Sorry, Wrong Apocalypse: Horizon Zero Dawn, Heaven’s Vault, and the Ecocritical Videogame
First author: CondisYear: 2020
Abstract
Climate change is arguably the most pressing threat the globe has ever faced. And yet despite (or perhaps, in part, because of) its urgency, science communicators have found it quite difficult to convey this threat effectively to the broader public. While Guerrilla Games’s Horizon Zero Dawn (2017) does an excellent job of creating opportunities for players to reflect on ecocritical themes, the disconnect that exists between its plot and its core gameplay loops somewhat blunt its effectiveness as an instrument of activism. In particular, its emphasis on combat diverts attention from what Rob Nixon (2011) calls the “slow violence” of climate change in favor of escapist power fantasies. I suggest that this disconnect between the game’s mechanics and its themes point to the need to invent new modes of interaction more suited to showcasing the unprecedentedscale upon which cli-fi stories take place. As one potential model of a relevant mechanic, I would like to nominate inkle’s Heaven’s Vault (2019), an “archeogame” (Reinhard, 2018) in which the impact of events long distant in time and space reverberate into the future and the only way to fight back against a cataclysmic environmental disaster is to understand the entrenched political and ideological institutions that brought it into existence over the course of millennia as well as the place of the individual within those institutions as potential agents of change.Details
Language: EnglishCountry of affiliation: United States
Published in: The international journal of computer game research
Publication type: Journal article
Source: https://gamestudies.org/2003/articles/condis
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