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12. Green New Worlds? Ecology and Energy
in Planetary Colonization Games
Paweł Frelik
Abstract
The chapter examines planetary colonization games as a subgenre primed
for its ability to speak to environmental concerns, such as extractivism,
sustainability, and biodegradation. However, although the subgenre os-
tensibly lends itself to the radical reimagination of models of civ ilizational
advancement, t he majority of games in this categor y reproduce attitudes
and developmental mechanisms that underwrite the climate crisis. This
chapter identies a number of shared mechanics and conventions in the
subgenre, briey discussing Aven Colon y (Mothership Entert ainment 2017)
as a paradigmatic text that encapsulates its ecological rhetoric. Finally,
it looks at several titles that depart from the subgenre’s baseline, paying
attention to how their narrative and procedural rhetoric can be harnessed
in to raise awareness about environmental degradation.
Keywords: Anthropocene, capitalism, speculation, energy
Questions of ecology and sustainability have entered science ction texts in
a variety of thematic scenarios and patterns, both pessimistic and optimistic.
Among the former are visions of the unchecked development of industrial
societies, apocalyptic ecocatastrophes, and the gradual but inevitable deg
-
radation of the environment. Optimistic visions have been fewer in number,
mostly because, in the wake of two world wars and the onset of neoliberal
capitalism, explicitly utopian narratives have lost much of their impetus and
popularity since the middle of the twentieth centur y. Nevertheless, it is not
dicult to nd technological visions of new fuels and materials and alien
interventions efecting new awareness of the environment. Among these
more optimistic imaginaries is the loosely dened subgenre of solarpunk,
Op de Beke, L., J. Raessens, S. Werning, and G. Farca (eds.), Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on
the Climate Cris is. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024
10.51 17/9789463721 196_12
276 paWEł frELik
which originated in a network of blogs in 2008 (Republic of the Bees 2008).
Solarpunk espouses a utopian environmentalism in which the convergence
of advanced technologies and ecological consciousness leads to a successful
overcoming of the current global challenges known under the moniker of
the Anthropocene. Although the newness of this vision can be contested,
solarpunk’s emphasis on photovoltaic technology and its attendance to
alternative energy tech is noteworthy, something that I will return to later
in this chapter.
All these environmental plots and tropes have a long history of engage-
ment in science ction media: literature, lm, television, comics, and, most
recently, video games. While ecocatastrophe and terraforming narratives
most readily lend themselves to ecocritical analysis, one less obvious
thematic scenario that seems remarkably poised to engage ecosystemic
questions involves stories of planetary colonization. As the name indicates,
they envision a fresh start on a celestial body: a planet, a moon, or an asteroid.
At times, such stories are set in recognizable locations, such as Mars, while
others take place on ctional planets or moons, introducing more speculative
biosystems. A convention that harks back to the early robinsonades, in
the twentieth and twenty-rst century alien planet colonization stories
force us to confront decisions that we know had disastrous consequences
from our time on the planet Earth. The formula has a long(-ish) tradition
dating back at least to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) and
peaked, arguably, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992, 1993, 1996),
the single most extended narrative of the kind. However, in light of the
media-driven interest in Mars colonies (Lepore 2021), but also fueled by
the search for exoplanets invigorated by developments in astrophysics and
astronomical imaging, the planetary colonization story has resurged in the
last two decades. Some recent examples include Michel Faber’s The Book of
Strange New Things (2014), Emma Newman’s Planetfall series (2015–2019),
Marguerite Reed’s Archangel (2015), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora (2015),
and Charlie Jane Anders’ The City in the Middle of the Night (2019). There
are also examples to be found on TV: Lost in Space (2018–2021), Raised by
Wolves (2020–2022), Settlers (2021), and The Expanse (2015–2021). Most
importantly for this book, planetary colonization has also registered in the
gaming medium, giving rise to a loose albeit distinctive and fairly numerous
subgenre I call “planetary colonization” games.
In this chapter I would like to examine planetary colonization games
as a subgenre privileged in the consideration of intersections between
speculative video games and broadly understood environmental concerns,
such as extractionism, sustainability, and biodegradation. My contention
grEEn nEW WorLds? EcoLogY and EnErgY in pL anEtarY coLonization gamEs 277
is that although the genre formula lends itself to the radical reimagination
of the models of civilizational advancement, the majority of the titles
reproduce developmental mechanisms that have led us to the climate
crisis and thus seem very relevant—albeit as negative impressions—to
our current historical moment. To demonstrate that, I will rst explain
the subgenre’s special status as a category of ecogames and outline its
contours. Then I will identify a number of shared mechanics and con-
ventions that bear on environmental questions, briey discussing Aven
Colony (Mothership Entertainment 2017) as a paradigmatic text. This will
lead to the assessment of the genre’s rhetorical tenor regarding ecology.
Finally, I will brie y look at several titles that depart from the subgenre’s
baseline, paying attention to how their narrative and procedural rhetoric
can be harnessed in the service of raising awareness of the current global
condition.
Dening planetary colonization games
A loose but recognizable cluster of titles, planetary colonization games draw
on and integrate elements from earlier gaming genres. Most centrally, they
use elements of city builders and economic simulators, which force the
players to balance growth, maintenance, population control, and resource
management. SimCity (Will Wright 1989) is an obvious inspiration, but
the roots of the planetary colonization game date back almost to the rise
of video games as a medium. The Sumerian Game, a text-based strategy
game of land and resource management, appeared in 1964 for the IBM
7090mainframe computer; its spin-ofs and inspirations, such as Hamurabi
(Doug Dyment 1968), helped establish the tradition of early strategy and
city-management games. Speculative titles have always had their place in
this genre, including Sim Earth (Will Wright 1990), Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
(Firaxis Games 1999), Startopia (Mucky Foot Productions 2001), and Anno
2205 (Blue Byte 2015). Another genre that planetary settlement games draw
on are civilization-building games set within quasi-historical contexts.
Particularly relevant here are titles reimagining the colonial conquest and
exploitation of Americas, such as Sid Meier’s Colonization (MicroProse 1994),
its remake Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization (Micro Prose 2008), and
Commander: Conquest of the Americas (Nitro Games 2010). Last but not least,
planetary colonization titles may overlap with a category known as “god
games,” although the latter’s scope is broader, control mostly indirect, and
visual and gameplay conventions subtly diferent.
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Planetary colonization games are, in some ways, special, particularly in
the context of the processes and transformations collectively known as the
Anthropocene or the Capitalocene (Moore 2017, 2018). Many privilege action
and strategic planning, both of which are often fairly generic, at the expense
of complex narratives; however, it is the extraplanetary narrative framework
as well as the speci c gameplay mechanics that are of consequence in the
consideration of the Anthropocene. Players’ options and activities in these
games often closely reect the trajectory of the last ve hundred years of
Western history, allowing us to engage in the same processes as the colonial
powers and industrial societies between the 1400s and now. Many of these
games also bear resemblance to early accounts of American colonization;
rstly, they assume the emptiness and free availability of land, water, and
other resources, and secondly, they reect the cultural parameters of the
arriving colonizers. As media objects, these titles are clear narrative fantasies
of a planetary reboot, informed by the desire to begin with a blank slate
in a new place, with very few prerequisites, which is a conguration they
share with postapocalyptic stories.
Planetary colonization games are obviously not the only subgenre capable
of engaging with notions of Anthropocenic change, but, to my mind, they
helpfully bring into focus, by grace of their gameplay conventions, various
aspects of the human–planet interaction. Moreover, if games are indeed dif-
ferent from other media with respect to their rhetorical power and, because
of their performed and repetitive nature, hold a much higher argumentative
charge (Bogost 2007), than games that engage the very types of activity
that have brought about the Anthropocene strike me as prime spaces in
which to reassess those practices that remain at the very core of the current
planetary crisis. Writing about game spaces in The PlayStation Dreamworld
(2017), Ale Bown asserts that any “attempt at subversion needs to work
inside this dreamspace—a powerful force in constructing our dreams and
desires—or else the dreamworld will fall into the hands of the corporations
and the state” (2017, 3). Thus, games focused on anthropogenic planetary
transformations can become either hopeful sites of change or serve as
rhetorical tools shoring up the cognitive habits that brought about the
Anthropocene. Thanks to the medium’s embodied cognition (Arjoranta
2014), games may also enable a better understanding of the decisions that
have brought civilization to the brink of collapse.
Depending on the design of their algorithms, planetary colonization
games can strengthen and naturalize the ideologies of anthropocentrism and
ecological recklessness. While they obey the same premise, they also difer
among themselves. Some strive to retain a degree of realism best exempli ed
grEEn nEW WorLds? EcoLogY and EnErgY in pL anEtarY coLonization gamEs 279
by Mars-oriented titles: Of world Trading Company (Mohawk Games 2016),
Sol 0: Mars Colonization (Chondrite Games 2016), Mars Industries (ZovGame
2016), Take on Mars (Bohemia Interactive 2017), Mars 2030 (FMG Labs 2017),
Surviving Mars (Haemimont Games/Abstraction Games 2018), Per Aspera
(Tlön Industries 2020), and Reshaping Mars (Tholus Games 2021). Others are
fully science- ctional, set on known exoplanets, or entirely ctional planets
and moons. This chapter will not address these “Mars games” as their analysis
would require attending to ongoing media cycles of a presumed Martian
future. My discussion in this chapter is limited to more fantastical games
of planetar y colonization, and especially to their deployment of ecological
and energy imaginaries. Consequently, looking at them as a subgenre grants
a clearer sense of their collective message whose tenor and timing is, to my
mind, neither accidental nor unclear.
Planetary colonization games share narrative and gameplay conventions
like the management of settler demands and desires, resource extraction,
defending against hostile environments, and growing your colony in
(nancial) strength and number. In Light of Altair (SaintXi 2009) players
expand from a landing pod to a metropolis. While expanding colonies, it
is also possible to launch eets and expand to other worlds, clashing with
other factions in the process. Unlike most other titles in the category, it is
also possible to mine orbiting moonlets. Similarly, in Farlight Explorers
(Farlight Games Industry 2019) players design systems and grow colonies in
order to colonize more planets. Resource extraction is central to gameplay,
but many planets are presented as inhospitable environments with little
complex organic life. Others focus on more localized tasks. A remake of
the 2003 game, Space Colony: Steam Edition (FireFly Studios 2015) is one of
the few titles in the group in which, like in the Sims franchise, the player
needs to manage colonists. Much efort is spent resolving con icts between
colonists, so in addition to mining minerals and harvesting resources to
prevent running out of oxygen and power, one needs to develop relationships,
collect food, and repel alien attacks.
As with most issues in the gaming medium, questions of ecology and
energy can enter these games in several principal ways, including narrative,
visuality, and procedurality. As noted earlier, only a small handful of these
titles, such as Rimworld (Ludeon Studios 2018; discussed below), feature any
kind of complex plotting. Instead, narrative information is coded in their
world-building, which connects this speculative subgenre to a number of
earlier tropes and storytelling scenarios. Many of the colonized worlds
are presented as uncivilized wildernesses. Some will have local life forms,
although in most cases they will be limited to predatory animals with some
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intelligence, or at best otherized alien beings. Science ction, of course,
has a long tradition of imagining pristine worlds with ourishing fauna
and ora. The fantasy of an empty world waiting to be colonized exceeds
the connes of the genre and taps into the early colonial narratives of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, something that Henry Jenkins
and Mary Fuller discussed in “Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing:
A Dialogue” (1995). Equally importantly, this historical moment partially
but tellingly overlaps with the period that Jason Moore denes as the onset
of the Capitalocene. For Moore, the mid-eighteenth century, where many
narratives of the Anthropocene locate its beginning, is merely the moment
when the environmentally destructive consequences of large-scale human
activity start manifesting.
Narratives of planetary colonization in games also rely on cultural
discourses of nature. In the Anglophone world, one of the most in uential
texts concerning the cultural constructedness of nature is William Cronon’s
“The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” (1996).
One of Cronon’s central premises is “that [wilderness] quietly expresses and
reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject” (Cronon 1996, 16). This
contention has special signicance in the context of the European colonial
project which cast the Americas as both empty and virgin land. And indeed,
very few of the discussed titles feature intelligent aliens, as their presence
would undermine the innocence of the “errand into the wilderness” trope
these games o fer and would position the players as obvious exploiters and
colonizers. The imperialism of planetar y colonization games may not have
the same resonance as in more historical games like Sid Meier’s Civilization I V:
Colonization, but the rough outlines of the world-building remain the same.
Environmental and ecological concerns can also register in the mechanics
of the discussed titles by way of procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007). Game
rules communicate assumptions about ecological, economic, and social
processes and how these processes interact to create or alleviate environ-
mental crises. Depending on the game, the political implications of specic
solutions to these crises may vary, but common to them are diferent types
of mechanics creating a fordances and limitations for the activities involved
in planetary settlement.
Most of these genre parameters can be readily found in Aven Colony, a
quintessential example of the genre visually, narratively, and algorithmically.
Available for Windows and the two main eighth-generation consoles, the
game uses the isometric perspective and provides the players with a very
polished and colorful interface. The bird’s-eye view and lush visuality imbue
gameplay with a sense of masterful and organized control. The narrative
grEEn nEW WorLds? EcoLogY and EnErgY in pL anEtarY coLonization gamEs 281
is minimal: the player plays the role of the governor of humanity’s rst
extraterrestrial colony. The location of the rst settlement is in the middle
of a verdant mountain valley, but the atmosphere comprises only carbon
dioxide, necessitating the use of hermetically sealed tunnels connecting
individual buildings. Both diurnal and seasonal cycles are present. From
time to time, the colony needs to cope with environmental hazards such as
storms, dust devils, toxic gas, and shard storms as well as external threats.
Management involves paying attention to twelve menus representing citi-
zens, employment, commute, happiness, crime, resources, electricity, water,
air, crops, structures, and drones. This balance of social, environmental, and
technological challenges provides room for diverse gameplay, which includes
prescripted campaigns as well as the never-ending sandbox mode. From an
ecocritical point of view, Aven Colony is a textbook example of the invisible
ideologies mentioned earlier and evinces practically no environmental
consciousness. The governor’s decisions have consequences, but none of
them are related to the ecological status of the planet. Read ecologically
and politically, the game also replicates virtually every single assumption
that historically informed the colonial conquest and the Capitalocenic
perception of cheap nature (Moore 2017, 7).
Anthropocene ideologies
Planetary colonization games adopt a broad range of visual styles, narratives,
and levels of complexity, but a closer look reveals, with a few exceptions,
a number of similarities. Their recurrence gives some food for thought
concerning these games’ rhetorical stance and, implicitly, their politics
regarding the environment—and most of these politics can only be de-
scribed from an ecocritical perspective as at best conservative and at worst
Anthropocene-denialist.
Firstly, by de nition, planetary colonization games envision ctional
worlds as closed systems with limited support from other planets in the
form of care packages with components or materials. The genre’s central
challenge involves achieving self-suciency. Secondly, many titles in this
category feature communities as imprisoned by the gravity well of their
planets, and they posit the development of space age technology as a victory
condition. Consequently, they seem particularly relevant to our current
historical moment, which has painfully brought to the fore the sense of
Earth’s planetarity and its nitude, on the one hand, and the desire for
miraculous techno- xes and deus ex machina developments to remediate
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environmental devastation and cascading species extinctions, on the other
(Op de Beke 2020). Consequently, while we have already efectively colonized
our entire planet, the kind of challenges and tasks that planetary coloniza-
tion games confront players with are recognizable from our world: supply
chain bottlenecks, overextension, and the overexploitation of specic
biomes, and energy shortages in the face of ever-increasing demand.
The environmental character of various colonized locations can vary
from barren planets to lush environments. Natural disasters occur but
they are usually unrelated to human activity. What is more, the fact that
many titles, such as Earth Space Colonies (Person and Pixel Studio 2016)
and Rimworld, are set in di cult environments which demand aggressive
measures to settle seems to justify the lack of attention to environmental
consequences of in-game activities. The logic underlying them is that biomes
hostile to humans should be tamed anyway and that it is only “beautiful
nature” that deserves protection. The playful planetary management can
readily be linked to the real-world processes of global capitalism and the
condition of the Anthropocene, but its consequences in digital games are
more often than not dramatically simpli ed. Planetary ecologies are almost
always very simplistic and rudimentary and the interdependence of various
zones and biomes is virtually nonexistent. Despite the fact that these titles
require strategic thinking, they largely obscure the complexities involved
in the planetary-scale handling of ecosystems. As such, they also tend to
perpetuate the myth that human agents are capable of what Alenda Chang
calls “surgical precision in diagnosing and addressing environmental ills”
(2019, 81). This bias can be found, for instance, in The Planet Crafter (Miju
Games 2022), which sends colonists to a hostile planet to make it habitable
for humans. Again, the collection of resources and base-building is merely
an overture to large-scale terraforming, including the generation of an
atmosphere and geoengineering the entire planet.
Most of these games rely on two principal modes of interrelated activities:
construction and extraction. The former is often envisioned as speculatively
idealized with futuristic buildings springing up across colonized worlds.
The architectural imagination in these titles does not difer much from
that in lm and television, where it is characterized by the cleanliness of
design, modularity, and exibility as well as by the absence of construction-
related friction. Extraction, in turn, comes across as decidedly mundane
and seems to be subject to the known patterns and modes of fossil fuel
mining of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Tellingly, in very few titles
large-scale extraction translates into any environmental impact. Resources
are simply—and, usually, very quickly—exhausted, forcing the player to
grEEn nEW WorLds? EcoLogY and EnErgY in pL anEtarY coLonization gamEs 283
move further away. This may create a need for transportation and longer
supply lines but while their cost can factor in decision-making, rarely does
it translate into environmental degradation. This avoidance of the harsh
realities of extractivism is also visible in the visual representations where
the hellish landscapes of postextractive activity are usually absent or are not
even implied. To wit, in The Planet Craf ter, one of the resources is uranium
but the game features no side efects of its processing and use. The same
happens in Earth Space Colonies, whose goal is to colonize the solar system.
This involves a great deal of building and maintenance through a fairly
advanced crafting system, which creates demand for natural resources and
their extraction, but the latter’s increase does not lead to any consequences.
Energy in most of these games is clean and its production and use are
largely obscured except for purely economic dimensions. Imre Szeman as-
serts that “the failure to acknowledge the signicance of the material forces
that have quite literally fuelled modernity has dangerous consequences when
it comes to understanding how we should best address global warming”
(2017, 441). This energy oblivion has also registered in speculative ctions
across media, many of which are driven by the energy unconscious, as
Graeme Macdonald demonstrates (2016). Video games are no exception here,
even if the specic lack of attention to energy questions may difer from
lm or television. Planetary colonization games largely skirt this issue by
envisioning speculative energies as harmless and benevolent. This belief
seems to be embedded in a broader assumption, in most of these games,
of the complete neutrality of any kind of technology, whose application
involves a logistic challenge but not one of management and stewardship.
Relatively few planetary colonization games focus on humans as individu-
als and even fewer include such parameters as population satisfaction or
happiness. This depersonalization of planetary colonization games can be
read both as a re ection of the planetary system of capitalism and as an
indication, albeit more suggestive than realistic, that the path forward is
through collective action. In other words, while it is customary for simulation
games to possess minimal narratives, this paucity seems very appropriate in
the case of planetary colonization games. If they are, indeed, thinly veiled
emanations of geoconstructivist discourses (Neyrat 2018), their scarce
narratives can be seen as apt reections of the lack of grand narratives
connected to the climate catastrophe (Ghosh 2016) and the need for a new
world order. While Earth’s transformations have been well documented in
science and theorized in contemporary political and critical theory, most
countries lack convincing public narratives that both address the current
crisis and show a clear way forward. This, in turn, creates a fertile ground for
284 paW Eł fr EL ik
monomaniacal visions of Martian settlements and of-world colonies which
consume funding that could be much more protably used to ameliorate
more pressing causes. The absence of human responsibility for the state of
colonized worlds is, in some games, literal: Colonials Programme (Cook ie
Legends 2020) features two robots traveling in space and constructing
colonies on a tile-based map. The game features twelve di ferent machines
responsible for such tasks as extraction and power grids and each mission
is placed in diferent terrains and layouts.
Despite their emphasis on strategic thinking and cost benet analyses,
the visions of planetary colonization are anything but neutral politically.
In his critical review of Jane McGonigal’s book Imaginable (2022), Ca meron
Kunzelman elegantly summarizes the position of many contemporary
scholars of science ction: “There is no imagination without an attendant
ideology” (2022). Naturally, fantasies of planetary possession and manage-
ment are hardly ideology-proof, as they imagine entire celestial bodies as
exible objects that are always-already available to serve the purposes
of those arriving. This perception of global plasticity is grounded most
centrally in two mutually imbricated ideological positions: the dominant
socioeconomic system of neoliberal capitalism and the Western formation
of technomodernity in general and the notion of progress in particular,
both of which are deeply steeped in the historical systems of colonialism
and imperialism. Interestingly, such “unwavering faith in technological
modernity” (Neyrat 2018, 12) is, for Frédéric Neyrat, one of the principal
lines of thinking propping up the ecoconstructivist project, a dark twin of
terraforming-friendly geoconstructivism. The ecoconstructivist agenda
insists on the harmonious interconnection between nonhumans, humans,
and objects, including ones produced by humanity.
A much less obvious ideological position in these titles is that ecology is
really economy (Abraham and Jayemanne 2017, 82) and that the measure
of success, even when environmental concerns are incorporated, is growth.
This is naturally not a new worldview. For Moore, the natural environment
understood as the locus of freely available resources—what he calls “cheap
nature”—is the ontological praxis of capitalism and is decisive in “capital’s
expanded reproduction, working through the ceaseless transformation of
Earth systems at every scale” (Moore 2017, 7–8). Moore locates the origins
of this ideology at the very beginning of the Capitalocene, in the era of
settler colonialism in the Americas and in Africa. Practically all planetar y
colonization titles do indeed see alien natures as cheap or free with the only
cost of their exploitation being the actual labor of colonists, expressed in
their management and the cost of the machinery involved.
grEEn nEW WorLds? EcoLogY and EnErgY in pL anEtarY coLonization gamEs 285
Visuality plays a major role in the ideological implications of these titles.
The visua l interface of planetar y colonization titles is fairly uniform: colonized
worlds are shown using either the top-down perspective (e.g., Rimworld) or
the isometric perspective, with a few games allowing additional access to
more than one location on a globe. While typical of the larger category of
strategy games, this visual vantage has political implications, including a
long tradition of theorizing verticality as hierarchical and reective of social
class. Writing about this god’s-eye perspective, Hito Steyerl asserts that
“the hegemonic sight convention of visuality is an empowered, unstable,
free-falling, and oating bird’s-eye view that mirrors the present moment’s
ubiquitous condition of groundlessness” (Steyerl 2011). Although currently
associated with the privilege of penthouses and control of military and
law-enforcement drones, this perspective can also be traced to a v isual object
that breathed new life into Western ecological awareness: The Blue Marble
(1972), a photograph of the Earth viewed from space taken by the crew of
Apollo 17. In contrast, however, to the rigidity and frozenness of the Earth in
The Blue Marble, at least in some of these games players can freely swivel the
globe with the uidity that, in our world, re ects an idealized power fantasy
of the top 0.1percent of the global population as well as military operators.
More importantly, The Blue Marble mobilized both ecological and peace
movements, but it also heralded the arrival of a new perceptual subjectivity,
“a rogue, quasi-of-planet subject striving to vampirize natural dynamism in
order to refabricate everything there is” (Neyrat 2018, 15). This new subject
position represents what Neyrat calls “geo-constructivism” (2018, 3–5), a
cluster of views and positions invested in terraforming Earth. According to
Doron Darnov, players in such games occupy “vaguely extra-planetary and
ambiguously disembodied vantage points from which they can e ciently
oversee the scope of their unfolding civilization’s economic or military
progress” (2020). There are also other aspects of visuality in the discussed
games that re ect colonial vantage points. The mapping of the planetary
terrain as well as the progress of the exploration or settlement shares a
number of anities with the cartographic representation of virtual spaces in
other types of video games, which has in turn inherited many of its graphic
conventions from nineteenth-century imperial maps (Mukherjee 2015;
Majkowski 2016; Van der Merwe 2021). The landscape and the map become
coterminous; the expansion begins in the center from which the colonial
efort extends; and the unexplored space is either invisible or represented
as blank space, preguring its presumed emptiness. All these parameters
also assume godlike points of view of omnipotence, again a position that
allows for little recognition of the ground-level ecological realities.
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The temporality of planetar y colonization games is equally problematic,
a consequence of the complicated status of temporality in video games at
large (Zagal and Mateas 2010). On the one hand, the accelerated passage
of time, particularly in the context of diegetic activities, normally last-
ing decades, if not centuries, may promote a belief in quick xes whose
efects are anticipated to be clearly discernible. This belief, in turn, can
foster delayed responses to climate change mitigation. On the other hand,
considered vis-à-vis what Rob Nixon (2011) calls the “slow violence” of the
environmental efects of climate change, the shortened time spans of
in-game activity may possess a positive potential. The tasks that players
undertake happen on accelerated in-game time scales and durations, thus
bringing the invisible consequences of slow violence into view and providing
much needed lessons about their consequences. Darnov also notes that the
“immediate visual feedback of watching planetar y systems respond to the
efects of human decision-making provides players with a cognitive reference
point for reecting on the ways that individual and collective actions might
impact the planetary scale of Earth’s own environment” (Darnov 2020).
Last but not least, planetary colonization games espouse a degree of
utopianism. Although all discussed games confront the players with chal-
lenges and in some titles, those challenges never let up, there is a degree of
utopian and scientic rationalism imbued in the genre that seems incom-
mensurate with the threat human civilization is facing right now. After all,
these challenges do not stem from a lack of knowledge about climate change
or the absence of mitigating technologies. Consequently, there is something
escapist about planetary colonization games, especially in their assumption
that planetary systems behave predictably, even where natural disasters
force the players to be creative. Most of them do not feature r unaway efects,
chaotic systems, or boundaries that once breached cannot be restored.
Instead, the universe is—obviously—algorithmically consistent and, given
sucient time, each obstacle can be met and overcome.
Not all hope is lost
This outline of the parameters of many planetary colonization games
demonstrates clearly that they tend to embrace and perpetuate, through
their gameplay, the kind of cognitive habits that have underwritten the
epoch known as the Anthropocene: the steadfast refusal to consider large-
scale human activity as consequential for the planet, the myopic pursuit of
short-term goals of growth and progress, and the naïve belief in the political
grEEn nEW WorLds? EcoLogY and EnErgY in pL anEtarY coLonization gamEs 287
neutrality of technological development. This is not to say that the genre
is predetermined as it encompasses several titles whose narratives and
mechanics encourage a more reexive and even critical consideration of
the processes involved in their core mandate. This critical potential can be
communicated in narratively but also, to my mind more importantly, in the
mechanics of material transformations (which resources can be processed
into which materials), the more complex structures of technology trees
(Ghys 2012; Heinimäki 2015), and the really complex types of challenges
game systems ofer to players. In these more critical titles, interdependen-
cies between various aspects of the process known as colonization are
highlighted: social, technological, extractive, and ecological.
At rst glance, Factorio (Wube Software 2020) comes across as less pol-
ished than other titles. Almost seven years in the making before its release, it
is considerably more modest visually, with both the top-down and isometric
perspective and cruder, more pixelated, muddy-colored graphics reminiscent
of the steampunk aesthetic. Its narrative premise is also fairly economical.
The player is an engineer who has crash-landed on an alien planet and, in
order to build a rocket to escape it, must har vest resources and develop the
entire technological infrastructure needed for the rocket to launch. This
deceptive simplicity conceals immense complexity, which led one of the
reviewers to proclaim the game “a machine-fetishist’s best friend” (Priestman
2013). Factorio’s technology trees are exceptionally complex and the number
of actions one needs to perform to unlock and develop technologies is
staggering, even with a degree of automation possible in the game. More
importantly, while the description so far may suggest a title attractive for
the techno-fetishist player, Factorio demonstrates a surprising awareness
of the interrelation between industrial development and environmental
destruction. As more types of machinery become operational, producing
pollution and demanding massive amounts of resources, the planetary
biosphere reacts. The planet possesses Indigenous fauna known as Biters,
Spitters, and Worms, which become increasingly hostile. This forces the
player to commit resources to defense, slowing down industrial production,
and then to carefully balance technological development and environmental
pressures. Factorio’s yoking of human activity to environmental feedback
ofers a powerful rhetorical statement about the costs of techno-modern
civilization, but it also demonstrates how more reective gameplay may
emerge over time, often in titles where players do not expect it.
Another title that clearly goes against the grain of the subgenre’s param
-
eters is Imagine Earth (Serious Bros. 2021), whose Steam description reads “[D]
o research to protect your colonists from disasters and avoid a climate crisis.”
288 paW Eł fr EL ik
The narrative framing has colonists leaving Earth, which has been divided
by large corporations and practically depleted of all of its resources. Players
are recruited by a company committed to sustainable colonization, but other
corporate entities do not follow the same environmentalist philosophy.
While the game demands a wide array of activities typical of planetary
colonization games (and several not so typical, such as trading stocks and
performing nancial takeovers of rival corporations), it imbricates ques-
tions of sustainability and environmental balance in almost every aspect.
The links between industrial activity and ecology are omnipresent and
immediate: expanding cities generate emissions; various sources of energy
contribute diferently to the state of the environment; exhaust emissions and
ground pollution impact the global climate; increasing temperatures melt
polar caps, with rising sea levels destroying colonies; and climate change
triggers more frequent and severe natural disasters. For players, achieving
a balance between growth and sustainability is the nal challenge, but
the competitors follow more pro t-oriented goals. Imagine Earth’s Steam
description exhorts players to “use our second chance to change our ways
of life and transform the production of energy and goods in a sustainable
way,” but these environmentalist ambitions clash with the game’s concern
with market forces. However, it is also possible to read the game as inher-
ently anti-capitalistic. The capitalist scramble for planets is presented as
dystopian, and in the game’s campaign the player attempts to escape it. At
the campaign’s conclusion, you launch a shield that ends space travel to
and from the planet completely, symbolically nullifying hopes invested in
what has come to be known as Planet B. In other words, the presence and
frequency of disasters—chemical spills, oil spills, radioactive contamination,
wildres, tornadoes, volcanoes, dying forests, and desertication—sets
Imagine Earth apart from many other planetar y colonization games in that
it understands social and economic organization to have real consequences.
It is possible to think about the capitalist framework in Imagine Earth less
as an expression of what the game thinks is proper and more as a diagnosis
of what the game thinks is problematic.
One last title that difers from the mainstays of the discussed subgenre is
Rimworld, which emphasizes the management of colonists’ moods, needs,
individual wounds, and illnesses. Conicts, both internal and external,
occur frequently as the colony needs to repel aggressive local fauna and
ancient killing machines. Adding to these challenges is the fact that the
colonists are not professional settlers, but survivors of a crashed passenger
liner with a procedurally generated set of skills and backgrounds, some
benecial, some detrimental (the group may include neurotics, nudists,
grEEn nEW WorLds? EcoLogY and EnErgY in pL anEtarY coLonization gamEs 289
but also cannibals). As a planetary colonization game, Rimworld is unique
in its emphasis on social dynamics at both the micro- and the macro-level,
demonstrating that, in raising ecocritical awareness, social concerns are
no less important than technological infrastructure. This focus comes at
the expense of broader environmental concerns, though. For instance,
Rimworld features a class of machines known as climate adjusters, which,
utilizing chemicals and exotic resources, can be used to manipulate the
atmosphere, primarily shifts in temperature. Very little attention is paid
to the external consequences of their operation. Moreover, one of the win
conditions of the game is constructing a starship and escaping the planet
with at least one colonist alive, a scenario that resonates with Musk-esque
dreams of spreading into space, but which also involves abandoning Earth
in the process.
Conclusion
Existing research on the politics of game design calls for caution in making
deterministic statements about the links between specic game mechanics
and political messages. Nevertheless, planetary colonization games present
very interesting case studies to think through the ideological stakes of
ludic texts. On the one hand, it is dicult to deny that, by and large, they
perpetuate a number of corrosive ideological positions and worldviews that
have been historically associated with the political institutions of colonial
empires as well as with the Capitalocenic treatment of the environment.
Consequently, it is tempting to consider this narrative and procedural
formula to be severely compromised by the mental habits that have directly
contributed to the climate crisis, the sixth mass extinction of species,
atmospheric pollution, and ecosystemic degradation: blind commitment
to the Western conceptions of growth and progress, willful oblivion of
what Jason Moore has called the “Web of Life” (Moore 2015), and lack of
future thinking.
On the other hand, beyond the simplied renditions of planetary
colonization and terraforming in games such as Terratech (Payload Studios
2018) or Colonies End (Raw Orange Studios Limited 2020), the subgenre is
constantly evolving and experimenting with new forms. Rimworld, Factorio,
and Imagine Earth compellingly demonstrate that the genre’s narrative
and mechanics can be yoked to promote more critical positions regarding
the techno-modern ideologies informing the very industry in which such
games are developed. In the last few decades, the discourses of science
290 paW Eł fr EL ik
ction have done much to atone for the genre’s historical complicity in
colonial and technocratic regimes, fostering more ecological imaginaries.
While the core titles of planetary colonization continue to coast on these
older legacies, there is enough critical insight in some games to warrant
cautious hope about the thought-provoking and mind-changing potential
of the subgenre.
Acknowledgments
The research involved in the preparation of this article was supported by a
grant from the National Science Center in Poland (no.2019/35/B/HS2/02024).
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About the author
Paweł Frelik is Associate Professor and the Leader of the Speculative Texts
and Media Research Group at the American Studies Center, University
of Warsaw. His research interests include science ction, video games,
and speculative visualities. He has published widely in these elds, serves
on the boards of Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and the Journal of
Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and is the coeditor of the New Dimensions in
Science Fiction book series at the University of Wales Press. In 2017, he was
the rst non-Anglophone recipient of the Thomas D. Clareson Award for
Distinguished Service for outstanding service to science ction studies.