Videogames enjoy a privileged relationship with futurity. No other media formats ‘have the same kind of relationship [with] pure, speculative desire that games do’ writes Cameron Kunzelman in Vice. Their affinity with science fiction technologies. Other arguments about the relationship between futurity and videogames argue that something more fundamental is at play, owing specifically to the kind of reversible, branching temporality engendered in videogames. I call this temporality procedural futurism, using a term modelled after Ian Bogost’s notion of procedural rhetoric, to highlight a kind of if/then thinking that is at work in videogames. For Bogost, the constraints and pathways of videogame procedures contain arguments about how the world is, or should, work.
View More Procedural Futurism in Climate Change VideogamesAuthor: Laura op de Beke
Laura op de Beke (www.lauraopdebeke.com) is a PhD fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her work is part of a project called Lifetimes – A Natural History of the Present. Her contribution looks at Anthropocene temporalities in videogames, which manifest as temporal affects: for instance anxiety over the future, petro-melancholia, a preoccupation with death, failure and extinction, as well as technofuturistic hope. Her other interests include science fiction, green media studies, veganism, LARP, and the environmental humanities more broadly. Laura is also the founder and co-convenor of the online reading group un-earthed (www.un-earthed.group.com).