Special Issue on Crisis and Rupture
Video Games and the Cheerful Apocalypse
Players are bored of catastrophe. Video games have presented worlds ruined by climate change, nuclear winter, world wars, viral outbreaks, natural disasters, meteors, man-made plagues, gray goo scenarios, artificial intelligence networks, robots, aliens, vampires, mutants, and hordes upon hordes of zombies—to the point that post-apocalyptic settings are often considered overdone and clichéd. For game developers, barren wastelands and ravaged cities are tempting gameplay settings, for both technical and aesthetic reasons, but creating novel experiences in post-apocalyptic worlds is a challenge. In short, the apocalypse has become banal.
Regardless, there is no shortage of post-apocalyptic games. Many of the longest-running and most critically acclaimed games and game series take place during or shortly after a global apocalyptic event, including Fallout, Metro, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, Days Gone, Left 4 Dead, Death Stranding, Nier: Automata, Frostpunk, Telltale’s The Walking Dead, and any number of games in which zombies, mutants, or plague-ridden creatures serve as the main antagonists. Recently, however, a surprisingly gentle trend has begun appearing in post-apocalyptic games. Rather than focusing on the player character as a hardened survivor wandering a crumbling and hostile wasteland, some games present a world in which the survivors are doing just fine: communities are thriving, the natural world is flourishing, and kind and helpful people are continually improving their circumstances. This trend isn’t limited to smaller indie titles like I Am Future (2024), Wildmender (2022), and My Time At Sandrock (2023): one of the clearest examples is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), a triple-A mainline title in one of Nintendo’s two flagship series and the launch title for the Nintendo Switch.
[To read the full article, please download the PDF below–coming soon!]