Death, Culture & Leisure

Playing Dead

Matt Coward-Gibbs, Matt Coward-Gibbs

• Verlag: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839090394
• Thema: Scienze sociali
• Thema: Morte in sociologia

Death consumes our lives. As such, it is unsurprising that our leisure time, recreational activities and playful exploits are also infatuated with dying, death and the dead. Death, Culture and Leisure offers a playful exploration of the way in which we play with both death and the dead. This inter- and multi-disciplinary work brings together a variety of scholars to consider the nexuses that exist between death, culture and leisure. Edited by Matt Coward-Gibbs, this collection provides an exploration of how our leisure time and playful exploits are interwoven with death. Embracing an array of tensions and contradictions, this book draws on a diverse trajectory of examples ranging from play in the post-Anthropocene to the articulate undead, and from the depictions of death in children's picture books to the playful activism of the death positivity movement. Bringing together debates from thanatology, game studies, sociology, music studies, theatre studies, contemporary literature, religious studies and media studies, this innovative collection offers up a rich assemblage of interdisciplinary voices. This text invites readers to not only consider the diverse ways in which we play dead but also invokes a call to explore the myriad of presentations of death, dying and disposal that exist in leisure environs.

Part 1

Playing with Understandings

Chapter 1

Nonhuman Games: Playing in the Post-Anthropocene

Paolo Ruffino

Abstract

This chapter explores what video games can teach us in light of the ongoing sixth mass extinction in the history of our planet, allegedly caused by global warming and the over-consumption of vital resources. Games made and played by nonhuman actors can shed light on the situatedness and partiality of our knowledge regarding the boundaries that separate and differentiate human and nonhuman, interactivity and passivity, entertainment and boredom, and life and death. Nonhuman games help us to articulate the space and time in-between these dualisms and have the potential to re-route gaming (and game studies) from false myths of agency, interactivity, and instrumentalism, and the masculinism inherent in these notions. Nonhuman games are companions for earthly survival, and as such they can be taken as useful references when considering a more ethical approach to the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene. The chapter investigates notions of posthumanism, interpassivity, and contemporary critiques of the early assumptions of game studies on the agency of human players. It looks at video games that play by themselves, idle and incremental games, and the emergence of nonplaying characters in ludic and open-world simulations. It explores forms of automatic play and the use of bots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in online role-playing games, procedurally generated virtual environments, and games that far exceed the lifespan of their players.

Keywords: Anthropocene; sixth mass extinction; nonhuman; posthuman; agency; interpassivity

Let’s Start from the End

Animal species across the planet are extinguishing at a much faster pace than what would normally be expected in a transitionary period of biodiversity loss (Ceballos et al., 2017), an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported. This publication confirmed the outcomes of previous studies on the alleged sixth mass extinction (Kendall, 1992; Ripple et al., 2017). The causes have been identified in global warming: the melting of permafrost and the rise of temperatures across the globe have been affecting the life of numerous species. The over-consumption of resources by the human population, which in its own turn is raising to an expected figure of 10 billion (Dorling, 2013), has been catastrophic for biodiversity. Guy McPherson, a scientist from University of Arizona, has been claiming throughout his career that the effects of human intervention are now irreversible, and we should expect life to disappear from Earth by 2030 (Curry, 2013). The prediction would be consistent with the outcomes of the previous mass extinctions that our planet has seen in its history, which annihilated 75%–95% of biological forms in each round. McPherson’s predictions have still not manifested in their full extent, but he has become a popular reference in the age of social media when his interviews were published on YouTube: a sign of the growing interest and preoccupation for global warming. In a shorter term, a recent United Nations report has confirmed that up to a million species are at risk of disappearing within the next decade (United Nations, 2019), a pace of extinction that is ‘tens to hundreds times higher than it has been, on average, over the last 10 million years’ (BBC, 2019).

These are only some of the implications of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch characterised by the long-lasting impact of the human species on Earth. Theorised by scientists Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen in early 2000, the Anthropocene is now a widely accepted term to identify the geological impact that we are both causing and witnessing as a species. The Anthropocene has gathered the attention of scholars from different fields, extending far beyond geology and biology. The gesture of naming the present time as defined by our own presence is anthropocentric, but it has the contradictory effect of putting our species at the centre of its own failure. It is self-congratulatory (we have made an impact that will last after our departure) and humiliating (we might not last to see those effects). It attributes potestas (power) to humankind, the power to subjugate life and matter, while denying potentia to alter its own destiny and generate new futures. Within the same gesture, it acknowledges that human beings have the capacity to inscribe on the surface of planet Earth long-lasting signs of their presence, and it deprives our species (particularly in its most apocalyptic versions) of any significant agency. If there is an Anthropocene in the history of our planet, then there must also be a post-Anthropocene, in which humans will no longer play a significant role or might be completely absent.

This chapter explores how video games could help us re-think the meaning and value of our time on planet Earth, soliciting an ecological thought and a different understanding of the conflictual and contradictory condition prefigured by the notion of the Anthropocene. The chapter will look at how some recent video games have complicated the relation between a gamer and a game, decentring the human and occasionally making humanity completely redundant. At the same time, these ludic texts force us to rethink the boundaries of our self and how we participate in our surroundings, bringing to the fore new perspectives on the meaning of entertainment and boredom, interactivity and passivity, and life and death. Posthuman thought can help us understand how to play these games, as they shift the boundary between our bodies and the machine, the human and nonhuman (Braidotti, 2013). It is worth exploring these games as they provide alternative modes of thinking about the meaning of being human, and offer insights on how to live better in the time we have left. Better does not necessarily mean that they can provide a solution, a fixing, to the wrongdoings of humankind, but they could suggest different ways of enjoying the present time. As I would like to argue, these video games might appear minimal and almost insignificant in light of the catastrophic effects of the Anthropocene. However, it is their marginality within the larger picture that makes them useful and relevant for our struggles.

Boys’ Tools

Discourses around the Anthropocene often include a technological solution. The Canadian company Carbon Engineering (https://carbonengineering.com), for instance, has been promoting a carbon removal technology that ‘hoovers’ carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere, and could potentially decrease the amount of carbon emission in a relatively short time. Welcomed as an immediately effective fix to climate change, it exemplifies the conservativism inherent in the technological solutionism that lies at the root of the problem. As such, it does not solve the systemic contradictions that caused global warming in the first place. More specifically, the tools invented by Carbon Engineering include the Air to Fuels technology, which transforms CO₂ in synthetic fuels to be used on already existing cars, aeroplanes, and other transportation vehicles. It is a patch, to borrow a term from software engineering, that can be installed without changing the available infrastructure and the industry that supports it.¹ In this view, neoliberal capitalism can continue in its friction-less growth as it repairs its own mistakes. More problematically, the application of Carbon Engineering’s large scale hoovers (known as Direct Air Capture technology) is expected to work on a planetary scale, but its effects have been based so far on computer simulations. As argued by Anderson and Peters (2016), relying on these predictions without first seeing the results of its applications would be a ‘high-stakes gamble’, which risks locking the planet in a high-temperature pathway if it is not immediately verified. As the authors observe, the presence of these prototypes has already produced the negative effect of delaying political action, as their efficacy has already been taken for granted despite being so far only theoretical.

The Anthropocene and its solutions share a masculinist excess of confidence that aims to control both the present and the future by betting on the effects of new products and technologies. In this view, the ecological crisis is resolved recurring to scalable solutions: a CO₂ hoover produced in Canada should be copy-pasted in other regions of the world and is expected to reproduce the same results everywhere it is applied (around 10,000 of these need to be installed to eliminate CO₂, Carbon Engineering has estimated). The imaginary that sees the Anthropocene as being the same everywhere, resolvable with the same trick, and equally affecting every living species, serves to reduce particularisms and frictions. The same approach is visible in the news articles on climate change that take great visibility on social media feeds. These often include in their title a year of no-return, an ultimate deadline after which life will be obliterated from Earth. It is easy to imagine that similar ‘expiry dates’ will not work as imagined in the narratives of these press releases, even in the most apocalyptic scenario. The disappearance of life from Earth is more likely to be made of molecular events, many of which are already happening, despite being almost invisible. The disappearance of bees and the melting of permafrost are slow and nonspectacular effects of global warming that do not occur at a precise place and time. The Syrian political crisis of 2011 that brought more than 6 million people to migrate is primarily an ecological crisis, as it was induced by the desertification of the region which made access to freshwater harder for the inhabitants (Gleick, 2014). The Anthropocene highlights the numerous frictions and inequalities that take place around, over, and below the surface of the planet, and how these are often out of reach of our limited and situated experience.

Technological solutionism and its inherent masculinism are too confident in their own possibilities. As Joanna Zylinska (2014, 77–88) argues, in these times of crisis we need a minimal ethics for the Anthropocene: a philosophy of life that makes of its vagueness and openness a critical premise. Embracing this mode of thinking involves, as she puts it via the work of Darin Barney (2013), a post-masculinist courage: the courage to face uncertainty and the unpredictable without trying to control it with instrumentalism and rationality – two concepts that video game culture knows a great deal about.

Posthuman Games

The connections between the Anthropocene and video game culture are manifold. Instrumentalism, rationality, and masculinism take a dominant position in both discursive fields. Making and playing video games, as much as naming and trying to fix the Anthropoc...