Dawn of Machinic Cyclicality: Life As We Don’T Know

Dawn of Machinic Cyclicality: Life as We Don’t Know Alexandre Paquet University of Toronto 130 St. George Street, #14080 Toronto, ON, M5S 3H1, Canada 1-416-276-4071 [email protected] ABSTRACT This paper engages with the question of cyclical time, and more specifically, how the re-imagination of collectives introduces an essential agency in conceptualizing time by diving into the narrative of the video game Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017) to examine the ways in which entanglements of different forms of life (such as the coexistence of humans, nonhumans and technology) as planetary collectives challenge the fixed structure of time through the incorporation of agency as a decisive factor in shaping cyclical time. The first section explores the complexity of the human-nonhuman coexistence in relation to discourses of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Chthulucene. The second section engages more specifically with the ways in which these newly conceived entanglements challenge notions of time by allowing for productive ways to transform our understanding of endings and the potential of innovative cyclicality to arise. Keywords Time, cyclicality, collectives, human, nonhuman INTRODUCTION Cyclical time, understood through the Marxist critique of capitalist time, can appear predetermined in the most oppressive way, and for good reasons. After all, the individual has little to no power in shaping his/her relationship to the broader strokes of capitalist cyclical time, almost always going with the flow so to speak of these “higher forces.” This lack of control is why collectives play such a significant role in the utopian struggle for change, but how we conceive of these collectives is a whole new question of its own. The present paper dives into the narrative of the video game Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017) to examine the ways in which entanglements of different forms of life (such as the coexistence of humans, nonhumans and technology) as planetary collectives challenge the fixed structure of time through the incorporation of agency as a decisive factor in shaping cyclical time. Horizon: Zero Dawn’s foregrounding of time is so essential that one would be hard- pressed not to address the game’s temporalities in one way or the other. While some scholars only briefly address time as such, as is the case with Lars de Wildt, Stef Aupers, Cindy Krassen and Iulia Coanda who explore representations of “techno- religion” in game narratives (2018, 169), others engage with this question more at length. Janine Tobeck and Donald Jellerson suggest that participatory aesthetic as formulated in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, a work that rejects the trappings of cyberpunk he himself help establish in the first place, is structured by a “set of temporal concerns” (2018, 53). Primarily concerned with exploring Gibson’s work in order to identify to foundations of its humanism and most importantly aesthetic of Proceedings of DiGRA 2019 © 2019 Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author. care, the authors also consider the ways in which Horizon: Zero Dawn, through its technologically-saturated narrative, “encodes” the value of care in a similar fashion, comparing the game’s temporal disposition toward past, present and future to Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2018, 66). While an interesting point of departure, this emphasis on reification of Gibson in the game considerably limits the actual potential of engaging with a game like Horizon: Zero Dawn, as its engagement with questions of time go far beyond this particular scope. To be clear, I approach Horizon: Zero Dawn as a text that in and of themselves participates in generating theory, as opposed to considering them simply as being influenced or representative of “proper” theoretical texts. That is not to say that the game is not influenced, or at the very least exist within broadly established intellectual discourses. Of the utmost importance is certainly a vast corpus of scholarly work that explore the relationships between humans, the environment and nonhumans – at the core of which is the progressively accepted and dominant discourse centered on the concept of the Anthropocene, which offers an appropriate point of departure to consider the context in which Horizon: Zero Dawn intervenes. The term Anthropocene seems to have been coined in the early 1980s by University of Michigan ecologist Eugene Stoermer in order to refer to the growing evidence of the transformative effects of human activities on Earth (Haraway 2016, 44). The term became more globally used when atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen (2000 Nobel Prize winner) proposed that human activities “had been of such a kind and magnitude as to merit the use of a new geological term for a new epoch” (Haraway 2016, 44-45), replacing the Holocene which dated from the end of the last ice age. The Anthropocene recognizes that the now global human activity is the cause of most contemporary climate change, the impacts of which will most likely be observable “for millions of years into the future” (Lewis and Maslin 2015, 171), making human actions the Earth’s most important evolutionary pressure. Introduced to capture the “quantitative shift in the relationship between humans and the global environment” (Steffen et al. 2011, 842), the term Anthropocene has become widely accepted among researchers of global climate change. The Anthropocene thus emphasizes the impact of human activity, mankind as a “major geological force,” on the biosphere and geological time – it entwines human history and natural history (Moore 2016, 3). While containing within it a certain potential, many scholars are quick to point out the problems that come with this loaded term. Donna Haraway notices how it made its place in popular and scientific discourse in the context of urgent efforts to talk about, theorize, model, and manage “a Big Thing called Globalization,” most easily meaningful and usable by intellectuals in wealthy classes and regions to address climate-change (2016, 45). Jason Moore is quick to criticise the “Two Cultures” of the natural and human and the dualism therein.1 The conceptual alternatives to the Anthropocene will be explored more in-depth in the following pages, but for now, what is important to remember is that the entanglement of human and nonhuman forms of life is fundamental to understanding the complex web of relationships that operate at a planetary level, and as will become increasingly important to our present analysis, to reconsider our engagement with time, and cyclical time in particular. The context of the Anthropocene and the multispecies entanglement at its core provide fruitful grounds for Horizon: Zero Dawn (from now on simply referred to as HZD), both in terms of it being a video game product and in terms of the actual content of the narrative it brings to the table. Developed by Guerilla Games, HZD is the first new intellectual property of the studio since the first-person shooter Killzone (which spawned 4 mainline games from 2004 to 2011), and also marks its first foray into the role-playing action adventure genre. Director Mathijs de Jonge described the pitch for HZD as “by far the most risky one [among 40 or so pitches presented by the studio’s staff when deciding what new project Guerilla Games would work on next] -- 2 -- because it was so different and so ambitious” (O’Dwyer 2017). By releasing in 2017, in a time when discussion of climate change abound from all directions, the focus on apocalyptic events is not in itself surprising, but the approach of HZD to unfolding the complex layers of relationships between various forms of life sets it apart, especially because this intervention fundamentally engages with conceptualizations of cyclical time. The story is set in the 31st century, on what is seemingly Earth which is now equally populated by tribal human communities, lush flora, plentiful fauna, and dinosaur-like machines. From this limited information, we can assume that some unknown cataclysmic incident has transformed Earth’s landscape and the life inhabiting it. The player takes control of main protagonist Aloy, an outcast member of the Nora tribe which lives in snowy mountainous areas. While the aforementioned life forms coexist peacefully for the most part, a phenomenon known as “derangement” is causing an increasingly large number of machines to actively attack human settlements. When the Nora are attacked by a group of “cultist” who could be linked to the “derangement” of the machines, Aloy begins her quest to uncover the mysteries of the world. Through its conceptualization of new entanglements of humans, nonhumans, nature and technology, HZD not only rethinks the ways in which this web of relationships needs to be considered at a planetary scale and in the longue durée, but in doing so, the game more importantly reconfigures the meaning of thinking about “the end” through creative cyclicality. The first section of this paper therefore focuses on the former, by exploring the complexity of the human-nonhuman coexistence as portrayed in HZD in relation to discourses of Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Chthulucene. The second section thus engages more specifically with the ways in which these newly conceived entanglements challenge notions of time by allowing for productive ways to transform our understanding of endings and the potential of innovative cyclicality to arise. AMIDST THE CHTHULUCENE: HUMANS-NONHUMANS COEXISTENCE Whether fully acknowledged and taken into consideration or purposefully undermined and put by the wayside, the coexistence of various forms of life characterizes Earth’s complex web of relationships amongst all life. HZD depicts a world inhabited by some familiar forms of life such as humans, as well as plentiful flora and varied animal wildlife, but also more “alien” ones in the form of dinosaur- looking mechanical organisms who similarly populate the land.

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