Chapter 5, Collapse:

Success and Failure States?

• On failure, see:
• Jack Halbertam, queer theorist
• "failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood
• reorientation of queer negativity from sunny, normative aspects of mainstream queer culture, through a more generous understanding of failure
• see also: Pleasure Activism
• interesting in relation to community crowd play experiments/interactions and the impossibility of maintaining states of anarchy when failed with failure states, either periodic or proximate/local
• periodic being restart of game
• proximate/local being the ledge or the Safari maze in Twitch Plays Pokemon
• Jesper Juul, games scholar
• relation to community crowd play and the impossibility of failure states?
• Destructibility ratings (ability to visit destruction upon something is an index of how sandboxy a game is)
• "I conflate the physical and moral senses of the term collapse in part because games also do so"
• Seeing Failure and Collapse as two points on a spectrum, typically
• Failure = personal
• Collapse = systemic
• environmental failure can be a link between collective action or inaction and cascading organizational faults in natural and human-made disasters

On the urgency and temporal/historical location of collapse studies:

• "In fact, despite its name and place in the order of things, this final chapter is not so much about endings as it is about beginnings, or how we make a start in the face of looming or already elapsed calamities. We will therefore need to distinguish carefully between varieties of apocalyptic imaginings, as some envision futures in which humans are noticeably absent, while others pin their hopes on a small number of survivors. It will also be necessary to consider how different cultural forms constrain what environmental changes may be presented."
• Games that present the player(s) with a world with far fewer humans often invite religious interpretation

World-breaking in Games

• The cataclysm change (expansion) in World of Warcraft
• {{[[video]]: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfN_0McrBEk}}
• PvP v PvE (Player versus Player or Player versus Environment)
• environment-as-utility-belt
• "One final distinction that World of Warcraft helpfully exemplifies is that between two characteristic modes of play: PvP, short for player versus player, and PvE, or player versus environment. This terminology probably arose with early multiplayer online games,18 and nowadays it is standard practice for MMOGs to offer predominantly PvE servers or shards and just a few PvP ones that cater to subscribers looking for less restricted player-killing. Essentially, in PvE, a player need not worry about being ambushed, ignominiously killed (“ganked”), or otherwise griefed by other players, although they share the game world. Apart from designated PvP areas or contests, the focus is on completing game objectives and progressing against nonplayer characters, for instance, by slaying monsters. In PvP, the same game objectives still exist, but the threat or thrill of player persecution adds greater risk to one’s experience. While this jargon applies only hazily to other kinds of games (Is Scrabble PvP? Are all single-player games PvE, even ones that feature an AI opponent?), I am consistently struck by how the label “player versus environment” stands in for a more congenial and collaborative form of play, despite the stark pitting of human players against practically everything else. For me, being conversant with the term does not prevent it from conjuring a comical vision of games as X-Men-style danger rooms in which players square off against convincing computer-generated scenery. In other words, PvE rhetoric unintentionally glorifies solo and social play at the expense of a more robust notion of game environments, in a ludic instantiation of the old proverb that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.Yet historically speaking, PvE was the de facto mode of most computer and console gaming before networked online play became commonplace. At its crudest, the PvE mindset manifests every time a game encourages a player to mindlessly shoot open a box, bash a barrel to smithereens, or otherwise demolish probable containers to get at what’s inside, usually money, weapons, or useful supplies. Loot crates and conspicuous vases are, of course, a flimsy narrative pretext for player augmentation, and this environment-as-utility-belt mentality (or Heideggerian vorhandenheit and zuhandenheit, if you prefer) is, as I have already argued in earlier chapters, common to the normative view of games as vehicles for player progress.19 Today, however, PvE has assumed a new and even more disturbing form, through its metonym, destructibility. There are obviously many other ways to interact with or take notice of game environments, but depressingly, game reviews now celebrate the “environmental destructibility” level of titles, regularly assembling “top-x” lists of such games as Far Cry 2 (2008) and Battlefield: Bad Company (2008) because in one, you can start brush fires, and in the other, you can demolish buildings. Back in 2011, one writer had ventured to diagnose “a general lack of satisfaction beginning to creep in with the humble FPS. Blowing people up is no longer enough; players who want to vent frustration need to be able to blow stuff up as well.”20 But by 2014, another returned from the industry showcase E3 satisfied that “environmental destruction has come a long way in gaming.”21 Scenic havoc had apparently reached its pinnacle in Battlefield 4’s “levolution” mechanic, which allowed players to trigger map-altering events like a dam bursting, skyscraper collapsing, or gas line exploding, given enough ammunition or incendiary material. Advertised by developer EA DICE as “breath-taking game-changers,”22 these levolution events at the least primed players to approach game maps as potentially modifiable. Upon the game’s release in 2013, players rushed to determine how to bring about the levolution event on each map, although not all of them granted strategic advantage—some open up different paths for infantry or change lines of sight, but others seem to be included purely for show. Perhaps the most dramatic occurs on the map helpfully entitled “Flood Zone,” where players can breach a levee and turn the Chinese urban scene into a watery tableau, necessitating boats instead of land vehicles and engagement via canal and rooftop rather than the streets.A generous environmental reading of levolution might praise the mechanic for introducing a more improvisational style of play to the first-person shooter and encouraging players to take greater account of the game’s terrain, insofar as that could yield advantages or an extravagant show. However, I remain skeptical about these extreme forms of PvE, or player versus environment, gaming.What we truly need are games where the player is in, of, or with the environment. As the Battlefield 4 example demonstrates, environmental destructibility often goes hand in hand with armed conflict, just as collapse usually follows both social and ecological states of exception. In Battlefield 4, sites formerly designated for civic, commercial, scientific, or military-industrial use (such as offshore windmills, a city center, a radio telescope, or an abandoned tank factory) become host to pitched battles between the Russians, Americans, and Chinese, eerily reflecting experts’ predictions that climate change and extreme weather will exacerbate international and internecine clashing. Not by accident do the game’s multiplayer levels evoke actual disasters ranging from Hurricane Katrina (“Flood Zone”) to 9/11 (“Siege of Shanghai”) and a high-security prison straight out of the musings of Jeremy Bentham (“Operation Locker”). Put in terms of game design, I find it likely that the once distinct modes of PvP and PvE will continue to converge, not just because networked online play is more readily available now or because games themselves have become more complex, but because mastery over nature and mastery over other people are increasingly one and the same thing. That is why, despite political stalemate over climate change in Washington, D.C., U.S. military leaders consider global environmental change very worrisome for national security, and accordingly have made deep-pocketed preparations for everything from sea-level rise to oil scarcity.23 One 2016 report published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, entitled “The US Military on the Front Lines of Rising Seas,” for instance, warns that the Department of Defense stands to lose billions of dollars as higher coastal waters threaten military installations, many of them naval, such as the Naval Air Station in Key West or the largest naval base in the world in Norfolk, Virginia.24 Someday in the not-so-distant future America’s Army and other first-person shooters may embrace scenarios in which U.S. troops are forced to defend water rights against thirsty (not just bloodthirsty) neighbors, or take part in generational feuds over vanishing arable land."
• Games, and PvE in general, per-mediate the coming shape of collapse
• "The counterweight to obsessive premediation is repetition after the fact, seen for instance in the endlessly looping news footage of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11. Both impulses are manifestations of the risk society as formulated by sociologists Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck..."
• Civ is useful in understanding history's malleability and contingent quality, but not it's stereotypical representations of civilizations and leaders

Case study: Eco

• Having serves that are self destroy after a set time frame is one example of world and collective permadeath.

Case Study: Seafall

• Initial leader cards are torn us because the rest of the game occurs many years latter after the original leaders have become only faint memories.
• analogue Game Studies, Journal, Ivan Mosca on LEGACY games and irreversability
• “A double irreversibility—the player permadeath and the impossibility to reiterate— drives LEGACY players to abandon the classic, progressive model of knowledge in favor of an ‘openness to vulnerability,’ which expands the magic circle to a horizon magnitude"

Conclusions

• Bonnie Ruberg’s recent essay on “permalife” games