Wilderness Ecologies in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Horizon Zero Dawn
First author: MorrowYear: 2024
Abstract
At first glance, Rockstar Games’s Red Dead Redemption 2 and Guerrilla Games’s Horizon Zero Dawn seem diametrically opposed in terms of temporal settings, protagonists, and levels of technology. RDR2 seems to operate as an elegy to a lost time of rugged individualism, open frontier, and a mythologized America while HZD reads more as a postapocalyptic jeremiad which warns us of the possible consequences of an overreliance on technology for military as well as environmental purposes. Despite the narratological disparity, these games both engage ecocritical and environmental concepts in ways that complicate the anti-environmentalism of most mainstream games identified by Alenda Chang. Contextualized within the rich history of green game and ecocritical studies, this essay demonstrates that both games offer players space for a more nuanced and complicated understanding of environmental issues through their exploration of the relationship between civilization, technology, and the frontier as well as the representations of the natural world and the structured and unstructured interactions and relationships with flora and fauna. Acknowledging the realities of the environmental issues which pervade mainstream games as well as regressive understandings of nature, this essay teases out the complexity of the wilderness ecologies of these two games and illustrates how they enable players to reflect on larger environmental issues at play. In this essay, I explore the specific “politics of the wild” that both of these games ludically offer through the roles of Aloy, Arthur, and John. I will begin by thinking of these games in terms of Buell’s ecocritical criteria but expand beyond this scope to explore specific aspects of the wilderness from concepts of frontiers, animals, indigeneity, and N/nature to human (which gets constructed a pseudo-European) intervention in that wilderness in forms such as civilization, exploitation, space, and technology. These representations will also be situated within an examination of the concept of open-world games and interactivity, interrogating what it means to play within these environments and how that play influences the construction of wilderness ecologies in both games. My essay will ultimately outline how these games whether through a postapocalyptic jeremiad or an elegy of the American West offer timely, relevant, and surprisingly similar ecocritical notions for contemporary players.Details
Language: EnglishCountry of affiliation: United States
Published in: Video Games and Environmental Humanities: Playing to Save The World
Publication type: Book chapter
Source: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-67980-3_11
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