Laura Op de Beke

This article explores the potential of a new generation of environmental god games, or Gaia games, to engage with the ambivalent dynamic of Anthropocene temporality, a concept modelled after Nicolas Mirzoeff’s notion of Anthropocene visuality. In particular, this article highlights a trope that has become popular in god games recently: the move from map-style interfaces to the use of whole Earth images and models. This trope signals an overt and growing – although as I will point out, imperfect – engagement with planetarity: an emerging worldview that posits the planet as a world-ecology, one that imbeds both human and nonhuman forces while calling for a renewed attendance to the ethics and aesthetics of relationality. At the same time, this article also notes the perpetuation in Gaia games of generic tropes and conventions like the tech tree and expansionist gameplay. The notion of Anthropocene temporality that this article attempts to theorize helps us to think through the juxtaposition between ecological relationalityand a continued desire for expansionism and progress, as both of these play out in videogames.

Do videogames help us engage with climate change and the nonhuman timescale of the Anthropocene? Or do they reflect exactly the kind of expansionist, techno-utopian logic that got us into this crisis in the first place? Most likely, the truth is somewhere in the middle. This talk briefly introduces the potential of videogames as environmental media by focusing on the way they engage with what I call Anthropocene temporality. In particular, I highlight a trope that has become popular in so-called god games recently: the move from map-style interfaces to the use of whole Earth images and models. This trope signals an overt and growing – although as I will point out, imperfect – engagement with planetarity: an emerging worldview that posits the planet as a world-ecology, one that imbeds both human and nonhuman forces while calling for a renewed attendance to the ethics and aesthetics of relationality. At the same time, my talk will also note the perpetuation in videogames of generic tropes and conventions like the tech tree and expansionist gameplay – which run counter to their environmentalist message. In doing so they videogames stage a dynamic at the heart of Anthropocene temporality, which casts humans as geologic subjects embedded in a planetary ecology that we continuously bump up against or seek to transcend.