While I was in my early teens, I played King’s Quest on an old Tandy my dad had thrown out of his office. This was the mid-1980s so I’d have to boot up a couple of 5¼-inch discs and wait for five minutes to load the game.
I hardly remember the storyline. I remember, rather, the pleasurable feeling of moving through this flat, pixelated fairytale world, searching for various clues and objects to the backdrop of weirdly soothing synthetic birdsong.
Video games give the illusion of agency. No matter how primitive, games give you a world to believe in, to interact in, to excel in. Back then, before games went online and became multi-player, they were lonely pleasures, divorced from IRL problems — like the divorce of my flesh-and-blood parents, my lack of a girlfriend or what have you.
By 14 or 15, I had more friends and discovered more adult, illicit pleasures. My pals and I still occasionally played arcade classics Miss Pacman or Heavy Barrel or Gauntlet II but in terms of emotional immersion they never compared to the less frantic, solitary adventure of Kings Quest.
What does this have to do with anything? Towards the end of the 1980s it slowly dawned on me that, out on the analogue Earth, humanity was in deep shit when it came to climate change, pollution, biodiversity etc. A pivotal book for me was Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, the first mainstream book on the changing climate. One passage hit me over the head: Human activity had fundamentally altered the chemistry of both the air at the top of Mount Everest and the water at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. There was no going back to some innocent, pure state of “nature”.
My reaction to this news was to push my school to recycle aluminum cans. I had a “RECYCLE OR DIE” sticker on my ancient Volkswagen. Every Thursday I’d drive the school’s empties to a commercial recycling yard that paid by the pound. Not exactly Greta Thunberg-level impact, but something.
I also think that my growing “environmental awareness” led to the gradual realisation that the human will to tackle the “big questions” on particular hyper-phenomena like climate change was almost non-existent. I felt the sense of agency that had somehow powered me through my early adolescence evaporated.
In 2023, eight years after the Paris Agreement, a document in which nearly every country on the planet agreed to drastically cut fossil fuel emissions, very few are meeting their targets. Not even nations like Germany, who have always worn their green credentials on their sleeves.
The world is not a game. There is no single score we have to hit. Achieving certain numerical metrics isn’t going to make everything alright. Even so, scientists, perhaps as a desperate strategy to drill into the heads of their fellow humans the urgency of the situation, feel compelled to invent important new all-encompassing metrics. Like the “nine planetary boundaries” measuring the ability of Earth to sustain human life. Scientists working for the Stockholm Resilience Institute last week provided a somber assessment: We’ve crossed 6 out of the 9 boundaries.
Scared yet? I am. But this news made it into barely a handful of media outlets. When I bring it up with friends it elicits a shrug.
Below is a zoomed-in version to give you a sense of what I’m talking about. “Novel entities,” by the way, refers to pollution introduced to the environment by humankind, stuff like plastics.
In short, the world is “well outside the safe operating space for humanity,” The Guardian reported.
The graphic reminds me of a gaming dashboard measuring the vitality of the main character. The sad thing is that right now virtually every human on the planet feels like a non-player character, entities with little or no agency vis-à-vis the vast dangers threatening our world.
When push comes to shove, even presidents, billionaires and celebrity activists appear to have virtually zero ability to shift those “scores” to a better place in the chart.
“But we fixed the hole in the ozone layer,” one might object, pointing to the successful international phaseout of damaging chlorofluorocarbons. As if “fixing” climate change or the biodiversity catastrophe or world-wide plastics pollution was simply a matter of flipping a switch or completing a linear mission in another video game.
This isn’t King Quest or Minecraft or Fortnite or any other metaverse. This is the only habitat for our species and it’s vanishing. We can’t give up our fight to reverse this unfolding horror but we also shouldn’t fool ourselves that it’s as simple as tweaking a few simple controls as if this was a world-building bit of electronic fun where you can start anew when you die. We’re talking about the one-of-a-kind, hyper-complex web of life, the only life that we know of in the universe.
This is not a game.
The emotions and thoughts sketched above led me to help produce my friend Ben Knight’s fantastic documentary on collapse anxiety, We’re All Going To Die. If you happen to live in Berlin, there’s a screening on September 27th at Backhaus Projects in Neukölln. See you there!