Video Games for Earthly Survival: Gaming in the Post-Anthropocene

In this paper I evaluate the sixth mass extinction on planet Earth, and its implications for the medium of the video game. The Anthropocene, a term popularized by the end of the 20th century to refer to the geological impact of human beings on planet Earth, assumes temporal development, a ‘before’ and ‘after’ the appearance of humankind. The ‘after’ period, the Post-Anthropocene, is repeatedly claimed by scientists to be approaching within the next few decades, as over-consumption is destroying vital resources of the planet. Allegedly, the sixth mass extinction in the history of our planet is already unfolding, and might determine the disappearance of life from Earth and, as far as we know, from the Universe and beyond. Video games responding to the arrival of the future is not just imagined in fictional settings (e.g. The Legenda of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Nintendo, 2000; Horizon: Zero Dawn, Guerrilla Games, 2017), but within game design. In the last decade an increasing number of video games requiring limited human intervention has been released. Incremental/ idle games such as Cookie Clicker (Julien Thiennot, 2013) and AdVenture Capitalist (Hyper Hippo Productions, 2014) require an initial input from the player to start, and then keep playing themselves in the background operations of a laptop or smartphone. Virtual environments can be entirely designed by algorithms, as experimented by Hello Games for No Man’s Sky (2016). Artificial Intelligence is also used to play games. Screeps, a massive-multiplayer online game, requires players to program an AI that will play the game in their place, and which will “live within the game even while you are offline” (Screeps Team, 2014). Ghost cars in racing games replace the human actor with a representation of their performance. The same concept is further explored by the Drivatar of the Forza Motorsport series (Microsoft Studios, 2005-2017), which simulates the driving style of the player and competes online against other AI-controlled cars. These are only some of the examples that suggest that human beings are becoming peripheral in the act of playing games. In short, it is probably becoming ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of gaming’. While studies on games with no players, and on the non-human side of gaming, have been proposed in the past, my presentation takes a non-normative and non-systemic approach to the study of games for the Post-Anthropocene. I am concerned with the creative potential of the paradoxes, spoofs, and contradictions opened by games that take Man/Anthropos as being no longer at the centre of ‘interaction’, ‘fun’, and many other mythological aspects of digital gaming. Nonhuman gaming questions the historical, political, ecological and even geological situatedness of our knowledge on games and gamers, interaction and passivity, life and death