As survival of the Anthropocene increasingly preoccupies our worldview, depictions of the utopian in popular culture have waned. Global disasters of uncertain origins, taking the form of everything from sudden blindness to sound-hounding mutants, have saturated our screens. This has left little room for idyllic (and far less lucrative) visions of a future in which we coexist with one another, our creations, and the ecosystem. One of the few remaining respites from this plague fatigue has been found in games.
As they are typically conceived, games present players with a rendering of an ideal state of being. Within games, choices are significant, with all leading to a fulfilling conclusion. Justice is doled out equitably, all jobs are rewarded with good pay, and any chaos found is discretely rooted in predictable prefabrication. Even though many of the virtual environments we play in suffer from uncannily familiar calamity, games have brought relief...
University of California Press