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Title (eng)
The Scales of Apocalypse. Spaces, Movement and Affect between the Sacred and Profane in Video Games
Author
Tim Sanders
Author
Felix Schnitz
Description (eng)
Video games that immerse players in end-of-the-world scenarios can provide powerful, at times polarising, emotional experiences between despair and hope. This potential lies in the spatio- temporal quality of the medium: The dimensions of a video game world that players explore in (post)apocalyptic games, plus the means that players are given to explore them, turn them, for example, into wanderers searching for hope across vast wastelands or allow them intimate meditations in sheltered spaces. The player’s role in a game’s end-of-the-world setting, the spatial arrangement of its virtual geography, and their lasting effect are intrinsically linked. We propose the ‘scales of apocalypse’ in this paper: a taxonomy identifying three different types of such (post)apocalyptic game spaces and how they may affect players. We explore how the portrayals of video game worlds always depend on how players are embedded into them and identify how the size and design of these spaces impacts their end-of-the-world aesthetics significantly, which, in turn, shapes how they affect players emotionally. The scale considers how apocalypse-themed games spatially distribute elements of hope and despair, encapsulated in environmental storytelling nodes of sacred or profane qualities, to enable meaningful experiences revolving around (post)apocalyptic scenarios. We identify its calibration points as local affect games, global affect games, and the affective segue. The last one is an impactful yet rarely discussed transitional key experience arising from the in-between of two or more successive game instalments. As a follow-up thought to our summary, we muse about the meaning of our thoughts regarding the broad range of opportunities in experience-based game design practices that handle (post)apocalyptic scenarios. We also provide further relevant research questions concerning fringe cases on the scales and the affective segue.
Keywords (eng)
affectapocalypseexperiencegame studiesidentityspace and spatiality
Type (eng)
book part
Language
[eng]
Persistent identifier
https://door.donau-uni.ac.at/o:5822
DOI
10.48341/zgjr-pm49
Is contained in
Title
Gaming the Apocalypse
ISBN
978-3-903470-30-9
DOI
10.48341/j34c-h575
Publication
University of Krems Press
Publication
University of Krems Press
Date issued
2025-11-14
License
CC BY-NC 4.0 International