Dawn of Machinic Cyclicality: Life as We Don’t Know

Alexandre Paquet's essay uses the video game Horizon: Zero Dawn as a theoretical text to challenge linear, apocalyptic conceptions of time and human dominance over nature. Drawing on Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Donna Haraway's Chthulucene discourses, the analysis argues that the game moves beyond human/nature dualism toward a model of cyclical renewal grounded in multispecies entanglement. It positions the game's depiction of coexisting premodern tribal communities, dinosaur-like machines, and a fragile ecological balance as central to its theoretical interest, and it contends that earlier scholarship limited the work's potential by focusing too narrowly on its relationship to William Gibson.

The paper's core analytical move centers on the game's "post-post-apocalyptic" setting. The Zero Dawn project, in which the AI GAIA plans to reseed life after a robot-driven ecological collapse, serves as the paper's principal example of cyclical renewal. Here the essay reframes the end of humanity not as finality but as a recurring process, supported by Anna Tsing's concept of resurgence within capitalist ruins and Fernand Braudel's notion of the longue durée. Time in the game is presented as malleable and shaped by agency, suggesting that endings can become new beginnings through interdependent collectives of human, nonhuman, and machine life.

The essay also attends to the game's design, including its varied landscapes, open-world exploration, and the Focus device, which the author reads as reinforcing the narrative's emphasis on entangled relationships. Although the paper notes that the game's landscape design reflects on-site research and technological constraints, it treats the production process as outside its primary scope. The analysis is thus concentrated on the textual and conceptual dimensions of a single game, and its conclusions are offered as an interpretive contribution to ecocritical and posthumanist discussions of game narrative rather than as an empirical study of the industry.