AdVenture Capitalist
Game
Documents about AdVenture Capitalist
Whitepaper3 pages
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.
- Ruffino argues that the dominant approaches to games and the Anthropocene, the instrumental (games as tools for pro-environmental behaviour) and the representational (games depicting nature), share an unexamined assumption that ecological messages scale up through repeated exposure to shift player behaviour at population level.
- The paper contends this scalability paradigm offers false reassurance that the climate crisis is being addressed through games, when it may not be.
- Drawing on Anna Tsing's non-scalability and friction, Timothy Morton's hyperobjects and subscendence, and Joanna Zylinska's minimal ethics of the Anthropocene, the author proposes studying meaningful game engagement as situated, contradictory encounters that resist aggregation into unified political messages.
DiGRAJun 2026
Presentation3 pages
Non-Human Gaming: Video Games for the Post-Anthropocene
The document explores the concept of "Non-Human Gaming" as a response to the impending Post-Anthropocene era, characterized by the potential mass extinction of human life due to environmental degradation.
- Dr Paolo Ruffino's DiGRA 2018 extended abstract argues that games designed to play themselves or run with minimal human involvement form a long-standing presence in the medium, which he terms Non-Human Gaming rather than an anomaly or passing fashion.
- The paper frames Non-Human Gaming as a response to anxieties about a possible mass extinction and a coming Post-Anthropocene, and claims existing game studies frameworks built around human agency, interactivity, and skill have largely failed to address it.
- Examples cited include idle games such as Cookie Clicker and AdVenture Capitalist that progress after minimal input, No Man's Sky's algorithmically generated environments, and Screeps, where players program AI agents that act for them while offline.
DiGRAJan 2018
Whitepaper2 pages
Progress Wars: Idle Games and the Demarcation of "Real" Games
This paper examines how idle games have influenced and redefined the social construct of what constitutes a "real" game.
- The paper argues that the category of "real" games is not a natural given but is actively produced through contested practices of designers, players, and critics, drawing on social constructivist views of games.
- Idle games began as parody: titles like Progress Quest (2002), StatBuilder Classic (2008), Progress Wars (2010), and Godville (2010) used reductio ad absurdum on RPG grinding mechanics to argue such progress involved no real skill.
- Ian Bogost's satirical Cow Clicker (2006) unexpectedly became hugely popular, revealing an absorptive "being in the zone" appeal that its critical intent had not anticipated.
DiGRAJan 2016
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