Non-Human Gaming: Video Games for the Post-Anthropocene

Dr Paolo Ruffino's extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2018, argues that video games are increasingly designed to play themselves or to operate with limited human involvement, and that this trend, which he terms Non-Human Gaming, responds to anxieties about a possible mass extinction and a coming Post-Anthropocene. The paper's central thesis is that such games are not an anomaly or a passing fashion but a long-standing presence within the medium, one that existing game studies frameworks centred on human agency, interactivity, and skill have largely failed to address.

The author surveys a range of examples to support this claim. Idle games such as Cookie Clicker and AdVenture Capitalist continue progressing in the background after minimal initial input, No Man's Sky features algorithmically generated environments, and Screeps requires players to program AI agents that act on their behalf while they are offline. Ghost cars and the Drivatar system in Forza Motorsport, along with Ian Cheng's installation Emissaries and Ben Watanabe's Twitch streams of computer-controlled Grand Theft Auto avatars, further illustrate games that continue without people. Drawing on Sonia Fizek's work on interpassivity and on Alexander Galloway's concept of "ambience acts," the paper connects these phenomena to broader developments such as self-driving cars, algorithmic trading, and remote warfare.

The paper is conceptual and essayistic rather than empirical, offering no survey data, sample sizes, or quantitative findings. Its methodology is theoretical and interpretive, drawing on philosophy, critical theory, and existing scholarship in game studies and Anthropocene thought, including work by Haraway, Caillois, and Wark. Its scope is therefore intellectual and speculative rather than geographically or temporally bounded. The author concludes that Non-Human Gaming can help redirect game studies away from instrumentalist framings of games as tools for health, education, or self-improvement, positioning such games as "companions for earthly survival" that articulate the uncertain space between life and its possible disappearance.