Certainly in the past we’ve never been that good at looking after the world around us. We’ve taken our planet for granted, and in doing so, in focusing on our immediate needs and self-interest, we allowed some of our worst traits to run rampant. We are used to exploiting our planet and its resources. It has become second nature to put ourselves first without thinking of the longer-term consequences, stretching back to the days when our ancestors hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction. But it is a modern invention that best encapsulates this attitude: videogames. Fictional worlds where there are no consequences, where nothing matters, and everything exists to serve the player.
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
