Unplayable Encounters with the Anthropocene: Rethinking Scale and Agency in Game Studies

Paolo Ruffino's paper critically examines the dominant approaches to studying videogames in relation to the Anthropocene and proposes an alternative framework centred on non-scalability. The author contends that the two prevailing approaches in game studies, the instrumental (games as educational tools for pro-environmental behaviour) and the representational (games depicting nature and ecological relationships), share an unexamined assumption that ecological messages will scale up through repeated exposure to influence player behaviour at a population level. The paper argues this scalability paradigm offers false reassurance that something is being done about the climate crisis through games.

The methodology draws on Anna Tsing's concepts of non-scalability and friction, Timothy Morton's notions of hyperobjects and subscendence, and Joanna Zylinska's minimal ethics of the Anthropocene. From this vantage, the author holds that meaningful engagement with games occurs in situated, contradictory encounters that resist aggregation into unified political messages, and that individual encounters may carry more complexity than aggregate analyses of player populations reveal. The approach is illustrated through brief case studies rather than systematic data: sporadic forum comments about the incremental game AdVenture Capitalist expressing anxieties about endless accumulation, and YouTube videos attempting to "cure" Arthur Morgan's tuberculosis in Red Dead Redemption 2, which the author reads as desires to restore anthropocentric control.

The paper is a conference talk abstract and argument rather than an empirical study, so it reports no survey sizes, sample populations, or quantitative findings. Its evidence base is theoretical and qualitative, drawing on a small number of games and player artefacts. Its scope is primarily within digital game studies and ecocriticism, and it situates itself alongside recent scholarship by Backe, Nicoll, and May and Hall. The author concludes that videogames in the Anthropocene should be studied through a methodology of careful listening to contaminated diversity, abandoning claims to scalable solutions in favour of partial and sometimes uncomfortable revelations.