End-Game: Apocalyptic Video Games, Contemporary Society, and Digital Media Culture 9783110752687, 9783110752809, 9783110752861

Citation preview

End-Game

Video Games and the Humanities

Edited by Nathalie Aghoro, Iro Filippaki, Chris Kempshall, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Jeremiah McCall and Sascha Pöhlmann Advisory Board Alenda Y. Chang, UC Santa Barbara Katherine J. Lewis, University of Huddersfield Dietmar Meinel, University of Duisburg-Essen Ana Milošević, KU Leuven Soraya Murray, UC Santa Cruz Holly Nielsen, University of London Michael Nitsche, Georgia Tech Martin Picard, Leipzig University Melanie Swalwell, Swinburne University Emma Vossen, University of Waterloo Mark J.P. Wolf, Concordia University Esther Wright, Cardiff University

Volume 16

End-Game

Apocalyptic Video Games, Contemporary Society, and Digital Media Culture Edited by Lorenzo DiTommaso, James Crossley, Alastair Lockhart and Rachel Wagner

ISBN 978-3-11-075268-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-075280-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-075286-1 ISSN 2700-0400 Library of Congress Control Number: 2024933099 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Diego “Novanim” Zúñiga, “Habitat 67 Montréal – Post-Apocalyptic” (2020) Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Preface Video games are a global phenomenon, international in their scope and democratic in their appeal.1 The post/apocalyptic is among the most popular type2 of video games, and the one that arguably best reflects the temper of contemporary society.3 BioShock, BioShock Infinite, Death Stranding, the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Far Cry 5, Horizon Zero Dawn, The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II, and the Legend of Zelda, as well as the Fallout and Resident Evil series are among the bestknown and most widely played of all video games, and collectively form the object of the greater portion of scholarly enquiry. This is the first volume that is devoted to the critical study of post/apocalyptic video games and their cultural contexts. Twenty-three invited papers investigate a variety of post/apocalyptic video games and address topics ranging from game design to themes, symbolism, music, player agency, ludic textures, the gaming experience, and, above all, the social functions of the games. The volume also includes the first comprehensive bibliography of critical scholarship on the subject. The idea for this volume emerged from a conference, “Video Games and Religion: Apocalypse and Utopia,” which was held online in November 2020, during the first winter of the COVID-19 pandemic.4 The conference was hosted by the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements (CenSAMM) and co-organised by its Academic Director James Crossley and Co-Director Alastair Lockhart. The event featured sixteen papers and an international coterie of scholars, including Rachel Wagner, the author of several seminal works on video games, including Godwired: Religion, Ritual, and Virtual Reality.5 Following the conference, Lorenzo DiTommaso contacted Crossley and proposed a volume that would consist of revised versions of some of the conference presentations along with invited non-conference essays. Lockhart and Wagner graciously accepted invitations to join the volume project as co-editors.

 There is no consensus whether “video game” or “videogame” is the correct form. Our preference, which is reflected in the papers in this volume, is for the former. Separating the two words stresses that a video game is a certain type of game (and all this implies) rather than a thing-initself. The adjectival form is “video-game” (with the hyphen).  As it is used in video-game contexts, “genre” is reserved to specify the kind of game, e.g., firstperson shooter games, massive multi-player online games, etc.  See further the introductory and closing essays in this volume: Lorenzo DiTommaso, “Video Games and the Contemporary Apocalyptic Imagination,” and James Crossley, “Apocalypticism Today.”  https://censamm.org/conferences/video-games-and-religion.  Rachel Wagner, Godwired: Religion, Ritual, and Virtual Reality (London: Routledge: 2012). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110752809-202

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The editors extend their most profound gratitude to the volume contributors. Despite the toll that the pandemic took on everyday life, and on academic research, teaching, and scholarship specifically, our contributors managed to adhere to a rigorous and astonishingly brief timetable with professionalism and good cheer all round. We also thank our outstanding series editor, Rabea Rittgerodt, for shepherding our volume from proposal to production, and our wonderful production editor, Jana Fritsche, for seeing it into press. Financial support for the conference was provided by the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements, based in England. Financial support for the volume was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia University Montréal. To these organisations and institutions: thank you. Lorenzo DiTommaso, Montréal, Canada James Crossley, Oslo, Norway Alastair Lockhart, Cambridge, England Rachel Wagner, Ithaca, USA Summer Solstice, 2023

Contents Preface

V

Contributors and Editors

XI

Overture Lorenzo DiTommaso Video Games and the Contemporary Apocalyptic Imagination

3

Essays Megan Condis and Ben Alfonsin Frostpunk, the Apocalypse, and the “Enduring Temptation” of Ecofascism 29 Mia Consalvo The Missing Middle Class in The Outer Worlds

49

Ellie Fielding-Redpath Masculine Apocalypses: Navigating Masculinity, Male Spaces, and Violence in Days Gone (2019) and The Last of Us Part II (2020) 73 Emma Fraser Cities of the (Digital) Apocalypse – The Meeting of Video Games, Ruins, and Urban Studies 91 Samuel Fuller My Ruined Town: Fallout 4 Modding and Digital Storytelling

109

Jovi L. Geraci “I Am Making Everything New”: Animal Crossing as Postmillennial Apocalyptic Progress During the Covid Pandemic 131

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William Gibbons “All Sound Will Be Muted. All Life Will Scream”: Music and Sound as Existential Resistance in Disco Elysium (2019) 145 Amy M. Green The Two Broken Messiahs of Far Cry 5

159

Robert Houghton “There Will be a Reckoning”: Galactic Apocalypse as Endgame in Stellaris 177 Andra Ivănescu A Playlist for the Apocalypse: Popular Music in Death Stranding Stephen Joyce Horizon Zero Dawn as Genre-Medium Coevolution

193

209

Gi Soo Kim and Lorenzo DiTommaso End Game: Determinism and Human Instrumentality in Apocalyptic Video Games 223 Oleksandra Kuzmenko Anthroponyms, Apocalyptic Dualism, and Identity Formation in Post-Apocalyptic Video Games 239 Ryan Lizardi Death Stranding, Connections, Timefall, and Our Interactive Past

257

Lawrence May Undead Ecosystems: Death Stranding and the Contemporary Video-Game Zombie 271 Conor McKeown “Everyone in This Story Is Already Dead”: Death Matters in Disco Elysium’s Apocalypse 285

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Gerardo M. Muniz Villalon The Haunted Environment: Ellie’s Engagement through Retrospection 305 Sascha Pöhlmann The End of Everything

319

Lars Schmeink “Pick Your Plasmid and Evolve!”: Individualization, Genetics, and Choice in BioShock 339 Rowan Tulloch and Craig Johnson The Dystopia Industry: Video Games and the Commodification of Cultural Collapse 365 Lars de Wildt Video-Game Religion beyond the Anthropocene

385

Lauren Woolbright Giving Pandemic a Face: Ecophobia in A Plague Tale: Innocence

401

Sunny Yoon Medieval Fantasy in Video Games and Apocalypse in Digital Culture

Coda James Crossley Apocalypticism Today

433

Bibliography Lorenzo DiTommaso A Bibliography of Critical Scholarship on Post/Apocalyptic Video Games 451 Index

479

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Contributors and Editors Ben Alfonsin is a doctoral student at Texas Tech University, USA. His studies have previously focused on computer-mediated communication during the COVID-19 pandemic; published in Higher Education Implications for Teaching and Learning During COVID-19 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). His more recent work focus has shifted to the realm of electronic media and fandom engagement during his doctoral studies. His participation in this work marked his first experience as a research assistant during his academic career. He was also able to utilize part of his paper for the completion of the thesis work requirements for his master’s degree. Stef Aupers is Professor of Media Culture at the Institute for Media Studies, Leuven University, Belgium. Working at the intersection of cultural sociology and communication science, he empirically studies the mediatization of contemporary culture and published widely in international peerreviewed journals on topics like game culture, digital religion, AI culture and conspiracy theories on the internet. Megan Condis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Texas Tech University. Her book, Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2018. Mia Consalvo is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the co-author of Real Games: What’s Legitimate and What’s Not in Contemporary Videogames (2019) and Players and their Pets: Gaming Communities from Beta to Sunset (2015). She is also co-editor of Sports Videogames (2013) and the Handbook of Internet Studies (2011) and is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (2007) as well as Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Context (2016). Mia runs the mLab, a space dedicated to developing innovative methods for studying games and game players. She’s a member of the Centre for Technoculture, Art & Games (TAG) and has presented her work at industry as well as academic conferences including regular presentations at the Game Developers Conference. She is the Past President of the Digital Games Research Association, and has held positions at MIT, Ohio University, Chubu University in Japan, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. James Crossley is Professor of Bible, Society, and Politics at MF Oslo and Academic Director at the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements (CenSAMM) in the UK. His early work was focused on Christian origins while his more recent work has focused on religion in English political discourse and has published widely in both areas. His most recent work includes Spectres of John Ball: The Peasants’ Revolt in English Political History, 1381–2020 (Equinox 2022). He is also the co-editor (with Alastair Lockhart) of the online Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements launched in January 2021. Lorenzo DiTommaso is Professor of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University Montréal. His research focuses on apocalyptic speculation in its aggregate, from the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation to medieval texts to contemporary politics and popular culture. He has authored or edited sixteen books and composed over 200 articles, book chapters, and other short studies, most recently Re-Imagining Apocalypticism: Apocalypses, Apocalyptic Literature, and the Dead Sea Scrolls (SBL 2023, ed. with Matthew Goff) and Music in the Apocalyptic Mode (Brill 2023, ed. with Colin McAllister). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110752809-204

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Ellie Fielding-Redpath is an interdisciplinary academic and associate lecturer based at Lancaster University (UK), working within the fields of Literature, Religion, Sociology, Politics, and Cultural Studies. Her forthcoming monograph examines post/apocalyptic North American fictions, and their capacity to evoke resistive action through positioning cultic communities as counter-hegemonic spaces. Engaged with issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality, she considers how fictions destabilise power structures and promote possibilities of change. You can find her on X (@Cult_Lit) and Instagram (@elliefredpath). Emma Fraser is a lecturer in Media Studies and the Berkeley Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Emma’s research considers games and play across sociology, geography, game studies, and media and cultural theory. Emma also researches and writes about space and place, modern ruins, and digital and visual media in relation to urban experience and the writings of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School. Samuel Fuller is the Leola Purcell Endowed Associate Professor of Technical and Professional Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University, and founder of its Video Games and the Digital Humanities Colloquium. His primary research focus is on video game modding as Digital Humanities praxis. He has written on copyright and labor issues related to mods, technical writing genres used in modding communities, hacker ethics, private data leaks, video game preservationism, and technical writing in zombie fiction. He has a chapter in the upcoming volume, Deconstructing the Zombie: Cultural and Ideological Approaches, from Brill. Jovita L. Geraci teaches Religious Studies at Manhattan College, USA. Her research focuses primarily on the intersection of religion with video games, social media, and handcrafts. She is particularly interested in the ways that the visual elements of religion and culture are incorporated into digital media, and in how these images are used to build people’s sense of self and the construction of community. Jovi has also published over 50 knitting patterns, and enjoys both knitting and gaming, often at the same time. William Gibbons is Dean of The Crane School of Music at the State University of New York at Potsdam. A scholar of musical multimedia and the cultural functions of music, he is the author of Building the Operatic Museum (Boydell & Brewer, 2013) and Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music (Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as coeditor of the essay collections Music in Video Games (Routledge, 2014), Music in the Role-Playing Game (Routledge, 2020), and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Sound in Video Games. Amy M. Green is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her research focus is on game studies, specifically the intersection of narrative and video games. She approaches video games as important cultural artifacts reflecting stories that are both universal and indicative of the historical context out of which they emerge. She is the author of several books related to game studies, Storytelling in Video Games: The Art of the Digital Narrative, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V, A Cure for Toxic Masculinity: Male Bonding and Friendship in Final Fantasy XV, Kingsglaive’s Exploration of World War II, Cultural Trauma, and the Plight of Refugees: An Animated Film as Complex Narrative, and Longing, Ruin, and Connection in Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding, as well as numerous articles.

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Robert Houghton is a Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Winchester, England. His research primarily considers Italian socio-political networks in the Central Middle Ages and representations of the Middle Ages in Modern Games. His recent publications include ‘If you’re going to be the king, you’d better damn well act like the king: Setting objectives to encourage “realistic” play in Grand Strategy Computer Games’ (2021), ‘History Games for Boys? Gender, Genre and the Self-Perceived Impact of Historical Games on Undergraduate Historians’ (2021), and ‘Crusader Kings Too? (Mis)Representations of the Crusades in Grand Strategy Games’ (2021) and he is currently writing a monograph titled The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism. He is the Games Editor at The Public Medievalist and lead organiser of the annual Middle Ages in Modern Games Twitter conference. Andra Ivănescu is a Senior Lecturer in Game Studies and Ludomusicology at Brunel University London, where she is also lead of the Games Design undergraduate programme. Her primary area of research lies at the intersection of nostalgia, musicology, and video games. She is a member of the Ludomusicology Research Group and co-editor of the Intellect series Studies in Game Sound and Music. She has published work in the fields of ludomusicology and game studies in journals including The Soundtrack and The Computer Games Journal as well as a number of edited collections, most recently the Cambridge Companion for Video Game Music (2021). She is the author of Popular Music in the Nostalgia Video Game: The Way It Never Sounded (2019) Craig Johnson is an academic coordinator in the Creative Industries Program at UTS College. He is the author of Modernity without a Project (New York: Punctum), a critique of powerful institutional attempts to condition a sense of historical time through narratives around modern art and architecture. He is working on a project with Rowan Tulloch on games and dystopia and holds a Ph.D. in Critical and Cultural Studies. Stephen Joyce is an Associate Professor at the Department of English, Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published extensively on transmedia storytelling, video games, and the post-apocalyptic genre, including the book Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse (Palgrave Macmillan 2018). His research interests include the relationship between apocalypticism and conspiracy theories, as well as fan studies and media tourism. He is currently working on a new monograph investigating the creation and reception of story worlds across media. He is a co-editor of Imagining the Impossible, an international journal for the fantastic in contemporary media. Gisoo Kim graduated from Concordia University Montréal with an M.A. in Religions and Cultures. He focused on the relationship between religion and popular culture, including post/apocalyptic themes in Western video games as well as video-game lore and narrative as a reflection of points of tension among Western Millennials. At present Gisoo is a writer for a Canadian soccer publication, DARBY magazine, and has published articles in three issues. He also works as a podcast producer for the Darbycast, and hosts his own podcast called “Soccer Pilgrim.” Oleksandra Kuzmenko is a postgraduate student at the Graduate School of Empirical and Applied Linguistics of the University of Münster, Germany. Since 2019, she is a member of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences (ICOS). Her Ph.D. project is currently supported by the Friedrich-EbertStiftung scholarship. In her research, she analyzes the names of video game objects as the building stones of the game world, paying special attention to anthroponyms as character and user names

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and their application in player interaction. Her research interests extend to aspects of video game localizations, cultural (in)sensitivity in gaming, and in-game names functioning as culturemes. Ryan Lizardi is Associate Professor of digital media and humanities at SUNY Polytechnic Institute. He focuses his research on media encouraged nostalgia, including his books Mediated Nostalgia (2014), Nostalgic Generations and Media (2017), and Subjective Experiences of Interactive Nostalgia (editor, 2019). His latest book, Existential Science Fiction (2022) connects this research into longing for the past to the big questions about our existence as human beings and the role media can play in contemplative answers. Alastair Lockhart is a Fellow of Hughes Hall, a postgraduate college of the University of Cambridge, England, a member of the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge, and Academic Co-Director at the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements, Bedford. He has a research background in the 20th century history of the psychology and religion and the contemporary history of emerging religion. His first book, Personal Religion and Spiritual Healing (SUNY Press), was published in 2019, and he is co-editor (with James Crossley) of the online Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements launched in January 2021. Lawrence May is a lecturer at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research addresses the fields of game studies and digital cultures, especially exploring the relationships between users, stories and spaces within video games and new media. His 2021 book Digital Zombies, Undead Stories (Bloomsbury) examines emergent narrative in multiplayer contexts, the narrative dimensions of players’ activities in online communities, and the role of zombies in contemporary video games. Conor McKeown is a lecturer of Digital Media at the University of Stirling. Their work reveals the power of video games as tools for thinking with complex topics such as quantum theory and biotechnological ecologies. They approach this through theory – as with their forthcoming chapter “The Pain of Thinking at Light Speed” in the edited collection Incomputable Earth: Digital Technologies and the Anthropocene (Bloomsbury, exp. 2023) – and through practice, through short games dedicated to stem cells, photography, and time. Gerardo M. Muniz Villalon is an Assistant Teaching professor at the Pennsylvania State University in State College Pennsylvania where he teaches Business Writing, Technical Writing and Communication, Social Science Research and Rhetoric & Composition. His research focuses on apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic and dystopian Hauntological approaches to film, video games, graphic novels, and British & American Literature. He has attended popular culture conferences presenting on topics such as the representations of lost histories in modern video games, ahistorical representations of chaos in New Weird Fiction and Slipstream and political and cultural turmoil in foreign horror films. Currently, he is working on the influence literary antecedents from the Weird Tale shaped and structured the events that transpired in the Television Series True Detective season one and the Mist. Sascha Pöhlmann is Visiting Professor of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Innsbruck. He is the author of the monographs Pynchon’s Postnational Imagination (2010), FutureFounding Poetry: Topographies of Beginnings from Whitman to the Twenty-First Century (2015), Stadt und Straße: Anfangsorte in der amerikanischen Literatur (2018), and Vote with a Bullet: Assassination in American Fiction (2021). He has edited and co-edited essay collections on Thomas Pynchon, Mark

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Z. Danielewski, foundational places in/of Modernity, electoral cultures, American music, unpopular culture, and most recently Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies (2019). His video gamerelated essays deal with Pynchon’s use of games, ludic populism and its subversion, and the representation of homelessness. He is a co-editor of the book series “Video Games and the Humanities” at De Gruyter Lars Schmeink is a science-fiction researcher and media journalist. He studied American studies, English studies, and German studies in Hamburg, Toronto, and Berlin. In 2014, he was awarded his PhD at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin with a thesis on contemporary post-human science fiction. Prior to this, he worked as a research assistant at the Institute of English and American Studies at Universität Hamburg from 2007 to 2012. He currently works as project lead for the “FutureWork” subproject “Science Fiction” with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. His latest publications are The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2020), Cyberpunk and Visual Culture (2018), and Biopunk Dystopias (2016). Rowan Tulloch is a lecturer in digital media and video gaming in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature at Macquarie University, Australia. His research looks at the technological and cultural logics embedded within practices of interactivity and play: from the neoliberal rhetorics of choice and agency in video gaming, to the surveillance architectures of gamification. He seeks to understand the relationship between play and power, and to explore the systems that shape our leisure practices and preferences. Rachel Wagner is Associate Professor of Religion at Ithaca College, USA. Her first book, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality (Routledge, 2012) deals with the relationship between religion and media in its various modes. She has written extensively on religion and culture, especially the intersection between virtual reality, gaming, and religion. Her next book, Cowboy Apocalypse, looks at the gun as a transmediated fan object, placing it within a repetitive American myth of postapocalyptic yearning for a time that never existed. Rachel has served as the Chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Unit, and as a member of the steering committees of the Religion and Popular Culture Unit and the Religion, Media, and Culture Unit. Lars de Wildt is Assistant Professor in media and cultural industries at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen. He studies how media cultures and industries change contemporary worldviews; including how video games make belief, and how online platforms birth conspiracy theories. His first book, The Pop Theology of Videogames: Producing and Playing with Religion is published by Amsterdam University Press. Lauren Woolbright holds the position of Lecturer of Digital Media at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Her research sits at the confluence of game studies and environmental humanities, focusing on how environments and mechanics communicate meaning in games using theories of game design, interactive storytelling, media studies, and environmental communication. Her recent work examines darker aspects of ecomedia in games using ecophobia, environmental mourning, and the monstrous-feminine as lenses. She is co-founder and lead editor of OneShot: A Journal of Critical Play and Games, which publishes scholarly and pedagogical games and essays contextualizing them.

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Sunny Yoon is Research Professor at LUT university in Finland, and Professor of Media and Communication at Hanyang University, Seoul, in South Korea. She has published widely on cultural studies, visual culture, and ethnographic studies of media audiences. Her research also includes religion and popular culture including digital games, films, TV shows and music. She has authored numerous books including Social Media and Cultural Politics of Korean Pop Culture in East Asia (Routledge, 2023)

Overture

Lorenzo DiTommaso

Video Games and the Contemporary Apocalyptic Imagination An apocalyptic video game is a player-interactive digital game whose plot, setting, and objectives are informed by an event that either has radically disrupted civilisation (“post-apocalyptic”) or is predicted or imminent (“apocalyptic”), and where the player is induced to engage with its existential implications.1 The apocalyptic video game is also the sole media form of the apocalyptic imagination that is unique to the twenty-first century.2 It is true that it has its origins in the role-playing3 and arcade games4 of the 1970s and 1980s, and the first PC game of the type, Wasteland (Electronic Arts), appeared in 1988.5 But these rare and distant ancestors bear faint resemblance to today’s video games or to the novel gaming lifestyle that they have created, which are the result of the digital revolution of the twenty-first century. Nor should these distant ancestors obscure the fact that virtually all post/apocalyptic video games are products of the twenty-first

 The spellings “video game” and “videogame” appear with equal frequency in the scholarship and popular literature. I prefer the former, to distinguish video games from other kinds of games and thus highlight its special feature. “Video-game” is the adjectival form.  The original medium, apocalyptic literature, is ancient. Apocalyptic drama, music, and art are mediaeval in origin, although late-antique Christian wall-paintings of the Last Judgment are known. Apocalyptic fiction, film, anime, radio programs, television series, comic art, street art, and music videos are all modern, being products of the late nineteenth or twentieth century.  Metamorphosis Alpha (TSR, 1976) and Gamma World (TSR, 1978), both created by James M. Ward. Lowell Francis, “AoR: History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part One: 1976–1984)” (6 November 2019), cites Metamorphosis Alpha as the first apocalyptic game. Ward himself, though, awards the title to Gamma World: “I’m a famous game designer,” he says, “with credits like the first science fiction rpg in METAMORPHOSIS ALPHA and the first apocalyptic rpg in GAMMA WORLD” (https://garycon.com/honored-guests/).  Most notably Missile Command (Atari, 1980). Originally titled Armageddon, gameplay terminated with an ominous “The End” instead of the usual “Game Over.” See Alex Rubens, “The Creation of Missile Command and the Haunting of Its Creator, Dave Theurer,” Polygon (15 August 2013).  Michael Falero, “A Brief History of Post-Apocalyptic Video Games” (9 November 2015), Robert G. Burgess, “Nuclear Nightmares: Representations of Nuclear Anxiety in American Cold War Visual Culture” (M.A. Thesis: Sheffield Hallam University, 2016), 61, and Kevin Ashton, “Are We Nearing the End of the World?” (7 December 2019). The “Universal Videogame List” database, however, cites the 1987 game, Shalom: Knightmare III (Konami). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110752809-001

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century.6 Video gaming has become the pre-eminent entertainment medium of our time, and the post/apocalyptic game one of its signature types.7 The number of post/apocalyptic video games that have entered the market is difficult to determine.8 The “Ultimate Pop Culture Wiki” website records 104 postapocalyptic games and twenty apocalyptic ones,9 but the “Universal Videogame List” cites 108 apocalyptic games and zero post-apocalyptic ones.10 The Wikipedia webpages list fifty-five apocalyptic and 423 post-apocalyptic games respectively,11 while a word-search for “apocalyptic” on the RAWG video game database generates a staggering 782 hits.12 Yet even this figure falls short. By my count, no less than 1,034 post/apocalyptic video games have appeared since 1988, virtually all in this century.13 Discrepancies about the number and name of such games reflect the elasticity of the label “apocalyptic” and its everyday applications. What is apocalyptic, and what is an apocalyptic (or a post-apocalyptic) video game? What connects the biblical apocalypses of Daniel and the Revelation of John with games such as BioShock, Death Stranding, Far Cry 5, Horizon Zero Dawn, and The Last of Us? What prompts designers, publishers, advertisers, journalists, players, and academics to label these games “apocalyptic” – but not others? And why has post/apocalyptic popular culture become so popular in the twenty-first century?14 This paper addresses these questions in three sections. The first section focuses on the problem of definition. I suggest that “apocalyptic” is most usefully understood as a worldview, particularly in its popular-culture applications, where it

 Lorenzo DiTommaso, “A Bibliography of Critical Scholarship on Post/Apocalyptic Video Games,” at the end of this volume.  “Genre” is inappropriate, since the term in video-game scholarship usually refers to the way that the games are played – first-person shooter games, real-time strategy games, etc. – rather than their narrative structure or visual content. See further, Thomas Klein, “Genre und Videospiel,” in Markus Kuhn et al., eds., Filmwissenschaftliche Genre Analyse: Eine Einführung (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2013), 345–60, and the sources cited there.  “Post/apocalyptic” is a shorthand for discussing apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic settings as a single category. On the latter, see §1.2, below.  https://ultimatepopculture.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Apocalyptic_video_games and ~/Category:Post-apocalyptic_video_games.  https://www.uvlist.net/groups/info/apocalyptic. The Reddit site, https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/ wiki/postapocrpgs, cites around 100 games.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Apocalyptic_video_games and ~/Category:Postapocalyptic_video_games.  https://rawg.io/search?query=apocalyptic.  Total count to 31 December 2022, not including amateur, shareware, or pedagogic/instructional games.  I leave unaddressed the question of the obvious marketability of the term.

Video Games and the Contemporary Apocalyptic Imagination

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means both an existential event and the end of the world (§1.1–2). The second section situates the post/apocalyptic video game in its primary contexts: as part of contemporary popular culture; in the history of apocalyptic popular culture; and as reflecting the “superflat” aesthetic of pop culture today (§2.1–3). The third section of the paper discusses the post/apocalyptic video game as what I call the “frontier apocalypse” (§3). A summary ties together the paper’s threads (§4).

1 Apocalyptic and Apocalypticism, Traditional and Secular Apocalyptic is a term with many meanings. Although scholars have yet to resolve the problem of definition, some approaches have proven heuristically useful. Norman Cohn equates apocalyptic with millennial anticipation and the expectation for the violent eschatological (end-time) upheaval of the social order.15 For Stephen O’Leary and Greg Carey, apocalyptic is identified by its rhetoric or, as Carey calls it, apocalyptic discourse.16 John J. Collins argues that the core signifier is the literary genre apocalypse.17 For Christopher Rowland, apocalyptic is a noun, which he defines as “the revelation of heavenly mysteries.”18 I contend that “apocalyptic” is an adjective whose applications are defined by an underlying worldview, called apocalypticism. Briefly, the apocalyptic worldview is described by a set of propositions about the nature of space, time, and human existence.19 These propositions in turn support claims about knowledge,  Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957).  Stephen D. O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Greg Carey, Ultimate Things: An Introduction to Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature (St. Louis: Chalice, 2005).  John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination (third ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016). An apocalypse is “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisions eschatological salvation, and spatial as it involves another, supernatural world” (7–8).  Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1982).  A worldview is a fundamental cognitive orientation, an architecture of axiomatic presumptions and related claims through which individuals construct reality and interact with it, typically in terms of social groups. A “pattern” or “system” of thought means much the same thing. On the apocalyptic worldview, see further Lorenzo DiTommaso, “Apocalypticism in the Contemporary World,” in The Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature, edited by Colin McAllister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 316–42.

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history, anthropology, salvation, and justice. Considered together, the propositions and claims of the worldview constitute a notional structure that I call “the architecture of apocalypticism.” Apocalypticism models the world and the meaning of human existence in it. In this respect it is no different from Buddhism, Marxism, fascism, or other totalising worldviews, religious or secular. The apocalyptic worldview is expressed in two modes, traditional and secular. The traditional (or biblical) mode is the mode of the biblical apocalypses of Daniel and the Revelation of John. It is also the mode of all Jewish, Christian, and Islamic apocalyptic speculation ever since, including hybridised forms in other religions and cultures, as well as the cults, communities, and churches that espouse such a perspective. Even today, conventional, biblical-style apocalyptic speculation remains a powerful and present force, notably in the contemporary revival of fundamentalist streams among all the world’s major religions. The secular mode represents the recalibration of the apocalyptic worldview within the aggregate of ideas that constitute “modernity.” This mode emerged in the nineteenth century and since has become the signature form of apocalyptic expression in contemporary politics and popular culture.20 Its applications have generated a new vocabulary of apocalyptic speculation and novel registers of meaning by which questions about human existence are addressed.21 This process, which has accelerated since the late 1960s and 1970s, has transformed the meaning of apocalyptic in the popular imaginary as an existential event and as the end of the world.

1.1 Apocalypse as an Existential Event The existential dimension of apocalyptic manifests as the impulse to re-orient one’s life to the otherworldly revelation about the true nature of the world and the imminent end of the present state. Every purpose derives from this impulse. For example, a common “message” of apocalyptic texts is to remain steadfast in the face of oppression or persecution. Standing behind the exhortation, however,

 This is not to say that the traditional mode is incompatible with modern pop-cultural forms, or that its images, themes, symbols, rhetoric, and expectations have lost their meaning today. One example is Christian-oriented folk or rock music. Another is the eschatological thriller, such as Left Behind and the hundreds of similar novels that populate Christian bookstores or are selfpublished on Amazon.com.  Lorenzo DiTommaso, “Apocalypticism and Popular Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature, edited by John J. Collins (New York: Oxford University Press), 473–509, and “Apocalypticism in the Contemporary World.”

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is the revelatory information that the end of the present state is close at hand, and, following from it, the salvation and justification of certain individuals and their group and the overthrow and punishment of their enemies. The efficacy of the message is contingent on audience’s receptivity to heed the otherworldly revelation and to remain steadfast (or to repent and return). The existential impulse of apocalyptic speculation is most easily recognizable in its traditional mode. It is prompted by the revelation that God (the divine designer) remains in control of human events and will soon bring history to its predetermined end. The highlight of this event is the resurrection of the dead, who will be judged and awarded their eternal lot: those who are of the Chosen or Elect will go to Heaven or Paradise, those of the enemy “Other” to Hell or Perdition. The revelation, then, carries with it the demand for the members of the Elect (or others, as the case may be) to re-orient their lives to the revelation and, with it, the guarantee of salvation from the present state and, with it, justice. That this future seems improbable given the powerless, hopeless, and often terrible present state of the Elect underscores the heavenly nature of the revelation as a source of transcendent information beyond that human senses, experience, or logic. In the secular mode of apocalyptic speculation, including most pop-cultural expressions, the existential impulse remains, but is keyed to another register and alternative contexts of meaning. Consider, by means of illustration, the transcendental reality that is ontologically distinct from the everyday world and is the source of the otherworldly revelation about the true state of existence. In the traditional mode of the worldview, this reality is God/Heaven (or its agents). In the secular mode, however, this role can be filled by anything from artificial intelligence (AI) to aliens to human individuals, agencies, or states that have acquired the ability to wreak destruction or environmental change on a scale that was once imaginable only in terms of a divinity. Another example of analogous functionality across the two modes of apocalyptic speculation is the expectation for the eternal abode of the Elect. Its classic formulation is the New Jerusalem that descends from Heaven at the end of the Revelation of John (21:10–27). A secular analogy is the spacecraft that the members of the religious movement Heavens Gate believed was concealed behind the comet Hale-Bopp, which became visible in the sky in 1996. In late March 1997, as the comet approached perihelion, the movement’s members committed mass suicide, prompted by the revelation that Earth was about to be destroyed. This act, so they believed, would free their souls to ascend to the spaceship as it followed Hale-Bopp on its return journey out of our solar system and onwards to the Evolutionary Kingdom Level Above Human – or what John in his Revelation called “Heaven.”

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1.2 Apocalypse as the “End of the World” As a diagnostic definition, apocalyptic as the “end of the world” is both unsound and unsatisfying. Although many religious systems and some philosophies envision some form of an end to the present state, that kind of “end” refers to the termination of an age or a cycle in history, rather than the one-time, end-time event of apocalyptic speculation, with its soteriological and judicial aspects. The distinction is neither semantic nor pedantic. Ideas about time, space, and human destiny in Buddhism and pre-Columbian Mayanism, for example, fundamentally differ from those in the apocalyptic worldview.22 Hence, to refer to apocalyptic expectations in Buddhism or to a “Mayan Apocalypse” is to misunderstand the nature of apocalypticism and its radical claims. Apocalyptic may always be about the end, but not every ending is apocalyptic. That said, and despite its diagnostic deficiencies, the “end of the world” is how apocalyptic has come to be construed in contemporary popular parlance and popular culture.23 So, too, the reverse: any end-of-the-world situation, literal or figurative, is frequently described as “apocalyptic” or an “apocalypse.” Andrew Tate puts it well: “apocalypse is widely understood in the shared, popular imagination as a kind of classy synonym for spectacular destruction, death on a vast scale and the collapse of all that society might hold dear.”24 Defining apocalyptic as the end of the world also facilitated the emergence of the post-apocalyptic trope.25 In the traditional mode of the worldview, there is no place, strictly speaking, for the post-apocalyptic scenario. The end is the end. Still, one may detect the roots of the post-apocalyptic trope in the ancient idea of the eschatōn (“last things”), which presumes a brief historical period for the events of the end to transpire. From this (modern) perspective, the bulk of the Revelation of John is a post-apocalyptic text, with its cascade of eschatological calamities and woes. (For the same reason, Revelation is the ancient forebear of modern dystopian fiction and, arguably, the first full-blown example of the genre of alternative  As Jan Nattier remarks, the apocalyptic expectation that the world will come to a definitive end is not found in the Buddhist tradition; see Jan Nattier, “Buddhist Eschatology,” in Jerry L. Walls, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 151–169 at 151. Similarly, the pre-Columbian Mayan calendar from which the 2012 “Mayan Apocalypse” evolved is not apocalyptic, since its sense of time is cyclical; see Matthew Restall and Amara Solari, 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Mayan Apocalypse (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2011), and the next note.  Hence in the 1970s and 1980s the ancient Mayan calendar was re-imagined as an apocalyptic prediction, which became the seed around which the idea of a 2012 Mayan Apocalypse grew.  Andrew Tate, Apocalyptic Fiction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).  “Apocalyptic” and “dystopian” overlap in several key areas but are not identical.

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history.) By contrast, the secular mode, with its modern recalibration of the worldview, always permits the possibility of human time after a post-catastrophic event. Although secular renditions of this event do not always convey soteriological or judicial aspects in the eschatological future (although many examples do, and they are among the most interesting), the existential imperative of the apocalyptic substrate is always present.

1.3 Summary No approach to apocalyptic can answer every question that might be asked of the evidence, and each approach is valuable in ways that the others are not. But what is the “evidence”? Most approaches focus on the biblical texts or, in Cohn’s case, the millennial movements of western Europe in the late Middle Ages. Such approaches, based as they are on the categories and contexts of pre-modern periods, struggle to find relevance in today’s secularised, digitalised, and commodified world. Understanding apocalyptic as a worldview detaches the category from any specific cultural setting, historical era, corpus of texts, or literary genre. From this perspective, nothing is apocalyptic in itself – no symbol, image, rhetorical device, or expectation. It is the worldview that accords an apocalyptic valence to phenomena, in the same way as the Buddhist system of thought stands behind Buddhist texts and rituals, or Marxist ideology animates Marxist movements and manifestos.26 The worldview is like the ‘DNA’ of apocalyptic: it is the essential genetic marker that identifies apocalyptic phenomena no matter the degree of morphological diversity due to historical development or cultural adaptation.27 Moreover, and unlike the other approaches, the diagnostic utility of the apocalyptic worldview increases the farther the investigation moves away from antiquity. Specifically, it allows for the existence of both the secular mode of apocalyptic expression and the contemporary definition of apocalyptic as “the end of the

 For applications of the model, see my essays on apocalypticism and contemporary culture (n. 21) and “Apocalyptic Eschatology and the Transcendence of Death in William Gibson’s Neuromancer,” ARC: The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University 39 (2011), 37–54, and “‘Land of Confusion’ (Genesis, 1986 – Disturbed, 2005) and the Contemporary ‘Apocalyptic Shift’,” in Music in the Apocalyptic Mode, edited by Lorenzo DiTommaso and Colin McAllister (Word and Music Studies 20; Leiden: Brill, 2023), 251–284.  The approach is hardly novel. Scholars of ‘fascism’ also seek root definitions of the term to identify its diverse forms in different historical eras and political cultures.

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world.” Both the mode and the definition allow for a more nuanced appreciation of apocalyptic in contemporary popular culture, to which we now turn.

2 Apocalypticism and Contemporary Popular Culture Most modern apocalyptic popular culture is post-apocalyptic. This is particularly the case with video games, where the post-apocalyptic setting is so pervasive as to be characteristic of the type. While these games exhibit features that are idiosyncratic to the medium (below, §3), media forms do not exist in isolation from each other or from the broader contexts of their age.28 Video games are part of contemporary popular culture; as such, they have been shaped by its topography, history, and aesthetic.29

2.1 The Topography of Contemporary Popular Culture and the “Apocalyptic Shift” Space limitations restrict our discussion of contemporary popular culture to observations that are germane to video games. These observations are rooted in one cardinal fact: the digital revolution that has come to define daily life in this century, and which has made video gaming its signature form of entertainment, has transformed popular culture globally, and most notably its extent and influence.30 Today, popular culture not only saturates the social fabric of the planet but also

 This aesthetic position was first articulated by Johann Jacob Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755; sec. ed., Dresden/Leipzig: Walther, 1756).  On the ideas in this section, see DiTommaso, “Apocalypticism and Popular Culture,” and “Apocalypticism in the Contemporary World.”  The transformative process remains ongoing, with the result that the topographies of contemporary popular culture are continually in flux. Studies that appeared only a decade ago are already outdated, while those that were published at the turn of the past century have archival value only. John Storey’s authoritative volume, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2021), which was first published under a slightly different title in 1993, is already in its ninth, revised edition.

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orients the lifestyles of the greater percentage of its inhabitants, to the extent that popular culture is de facto world culture.31 These facts suggest the outstanding feature of contemporary popular culture: it is mass culture.32 Popular culture today is mass-produced, mass-distributed, and mass-consumed to an extent and degree that was unknown in previous eras and cultures.33 Fifty years ago, Guy Debord argued that late capitalism had made all relationships transactional, turning workers into consumers.34 Today, everyone is a consumer. Popular culture is the product, and the line between production and consumption has blurred. The primary generator of change has been and remains the digital revolution, and specifically the way that the new communications technologies and social media platforms have transformed modes of production both vertically (development to delivery) and horizontally (integrated, multimedia franchise empires). Popular culture now shapes every aspect of the daily lives of its global consumers, from their self-perception to their value systems to their life aspirations, to the extent that “to become a big brand” is now considered a viable choice of profession, without the hint of irony.35 Equating popular culture with mass culture reveals the primary demographic characteristic of apocalyptic speculation today: its mass appeal. One misconception about apocalyptic speculation is that it attracts only small groups of religious fanatics or socially marginalised religious movements (“cults”) who expect immi-

 Excellent introductions to popular culture today are Storey’s Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, and the articles in Toby Miller, ed., The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2015), and in John C. Lyden and Eric Michael Mazur, eds., The Routledge Companion to Religion and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2015).  My ideas of mass culture draw on aspects of the category as proposed by Theodore Adorno, and especially his essay, “Das Schema der Massenkultur,” in Gesammelte Schriften 3: Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), 299–355, and Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217–251. What Adorno and Benjamin could not foresee, of course, was the digital revolution or its transformative effects on mass media and the means of information production and consumption.  Perhaps the closest analogue is the popular culture of Tokugawa-era Edo. See Nancy K. Stalker, Japan: History and Culture from Classical to Cool (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2018), and E. Taylor Atkins, A History of Popular Culture in Japan: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present (second ed.; New York, Routledge, 2022).  Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967).  Colin Grant, “A Country out of Control,” The New York Review of Books, 7 April 2022, 10–14 at 10. The article quotes Wole Soyinka, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (New York: Pantheon, 2021), who describes youths in modern Nigeria, but the sentiment is global among those under the age of 25.

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nent social change.36 While the small, oppressed group is not an uncommon demographic for the apocalyptic worldview, from the historical perspective it has had a far broader appeal to stakeholder populations.37 The basic social function of apocalyptic speculation, past and present, is to preserve group identity, especially when threatened, whether the danger is real or perceived. There is more to apocalyptic speculation than this, to be sure. But the universality of this primary function ensures the appeal of the worldview to members of any group, religious or secular, and to groups of any size, from tiny cults to world churches, as a lens through which to comprehend their situation.38 The intersection of mass culture with the broadband appeal of apocalyptic speculation has special relevance today. The past sixty years have seen a steady increase in the scope and degree to which persons have come to regard their existence in apocalyptic terms.39 So far, this “apocalyptic shift” has exhibited two phases. The first phase extended from the late 1960s and 1970s to around the turn of the millennium.40 The second phase, which remains ongoing, is marked by an intensification and amplification of the first phase in all its iterations, to the extent that apocalyptic thinking has now come to occupy a central part of everyday life in the west and around the world. This movement to centrality is best described as one “from the margins to the mainstream.”41 The main manifestations of the apocalyptic shift and its two phases are religious, political, and pop-cultural. With respect to the latter, the first and best evidence is statistical. Modern apocalyptic popular culture is a product of the past 150 years, from the late nineteenth century to the present. This span of time has witnessed the creation of over 10,000 post/apocalyptic novels, films, manga, anime,

 This model is rooted in the biblical apocalypses of Daniel and Revelation, which focus on the history and its end and were composed for religious groups under oppressive foreign domination. Norman Cohn’s approach, described above, gave this “cult” model an academic framework by which scholars could identify analogous movements in other cultures, eras, and settings, and gain insight into their motivations and expectations. An early example is the collection of essays in Sylvia L. Thrupp, ed. Millennial Dreams in Action: Essays in Comparative Study (Den Haag: Mouton, 1962. See also the following note.  This fact was recognised by Cohn’s fellow mediaevalists. Their criticisms prompted Cohn to revise his thesis in its third edition of his book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).  “Identity” here can mean a way of life to religion, language, class or caste, culture, shared history, and even skin colour, and usually involves a combination of these things.  See further, DiTommaso, “Apocalypticism in the Contemporary World.”  The shift is a result of series of long-term changes and specific events and cannot be pinned to a specific year. But the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 mark the transition between its first and second phases.  DiTommaso, “Apocalypticism in the Contemporary World.”

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songs, role-playing games, and other media forms. The great majority of these are products of the past sixty-odd years (i.e., the six decades of the apocalyptic shift), while two-thirds are from the twenty-first century alone (i.e., the shift’s second phase).42 These are remarkable statistics, on which the history of apocalyptic popular culture and the emergence of a new pop-cultural aesthetic shed some light.

2.2 The History of Apocalyptic Popular Culture The history of modern apocalyptic popular culture can be divided into three distinct periods: pre-atomic, atomic, and post-atomic.43 The first period extends from the nineteenth century to the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945 that ended the Second World War. Apocalyptic novels, art, and films of this era are comparatively few. For the most part, they reflect the anxieties of a population that for the first time in history could imagine the traditional causes of catastrophe and social collapse – war, pestilence, the decline of civilisation – in secular terms and as the result of human activity rather than the divine hand. As Henry Adams observed in 1907, the world of science and steam created a “power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, [and] made the world irritable, nervous, querulous and afraid.”44 The second period corresponds to the Cold War era (1945–1989) and the settling-out decade of the 1990s. The primary source of apocalyptic anxiety here was the threat of atomic war and then the safety of nuclear weapons in the postSoviet era. This anxiety prompted the creation countless apocalyptic and postapocalyptic scenarios, the latter essentially equating to “post-atomic.” Many of

 See DiTommaso, “Apocalypticism and Popular Culture,” for the first survey (2014) and DiTommaso, “Apocalypticism in the Contemporary World,” for the update (2020). The figures in the present paper represent the most current update, conducted in January 2023. They reflect a more precise accounting of apocalyptic fiction, comic art, music and, here, video games.  On the three periods, see DiTommaso, “Apocalypticism and Popular Culture.” On apocalypticism and modern popular culture, see also “Apocalypticism in the Contemporary World,” as well as Douglas E. Cowen, “Millennium, Apocalypse, and American Popular Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism, edited by Catherine Wessinger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 611–627, and Shayna Sheinfeld, “Scenes from the End of the World in American Popular Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and American Popular Culture, edited by Dan W. Clanton, Jr., and Terry R. Clark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 201–218. There are many dozens of studies on apocalyptic popular culture as expressed in each media form, and many hundreds on specific examples of each medium.  Quoted by John Lahr, “Puzzled Puss,” London Review of Books 45.2 (19 January 2023), 3–6 at 5.

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these scenarios were fictional, but some were not, including military plans and civilian strategies for “surviving” an all-out nuclear war. As William Faulkner observed in his speech for the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, the only question that seemed to be worth asking anymore was, “When will I be blown up?” The third, current period of apocalyptic popular culture remains ongoing. Here the threat of a nuclear Armageddon has been supplanted by the anxieties of the twenty-first century: economic collapse, falling wages, civic breakdown, diminishing natural resources, global pandemics, world famine, increasing mass migrations and population displacements, religious fundamentalisms, political illiberalism and the turn to autocracies, the rising tide of nativism, and the global erosion of legal safeguards and human-rights protection.45 Overshadowing everything is the existential black hole that comes with the reality of anthropogenic climate change and environmental destruction, for which simply slowing an irreversible process is the best possible outcome.

2.3 Apocalyptic and Superflat Popular Culture An aesthetic is a set of principles that inform the work of an artist or, more broadly, a creative style or movement. The artist and critic Murakami Takashi introduced the concept of “superflat” to describe the traditionally two-dimensional nature of Japanese art and, by extension, the shallowness of modern Japanese culture.46 I expand his usage to refer to mass popular culture today as it has been shaped by the new digital communications technologies. The digital revolution is the landmark achievement of our era. By changing the information environment, these new technologies have transformed society. Popular culture has become global mass culture (above, §2.1), out of which has emerged a post-modern superflat aesthetic. As its name implies, the main characteristic of this aesthetic is its virtually limitless data horizon and corresponding lack of depth of existential meaning. This is not to say that contemporary popular culture is without meaning or that examples to the contrary are rare. But scholars tend to focus on the marquee examples in each media form, which also tend to

 The threat of nuclear war has returned somewhat with the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Thomas LaMarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), esp. 110–23.

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be the most atypical in this regard.47 Mass culture is monocultural, with all that this implies, including the junk-food appetites of its audiences, at whom the vast bulk of the 10,000-plus apocalyptic films, novels, television series, comic art, and video games is aimed.48 As it applies to apocalyptic speculation, the superflat aesthetic reflects the capacity of individuals to instantaneously find (and use or cite) apocalyptic material from a historical range of examples on the Internet. The ability to select material and blend it for one’s purposes encourages the syncretistic re-interpretations of religious images and expectations that might be far removed from their traditional associations. In sum, contemporary popular culture, including its post/ apocalyptic forms, tends to be syncretic, synthetic, and superflat. A good illustration is the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.49 Its episodes are replete with religious symbols and language that are drawn from a host of religious and secular traditions. Together, they acquire an apocalyptic valence through the anime’s plot and purpose, which foreshadows the imminent end of humanity’s current state. The synthetic quality of superflat apocalyptic, however, does not imply a lack of meaning. Despite their frequently monocultural shallowness, superflat media offers as much in the way of existential meaning to its audiences as the biblical Revelation of John once did (and still does) to theirs.

2.4 Summary The new digital communications technologies have transformed every aspect of society in the twenty-first century, including popular culture. These technologies are the primary catalyst for the emergence of the modern video game and a major factor in the development of post-industrial mass culture of which video gaming and the gaming lifestyle are part. Even so, the digital revolution does not in itself account for the popularity of the post-apocalyptic type of game in terms of its numbers or the wide diversity of its settings (below, §3.1). More illuminating is the evidence of the broader social and historical trends and their intersection. Mapping the contemporary “apocalyptic shift” against the history of apocalyptic popular culture in the modern era reveals a striking corre-

 See, with reference to video games specifically, my observations in “A Bibliography of Critical Scholarship.”  This evaluation might seem overly harsh and even judgmental, but all the evidence supports it. One obvious indicator is the universal popularity of superhero films among those aged six to sixty.  Dir. Anno Hideaki, 1995–96.

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spondence: the second phase of the shift (§2.1) overlaps with the third period of modern apocalyptic popular culture (§2.2), and both are features of the twentyfirst century. The evidence is clear. Since 2001, apocalyptic thinking has moved steadily from the margins of society to the mainstream. This movement is a reaction to the ever-increasing deterioration of the state of the world and the growing conviction about the ever-diminishing prospects of human action to arrest it. One manifestation of the new Zeitgeist is an obvious spike in the numbers and diversity of post/apocalyptic scenarios in popular culture.50

3 Post-Apocalyptic Video Games and the Frontier Apocalypse As noted, the post-apocalyptic setting dominates contemporary apocalyptic popular culture, especially in video games. Several reasons may be tendered, although none explains the phenomenon satisfactorily. In this sub-section I propose another, complimentary explanation for the setting’s appeal and its prevalence in video games, one that considers it in terms of the “frontier apocalypse.” My argument builds on Brian Aldiss’s idea of a cozy catastr