Pandemics and PhDs
My name is Megan Rose O’Kane, and I have been studying Geography at QUB since 2012, back when I started my undergraduate degree. I have had a relatively bumpy ride and taken time off here and there for my mental health – but I’ve always returned to my studies. At the time of writing, I’m a final year NINE-DTP funded PhD student frantically compiling my thesis research into a semi-coherent body of work. My PhD journey began in 2017 and has been a much longer process than initially anticipated for various reasons, the most significant being a certain…unprecedented global health event. While the COVID-19 pandemic was (and continues to be) a disruptive force for many of us, lockdown gave me some much needed time to re-evaluate and reshape my thesis in the wake of a rapidly changing world.
My PhD research itself largely deals with digital geographies, specifically the representation of apocalypse in videogame landscapes – and rather ironically, during the pandemic it was videogames that became an essential means of escapism from a physical reality that at times felt like the end of the world. Whether it was quizzes with co-workers on Zoom or visiting friends’ islands on Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020) as seen in Figure 1, the act of play became a crucial means of maintaining some semblance of sociability during a period marred by government mandated isolation. As someone who always believed videogames were deserving of academic attention beyond their supposed propensity to inspire violence, is was the COVID-19 pandemic that – for me personally – really revealed how meaningful the digital world and the affective experiences we have within them really are.
Why Study the Contemporary Apocalyptic Imagination?
My PhD research aims to explore some of the most prominent depictions of apocalypse in videogames and understand what these speculative visions reveal about the human condition. While the term ‘apocalypse’ is historically associated with religiosity, and is commonly presented as a single, divine, catastrophic event across Christian and Muslim eschatological traditions, my research deals with a more contemporary, post-structuralist conceptualisation of the apocalypse. My understanding of the apocalypse is that of a gradual, meandering process that is constantly being made, unmade, and remade – one that can be ameliorated or accelerated from one moment to the next, and is dependent on tangible, human-made interventions on Earth – be those economic, political, environmental, and so on. In rejecting the metaphysical pessimism of theistic fatalism and religious apocalypticism, the idea of an omnipresent, anthropogenic, secular apocalypse not only holds humanity responsible for the wellbeing of the planet and all life therein, but also empowers us with the agency to avert the all-encompassing doomsday event that the word ‘apocalypse’ usually implies. The apocalypse is everywhere, and it happens every day; every time a civilian is killed in war, every time another goofy looking frog species goes extinct because of habitat destruction, every time a scientific study is published showing the presence of micro-plastics somewhere they shouldn’t be, and as my research intends to show – every time we turn on our favourite gaming consoles (Figure 2).
The secular apocalyptic imagination is best showcased by the ever-expanding repertoire of doomsday iterations known as, the post-apocalyptic fiction genre. As today’s society continuously contorts itself in the attainment of vague notion of ‘progress’ – so too does our ever-evolving creative capacity to conceive of new, inventive ways for the world to cannibalise itself. The speculative, dystopic fictions encountered in popular media reflect very real contemporaneous anxieties, from Japanese post-war fears of radiation as seen in the classic horror film Godzilla (1954), to more prescient concerns regarding the use of artificial intelligence in emergent military defence technologies presented in the sci-fi adventure RPG Horizon Zero Dawn (2017). My chosen medium for apocalyptic inquiry is that of videogames, so the case studies I draw upon include examples such as the latter.
Play as Methodology
Doing a PhD is basically just repeating some variation of the same thesis synopsis over and over again, mostly to people who only ever asked to be polite. It is a well-choreographed routine, and the part where I describe my methodology and means of data collection is usually the bit that gets laughs – which I do not mind! This widespread attitude just proves exactly why it needs to be done. Games have always attracted political, academic, and even medical ire – from the 1940s pinball prohibition in New York City, to the recent addition of ‘gaming disorder’ to the World Health Organisation’s 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). Unsurprisingly, this enduring stigma has stunted the academic acceptance of ludic research, playful methods, and other game-adjacent studies. To this day, the most widely cited instances of videogame research have been conducted almost exclusively by senior academics with generational prejudices, who proudly abstain from playing the very games they dedicate their careers to denouncing – to the frustration of many youths, new media scholars, and game developers (Figure 3). I think we should all be laughing at those guys for their dodgy methodologies, not me!
Despite all this, attitudes are changing – the act of playing games is now considered crucial in the cognitive, emotional, and intellectual development of juveniles, and is recognised as a powerful tool for heuristic learning in both children and adult populations. Videogames, toys, and other so-called ‘playthings’ can no longer be dismissed as mere frivolous pastimes, and are deserving of meaningful, unbiased, academic attention. Furthermore, I believe that not only should the performance of play and playthings be the focus of more research but play itself should be used more as a method for conducting research. After all, how else can I fully experience the apocalyptic worlds of contemporary videogames?
Becoming the Post-Apocalyptic Player-Ethnographer
The only way I can truly immerse myself in the ruinous landscapes of digital dystopia is by playing them. And this isn’t such an outrageous idea – the role of the ethnographer and the player are increasingly theorised as being one and the same, with the term ‘player-ethnographer’ recently entering the creative digital qualitative research method lexicon. Not unlike the traditional travel writer, I traverse worlds estranged from my own, and document my observations and encounters within them. These distant lands, from the irradiated nuclear wastes of Fallout 4 (2015) to the hyper capitalist space colonies of Outer Worlds (2019), just so happen to exist in the realm of the virtual rather than the physical. Formally, my work can be categorised as critical auto/ethnography, but it’s more fun to think of it as a kind of videogame travel memoir – one where I have three clear questions in mind:
In what ways do the apocalyptic representations in videogames extrapolate upon the unique anxieties of the 21st century?
How do the narratives differ between AAA and indie videogames, and whose apocalyptic realities are omitted – if any?
What are the affective impacts and potentials of playing the apocalypse?
To answer the first question, I use a reimagined ‘four horsemen’ approach to guide my analysis; Instead of war, famine, disease, and pestilence, the riders that guide my thematic deconstruction of contemporary cataclysm are a) the military-industrial complex, b) environmental crisis, c) capitalist economy, and d) disinformation technologies. While each of these issues are intrinsically connected and cannot be understood independently of the other – these are the core concepts that will guide my study. My second thesis question is a comparative study where I compare popular, big budget videogames with those created by small developers, and assess where their apocalyptic imaginations converge and deviate – for example, in the environmental dystopias of Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) and Disco Elysium (2019), does one favour shocking visuals of ecological decline (see Figure 4) over more coherent narratives on themes like climate injustice? And finally, what does it mean to actively participate in and interact with these stories via the medium of the videogame, as opposed to the passive, one-sided engagement associated with more traditional media, i.e. films, novels, and radio dramas. I hope to demonstrate that play, specifically that of transgressive play (or non/unfun play), wherein the player experiences a spectrum of conflicting affect – stress, relief, guilt, joy, grief – has the potential to be a powerful, if not transformative tool in enabling humanity to meaningfully encounter their apocalyptic becomings, and confront the consequences of their actions – in both the digital world and beyond.
Unfortunately, the contemporary landscape of videogame research is still impacted by the influx of violent videogame studies that emerged in the wake of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, where the ensuing media frenzy saw the first-person shooter franchise Doom bear the brunt of the blame for the tragedy – and arguably act as strategic scapegoat in deflecting attention from more entrenched socio-political issues in America: far-right domestic terrorism, international war and conflict, gun control and regulation, and inaccessible healthcare, to name a few. Consequently, a significant portion of new videogame scholarship today is fixated on rectifying these problematic publications of the past. This preoccupation with dis/proving that videogames cause real-world aggression has resulted in what Etchells (2019:150) has aptly described as an abundance of ‘polarising, simplistic, all-good or all-bad dichotomies that completely miss the important questions we should be asking’. I hope that my research asks some of those questions, and answers a few of them too. We will just have to see how it plays out.
Reference
Etchells, P. (2019) Lost in a good game: Why we play video games and what they can do for us (Icon Books).
