself how that system affects your connection to the game’s setting. Then ask yourself what you make and what it says about your connection to the world around you.
David Bowman is a technical writer and blogger living in the DC area. You can find links to his other work at dwbowman.com.