Playable ruinscapes that reflect a character’s mind appear in many games. In The Void (Ice Pick Lodge 2008), however, the world is not just an explorable mental model. It’s a commentary on resource extraction and overuse. The Void is a collapse game (Chang 2019): an extended metaphor for self-destruction that questions the desire to perform both selfish and selfless acts in video games. It showcases the cost of pushing oneself to the absolute limits while moving through a hostile, embittered world. Echoing Espen Aarseth’s notion of cybertext (1997), it shows how we can configure the very idea of ecological ruin in different ways.
Using the frameworks of ludoarchaeology and ecogaming, I examine The Void as an important literary artefact of our time. It engages questions of gender essentialism and political disenfranchisement as much as impending ecological collapse. I argue that it tells an increasingly relevant story through play, where a player’s choices affect the mentalscape around them. It also allows players to recognize their own beliefs in various characters. These characters represent distinct philosophical concepts and ways of living. Letting players choose which philosophies to follow enables introspection in an age of climate catastrophe. That introspection then prompts players to consider how our ways of thinking shape not only our perceptions of the world but also the state of our environments.
(she / her) (MA) is a writer, scholar, game designer, woman, and PhD candidate in English at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her academic work focuses on video games as literary artefacts, and how players express agency in digital space through video game mechanics that encourage introspection.