Game Preserves: Digital Animals at the Brink of the Post-Anthropocene

ABSTRACT As we enter what scientists are calling the 6th mass extinction of life on this planet, we are forced to confront the prospect of a future world without animals. Despite the disappearance of ‘real’ animals in the wake of global ecocatastrophe however, animals proliferate in the ‘Anthropocene’ imaginary, and in particular, through contemporary video games as they reimagine the future relationship of humans and animal life increasingly withdrawn from the lives of humans. The animal imagined in video games herein serves not only to re-join the animal to a culture that has no more room for nature, but to preserve the animal as a sign of our status and significance on a rapidly changing planet. Herein, the surgical remaking of animals within video games constitutes an augury on the future status of the animal and the preservation of its existence via simulation, where it is yet made to labor in the psychical models of liberalism and humanism intimate to the conceits of Anthropocene thinking. Drawing largely from the scholarship of Jean Baudrillard (1994) and his developments on the transmutation of animals from ontological equal to hyperreal companion, this essay will analyze a number of contemporary video games (e.g. Fallout, the Outer Worlds) in which hyperreal animal companions are prominently featured. Following, the essay will aim to articulate the hyperreal reformatting of animality as both an index of our contemporary relationship with non-humans and as a mode of responding to the threat of extinction in the Anthropocene era.