Entropic Temporality & Care-Based Agency in Eco-Survival Games

This paper examines how eco-survival games use entropic temporality, the experience of time as decay, scarcity, and systemic breakdown, to structure ethical play around care rather than conquest-driven mastery. It positions itself against approaches that treat morality as discrete choices within established moral frameworks, arguing instead that ethical engagement emerges from ongoing relations and the sustained maintenance of fragile worlds. Drawing on feminist ethics of care, ecofeminist thought, and Stiegler's distinction between negentropy and anti-entropy, the author develops relational position as a central analytic variable, describing how a player's role as administrator, cohabitant, cultural outsider, or solitary survivor shapes which forms of care become possible or compromised.

The study uses a triangulated methodology combining videogame formalism, playthrough poetics as a form of digital autoethnography, and community discourse analysis drawn from Let's Play videos, forums, and player discussions. Four titles form the comparative corpus: Frostpunk, This War of Mine, Green Hell, and The Long Dark. These are read as a spectrum running from administrative governance to communal co-survival, cross-cultural encounter shaped by colonial entanglements, and solitary endurance in an indifferent environment.

Across these cases, the paper identifies four modalities of care: distributive care in Frostpunk, communal care in This War of Mine, mitigative care in Green Hell, and embodied care in The Long Dark. The work claims three contributions: a theory of entropic temporality as a structural principle of ethical play, the concept of relational position as a driver of differing care practices, and a multi-method framework linking game structures to lived and communal experience. The authors conclude that survival games cultivate moral reasoning, relational responsibility, and reflexive agency through the ethics of care.