There’s been a huge surge in immersive videogames in modern times. As gaming has grown in popularity through the twenty-first century to the point where it is arguably the most vibrant and widespread form of popular culture, the games that have enjoyed the greatest success have been ones that create a 3D world in which players explore and engage with their virtual environments. The world’s biggest-selling single game, Minecraft, has sold 200 million copies since 2011, and it is all environment, a virtual space in which first-person-point-of-view players dig, build, explore and fight other players. Other immersive game franchises have earned staggering sums of money: the Call of Duty series (several of which are set in explorable Second World War worlds, although later games have been set in other historical periods) has earned $17 billion globally. And the World of Warcraft games, in which you explore a high fantasy world with other players, has earned $10 billion and generated successful spin-off TV shows and movies.
The core logic of these games is that the world and everything in it is a means to an end, and you should always treat it like that. And it is this attitude, reified into a system of real-world belief, that is fuelling the ongoing climate catastrophe through which we are living.
A few years ago, the English novelist Will Self ‘hung out’ with his teenage son as he played a series of video games, in an attempt to bond with him, including Skyrim, in which players explore a fantasy world, acquiring items and weapons, killing monsters and fighting other players:
Eventually, once we had defeated various frost trolls and sex-changing lizard men, and reached Windhelm, it transpired that my son had built a gabled house in this Arctic community, and even acquired a wife. ‘My wife is a very nice lady,’ he told me, as a rather cowed-looking figure in a rough woollen dress shuffled about in the background. ‘She runs a store and gives me money every few days.’ ‘Oh, really,’ I said, desperate to clutch at these straws of domesticity. ‘And what’s your wife’s name?’ Without pausing in the ceaseless toggling of thumb-on-lever he said: ‘I don’t know.’*
That last exchange, and its hilarious pay-off, gets to the heart of the matter: video games are based on the idea that everything and everybody is a resource for you to exploit in the furtherance of your gameplay. It is good to have a wife, insofar as it leads to gameplay advantage.
The cornerstone of Immanuel Kant’s ethical philosophy is that we should always treat other people as ends in themselves rather than as merely means to an end. Terry Pratchett advances the same moral argument in his many Discworld novels. In Carpe Jugulum (1998), a character describes sin as ‘when you treat people as things. Including yourself.’ And when Immanuel Kant and Terry Pratchett agree on something, it seems to me a very good reason for thinking it true.
Video games of course have nothing directly to do with climate change (beyond the creation and use of billions of computers and the generation of the electricity to run them). But the way these games have developed is symbolic of this exploitative attitude with which we approach everything, including our planet. Climate change is a result of us treating the world as a resource that we should exploit rather than a life-support system to nurture, and often doing so in a wholly unconsidered way, as if killing it wholesale is the most natural thing in the world.
I see one contemporary narrative above all others as the most purely representative of our ongoing environmental apocalypse: the Dark Souls video game trilogy. The first volume appeared in 2011, with the second and third instalments following in 2014 and 2016.
In Dark Souls you are in charge of a character that moves around an intricately detailed, enormous, ruinous gothic fantasy world. There are many separate realms, all linked to one another, and all to varying degrees broken, collapsed, burnt out and desertified. But where other first-person adventure games ramp up excitement via a fast-paced, kinetic and often brightly coloured environment, the world of Dark Souls is relentlessly downbeat, dour and underlit. Everything is the colour of ashes and shadows. There is little by way of ambient music, although from time to time doomy orchestral music swells in the aural background. Mostly the only sound is that of your own footsteps, echoing through ruined castles or claustrophobic valleys, or the slash of weapons cutting into flesh. The visual design is extremely beautiful in a mournful, collapsed sort of way, but there is something mind-boggling about the sheer relentlessness of this imagined world – it’s a potent and often repellent mixture of the decayed and the actively ugly. When vitality bursts into the gameplay, it might be because some enemy has sprouted from a swordsman into a huge, tentacular mass of hideousness, an apotheosis of deformity. There are various storylines, but the fundamental battle concerns the question of whether to try to renew the world, or to league oneself with the Darkstalker Kaathe, let the fire that sustains humanity die out altogether and bring about a terminal Age of Dark.
It is the perfect artwork for the Anthropocene, and not just because video games have become so extraordinarily popular nowadays. Games provides players with choices, but those choices are in many ways illusions – the possible outcomes are limited to those created by the game’s designer to fit their intended story structure. In real life our options are similarly constrained – not by a ‘game designer’, but by the choices previous generations made with respect to our environment.
Nevertheless, we do still have choices available to us that can change the direction of our story. And we have proved that we are able to take decisive action when it is needed. For example: when it became apparent in the late 1970s that the ozone layer was being degraded by chlorofluorocarbons and other man-made chemicals, international cooperation led to the Montreal Protocol of 1987 restricting their use and emission. Ozone levels stabilised by the mid 1990s and began to recover in the 2000s. Similar stories can be told when it comes to endangered animal species, and rolling back the industrial pollution of rivers.* But there is a lot to do, and we as a species need to find the resolve to do what is necessary. Our fears for the future of our planet are valid. But we don’t have to accept that fate. The climate challenge can be overcome if we fully abandon our long-established extractive, exploitative attitude.
* Malthus, an Anglican clergyman as well as a social and economic theorist, believed that the disproportion between ‘hyperbolic’ population growth and ‘linear’ growth in the capacities of food production was imposed on us by God, to teach virtuous behaviour – by which he meant chastity and restraint: ‘the superior power of population,’ he wrote, can only be addressed by two things: ‘moral restraint’ or ‘vice and misery’.
* Not least in its title, which sounds like an order to add an extension to your house.
† When Harrison was writing, the population of the USA was 200 million, so this number presumably seemed terrifyingly inflated. At the time of my writing, the USA is home to 328 million people, without any signs of collapse.
* In Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (2014), George Marshall estimates that if the global temperature were to rise by 4 degrees by 2100, crops would fail across the board in Africa and ‘US production of corn, soy beans and cotton would fall by up to 82 per cent’. The 2018 IPCC report can be read here: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
* The deus ex machina, or ‘god out of the machine’, is a phrase from ancient Greek and Roman drama, where a dramatist would tie up all the loose ends of his complicated plotline by having a god lowered from a special theatrical crane (the ‘machine’) and disposing of the story with a wave of the divine hand. The climate emergency won’t be solved so simply, I fear. It will involve a lot of work, and – yes – a lot of money. We could be looking, in other words, at a ‘pay-us’ ex machina. I can’t and won’t apologise for this pun.
* https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/18/a-look-at-how-people-around-the-world-view-climate-change/
* Star Trek is almost unique, I think, in representing climate apocalypse as something that happened in the past, and which humanity overcame by colle
ctive action. Whenever the twenty-fourth-century earth is portrayed, it is a utopian blend of harmonious pastoral and urban stylings. Yet in ‘Future’s End’, a double episode of Star Trek: Voyager from 1996, a Federation starship is thrown back in time and we learn that in 2047 California was flooded due to climate change. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘True Q’ (1992), we discover that in the late twenty-first century, humanity worked together to find a scientific fix for the world-spanning tornadoes climate change had thrown up. Most famously perhaps, the whole story of the motion picture Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) concerns rescuing the last whales from extinction.
* Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days and Counting (2007).
* @GreatDismal, 25 August 2019.
† George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 2.
* Will Self, ‘Video Games’, London Review of Books, 8 November 2012: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n21/will-self/diary
* A good account of these kinds of victories is Frank M. Dunnivant’s Environmental Success Stories: Solving Major Ecological Problems and Confronting Climate Change (Columbia University Press, 2017).
EPILOGUE
THE END IS NEVER
The end of the world is ever on our minds. As we’ve seen, popular culture is busy with predictions and visions of our own demise, from religious myths to video games, from journalism to science fiction. Our fascination with the end times has created a remarkable array of apocalyptic subgenres, by turns baleful and strangely emancipatory – machine uprisings, zombie swarms, alien annihilations. Each story is revealing in its own way, but collectively they say something far more significant about humanity.
Sometimes what these stories say is quite straightforward: that the actual end of the world scares us. It’s very possible that climate change will render our planet uninhabitable, or that an asteroid will come hurtling through space to obliterate us. It’s not unreasonable to fear these things. I started this book by looking into Bayesian probability calculations that suggest that the end of the world is coming much sooner than we might think. The Doomsday Clock, created in 1947, is a representation of how close we could be to the final curtain: the threat level portrayed by the number of minutes to midnight – the moment of final catastrophe. When it was set up, that number was seven minutes; now, thanks to the escalating dangers of climate change and nuclear conflict, it is just 100 seconds. We do seem to be living through interesting times.
But is this the sort of end we mean when we’re exploring the end of the world in our storytelling? In reality, most of the ways we portray Armageddon are unlikely to come about any time soon: the gods seem unwilling or unable to destroy their creation; the sun has a few more billion years of fuel to burn; disease can be devastating – something we’re very aware of in a world shaken by Covid-19 – but not world-ending. The chance of all life being extinguished in one dramatic event seems small. It is more likely that we’ll slowly dwindle away – but then there is always something to take our place. Other people carry on when we die; other species may evolve in our place; other planets will continue to exist without Earth. Like the Eternal Return, an end comes; the end never does. Perhaps, in fact, the end of the world is not nigh. Perhaps it is never.
When it comes to the apocalypse, however, we’re not really worried about the end of the world. We’re worried about the end of our world. Individual mortality is clearly a theme that runs through apocalyptic fiction – as we’ve seen, we project our anxieties over our own death onto the world. Earlier I discussed H. G. Wells’s visions of how the world might end – the hammer blow from on high that is The War of the Worlds, and the gathering entropic gloom of the universal heat death in The Time Machine. His very last book, written decades later when he himself was an old and decrepit man, is called Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) and takes a different approach again. Barely a book, it is more like a pamphlet: thirty-four pages and eight short chapters. Written as he was dying, and published after his death, it is an unremittingly pessimistic prediction of the inevitable end of humanity.
This is easily the strangest thing Wells ever wrote. From his deathbed, he relays a sudden insight he has had that everything is approaching its end ‘within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by aeons’. Something about the cosmos has suddenly and profoundly altered: ‘There has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life, not simply human life but all self-conscious existence, has been going on since its beginning.’ If his thinking has been ‘sound’, he says, ‘then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.’ Homo sapiens is ‘played out’ – ‘The stars in their courses have turned against him and he has to give place to some other animal.’ Mind at the End of Its Tether offers no hard evidence for Wells’s strange presentiment that everything was coming to an end; it simply keeps returning to the idea that a nameless something is bringing doom. Of course, what had changed in Wells’s world was the awareness of his own imminent end.
It is something we still do today, imagining the end over and over again, in a compulsive loop of disaster clichés, as we continue to struggle collectively with the knowledge of our own inevitable deaths. And in a sense, that is the end of the world; from an individual perspective, the world only exists because we are in it. Without that perspective, the world is lost when we are.
The apocalypse is not simply a conceptualising of death, collective or individual. Which is to say, it is that, but not only that. These stories also explore our insecurities about the world and our place in it. There seem to be many precarious aspects to the situation humanity finds itself in: fragile societies that could collapse into chaos at any moment; the insignificance of our lonely planet circling one of trillions of stars in a universe that is unfathomably large; our own human nature, which so often seems set to self-destruct. Through our stories we have constructed a version of the world that gives an illusion of security – one made out of societies, laws, religions. But that world of our creation is vulnerable to change and upheaval; even though physically it might not end, those structures can, and have, come crashing down. Imagining the end of the world is an expression of our collective anxiety over life as well as death.
We use these stories to make sense of it all, to impose order on an uncaring and chaotic universe, creating the fantasy that we have some measure of understanding and control. This is not something that the universe engages in. The Big Bang is not a story – it just is (or was). Gravity and entropy do not have some grand significance beyond their existence and function. The cosmos, after all, is under no obligation to make sense to us.
Nevertheless, we look to fictions to add meaning and structure to our experience, and our storytelling tradition is based upon a linear progression: beginning, middle and end. For us to derive any meaning from the story, we have to know how it will end. For example, many people read the Bible as a linear story about the world as a whole, one with a beginning (Genesis), middle (now) and an end (Revelation). And that is also how we tend to understand our own stories: birth, life, death. Knowing how our story ends would give us the chance to consider our own lives and mortality, to make sense of our place in time and work out what is meaningful about our lives. And so stories of the end are not about a particular event, though they purport to be. They’re about how we all live all the time. The end is only the frame of our life; what matters is what that frame contains – connection, meaning, living.
One of the most fertile ideas the critic Frank Kermode floats in his influential book The Sense of an Ending is the distinction he draws between two kinds of time. One type he calls chronos, ordinary time that passes as one second per second; the other is kairos, a more transcendent and sublime kind of time. Chronos consists of all the ordinary moments with which our lives are filled but have no importance; they are routine actions that d
o not truly capture the human experience. Kairos are the points in time filled with significance that tell us who we are; the exciting and pivotal moments of our existence, charged with meaning.
We experience both chronos and kairos simultaneously, but we must live in chronos, in the normal progression of time. This can be fine, as we go about our lives, but we can come to feel that we are trapped in the tedium of the everyday. On the other hand, we are drawn to kairos – the right time, the special and magical time – but we can’t live that way twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Worse, it can be hard even discerning which are the truly important occasions in life. As in any story, their meaning is derived from their relation to the end.
But what could be more exciting and meaningful than the end itself? The ending is a key part of the story, we want to play a part in it, to be the heroes – not some insignificant character killed off prematurely. If humanity keeps on going thousands of years after our deaths, what was the point of our lives in the grander scheme of things? We are enticed by apocalypse because its arrival would make our time in the world more special. This is why people who predict the real-life end of the world place it imminently, within their own lifetime, and why most of those predictions aren’t really about the end but about times of transcendence and rebirth – capturing a moment of kairos that will last forever.
Most of us aren’t walking down the street wearing placards proclaiming the end is nigh. Instead we resort to our stories of disaster to explore our desire to escape the mundanity of life – imagining the starring role we could play, how the story of humanity unfolds, what it would be like to reduce the boredom of our everyday routines to one exciting purpose: survival. And so the reason why we are so drawn to the end, however grimly it is envisioned, is because we are tantalised by the gleam of wonder that kairos casts upon our humdrum lives.
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