Retro violence as a paradoxical fight for the environment: The nostalgic circular video games economy

Abstract

Violent retro video games contribute to a circular economy of nostalgia amidst the backdrop of climate change. This reuse of old games stands in contrast to the escalating resources devoted to new video games and consoles, which contribute to the growing issue of technological waste. How does this material retro circular economy intersect with the environmental meanings embedded within these games? Using Actor-Network Theory methods, the author conducted an analysis of violent retro video games set in natural landscapes. The findings reveal that these video games promote a gameplay experience that runs counter to sustainable messaging. Through video games, nature is presented in a way that highlights the impossibility of a direct connection between humans and the natural world, acknowledging this impossibility instead of leaving it as an unknown. Techno-nostalgia, unsustainable gaming designs, and violence emerge as significant factors shaping a sustainable circular economy, thereby challenging simplistic approaches aimed at promoting environmental literacy, progress, and pacifism for a sustainable future.

Introduction

Video games, besides being associated with moments of play, entertainment, and leisure, are also powerful media that convey meanings and actions with serious and tangible impacts on the interaction between humans, technology, and nature. As objects through which the meanings of what is natural, human, and technological are negotiated and shared on a global scale, they play a role in shaping how we act in the world, exemplified most prominently by the increasing gamification of contemporary experience (Vanolo, 2018). Not only do video games appropriate content mediated by other media, such as television and music, but they also have real effects on their players, altering the way they relate to the world. In this context, a vast body of literature discusses the dangers of violent, war-themed, and conflict-based video games, arguing that they stimulate aggressive behaviors. On the other hand, studies that counter this hypothesis, advocating for the cathartic and therefore calming effects of playing these types of games (Kowert and Quandt, 2016), position video games as a medium that transcends their purely playful or entertainment-related functions. Due to this significant impact of video games as mediators of messages and actions, it is not surprising that they have become an important technology for the creation of games aimed at promoting sustainability literacy and engagement (Ouariachi et al., 2019; Stanitsas et al., 2019). The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between war video games and the ways in which nature is depicted within them. This research applies an interdisciplinary approach to war games by intersecting military studies with environmental sciences, in order to examine the effects of war on the environment (Pearson, 2012; Pereira et al., 2022; Rawtani et al., 2022). In this case, the goal is to understand the value of exploring the meanings and actions attributed to nature in war games that do not explicitly aim to promote environmental awareness.

Video games serve as a microcosm wherein the complexities of our modern interaction between media, technology, nature, warfare, and violence are vividly illuminated. Within the literature, there exists a latent connection among video games, war, and the environment, which can be further elucidated through the lens of “nostalgia”. The contemporary popular culture of retro video games embodies a nostalgia for the past, as these games, once popular in bygone eras, are experiencing a resurgence in present-day engagement (Harris, 2020; Nolan, 2021). In analogous terms, war is often linked to a yearning to return to a pre-war era characterized by peace, serving as a means to restore a lost past (Davidson, 2016; MacKenzie and Foster, 2017). Likewise, the environment evokes a desire to reconnect with a natural world from the past, wherein rural landscapes symbolize, for instance, a harmonious relationship with nature (Collins et al., 2023; Wagner, 2018).

This research endeavors to explore the potential of leveraging the relationship between video games, war, and the environment to address contemporary challenges. Specifically, the research focuses on retro video games, particularly those with violent themes, as they have garnered significant success (Wulf et al., 2018) and offer a unique avenue for addressing climate change. The resurgence of interest in these old violent video games, evidenced by multiple re-releases on modern consoles and adaptations for smartphones, reflects a burgeoning market that operates as a circular economy of nostalgia. While circularity in the economy can be described as the disassembling and reassembling of used products to give new life to matter in the form of new products, it can also be achieved through the simple reuse of a product over time, thereby promoting its durability and extended use (Morseletto, 2020). This involves the continued use of the same product for its original purposes across different contexts without significant alteration, such as the reuse of old bikes or the consumption of treated water. In these cases, the product is preserved without radically changing its form. This concept also applies to old video games, which are played on modern hardware without altering the original software. When consumers choose to play these older, aggressive video games, they divert resources that would otherwise be allocated to the purchase of new video games and consoles, thereby mitigating the accumulation of tech waste (Fernandes, 2025). The virtual realm of violent video games serves as a means of fostering a circular economy of nostalgia, which in turn contributes positively to the present environmental landscape. Hence, violent retro video games emerge as a potent force in the fight against climate change (Zhang et al., 2021). Although the relationship between violence and video games is conceptually polysemic in the current literature (Kowert, 2020), it clearly carries a negative connotation. Rather than simply agreeing with this negativity, this research leaves it in suspension, as violence is not always ethically negative, despite its brutal effects—something reflected in the extensive literature on “just war.” While, materially, the return to these games produces a sustainable circular economy of the videogame industry, indeed, this leads to the following question: what are the environmental virtual meanings embedded in violent retro video games? This inquiry holds significance within the realm of environmental politics concerning the circular economy of retro games, as harmful nostalgia may inadvertently contribute to the promotion of sustainability. It is conceivable that certain retro games possess playing programs that are antithetical to environmental preservation. Therefore, it is imperative to explore the interplay between material and virtual practices within the circular economy of retro games, particularly regarding the potential for virtual engagements detrimental to the environment to yield positive material impacts.

Methods and materials

This research tries to answer this question by analyzing the contents of violent retro games, as a way to understand the relationships between materially fostering a circular economy of video games resources and the virtual meanings that the environment has on those games. We will adopt Bruno Latour’s method of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Latour proposes a method to analyze the relationships between society, technology, and nature. He seeks to build a method that prevents falling into three reductionist dangers: (1) the risk of ‘sociologism’, in which nature and technology are reduced to social explanations; (2) the perils of ‘technologism’ where society and nature are fully explicated by technological reasons (Latour, 1990: 110); and (3) the danger of ‘naturalism’ through which technology and society are reduced to natural factors (Latour, 2009: 20–22). This methodological proposal is relevant to thinking about the relationships between war, video games, and the environment because it questions any explanatory precedence of any of these three realities above the others. ANT investigates how the social is constituted without falling into a ‘vicious circle’ of explanation where a social institution would be made up of social relations and these, in turn, would be made up of social individuals, who would be the result of social norms that emanate, finally, from social institutions. ANT proposes, on the contrary, to understand how society is constituted as such in a non-tautological relationship with technology and nature. The ANT method describes how “non-social” factors (understood as such by traditional sociology), such as syringes, bacteria, or the wind, contribute to the existence of social relationships. ANT tries to study how the “non-human” factors, like nature or technology, are involved in the constitution of human society (Latour, 1996: 369).

The concept of “actor” (Latour, 1996: 371), which is the head of the acronym ANT (Actor-Network-Theory), aims to prevent, methodologically, that the analyst starts the analysis with elements strongly defined as technological, social, or natural. Latour (1996: 373) derives the concept of actor, not from human agency but from the concept of “actant” of semiotics. The actant is a textual or significant element that is always in a relationship of opposition and/or cooperation in a narrative, or a textual structure, with other elements (Greimas, 1971: 32). Any actor who is outside this structural relationship becomes difficult to be defined since it will have few resources to define itself in isolation (tautologically, it should be added). According to Latour (1996: 373), the actant is “something that acts or to which activity is granted by others”. Latour intends to capture the relational dimension of the Greimasian semiotic actants, as things defined through the relationships they establish, in order to transfer it to his concept of actor of ANT. Latour wants to extend this relational dimension of Greimasian semiotics, taking it beyond its textual dimension. He proposes a concept of actor that can streamline the links between technology, society, and nature, through a concept that receives its meaning when it “acts” or when it is “acted” on in technological, natural, or social ways. ANT will take from semiotics the rule that the actors are not definable before entering into a relationship with other actors. Latour (1996: 374) claims that the actors are “flows”, “circulating objects”, in the sense that they have an identity that depends on the relationships that are established between social, natural, or technological actors.

The “actor”, a kind of linguistic actant that is no longer limited to the textual sense but acts and is acted upon by technological, social, and natural actions, is a point of connection that these different meanings establish with each other. By extending the “agency” to technology and nature, the concept of actor allows conceiving technology and nature as made of actors, i.e., “technological” actors and “natural” actors, which are neither social nor human and are related to them. Latour’s concept of actor is in line with ANT’s relational proposal because the characteristics of the actor will depend on how other actors act on it or are the target of its action. In the structural analysis of narratives proposed by Greimas (1971: 32), the hero is defined in relation with to a subject who has to be saved and to subjects who are its enemies. ANT transposes this relational way of defining actants in semiotics to approach the relationship between technology, society, and nature. ANT is concerned with providing a way of understanding the process of

attribution of human, unhuman, nonhuman, inhuman characteristics; the distribution of properties among these entities; the connections established between them; the circulation entailed by these attributions, distributions, and connections; the transformation of those attributions, distributions, and connections of the many elements that circulate. (Latour, 1996: 373)

More specifically, ANT has been applied in the field of video game studies to decenter an anthropocentric perspective that focuses on humans playing games. Instead, it proposes interpretations in which games also make players do things, i.e., that games exert certain forces on players through rules, scripts, and designs, thus making the game an agent rather than merely a passive entity (Jessen and Jessen, 2014). An ANT analysis of video games demonstrates not only that the player acts and is acted upon by the game, but also how this interaction proceeds and what type of actor emerges from this interaction. In this sense, the video game is not just viewed as a space of “freedom” of movement and “responsibility” for one’s own actions, where the possibilities for action, particularly the difficulty of the game and the opportunities to win, would be presented as “neutral” values. This questionable perspective contributes to and participates in a neoliberal culture as a mode of life:

even if video games are more explicit about the redemption opportunities they offer, we see there are similarities between failures in video games and in our regular lives. In a neoliberal society, individuals, or at most particular groups or communities, are to be held responsible for their own situation without considering any structural conditioning that might be affecting them. The rhetoric here, in video games, as it is in wider society, is that should they exert themselves, they will be able to achieve their goals, or else they will fail due to their own deficiencies or lack of effort. (Muriel and Crawford, 2020: 152)

The formation of the player as shaped by the agency of video games includes not only what can be done within the video game but also how actions taken outside the game interact with the constitution of the meanings of the game and the player. This encompasses familial relationships, the materialities of the game space, and the game platform (Hung, 2016).

Following the ANT framework, this analysis aims to understand how nature emerges within the video game as a result of various agents that comprise the game—such as colors, gameplay, perspective, what is active, what is passive, what is hierarchically emphasized or devalued—treating the video game itself as a network rather than merely considering the network of agents in video game culture as that which exists solely between industry, programmers, players, chips, keyboards, etc. This is the strength of ANT: the network is not predetermined, and what constitutes nature or technology is not fully determined outside the game and subsequently represented by it. Instead, the game performs the emergent formation of the meanings of nature and technology through how it connects agents as micro as pixels, mobility and immobility of the environment and weapons, and so forth. In this ANT approach to video games, the research adopts “an object-oriented approach in videogame studies” (Ahn, 2018: 213) that does not view the video game as merely a human reproduction or as something that abolishes all human aspects through the video game. This approach avoids interpreting the video game object as either “the misrecognized human product or the abject other, detached forever from a subject and thus arousing castrating hallucinations; either human produced or human lost” (Ahn, 2018: 228).

Although in this research do not use classical ANT concepts (e.g., associations, obligatory passage points, inscription devices, etc.), which themselves derive from the context in which they were created—Science and Technology Studies—and thus are “actors” that cannot be simply transposed without forming a new network of different meanings, it adheres to ANT’s performative requirement to describe how nature, video games, and violence constitute themselves through their interactions, i.e., how they are constituted by what they “do” to each other. “Describing” seems to make ANT approaches similar to more formalist approaches in ecocriticism, due to its textual nature, which is not surprising given ANT’s Greimasian semiotic heritage. However, describing is not explaining, nor is it revealing a hidden meaning behind an explicit one. It is not, as in ecocriticism, performing a hermeneutics of the video game through concepts from literature or ecology. Describing is the challenging act of suspending the received meanings of nature and culture to see how nature and culture performatively, rather than symbolically, interdefine each other within the video game through what they do to one another. Staying at this level of empirical description is a challenge, according to Latour (2004: 64–65).

The materials utilized in this ANT analysis comprise a representative selection of retro video games centered on warfare narratives set within natural landscapes. Inclusion criteria for these games are as follows: (1) consideration is given to retro games developed for consoles with a maximum of 16 bits, not only due to their reduced resource consumption compared to subsequent 32- and 64-bit 3D generation games, which make them ecologically more valuable, but also owing to the extended lifespan of this console generation, which also enhances their sustainable circular value as they continue to be played over 30 years after their initial release within an ever-expanding video game industry; (2) preference is given to games with higher play counts on retro gaming sites, ensuring that are analyzed items with contemporary impact; (3) inclusion of games featuring military, firearms, or conflict-related themes; and (4) selection of games containing elements of more-than-human nature, defined as possessing biological traits, thereby excluding games set in space, indoor environments, or post-apocalyptic scenarios where sustainability is not a primary concern. ¹

While the issue of what constitutes the natural meanings of video games is the focus of this ANT analysis, which implies that a selection criterion searching for “elements of more-than-human nature” can only be provisional, given that this meaning is at stake in this article, there is also an important criterion that is not the main objective of this study, namely the concept of “retro.” As one of the reviewers aptly noted, the notion of retro is more challenging to define outside a traditional teleology that places the past behind, the present in the middle, and the future ahead in a topological sense. Historiographically, this linearity is obviously disrupted, and more so from an ANT perspective, where time is not a simple a priori but an actor that forms in interaction with other actors, including the video game and its continuous play in the present and potential play in the future. An ANT analysis of the musealization of video games shows that treating video games as artifacts of the past, i.e., granting them the status of “retro,” requires a set of actors such as institutions, curatorship, and archives. This approach, by freezing the video game in the past (Eklund et al., 2019), risks leaving unexamined how video games, with their potential for ongoing play, reactivate disputes between the boundaries of past, present, and future. Since the objective of this article is not to analyze how time, specifically the concept of “retro,” is constituted, it is assumed a linear notion of time where retro is a game that was chronologically produced a long time ago, given the brief history of video games within the broader context of human history and the considerable number of video games produced in recent history. This linear notion is used merely to apply the concept of “retro” in an ecological sense, i.e., as games that, through their constant reuse over time, reduce the ecological footprint, which also depends on a linear timeline due to effects of pollution accumulation. However, this naïveté is challenged when it is shown that, temporally, the challenge that so-called “retro” video games pose to the future and present of video games remains, demonstrating that the relationship between video games and nature does not easily change with the passage of time, in the sense of a so-called technological “progress” of new video games.

A rich qualitative ANT analysis must focus on a small sample of video games, given the intricate networked materialities and meanings that video games perform between war and environment as things defined inter-dependently. The analysis will focus on Contra, Battle City, and River Raid, as they meet the established inclusion criteria and are each played millions of times, unlike many other retro games of the same genre, which only garner thousands of plays. While there are numerous websites offering retro video game access, only one platform, retrogames.cz (nd), maintains organized user metrics. The substantial play counts of these three selected games ensure that the qualitative analysis addresses an aspect of significant quantitative impact within the contemporary nexus of video games, war, and the environment. Furthermore, the existence of over similar 300 online playable retro shooter games, collectively accumulating millions of plays, underscores the substantial influence of this phenomenon. These games were consistently among the most played or highly rated titles on various retro gaming websites and continue to be reissued for new gaming platforms. Consequently, our analysis focuses on video games that hold paramount relevance for understanding the interplay between war and the environment. It is important to note that the play counts provided in this text are conservative estimates, as they are derived solely from the playing times recorded on one retro gaming website.

The games: Contra, Battle City and River Raid

The most popular game in the selected list, played more than 2 million times, is Contra. A sequel, Super Contra, was released in 1988, sharing the same war–environment relationships of the original game, and this version was played around 330 thousand times. Developed and published by Konami, Contra is a ‘run and gun’ action game released in 1987 as a coin-operated arcade game. A home version was later released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988, including various computer formats. The game follows two military commandos, Bill ‘Mad Dog’ Rizer and Lance ‘Scorpion’ Bean, on a mission to thwart a dangerous alien invasion. The American version of Contra sets the plot in the present on an unnamed South American island. The game scenario is filled with green, brown and blue tones, with grass, snow, water, mountains and trees, corresponding to a certain idea of South America as an exotic and wild place without signs of urbanism or civility. The US version of Contra reveals several stages that are labelled with names that are typically linked to natural surroundings. For instance, Level 1 is called “Jungle,” Level 3 is named “Waterfall,” and Level 5 is denoted as “Snow Field.” These exotic locations are inhabited by hostile entities that must be eliminated, in addition to the presence of automated military equipment integrated into the natural environment, resulting in a perilous amalgamation of nature and technology. Battle City, played over 2 million times, is a multi-directional shooter video game released by Namco in 1985 for the Family Computer. Also, Tank 1990 is a ‘hack’ of the popular game Battle City created by the Chinese bootleg company Yanshan Software. This bootleg version was played more than 420 thousand times, which makes this type of game played nearly two and a half million times. The player controls a tank tasked with destroying enemy tanks while protecting their base from enemy attacks. The game’s stages present various terrains and obstacles, including destructible brick walls, steel walls, hidden tanks under bushes, ice fields hindering tank movement, and impassable water pools. The game ends if the player’s base is destroyed or they exhaust all available lives. The game takes place in a “city” comprised of brick walls that form a maze that can be destroyed, with no visible roads, sidewalks, or windows. River Raid, played over 1 million times, is a scrolling shooter game published by Activision in 1982 for the Atari 2600. It was later adapted for various other gaming platforms. In River Raid, players control a fighter jet flying over the “River of No Return”, engaging enemy targets like tankers, helicopters, and jets while avoiding collisions with the riverbank and enemy fire. Points are scored for destroying different targets, and fuel depots replenish the jet’s fuel. The game ends if the jet crashes or runs out of fuel, but gameplay is otherwise continuous if fuel is maintained and damage is avoided.

Analysis: an unnatural nature?

In Contra, although the player has the ability to destroy the enemy’s automatic weapon devices installed on land, the natural environment in which they stand remains indestructible. This means that it is not programmed to react to the bullets that pass through the screen until they disappear, creating a hovering effect over nature. Nature is simply the unmovable plane on which individuals stand and make leaps, quite literally the physical surface they walk on. Nature appears, thus, as the indestructible ground of play. On one hand, through the act of eliminating enemies and automatic war machines, there is a process of ‘cleansing’ nature from aggressive human and technological agents. On the other hand, the notion that nature possesses an inherent resistance to destruction is programed as an unaltered continuity. Two exceptions are the discontinuity of the land, which includes gaps that require the player to jump, and the “waterfall” stage, where rocks fall towards the player, which must be avoided for the sake of survival. It is crucial to highlight that these elements specifically relate to geological facets of nature, as opposed to biological ones. Rocks possess a greater degree of programed agency compared to other elements of nature. The impact of human interventions on nature is indiscernible, as the latter is programed to persist indefinitely. Furthermore, this implies that there is no necessity to prioritize the preservation of nature, as its destruction bears no repercussions. However, in the final moments of Contra, the hero manages to evacuate the island aboard a helicopter as it is consumed by a massive explosion, resulting in the eradication of specific mountain formations and the subsequent conflagration of the entire region. The triumph can only be considered whole upon the destruction of nature as well. The preservation of nature during gameplay is contradicted once the game concludes. The annihilation of nature through war is not regarded as an unfavorable consequence of the game, as it signifies the elimination of the locus of evil. The game establishes a connection between the wickedness of those to be eliminated and their location, highlighting the interdependence of the moral standing of nature and its inhabitants. The destruction of nature becomes necessary as a consequence of its lack of intrinsic worth. If nature facilitates the existence of the enemy, then it does not deserve protection. The game portrays the destruction of nature as a positive outcome, as evidenced by the victorious ending where the island explodes, but only after the human character has safely escaped. Nature is designed with providence, oriented towards anthropocentric interests, both vulnerable and resilient in order to serve human goals.

Battle City incorporates programmed agency for the natural elements, including bushes, ice, and water. The utilization of bushes as decoy elements serves to weaponize nature. On the other hand, the existence of water and ice poses challenges to the efficient operation of the tank in the game. Consequently, nature cannot be considered a passive component in the realm of war. Its programming is intended to play a crucial role in determining victory or defeat. Nature, indifferent to the goals of warfare, can be employed to deceive adversaries and expose the limitations of human skill in relation to environmental factors. In this game, the activity of nature plays a “neutral” role that should not be underestimated in determining the outcome of war. Nature remains indifferent to the distinction between right and wrong. It acts of its own accord. The game programs therefore a restricted weaponization of nature, creating a partially unfamiliar environment for humans and their objectives in war. The natural environment remains unharmed by the effects of war. Water, ice, and bushes are impervious to destruction. The relationship between nature and war is predominantly one-sided, with nature holding a decisive power over the outcome of conflicts. The sole solution to evade the detrimental consequences of nature involves dismantling the city (symbolized by brick walls), thereby exposing the player to potential threats. The tanks are then trapped between the unilateral effects of nature and the destruction of the city to escape the effects of nature.

In the game River Raid, nature is portrayed as an infinite entity, devoid of any reachable conclusion. At the same time, the limitations imposed by nature prevent unrestricted access, as any collision between the plane and the riverbank would result in a crash. There are, therefore, conditions to stay in the unconditioned nature. This implies that nature possesses an inherent programming that renders it simultaneously infinite and perilously finite in the context of human conflicts. Through the continued success of surviving in the game, the human attains a comprehension of nature that exposes the finite nature of humanity. This is accomplished through technological methods by programming an entity with eternal existence, demonstrating the enduring presence of technology and nature even after humanity’s disappearance. Through the use of video game technology, it becomes possible to conceive nature as boundless, irrespective of its human origins, while also serving as a testament to the finite nature of humanity, as the game cannot be concluded regardless of the number of participants or time invested. Another significant programming aspect of River Raid is the portrayal of nature as perilous for humans. As an example, in the event of the plane colliding with the riverbank, the game will abruptly come to an end, highlighting the direct impact of the natural environment on gameplay. Despite the potential infiniteness of nature, humans lack the ability to bear witness to their existence in the afterlife due to the perpetual nature of the game and the absence of opportunity to observe the environmental consequences of a plane crash, as the game terminates upon impact. Nature, being indestructible and infinite, is inherently alien to finite human understanding. The potential for human involvement in the infinite aspects of nature within the game is achieved through constantly refueling the plane. The implication is that, in order to grasp the concept of infinite nature, an endless supply of fuel and non-degradable plane technology would be necessary. In order for humans to achieve a close connection with nature indefinitely, they must utilize undestructible technological airplane transportation, necessitating the continuous consumption of fuel and consequent long-term exploitation of the Earth’s fossil resources.

Discussion: The more-than-human nature of videogames

All these games share a “dead nature,” a nature that does not produce a relationship similar to what can be experienced outside the video game. One reason for this is the technological limitation faced by the programming of these games, due to the amount of content that can be programmed within a limited memory. To address the counter-argument that retro games are limited in their portrayal of nature due to the older gaming systems they were created for, it is essential to engage in a comprehensive discussion of this shared element found in all three games. It holds true that nature in these games is largely a passive programmed scenario, thereby impeding the ability to fully interact with it in a more natural manner, i.e., with more responsiveness and, particularly, destructability. This seems to affect not only old games but also new ones, which seem to refuse using the potential of new technological developments (Chang, 2019: 21). One could argue that the technological constraints in programming these old games may pose limitations, nevertheless, this standpoint can be swiftly challenged by instances such as the spontaneous rock fall in the “waterfall” level of Contra, as its explosion of the island in the (unplayable) end of the game, or the perilous riverbank in River Raid. Another reason for such a “poor” presentation of nature in this game is the fact that, while these games depict the environment, they can hardly be considered an “ecogame” in the sense of raising environmental awareness, explicitly questioning human–environment relations, or showing environmental destruction of recognizable places (op de Beke et al., 2024: 9–10), given that they are shooters. However, a philosophical perspective may argue that the limited nature of human interaction with the natural world can be understood as ontological and programmed limitations of nature itself, and not just a technological failure that can be corrected. Žižek (2018) notes that in video games the

world is not perfectly programed, for example, in the back you see a forest but it is not part of the game to go there, so it is meaningless to us. ‘I want to see the trees there’ is not in the program. They only exist as this blurred incomplete background . . . The idea is this one that . . . in creating our world, but you can give also an atheist reading to it, god was a lazy programmer, god underestimated us, he thought ‘humans are too stupid to move beyond the atom, why should I bother programming position and velocity, they will never reach that point’ . . . we approach this incompleteness of the universe.

According to an atheist perspective, human beings, as natural entities, are programmed by nature and its laws in a way that prevents them from fully experiencing naturalness. To truly access naturalness, individuals must transcend their human nature and adopt a post-anthropocentric viewpoint. When video games introduce a nature that lacks comprehensive player interaction, they are essentially encoding the limitations dictated by the laws of nature governing the human–nature relationship. This means that video games may render nature in more-than-human ways precisely by showing a less responsive nature to human action, as something that not always responds in human comprehensible ways. If programming adheres to natural laws, if it is indeed part of nature and not a “transcendental” object, then natural limitations in the way humans access nature are inherent in the program. This limitation serves to highlight the fact that video games are unable to accurately replicate the true essence of nature, for natural reasons, for humans thus emphasizing the inherent challenge in comprehending and exerting complete human control over it. Therefore, the game does not fail to present a more interactive and realistic depiction of nature. It exemplifies the inherent limitations of technology and human comprehension in fully capturing or conveying nature, given the existing natural constraints that are behind humans and technology as part of nature and governed by its materials and laws.

However, it is through technology that the human accesses something as inaccessible, i.e., nature. It means that the inaccessible, limitless aspect of nature is produced by a congregation of limited technical and human agents, which together hint at an unlimited nature within their assemblage. This means that with technology the human acquires a more-than-human perspective. It is not possible then to agree more with the thesis that video games are “boundary objects that facilitate passage between the material and seemingly immaterial contexts of the physical world and virtual playspace” (Chang, 2019: 11). Videogames serve as a medium to establish, paraphrasing Deleuze (1988: 63), a relation with the non-relational, offering a human perspective on phenomena that are beyond the grasp of the human experience. That is the case of the game River Raid, where participation in the infinite consumes the conditions that guarantee that infinitization. Through perpetual destruction of adversaries, navigation of riverbanks, and constant fuel replenishment, humans can momentarily partake in the eternal and inexhaustible nature of technology and the environment. The game demonstrates that humans cannot engage with nature indefinitely unless they themselves eradicate that very infinity, by polluting and exhausting its fossil sources, rendering nature entirely inaccessible to them. The inexhaustible sense of nature cannot be witnessed by a human participant who does not consistently strive to establish the polluting conditions for witnessing.

In a philosophical sense, the video game illustrates the Kantian (1998) distinction between noumena and phenomena. Specifically, it shows the division between the video game’s representation of the noumenon—i.e., the inaccessible nature in itself—and this nature as it is presented by the video game as an accessible phenomenon, according to human capacities to grasp it. In the same way that humans cannot know the “in-itself” from a more-than-human perspective, though they can at least think about it metaphysically, the video game is also engaging in a thinking in action process by presenting the ungraspable notion of nature as something not reduced to the human perspective. The Kantian division is also used to place human freedom in the noumenal realm, protecting it from being reduced to natural laws that operate in the phenomenal world. Similarly, the video game portrays nature in the noumenal realm, ensuring its freedom from human control.

This Kantian division appears in the game Battle City where the city’s capacity for destruction differentiates between what is phenomenologically destructible, such as human-made structures like bricks and tanks, and what is noumenally indestructible, namely, nature. Only that which is created by humans has the potential to be destroyed. To win the war, it becomes imperative to eliminate artificiality that characterizes the city, given the invulnerability of nature. The unadulterated connection to nature, which necessitates the eradication of human artifacts, signifies an ecological relationship that transcends anthropocentrism. Within this framework, nature is intricately connected with the absence of urban development, cities, and the concept of civility. Nature is not only free from total human control but also serves as the moral arbiter of human behavior. This is exemplified in the conclusion of the narrative of Contra, where an indestructible island (during gameplay) is ultimately replaced by an unplayable destruction of the island. The technological manner in which nature is programmed as impervious by humans, yet vulnerable when it involves the annihilation of ethically flawed beings (i.e. the enemies), also gives rise to the associated concept of the morally upright human: The individual who possesses an unwavering commitment to preserve nature, unable to bring harm even if desired; the person who will always find stability on the natural terrain; and the observer who can witness the devastation of nature from a secure location. The morality of humans is affirmed by nature, which acts as the guardian, selecting and safeguarding those who are righteous. Conversely, being morally wrong is the result of being destroyed alongside nature. The programming of nature through technology imparts naturalness to human morality: what nature dictates becomes the moral standard, a form of moral natural determinism technologically encoded in the videogame.

This means that there is another mode besides the classical four modes of human–environment relationship in video games in which the “environment is largely subject to the activity of more lively entities that inhabit it: either an index of their movement (background) or subject to their extractive (resource), militarist (antagonist) or cognitive (text) gameplay” (Abraham and Jayemanne, 2017: 84). That other mode is that of a back-ground (with a hyphen), as a ground that ungrounds humans, i.e., as something that continually turns its back on the human perspective by being unresponsive to human control. A lack of response that is made through video game technological means, a more-than-human technatural actor that performs the limits of human agency. This is the power of an ANT perspective, which demonstrates that the background is not merely a passive creation of the human programmer. It is an agent of a more-than-human nature that refuses to be reduced to the human perspective. This back-ground enables humans to perceive limitations as something that exists in-between, rather than being completely unable to discern what lies on the other side. Otherwise, humans would not understand what the limitation is actually limiting. A positive relation with the negative.

When the game does not program the destructibility of nature when the player is destroying machines and killing humans, to make the play possible and not something self-destructible, it is precisely programming a relation with nature as it is possible to program with a nature that let humans live, to go to war, program and play video games. The inherent constraint on programmability, in a manner more aligned with nature, is also the inherent constraint on humans’ relationship with a nature beyond their grasp, which can only be fully understood by relinquishing the dominance of the human perspective through the technological video game programming, with natural laws and natural resources, to produce an undestructible nature. The game River Raid, by lacking an end and being playable infinitely due to its eternal loop, vividly illustrates the mortal nature of human players, who would need to be immortal to play the game continuously without losing. This scenario paves the way for the creation of a second automated program capable of playing the game indefinitely, demonstrating a situation where technology generates a nature unanchored from human influence. This possibility reveals a technologically produced post-anthropocentric or more-than-human nature. This finitude of the human in the face of an eternal loop that only ends because the player must abandon the game, either voluntarily or involuntarily, allows for an “existentialist” update of Sicart’s (2015) definition of the game loop as something “that is repeated until a break condition is reached, either in the game mechanics or in the computing operations”. It is the finitude of the human that prevents infinite contemplation of the programmed nature of the video game. It is precisely through the technology of video games and not against it that nature appears as something that does not fully manifest but appears in its non-totalization. In this sense, the video game has something profoundly natural about it, executing “the idea of living deliberately in nature through a video game” (Chang, 2019: 2). The use of technology, particularly video games, reveals this limitation and enables humans to establish a connection with nature that goes beyond human boundaries. For instance, in the case of Contra, war functions as an optimal means to eliminate adversaries and eradicate hazardous technological components from the environment because the selective detonations have no impact on nature. Consequently, the more-than-human nature of this nature surpasses that of the adversaries and machines, as it remains detached from the ongoing events.

It is critical to grasp that these video games should not be merely viewed as offering unrealistic representations of nature. The ontological perspective presents a challenge in creating war games with environmentally-friendly game designs. A game where the environment was effectively destroyed by war, with the possibility of restarting in a novel, untouched virtual world, would just repeat the indestructible nature of nature in retro games. Furthermore, implementing a war game in which the natural environment cannot be reset would enhance realism, yet render it unplayable in the long term due to escalating levels of playing field destruction. It would produce a post-anthropocentric natural realism, but humanly unplayable. Consequently, retro games do not merely exhibit a technological constraint in their portrayal of the natural world. This limit, which makes nature indestructible and more-than-human, is a natural limit, and, therefore, will seem to affect any video game, new or old. New video games that feature more interactive encounters with nature will only reinforce the perspective of nature as manipulable and intelligible for interaction and encounters, obscuring the important perspective of nature as inaccessible and possessing aspects that cannot be fully exhausted by technological advancements in video games. This risks reducing nature to “‘functional’ terms,” following the downgrading of the value of “passivity” in a world dominated by agency correlated with human manipulation (Seller, 2024: 353). Even if a super-programmer and/or super-program could create a video game where nature was entirely responsive, it would still be an anthropocentric fantasy—one where nature always responds and presents its responses in a manner intelligible to the human standpoint. This is particularly true when nature also includes silence and unresponsiveness to human concerns. The concept of “silence” itself is already an inadequate way to “listen” to nature, as it is only sensible to beings that hear and expect sound, such as humans. The fact that nature is programmed by its natural laws in a video game as indestructible, in the sense as something that is alien to war and human affairs, points towards the ontological position that nature is in some irreducible level alien to human concerns, that is, as something that does not care for humans, and cannot be reduced to them.

Retro violent video games are, thus, important natural, social and technological resources (e.g. hardware, software, the human and natural resources involved in the original game, the end of authorship rights that open the video game to free circulation, etc.) that use natural laws and materials to perform the limited power of the humans in nature, even if they do not have an explicit sustainable message. The retro violent video game shows how nature is inaccessible in a total way by the human perspective. This ‘video game unconscious’, while performing a realistic relationship between humans and nature, that is, a relation marked by a limit, allows nonetheless to step over the limit by technologically allowing a posthuman-nature relation that will create the conditions for a nature that can no longer sustain human life. However, by making accessible that inaccessibility as inaccessible, that is, the possibility of going beyond the limit to see it, may lead the human to the destruction of nature because the player is programed by the video game to be unable to destroy nature and be destroyed with its destruction. Video games are part of the natural history of the evolution of life and its techniques. They are the way nature, through the human nature of the video game programmer and the natural laws that are behind programming and video game devices, asserts its own inaccessibility to nature in a total way. The reason is that technological ways of crossing that limit are paid in the destruction of the natural conditions for human flourishing (e.g. the videogames’ lack of sustainable politics), but not of nature in a total way, which further confirms the alien relation between humans and nature. This unnatural notion of nature, one that is alien to the human nature when the human does not see the need for preserving it for its own good, is presented in the videogame as the fiction of a true undestructability or eternal killability of nature. Fiction in the sense that humans can survive in such a nature when they cannot, which is also a real presentation of nature as something that will always survive the human, meaning that these video games are a fiction (for humans) that is true (for a post-anthropological nature).

Conclusion

The case of retro shooter games shows that the re-play of retro videogames, which is crucial for a sustainable circular economy of the videogame industry, given the programmed unsustainable videogame mediation of the war–environment relationship, is a paradoxical mode of fighting climate change. The positive environmental effects resulting from the reuse of video games can occur independent of one’s level of literacy, political stance on green issues, or awareness of climate change. Paradoxically, through technological means, video games exhibit an artificial nature that remains impervious to human conflict. This more-than-human mediation of nature is made through technology and allows for a human access to nature as something that is, by nature, naturally inaccessible in a total way by human means. The glance of this inaccessibility is what makes nature, at the same time, as something that is more-than-human, and also as something that does not concern the human because it will always resist human wars. The sustainable circular economy of retro war video games shows that violence towards nature, unnatural videogames’ renderings of nature, and lack of efforts to raise consciousness for sustainability issues in games are compatible and contribute to the fight against climate change. Considering the association of circular retro video games economy with past resentful longings for an inexhaustible environment, gender inequalities, and xenophobic nationalisms, such as the exclusive presence of male characters fighting invaders in a South American island in the Contra game, what is the detrimental cost of nostalgia that we are willing to bear in order to achieve a sustainable world? The possibility of a more environmentally friendly world could potentially be accompanied by resentful subjectivities.