Title (eng)
Gaming the Apocalypse
Description (eng)
Players young and old use games not only to escape a seemingly gloomy reality for a while: through play, they confront worst-case scenarios head-on and gain a sense of agency and empowerment. By helping us address our fears without freezing in panic, games preserve a playfulness that keeps our minds open to new perspectives and opportunities. At the same time, the prevalence of post-apocalyptic settings shapes how pervasive doom feels, revealing both our fascination with catastrophe and our inclination to fall for threats of doom time and again.
Yet even if the world is not doomed, it clearly needs saving. Games have proven valuable tools for exploring ecological, economic, social, and political sustainability, allowing us to experiment with the very factors that might make an apocalypse more or less likely. And by inviting us to play together, they strengthen our ability to collaborate, imagine alternatives, and create shared visions. Most importantly, games instil hope by offering not only scenarios of doom, but also utopian possibilities that make a better future seem achievable — and worth striving for.
The 18th Vienna Games Conference – “FROG – Future and Reality of Gaming” 2024 – explored these and other connections between play & games, crisis and hope. This volume presents 29 contributions that deepen this conversation by showing the many ways in which we are, in fact, gaming the apocalypse.
Keywords (eng)
Game StudiesApocalypseCrisisDystopiaUtopiaGamesPlayLudologyGame DesignGame-based LearningSerious Games
Persistent identifier
ISBN
978-3-903470-30-9
Publication
University of Krems Press
Date issued
2025-11-18
14.11.2025
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978-3-903470-30-9 - Content
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