Red sky

We can compare the systemic approach of GS to the powerful climate change imaginary of the narrative-oriented Umurangi Generation (UG). Created by Maori developer Naphtali Faulkner, who currently lives in Australia, UG takes place in a mid-apocalyptic Tauranga. The cityscape is oppressive, and young people’s street culture pushes back against an overbearing state. Players take on the role of a photojournalist who records image packages for the Tauranga Express. Using a DSLR, players snap shots of the various levels, apply filters and move sliders to adjust the image, and are rewarded with funds to buy better equipment. This is a fairly typical gameplay loop, but things get very strange as the game progresses.

‘Umurangi’ means ‘red sky’ in the Te Reo language, and Faulkner has linked the game’s development (which occurred rapidly over 2020) to the Australian government’s inadequate response to the bushfires of that year. As the game progresses, environmental clues hint at the reasons behind the state’s repressive activities, as it becomes clear that the city is one of the last bastions of resistance against an alien invasion. The game knowingly draws on video game history, in particular referencing the classic Jet Set Radio through its stylised visuals and soundtrack. However, where the youth and street culture attitude of that game celebrated resistance and counterculture, in UG the bleakness is pervasive: there is no possibility of heroically averting this apocalypse, only to document the world’s final days.

The synchrony of UG’s narrative and level designs refuses any sense that some future technology will solve the climate crisis. The idea that capitalism will somehow come up with the solution to the climate crisis is as fantastical as the idea that it could arise without colonialism, slavery and exploitation. Here, in spite of its lurid fictionality, UG proves itself the more incisive ecocritical text. This is further reflected in the game’s cynical canniness around the limits of cultural work during an emergency. It is not the first game to subvert the FPS genre by giving players a camera rather than a gun. When players take a photo, a suite of processing tools is at their disposal: sliders to change qualities of the image and add filters on the fly. However, counter-intuitively, the final images are not saved on a capacious digital format, but on analogue canisters of film. The lability and reversibility of the digital is grounded in this non-renewable, finite resource. In the final level, players must take their last photo as the world ends under a red sky. Accompanying them are an extinct Huia, and underfoot are mud crabs: synchronic and diachronic symbols of life past, and life that will survive the apocalypse.

GS seeks to represent climate change by adding more and more rules, but in its inability to reckon with the true drivers of environmental destruction ends up being a systemic Potemkin village. If you lose, it doesn’t make one reflect on uneven development: just start a new game. This is not to say that games which tend towards narrative synchrony or more system-led diachrony are inherently better or preferable – see for example Paolo Pedercini’s Lichenia for an ecocritical ‘city builder’ that mixes complex systemic interactions with subtle narrative elements, so much as to point to the powerful and resistant new narrative forms exemplified by games such as BMML and UG.
In its stubborn, political synchrony, UG insists that while we can imagine many worlds and possibilities through games, in reality those counterfactuals have a different tenor. The game’s themes of indigenous sovereignty, state-sanctioned violence and critique of digital culture point to what we might term modal minorities – concerns and struggles that are often elided in gaming’s systemic possibility spaces. In this way, it asks what it may mean for games to truly be an art of the possible.