One library copy serves many readers, so each reading carries only a small footprint. This short game shows what drives the emissions of a single newspaper reading, and how your own choices change them. Built on life-cycle data from three national libraries.
The Newspaper Game is a pilot of the ReVerDi research project. You play one reading of a newspaper at a national library: The Daily Mirror at the British Library, De Telegraaf at the KB, the Basler Zeitung at the Swiss National Library. Three decisions shape your route: how much of the paper you read, paper or screen, and how you travel or which device you use. On the paper route you can enter your own distance to the library.
The game keeps things deliberately simple: one person, one reading, three decisions. Some inputs are still assumptions and will be refined as the research completes. Please treat all figures as preliminary; they are for exploring, and we ask you to leave them unquoted.
Walk with the arrow keys and jump with ↑. Stairs carry you up to a walkway in the sky. Where it ends, jump up to the upper road or hop down to the lower one — the road you cross the line on is your answer; at a wall of doors, step through the one you choose. Collect every paper 📗 and disc 💿 along the way and you earn the Golden Library Card 🏅.
Every result is in grams of CO₂ equivalents for one reading, counting everything behind it: making and keeping the newspaper, the journeys involved, and the energy while you read.
The values build on real life-cycle research. The per-page figures and distances come from the ReVerDi newspaper life-cycle assessment carried out with the three libraries (publication in preparation), the transport values come from the same LCA model, and the recommendations follow our published paper on the digitalization of the book industry (open access).
More about the project and its studies: reverdi.org · research outputs · our LCSA method
Your one-way distance — the game doubles it for the return trip.
A rough guess is fine. Type whatever feels about right.