by Paolo Ruffino
Published December 2024
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Abstract
In this article I critique and evaluate a number of methodological approaches to the study of videogames and their relationship to the Anthropocene. I identify two dominant tendencies. Firstly, videogames are seen as tools that can potentially inform and educate their players about humanity’s impact on our planet, and possibly suggest virtuous behaviours. Secondly, videogames are analysed for their strategies of representing the Anthropocene, for example, for the ways in which they depict the natural environment or imagine a post-human world. I call these the ‘instrumental’ and ‘representational’ approaches. Both methods of research and game design are valid and useful in many ways, and both rely on their scalability: through repeated engagement with videogames that draw on the instrumental and/or representational approach, players’ reflections on their experience are argued to scale up and influence future behaviour and thinking in real life. I suggest that, in parallel with these methods of critique and design, we can consider the possibility that the Anthropocene is transpiring and leaking into our entertainment practices, becoming visible through molecular and situated encounters. Players might occasionally articulate their fears and anxieties about the ‘Age of Man’ while responding to videogames that are not explicitly about the Anthropocene. This article argues that the scalability of players’ interpretations can be re-evaluated in all its complexity and unpredictability when exploring the potential of the medium of videogames to open up a post-anthropocentric imagination. This article considers a number of examples from game design, drawing on Timothy Morton’s notions of hyperobjects and subscendence, and Joanna Zylinska’s and Anna Tsing’s reassessment of the notion of scale.
Keywords: List, of, keywords (also add to post ‘tags’)
Leisure Time at the End of Times
Can videogames tell us anything meaningful in times of ecological and humanitarian crisis? What is the value of leisure time when there seems to be little time left for our species on this planet? This article explores a number of methodological concerns related to the study of the medium of videogames in the Anthropocene, the age defined by the impact of the human species on Earth.
The Anthropocene is a geological term originally formulated by the scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000) which attempts to define our current epoch, following the Holocene and as part of the broader Cenozoic era (Subramanian, 2019). The Anthropocene has been introduced to account for the increasingly visible impact of the human species (Anthropos, in ancient Greek) on the geological strata of our planet. There are conflicting views as to what constitutes an adequate definition of the Anthropocene and how to determine its starting point. Nuclear radioactivity, plastics, and the extraction of fossil fuels all combine to produce indelible effects visible in rocks, caves, and the general landscape. However, on March 4, 2024 the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy declined to formally recognize an Anthropocene epoch on the basis of its narrow historical definition.1 The Anthropocene might have started much earlier: there is evidence of Earth’s climate changing with the start of the Industrial Revolution when fossil fuels were released into the environment, and human beings have been decimating forests for thousands of years to create fertile soil (Ellis, 2024). The definition of the Anthropocene may still be open to debate, but there is consensus on the presence of long-lasting traces of human activity on the planet.
The concept of an Anthropocene is inherently contradictory. In placing human activity at the crux of our planet’s history, it assigns to human beings the status of a quasi-geological force comparable to volcanic eruptions, floods, and meteorites. At the same time, the Anthropocene suggests that our species’ time is limited. The same force that is leaving durable imprints on the Earth’s geological formations is undermining the very conditions required for life. Climate change, pollution, rising sea levels, famine, and drought are just some of the consequences of the Anthropocene that are currently contributing to what has been defined as a sixth mass extinction in the history of our planet. We may have taken centre stage, but at the cost of burning down the theatre.
The Anthropocene raises questions of justice, because not all people and life forms experience the effects of climate change in the same way and with the same intensity. But one injustice is in the naming itself. The Anthropocene suggests that ‘human beings’ are the cause of such a mess. Responsibility should be assigned to a much more precise historical force: White European colonisers, who have wreaked havoc through exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. Kathryn Yusoff (2018) argues that the emergence of the Anthropocene in scientific discourse erases the historical significance and far-reaching impact of imperialism and colonialism. What Yusoff calls the ‘slave-sugar-coal nexus’ enabled the displacement of plants, animals, and people for centuries, exploiting organic and mineral resources while destroying Indigenous lives. Andrew Baldwin and Bruce Erickson (2020) observe how the Anthropocene recalibrates racism as ‘geology,’ de facto eliminating the social responsibility of colonialism. The naming of the geological epoch hides the historical agents that have brought us to the current scenario, levelling the entire human species as if it was a natural force impacting on the planet with the same intensity. In light of such an unfair historical revisionism, how can an entertainment medium respond to the call for justice that has echoed around the world since slavery, intensive agriculture, and warfare changed planet Earth and its conditions of habitability?
There are a significant number of game designers and researchers within the field of game studies who are currently addressing these questions. Their perspectives on the subject vary, but I will evaluate two dominant methodologies. As I discuss in the following section, I see a twofold tendency. Firstly, videogames are seen as tools that can inspire more positive behaviour in their players, for example through educating them about respecting the environment and informing them about local and international policies that could help to reduce human impact on the planet. Secondly, videogames are designed and analysed for their strategies of representing the Anthropocene, for example, for the ways in which they depict a world after the human, or how they imagine an eco-friendly way of life. I call these the ‘instrumental’ and ‘representational’ approaches to the design of environmentally aware videogames. I intentionally chose slightly cacophonic terms to make these common approaches weird and uncomfortable to the reader. On the one hand, I acknowledge their potential and usefulness: both methods could raise awareness of the implications of the Anthropocene and help us rethink our understanding of the nature-culture continuum. They can suggest new ways of looking at the injustices caused to humans and nonhumans alike by the exploitation of natural resources. On the other, they also have certain methodological implications. In particular, as I will discuss, both approaches rely on the scalability of their reception: in this view, the ecological messages intended by the developers are supposed to scale up and influence the thinking and behaviour of their respective audiences through repeated exposure to the videogame-as-text. But the repetition and ‘elevation’ of the ecological message cannot be taken for granted. Both approaches rely on the scalability of the reception of a game’s rhetoric, but at the same time hide the complexities and contradictions of the players’ own interpretative strategies.
Instrumental and Representational Approaches to Game Studies and Design
Indeed, ‘instrumental’ and ‘representational’ approaches often overlap and coexist, but they offer two different ways of imagining how videogames can contribute to our ecological awareness. Both approaches can be seen in a wide range of examples. In the introduction to Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis, Laura op de Beke, Joost Raessens, and Stefan Werning note that the 21st century has seen the emergence of a significant number of videogames that explicitly address environmental issues (op De Beke et al. 2024). As the catastrophic effects of the Anthropocene become visible in the Global North in the form of droughts, rising sea levels, extreme temperatures, and ecological migration, it is particularly significant to see that these issues are being represented through videogames, a medium supported by a significant industrial apparatus in highly developed countries.
A section of Ecogames is devoted to studies of ‘Games for Change’: titles that aim to change players’ attitudes towards the environment. Per the authors’ definition, these are ‘digital and nondigital games and immersive media that are designed and used with the intention to engage contemporary social issues, address real-world challenges, and drive real-world social change’ (op De Beke et al., 2024, p. 23). These games can be seen in continuity with the gamification movement, which advocates for the use of ‘game design elements in non-game contexts’ (Deterding et al., 2011, p. 9). The use of videogames as tools to change or influence our behaviour and thinking is what would fall, in my view, under the ‘instrumental’ approach. From this perspective, videogames are understood as instruments that are supposed to bring about a different and better way of engaging with the environment in their players.
To illustrate the approach with an example, we can look at the game Beecarbonize (Charles Games, 2023), also cited in Ecogames. Beecarbonize is advertised as ‘an environmental card strategy game with climate change as your opponent,’ with the design inspired by turn-based card games. Players must make strategic choices with limited resources and find a way to reduce carbon emissions while dealing with unforeseen challenges. Players manage their resources across three categories: Money, People, and Science. Each card contains information about the state of scientific knowledge on the topic. For example, a ‘circular economy’ card informs players that this strategy will reduce waste and mitigate the effects of human-made pollution, while the ‘tipping point’ card tells players that once global temperatures have risen by an average of 0.5-1 degrees Celsius, they can expect ‘natural disasters of historically unprecedented extent.’ Each solution, once implemented, triggers a series of new pathways and choices, in a design strategy reminiscent of other videogames such as the Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise (1991–2016). In Meier’s titles, technological advances are presented within a scheme of nodes and pathways, each containing historical information on their value and significance.
While the potential impact of videogames such as Beecarbonize should not be dismissed, its overall approach has methodological implications. One only has to browse YouTube to find videos of players finding ways to speedrun Beecarbonize or achieve an easy win. As is likely to be the case with the historical context upon which Civilization is built, the informational material contained in Beecarbonize easily becomes incidental to winning. The game takes the form of a managerial simulation in which players must organise and deploy resources to achieve their goals. Moreover, even if Beecarbonize’s data on environmental policies and technology are received by the player, there is no way of ensuring that they will affect the player’s thinking or day-to-day life. An ironic comment on Steam illustrates this issue, acknowledging that by playing the game, the player ‘learned that pollution is a bad thing.’ As players become more aware of the catastrophic effects of the Anthropocene, they may resist texts that attempt to inform them about the current environmental crisis and its potential remedies, seeing as how these messages are clearly not influencing policy-making.
Another example of an instrumental approach is provided by Molleindustria (2023) with Green New Deal Simulator. Molleindustria compare their videogame to Beecarbonize, although the developers note that the latter’s title does not address the geographical specificity of environmental policies but rather presents an abstract global scenario. Green New Deal Simulator aims to contextualise the possible outcomes of environmentally conscious policies within the United States. The player is presented with a map divided into macro-areas and a deck of cards, each representing a specific policy. By choosing the right cards, the player is asked to reduce carbon emissions while maintaining normal levels of employment and the overall happiness of the population. Through the videogame, the player learns about the possible impacts of green technologies and local resistance to climate policies. Particular emphasis is placed on the importance of infrastructure that can transmit energy produced from renewable sources across the country, and on the adverse effects of energy obtained from fossil fuels. Green New Deal Simulator attempts to convey, in a playable form, the state of environmental research today and the viability of green policies in the current political scenario.
In these examples, a videogame can be a tool that allows the player to experiment with a simulation of future scenarios and learning about possible solutions to environmental problems. Such games inform and educate the player about the consequences of the Anthropocene and their possible remedies.
A different approach, taken by other games, depicts the Earth before, during, or after the presence of humans. These games attempt to change our perception of the relationship between nature and cultural products such as videogames, and they invite us to imagine different ways of engaging with the environment. Games like Ritual of the Moon (Kara Stone, 2019) aim to provoke an affective response, rather than merely provide information. I define this as a ‘representational’ approach because it relies on the potential of representational strategies to influence players.
Game developer Kara Stone is an ideal example of such an approach. In a chapter Ecogames, Stone reflects on her work and the potential of artistic expression to ‘represent and highlight’ the ‘temporality of the climate crisis’ (2024, p. 452). In Ritual of the Moon, played on PC or a smartphone, the player assumes the role of a witch living on the Moon who has the power to stop comets from hitting Earth and destroying all forms of life. The game lasts 28 days of real time. Each day, the player can interact with the witch for about five minutes and decide whether to save the planet. Ritual of the Moon‘s narrative is articulated through a series of thought-provoking moments and plot twists, but it is primarily concerned with experiencing the feelings associated to living on the brink of catastrophe. This game does not instruct the player as to any scientific or political issue related to the climate crisis but instead aims to provoke them to reflect on the feelings associated with a natural disaster and the agency (or lack thereof) of human beings in apocalyptic times. Ritual of the Moon is presented as a meditative game, one which solicits the player’s emotional responses over the course of 28 days.
Other games by Kara Stone, such as UnearthU (2022), the earth is a better person than me (2018), and Humaning (2017), follow a comparable design strategy. In these titles, Stone aims at ‘designing games about the environment with an intention to illustrate varying bonds with the earth, care work, and potentially foster alternate thinking towards nature, time, and affect’ (Stone, 2024, p. 460–461). The representational strategies of these games may not point directly to the Anthropocene but are informed in various ways by concerns about our relationship with nature. Their contemplative approach and pace of play invite players to reflect on their presence in their own environment and the precariousness of our planet.
Other examples of the representational approach relate more directly to the Anthropocene. For instance, to cite another game by Molleindustria, Lichenia (Molleindustria, 2019) invites players to ‘reclaim the ruins of a fallen city and create a sustainable human habitat.’ In its design and visual approach, this game explicitly borrows from city-building simulators such as Will Wright’s SimCity (1989–2014) franchise; however, Lichenia challenges the managerial approach of these titles by subverting the linearity of their goal-oriented structure. In Lichenia the player deals with a grid representing a post-apocalyptic environment. Each square can be modified by adding a natural element of different types ( grass, water, etc.), but the actual effects of each addition are difficult to predict. Molleindustria explicitly states that the ecology of Lichenia is ‘cryptic’ and that one of the game’s intended goals is to invite players to learn about a complex, ambiguous, and unpredictable living system (Molleindustria, 2019). Lichenia intends to confound the player’s expectations of a linear feedback system, offering instead a noisy and tentacled picture of the narratives of sustainability and rewilding.
As Merlin Seller (2020) argues, Lichenia critiques the idea of the post-apocalyptic world as a neocolonialist project, as it appears, for example, in videogames such as the Fallout series (1997–2018). It also questions the control and dominance that reverberate through strategy videogames such as Civilization and Age of Empires (1997–2021). Seller notes how Lichenia intervenes in the imaginary that sees nature as ready to be dominated and exploited in its cycles of production. Lichenia‘s terrain is only temporarily domesticated, and it constantly evades players’ desires of control. Through its peculiar and counterintuitive design, Lichenia has the potential to inspire a new understanding of our role in the environment, suggesting an abandonment of humankind’s will to endlessly civilize nature.
In her book Playing Nature, Alenda Chang (2019) invites us to look at games which represent nature through the concept of ‘mesocosms,’ as mini-ecosystems that replicate aspects of the surrounding world and which might improve awareness of real-life ecologies. This approach resonates with early concerns in game studies about the transformative potential of in-game economies, as closed systems which might in turn open a new perspective on real-life systems of exchange (Giddings, 2018). Lichenia, too, can be read through the mesocosm, since it presents a square piece of land, divided into grids and viewed from above, that makes up a fraction of an imaginary post-apocalyptic world. But Lichenia’s procedural design defies the logic of the laboratory test, as the rules of game remain cryptic to the player, who can never fully master the internal rules of the simulation.
A videogame such as Lichenia still relies on the possibilities offered by a strategy of representation. In this approach, designers focus on ‘representing’ the issues at stake, albeit through contradictions and ambiguities, with the aim of influencing players’ understanding of the world in which they live. In an article by Benjamin Abraham and Darshana Jayemanne (2017) on games and climate change, the authors observe how videogames typically represent the environment through four modalities: as a backdrop, a resource, an antagonist, or to tell a story about the fictional world in which the game is set. All of these modalities focus on what is represented on the screen and how nature is depicted for the player. Lichenia brings this problematic relationship to the fore, highlighting how digital entertainment tends to represent nature as governed by rules that can be understood and mastered.
Regardless of their originality and complexity, I argue that the instrumental and representational approaches emerging from videogames such as Beecarbonize, Green New Deal Simulator, Ritual of the Moon, and Lichenia rely on the successful reception of their messaging, with the expectation that it will lead to changes in the behaviour and mentality of their players. In this view, the more people play these videogames, the more they will act in a positive way towards the environment, and the more likely they will be to share information and raise awareness about the impacts of the Anthropocene. This reliance on scalability is neither a limitation nor a shortcoming. I see it as a methodological approach that can generate valuable insights, but it also carries its own risks. The main risk would be failing to reassure all parties involved (designers, players and academics) that something has been done, that videogames are doing their part to highlight and critique the logic of capitalist exploitation and resource accumulation that is destroying the planet.
The injustice and violence that the Anthropocene inflicts on all forms of life demands critical scepticism in evaluating our contribution, as videogame players, designers and theorists. We should resist the reassurances offered by the supposed scalability of the circulation and reception of videogames. In other words, the risk lies in relying solely on the interpretation of a game’s messaging by players while avoiding the frictions and misunderstandings, the over-interpretations and almost delusional reactions that read videogames as commentaries on the current ecological and political state of our planet. The materialisation of players’ affective responses, their situated and molecular interpretations, must be taken into account if we want to evaluate the potential of videogames for enacting positive change in the Anthropocene, even if they are inconsequential and almost invisible.
Rethinking Scalability
There are many other ways to understand the relationship between videogames and the environment. For example, recent studies have highlighted the impact of videogame production in terms of carbon emissions and raised awareness of the possibilities of a more ‘green’ entertainment industry (Abraham, 2022). Proposals focusing on textual strategies are at least as common in the literature as those analysing the environmental impact of videogame production. The Climate Special Interest Group of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is concerned with the potential of videogames to address the impacts of the Anthropocene. Its guidelines for the videogame industry are comprised of four key ‘pillars’ (IGDA, 2024). The first pillar is a call to ‘raise awareness’ of the potential of videogames to address climate change. The second pillar focuses on the ‘efficiency’ of the videogame industry in terms of carbon emissions. The third and fourth pillars are closely related to the instrumental and representational approaches, as discussed: the IGDA advises that videogame companies should ‘enable great content’ with ‘climate-positive elements’ and that videogames should ‘unlock behavioural transference’ that can translate into ‘real world outcomes’ (IGDA, 2024). These two objectives focus on the textual strategies of videogames and their potential as persuasive tools, giving almost equal weight to the material conditions of production and the potential of videogame content to address the environmental crisis.
In this section, I argue that videogames can produce transformative feelings about our relationship to the environment, but that the traces of these transformations should be located and analysed rather than merely assumed. I also suggest that we should resist the assumption that the effects of videogames should scale up and inspire the repetition of actions and thoughts among the population of consumers. Instead, I propose a way of looking that explores the frictions, inconsistencies, and resistances that are generated as videogames are played by consumers. Overall, this approach argues for re-evaluating the situated encounter with a videogame. Rather than limiting ourselves to imagining the effects of a text on an ideal reader, I suggest that we evaluate the specific circumstances in which players leave traces of their engagement with a videogame, for example in commentaries and paratexts published online or through auto-ethnographic and self-reflective approaches.
Such a methodological perspective brings to the fore the implications of relying on scalability in the study of videogames and the environment. Alenda Chang (2019, p. 69–105) suggests that videogames allow us to play with worlds and organisms at different scales and thus, in doing so, make scalability work for us, both operationally and affectively. In Chang’s view, videogames have the potential to communicate with environmental thinking as a form of scalar understanding of our presence and agency in the world. Videogames can model interaction at different scales and create affects of empowerment or disempowerment in relation to one’s anthropocentric worldview. Developing Chang’s perspective, I am concerned with how scalability enters into our understanding of the semiotics of videogames. In assessing the ability of videogames to generate meaning, we may tend to rely on an abstract escalation of the game’s messaging while overlooking instantiated interpretations (alongside mis- and over-interpretations). Instead, I reassess the importance of the non-scalable and the micro-scale, as well as the socio-semiotic conditions that dictate the visibility of our interpretations.
My argument finds an important ally in the research conducted by Anna Tsing (2015) in her search for the matsutake mushroom. Considered a precious commodity in many parts of the world, the matsutake mushroom has a fundamental role in nourishing trees in its natural environment, particularly areas affected by human presence and capitalist exploitation. Tsing travels the world to follow the traces of the mushroom: to Japan, where it is considered an expensive and rare delicacy; to Oregon, where it is picked and sold to roadside vendors; and to Finland, where the mushroom appears in artificial pine forests. As Tsing observes, to understand and appreciate the matsutake mushroom, we need to recalibrate the notion of scale we usually apply to commodities, edibles, and life in general. The stories Tsing collects are diverse and separated by vast distances, and as such they do not form a single coherent narrative. These stories are made up of myths and beliefs about the properties of the mushroom and are inconsistent across the communities of people who seek it out, either as pickers or buyers. Any conversation about the mushroom with a new respondent has the potential, therefore, to retrospectively alter our previous knowledge and give the mushroom a different flavour. The encounters with participants who share their stories of the mushroom resist a single analysis within a predetermined framework.
The matsutake mushroom has never been successfully cultivated in a controlled environment, and its stories never form a coherent picture. There is always something new beneath the soil, revealed by chance encounters. Tsing identifies an assemblage of contaminated diversity that requires a particular kind of listening, one open to the ‘indeterminate encounter’ (2015, p. 37). Each story and encounter is insufficient on its own to be scaled up into a theory about the status and significance of the matsutake mushroom. As Tsing argues, ‘the ability to make one’s research framework apply to greater scales, without changing the research questions, has become a hallmark of modern knowledge. To have any hope of thinking with mushrooms, we must get outside this expectation’ (p. 38). Tsing compares her approach to listening to polyphonic music (p. 23–25). In polyphony, a multitude of autonomous melodies intertwine without ever dominating one another; it resists scalability because it combines an assemblage of sounds and melodies that do not impose on each other. The listener can only follow one melody at a time, and as a result listening itself becomes precarious, threatened by the proximity of other overlapping melodies.
What if videogames are similarly capable of generating situated encounters that resist our pre-defined interpretive frameworks? Can a videogame be read as polyphonic rather than through an imagined singular, unified, and consistent ‘message,’ and how might these encounters affect our sense of the precarity of our lives in the Anthropocene? I suggest that videogames should be interrogated, not only as singular entities encapsulating their content and the effects of that content on the player, but also as texts generated through situated encounters. Reflecting on the scalability of videogames and their capacity to generate responses in players involves an ethical consideration of the implications of our methodologies; and an ethical approach to the study of videogames and their scalability (or non-scalability) would precede the ontological gesture of defining their content and effect. The question of evaluating the nature of the player’s encounter with a videogame, and our presence within the evaluation, takes place before the definition of the intentions and goals of the videogame. Joanna Zylinska (2014), introducing her elaboration of a ‘minimal ethics of the Anthropocene’ precisely from the notion of scale, calls for an ’embedded and embodied practice’ that takes into account how the entities of our world are interrelated, rather than ‘relying on a priori systemic normativity’ (p. 32). In this sense, our engagement with the world, which naturally includes videogames, consists of encounters that invite us to question how we generate and use scales in our perception. Zylinska’s turn to ethics, and to Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action (2007), reminds us that encounters are themselves generative of relations and thus ‘perform an ontological function: they stabilize and organize the universe for us’ (p. 32). The representational and instrumental approaches leave out the encounter: the moment in which a player engages with the videogame is rarely taken into account, replaced instead by theoretical effects on an imagined population of consumers.
I borrow Tsing and Zylinska’s ethical urgency in order to re-evaluate the situated encounters and contaminated diversity we embrace through our engagement with videogames as well as their suggestion to rethink our reliance on scalability in our interpretative projects. It is important to add that non-scalability is not a solution in itself, or somehow more ethical or just. Tsing explicitly reminds us that non-scalable projects can be disastrous, particularly in relation to the environment, as they often bypass any ethical or moral calculus. For instance, Tsing reminds us that ‘unregulated loggers destroy forests more rapidly than scientific foresters’ (2015, p. 42). Similarly, in the examples I will mention in the following section, non-scalable encounters often reveal ugly and unpleasant feelings about the world around us. Rarely do they suggest a solution, and they are never the result of calculated thinking. But these outcomes are important to us precisely because they shed light on players’ anxieties that might otherwise be difficult to identify in a more structured mapping of their responses. Like mushrooms, they hide out of view, scattered across the world, and are impossible to pinpoint on a map. These sporadic feelings must be taken into account, as they may reveal unexplored desires and resistances.
The methodology I propose here also borrows from the work of Timothy Morton (2013), in that it pays attention to the ways in which the Anthropocene, climate change, and capitalist exploitation of natural resources might leak into our everyday media experiences. Morton’s notion of the hyperobject is particularly useful in this respect. Events such as global warming are seen by Morton as escaping our common perception. We do not encounter these events in their totality at any point in our daily lives, and we rarely experience their effects (not limited to famine, drought, and climate migration) firsthand, especially in the developed countries of the Global North. But we do occasionally encounter climate change and the Anthropocene when we listen to the news, take environmentally friendly actions such as separating organic waste from non-recyclable waste, or have a conversation with our neighbour about the weather. On all these brief occasions, the massive hyperobject that is the Anthropocene intersects with our lives, as Morton writes, and the encounter can generate new feelings and understandings for us. We may feel relieved when we buy a locally grown vegetable, distressed when we hear about melting glaciers on the daily news, or angry when our neighbour claims it is all a conspiracy. None of these encounters captures the totality of the hyperobject, but they represent leakages into our everyday lives of something much larger.
Morton’s concept of the hyperobject suggests that the Anthropocene could also appear in our media texts. But its outpourings are much less predictable and expected than we might think. The vaster it becomes, the more the Anthropocene-object surrounds us and leaks into our media texts. Mediated representations of the effects of climate change may only make the Anthropocene available to us in a partial and incomplete form, but it is sufficiently evident to generate anxieties about a world on the brink of ecological catastrophe. Media texts, including videogames, might also contain less intentional leaks of the Anthropocene. Morton wants us to think of hyperobjects as viscous substances: he suggests that we are as inside it as a wasp fighting for its life in a jar of honey (p. 30). We are also in the Anthropocene in the sense that we are inescapably surrounded by it yet never able to reach its edges. Thus, it is almost inevitable that we will see traces of the hyperobject in our entertainment, too.
Morton’s image of the hyperobject may feel all-encompassing and suffocating, but his philosophy suggests that we should abandon any fear of losing ourselves and instead establish solidarity with the nonhumans who share our same condition. Scale is also crucial to Morton’s understanding of an eco-critical approach to life. Hyperobjects are distributed in time and space and largely beyond the scale of human perception, but they become accessible to us through hyper-local manifestations. Rising temperatures across the globe, for example, might be perceived in an unusually hot day in January.
How can these micro, local manifestations account for the complexity of the whole? Morton (2017) draws on the concept of ‘subscendence,’ which suggests, perhaps counterintuitively, that a whole can be less than the sum of its parts. Morton asks us how a forest can be less than its individual trees. A forest can be perceived as a singular entity, but a tree can be perceived through the multiplicity of its parts (its roots, branches, leaves, and so on), thus exceeding the whole — of which it is a part. A hand can be seen as one thing, but conversely each finger can be seen through the many bones, muscles, and nerves that make it up and connect it to the body. A finger can be more than the hand of which it is a part. Consequently, if a whole can be less than the sum of its parts, then the notion of scalability needs to be rethought. With regard to videogames, there may be more to explore if we scale down our object of analysis: from a broad analysis of a game and its effects, we may find more complexity if we narrow our focus to the situated encounter of a player, whose experience takes place within a defined time and space.
Morton’s concepts of hyperobjects and subscendence contribute to Tsing and Zylinska’s theorizations of scalability. Together, these diverse proposals suggest a methodology that explores singular encounters for their potential to reveal the Anthropocene as a hyperobject, and for how they make the Anthropocene accessible to us. The encounters may also reveal a complex, contaminated diversity that exceeds the whole: they may open up myriad, even contradictory interpretations of a videogame that go far beyond the supposed unity and integrity of the game’s ecological messaging.
Non-scalable Encounters with the Anthropocene
In this final section I present some examples of contributions to eco-critical game studies that problematise the notion of scale. Looking back on my own research (Ruffino, 2019; 2022), I can see that I was attempting to address the methodological problems inherent in the supposed scalability of videogames’ effects on players; for instance, how players of AdVenture Capitalist discuss the end of the videogame on online forums. AdVenture Capitalist is a mobile videogame that attempts to represent the economic imaginary of a capitalism with no material frictions or crisis. The player can accumulate increasing amounts of capital by automatically collecting the surplus generated by their fictional businesses. That capital can then be invested in further upgrades, which in turn accelerate the rate of capital accumulation. Capital can grow indefinitely as the game has no ending.
In my research I read through AdVenture Capitalist’s official forum to see how players discuss the game’s non-existent ending and draw a conclusion from their mixed reactions. While the majority of players denied the need for a videogame to have an ending, others invented their own way of defining the end of the game, such as claiming that getting a certain number of upgrades counts as finishing the title. Some even pranked other users, suggesting that it is possible to reach a secret ending through long and complex strategies. All of these responses revealed a certain anxiety about the logic of the game and its endless cycles of exploiting the player’s time, attention, and money (via microtransactions). On a few occasions, some users went on to read the game as a commentary on the exploitative nature of capitalism and the disastrous effects of endless accumulation on our environment.
None of these comments scale up to generate further responses. After all, most posts about AdVenture Capitalist’s ending received no reply. They are not intended as political commentary or as a complaint to the developers. Nor does the game suggest a critical reading of the capitalist system it represents: while AdVenture Capitalist tends to be sardonic, it’s never satirical. Those forum comments overinterpret the source text, but they also reveal a transformative approach to the game, illustrating players’ anxieties about an economic system that has failed to deliver on its promises. Following Morton’s theorizing of subscendence, I now feel that each of these contributions may be more complex and politically urgent than any larger dataset of player responses. Their near invisibility — around 85 threads created over the course of five years, most of them receiving no responses from other users — tells us something about the possibility of a political response to the crisis of the Anthropocene. Feelings of anger and frustration, when they emerge on a forum, are unlikely to reach visibility since they do not correspond to what players and developers expect to find. Nevertheless, encountering these inconsequential comments might tell us something about how the Anthropocene leaks into our everyday lives, as well as how it generates affects of fear, anger, and disillusionment.
In Ruffino (2022), I examined players’ responses to the death from tuberculosis of Arthur Morgan, the main protagonist of Rockstar Games’ 2018 Western blockbuster Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2). Late into the game Arthur contracts tuberculosis. Incurable and unavoidable, the disease defines the final act of the story, as Arthur becomes increasingly worn down by his respiratory infection. It is an unusually anticlimactic ending for a triple-A videogame. Arthur represents the typical White male hero at the forefront of videogame and Western narratives. In RDR2, not only does he fall ill, he seems to have no knowledge as to how he contracted the disease.
On YouTube, a number of players claim to have found a cure for Arthur or a way to prevent the infection. None of these video explanations are reliable. Sooner or later, players all admit that there is in fact no way to save Arthur from his fate. Some players have gone as far as to create modified screenshots of Arthur appearing to be healed, but these are noticeably fake and cannot be obtained in-game. Rather, these YouTube videos speak to the player’s lost sense of agency; they do not heal Arthur but instead work to alleviate the player’s discomfort. This is accomplished by affording, at least virtually, the player agency within the story and the environment. In my previous research, I evaluated my own encounter with these videos, with all their inconsistency and inconclusiveness, through the feelings they evoked in me.
The creators of the ad-hoc YouTube videos present an interpretation of RDR2 that has no obvious connection to the source text, as nothing in the game suggests that Arthur really can be saved. But the videos are not addressed to the developer, and they do not attempt to suggest that there should be a version of RDR2 in which Arthur remains healthy. The Anthropos, idealized on-screen by Arthur Morgan, is denied its typical position of power by Rockstar Games. A White male is no longer at the centre of the digital simulation, while in turn players engage in imaginary re-enactments of their lost agency. In reading players’ paratextual productions, I was particularly interested in how control over RDR2’s narrative, characters, and resources was re-established. That case study did not directly address the impact of the Anthropocene but was instead concerned with the persistence of an ableist and gendered vision of human agency that privileges the powerful centrality of the White male character while disempowering any form of alterity. The YouTube videos I refer to show how a post-anthropocentric world can still generate anxieties and desires to ‘take back control.’ These feelings must not be ignored, even if (especially if) they lack strategy or escape our framework of analysis.
Indeed, there are other studies that reassess the notion of scale in our relationship with the medium of the videogame and the Anthropocene. Benjamin Nicoll’s (2023) reading of Donut County (Ben Esposito, 2018) explores the pleasures derived from destruction and waste as it argues for a re-evaluation of the desire for nihilism in addressing our understanding of the ecological crisis. Though Nicoll doesn’t explicitly address the effects of climate change, he argues for the game’s embeddedness within the Anthropocene. In Donut County, the player moves a hole in the ground, which is used to swallow any kind of object (e.g. a snake, a tent, a radio, a skyscraper) presented at each stage. Nicoll’s psychoanalytic reading of the game departs from what I have defined as instrumental and representational approaches and instead dwells on his personal encounter with the text. The pleasures of swallowing the world are thematised in the game through dialogue and narrative. Nicoll reads these interactions as entangled in the viscosity of the Anthropocene. The author’s reading is valuable precisely because it focuses on the inconsistencies and contradictions generated by their own experience with the game. Nicoll follows one of the many possible interpretations of Donut County and shows how it, too, is enmeshed in our contemporary ecological concerns.
Lawrence May and Ben Hall’s (2023; 2024; 2024b) readings of players’ paratextual productions, in relation to Cities: Skyline, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and Battlefield 2042, follow a similar methodological path. The authors pay attention to the not fully articulated desires of the player community for an eco-friendly world and their clash with the inescapable logic of capitalism. Although the authors focus on representations of nature, they pay attention to their encounter with paratexts produced by players. These paratextual productions complicate and counter the original source text. The authors suggest that scaling down, or focusing on texts that resist scalability, might reveal the contradictions of videogames that attempt to introduce eco-friendly messages. In their reading of players’ responses to Battlefield 2042 (DICE, 2021), May and Hall (2024b) observe how paratexts can be classified as either resonance, amplification, dissonance, abjection, or weirdness in relation to our ecological concerns (A Method for Paratextual Analysis section, para. 3). These paratexts, although minimal and non-strategic, reveal a transformative process that leads players to reflect on the videogames they play and the world they live in.
The work of Hans-Joaquim Backe (2017; 2024) is likewise concerned with the eco-critical potential of games that do not have an explicit ecological message but which remain open to specific interactions in which environmental concerns are a common theme. In an early study, Backe (2017) examines Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar San Diego, 2010) and Dishonored (Arkane Studios, 2013) from an eco-critical perspective. Backe’s reading demonstrates the potential of game studies to address eco-critical debates beyond titles that explicitly entail an environmental interpretation. More recently, Backe (2024)has extended this perspective with further examples and a focus on an empirical reader. Through sessions of auto-ethnographic data collection, Backe’s study examines Minecraft (Mojang Studios, 2011), ARK: Survival Evolved (Studio Wildcard, 2017), The Long Dark (Hinterland Games, 2017), and Subnautica (Unknown Worlds Entertainment, 2018). This ecological reading privileges the personal and situated, taking into account the potential interpretative departures of the player and their ‘preferences and abilities, wishes and traits’ (p. 123).
Conclusion
Game studies should take up the challenge of evaluating how videogames relate to both the natural and human-made environment. I suggest that we evaluate how to bring the concept of scale to bear on this discipline, and consider the conditions that make some players’ interpretations non-scalable or operating at micro-scale. Such an approach could work alongside methodologies that emphasise the use of videogames as educational and informational tools, their representational strategies and their material conditions of production,. Doing so, we can identify interpretations and meanings that would otherwise remain invisible and that have the potential to highlight the power relations implicit in our research methodologies. To return to the question I posed at the beginning of this article, how can videogames help us to address the call for justice that resonates across the globe as the effects of the Anthropocene become more visible and violent? The methodology I have discussed might not give us a defined answer, but it could provide a degree of ethical guidance. Listening to players’ situated responses to videogames, we might learn how to abandon the sense of security that comes from the idea that solutions will eventually escalate and fix worlds. Videogames, traditionally designed around problems to be fixed and levels to be escalated, could show us the disastrous implications of the scalability of the anthropocentric imaginary. We should find new ways of thinking, playing, and writing while also paying attention to the situated encounters of games by players and remaining skeptical of any universal solution.
Endnotes
- The Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy is ‘a constituent body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the largest scientific organisation within the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). It is also the only body concerned with stratigraphy on a global scale for the whole geological column’ (Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, 2024).
Author Biography
Paolo Ruffino is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Curation and Computational Creativity at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. He is the author of Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture (Goldsmiths Press 2018), and editor of Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics (Routledge 2021). He has published articles on videogames, posthumanism, and production cultures on academic journals such as Convergence, Television and New Media, Games and Culture, Critical Studies in Media Communication. Ruffino is currently working on a new monograph on videogames and the (post-)Anthropocene.
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