Futurity as an Effect of Playing Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017)

Nicole Falkenhayner

doi:10.3390/h10020072

Abstract

Futurity denotes the quality or state of being in the future. This article explores futurity as an effect of response, as an aesthetic experience of playing a narrative video game. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ways in which video games are engaged in ecocriticism as an aspect of cultural work invested in the future. In the presented reading of the 2017 video game Horizon: Zero Dawn, it is argued that the combination of the affect creating process of play, in combination with a posthumanist and postnatural plot, creates an experience of futurity, which challenges generic notions of linear temporal progress and of the conventional telos of dystopian fiction in a digital medium. The experience of the narrative video game Horizon Zero Dawn is presented as an example of an aesthetic experience that affords futurity as an effect of playing, interlinked with a reflection on the shape of the future in a posthumanist narrative.

Highlights

Futurity enables us to imagine how to live beyond the present
The flurry of dystopian and apocalyptic storyworlds that we find in fictional genres and media in the present, from novels and films like The Road (McCarthy 2006) or even The Avengers films (The Avengers 2012–2019) to television shows like Black Mirror (Black Mirror 2011) or video game series like Fallout (Fallout 1997) is testimony to the dominance of a strong secularized sense of end times
When patterns of desire and affective relations afforded by popular cultures prevent our flourishing in the sense of hindering us to imagine having agency for the future, where can affective publics find resources that break this spell? In this article, I argue that an example from contemporary digital media culture, the open-world video game Horizon: Zero Dawn (Horizon 2017), can be understood as enabling an aesthetic experience of posthuman futurity which is not dystopic, and that this affordance for futurity in an optimistic mode is deeply embedded both in its basic structure as a video game and in its narrative

Summary

Introduction

Futurity enables us to imagine how to live beyond the present. It can be seen as a cultural capacity to actively shape and to take responsibility for the future. If my observations above about the shape of the collective imaginary in contemporary genres concerned with futurity are correct, the popular imaginary has not been able to “magnetize optimism about living” with multiple others, but rather gravitates towards a repetition of a narrative telos that ends in the loss of any notion of community in either algorithmized technoculture or in planetary destruction. I argue that an example from contemporary digital media culture, the open-world video game Horizon: Zero Dawn (Horizon 2017), can be understood as enabling an aesthetic experience of posthuman futurity which is not dystopic, and that this affordance for futurity in an optimistic mode is deeply embedded both in its basic structure as a video game and in its narrative. I will apply this concept to an analysis of the game Horizon

The “Affective Arrangement” of Video Games

Playing the Future in Horizon

Conclusions