(December, 2024)
Bonus issue editors: Lawrence May and Poppy Wilde
Beyond Barren Wastelands: The Greening of the Post-apocalypse in Video Games
by M. Bianchi
Uniting scholarship about games as ecomedia with perspectives in critical plant studies, this essay examines how plants and gardens in virtual postapocalyptic worlds can create meaningful engagements with ideas of ecological interconnectedness, sustainability, and the posthuman.
by K. Moore
By engaging with Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanism, this essay discusses how the 2021 remaster of the action role-playing game NieR Replicant realizes radical possibilities for auto-poiesis and posthuman community-making in the face of extinction, ultimately offering a case study of the potential of failure within video games to reckon with transformative modes of resilience and redress within apocalyptic scenarios.
Of Cyborgs and Cats: Nonhuman Companionship and the Specter of Humanity in Nier: Automata and Stray
by C. Smith
This article explores how the posthuman potential of cyborgian play as nonhuman avatars is troubled in post-humanity games like Nier: Automata (2017) and Stray (2022). Through identity tourism, the player perpetuates a capitalism-sustaining human exceptionalism.
Playing Nonhumanity: Simulating the Animal Apocalypse in Tokyo Jungle
by Y.J. Yang
What does it mean to play as an animal in a digital game? If we, as people, play as nonhuman, what does that entail? This article looks at Crispy’s 2012 PlayStation 3 game, Tokyo Jungle, where players engage as animals set free after the mass disappearance of humans. Largely underdiscussed, Tokyo Jungle presents a compelling challenge for the post-Anthropocene: what if we’re not only playing the age beyond human dominion, but also playing subjects whose subjectivity can be inaccessible? In this sense, the article asks questions of subjectivity through the interaction of human and nonhuman subjects, specifically through Donna Haraway’s focus on worlding, and how through digital games we can form pathways of interactions to approximate nonhuman lives.
by P. Wilde
This paper analyses My Friend is A Raven (Two Star Games, 2019). Depending on the navigation through the game, I argue Lutum either demonstrates an anthropocentric disregard for the Raven, or a posthumanist ethic of viewing the Raven as a friend and equal. The article also considers how material meaning-making occurs through the intra-action between player and game, allowing different material configurations of the world to emerge.
Dark Entanglement and Visions of the Post-Anthropocene in Battlefield 2042
by L. May and B. Hall
This article examines how Battlefield 2042 (DICE, 2021) engages with the dark forms of entanglement that underpin life on our crisis-stricken Earth, and invites players into encounters with the transition from the Anthropocene era to an apocalyptic post-Anthropocene future.
Infrastructure of Agency: An Anti-essentialist and Post-humanist Framework for Video Game Agency
by H. Zhou
This article surveys definitions of agency in game studies and argues for an understanding of agency whose modality is contingent on causal structures. Through an anti-essentialist and post-humanist lens, these causal structures reveal their constructedness. Thus, agency itself is understood as plural and unstable. Games are understood as infrastructures – they direct the flow of determining a particular modality of agency without dictating the final results.
by P. Ruffino
The article foregrounds the notion of scale in our understanding of the relation between the medium of the videogame and the Anthropocene.
Journal of Games Criticism 