Maksim Podvalnyi is a lecturer at Institute of Business and Design (B&D) in Moscow. Before that he was a lecturer in cultural studies at Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH). His yet-to-be-finished dissertation is dedicated to the construction of post-apocalyptic imagery in computer role-playing games; he is currently writing a popular science book on the same topic. Apart from game studies, his research interests include gender studies, semiotics, and theory of literature.
Post-apocalyptic societies of scarcity: the case of “Legacy: Life Among the Ruins”
FROG 2024 – Talk
Post-apocalyptic settings can serve many artistic purposes: from hosting grotesque westerns [5] to creating spaces of absolute negative freedom [9] or spaces of exploration or wandering [6]. But post-apocalyptic settings have another important property: they present the idea of deficit/scarcity in one of the best possible ways. The most obvious part is that they are abundant with imagery of scarcity: the ruins [12] gape with unwritten stories of their demise while megalopoli and machines cry of disanthropy [4]. On a narrative level, the scarcity of post-apocalypse is presented through absurdly brutal challenges the remnants of humanity face: while a primordial savage of real history might have lived in a society of plenty [1], feral humanity of the post-apocalypse lives in the state of permanent scarcity, for they are heirs to the needs created by the ancestors, but not to the means of satisfying these needs.
In games, however, this scarcity can be not only represented but experienced and thus utilized for modeling situations of scarcity [7, 8]. A case in point would be TTRPG “Legacy: life among the ruins” which has deficiencies (or “needs” in in-game terms) and surpluses of various resources (both material like weapons and abstract like morale) as core narrative-mechanical devices. This game is interesting in that it straightforwardly makes scarcity its main topic: unlike D&D, WHFB or many other “old school” RPGs, the rules of “Legacy…” don’t make players count anything (money, loadout weight, etc.) – instead they tell whether we get a surplus or a deficit of something and prompts us how to act upon it. As a result, the gameplay largely revolves around role-playing the state of being in a need of something and trying to make up for the lack. This presentation aims to analyze how mechanics that simulate scarcity are used for construction of post-apocalyptic narratives from a semiotic perspective [10,11], using “Legacy…” as the main example.
Bibliography
1. Baudrillard, J. (1970) The Consumer Society
2. Dashiell, S. (2017) Rules Lawyering As Symbolic And Linguistic Capital.
3. Dashiell, S. (2018) Rules As Written: Game Algorithms As Game Capital
4. Garrard, G. (2012). Worlds without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy” // SubStance 41, no.1.
5. Gurr, B. (2015) Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film
6. Kagen, M. (2022). Wandering games
7. Kelly, S. and Nardi, B. (2014) Playing with sustainability: Using video games to simulate futures of scarcity
8. Makai, P.K. (2024) Do You Want to Set the World on Fire? Amplifying Player Agency to Demonstrate Alternatives to the Climate Crisis // Ecogames.
9. Podwalny, M. (2017) Budowa apokalipsy w jednym kraju // EKRANy
10. Подвальный, М. (2020) Консенсус и власть в настольных ролевых играх
[Podvalnyi, M. (2020) Consensus And Power In Tabletop Role-Playing Games]
11. Подвальный, М. (2020) Границы видеоигры как художественного произведения
[Podvalnyi, M. (2020) The Boundaries Of A Video Game As A Work Of Art]
12. Vella, D. (2010). Virtually In Ruins: The Imagery and Spaces of Ruin in Digital Games
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