Ritual of the Moon

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.