Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition

Within the format of a AAA open-world RPG, HZD is an interesting intervention in the discussion on ecomodernism. In a nutshell, the latter is the idea that we will find a technological solution to climate change. HZD's take is fairly complex. On the one hand, Dr Sobeck managed to repair environmental damage through the creation of AI-infused green robots. On the other hand, her invention is repurposed by her employer Faro corp. towards the more profitable military industry, with the creation of autonomous robots fuelled by biomass and capable of self-replication that lead to complete extinction of every form of life within months. In other words, the game tells us that we might have the ingenuity to find a technological solution to climate change, but that this endeavour is undermined by the logic of corporate neoliberal capitalism.

This message is commendable, as it identifies some real shortcomings of the ecomodernist approach. However, it is not without its contradictions. In order to be successful as an action RPG, the game is in a sense forced to focus players' attention away from the slow violence of the world it depicts, in favour of fighting robot beasts (and human enemies).

Even more problematic is the choice of the action RPG as the genre for telling this story that chastises the consequences of capitalist logic. In order to skill up, players must accumulate natural resources as if they were limitless, thus involuntarily reproducing at the level of game mechanics the same destructive logics (accumulation and environmental exploitation) that are criticised at the narrative level.

Two sources on these points: Megan Condis, 'Sorry, Wrong Apocalypse: Horizon Zero Dawn, Heaven’s Vault, and the Ecocritical Videogame', Game Studies, 20 (2020) (http://gamestudies.org/2003/articles/condis), and Andrei Nae, 'Beyond Cultural Identity: A Critique of Horizon: Zero Dawn as an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Simulator', Postmodern Openings, 11 (2020), 269-77.