Xaver Boxhammer is a PhD student and research assistant at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (LMU). He holds an M.A. from LMU (English Studies) and a second M.A. from Loughborough University (Contemporary Literature and Culture). His research is situated at the intersection of game studies, rhetoric, narratology, and apocalyptic studies. Xaver’s PhD thesis investigates pre-apocalyptic imagination in contemporary ecogames. Other research interests include queer studies, narrative in historiography, and ergodic literature.
Umurangi Generation, Photographic Framing, and the Rhetoric of Apocalyptic Anticipation in the Contemporary Ecogame
FROG 2024 – Talk
This paper sets out to question how contemporary ecogames in which the apocalypse is linked to questions of ecology function on the level of rhetoric in their depiction of the pre-apocalypse. I argue that the pre-apocalyptic in the sub-genre of “ecogames” (Op de Beke, 2024) presents a rhetorical linkage of the contemporary to potential futures of ecological collapse. Pre-apocalyptic ecogames can lay bare contemporary eco-anxieties while providing a ludic frame within which they can be thought to their logical end. In emphasising the dimension of rhetoric in video games, this paper situates itself in the tradition of Ian Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric” (2010) which highlights the persuasive potential of the interactive process of transmission between digital interface and player. Such procedural rhetoric, I argue, has the potential to shape players’ understanding of the climate crisis, both on the level of factual knowledge and affect. Thereby, this paper argues for the unique rhetoric power of the apocalyptic in the video game in discussions of ecological questions.
In order to substantiate my claims, I provide an analysis of the game Umurangi Generation (Origame Digital, 2020) and its DLC “Macro” (Origame Digital, 2020) in which the player takes on the role of a courier who photographs for the Tauranga Express in a pre-apocalyptic New Zealand. Through analysing how the game’s pre-apocalyptic narrative is interrelated with the central gameplay feature of photography, I point to the potential of the photographic lens as rhetoric tool for framing the pre-apocalypse. I argue that the game’s fail-states and win-states engender an experience in which the function of seeing and unseeing by means of photographic framing becomes paramount to the effect of apocalyptic anticipation. By allowing the player to photograph virtually anything but the actual arbiters of the apocalypse, bluebottle jellyfish, Umurangi Generation highlights the pertinence of questions of discursive inclusion and exclusion in times of crisis by means of photographic framing.
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