[Journal Club] What Old War Video Games Tell Us about the Relation between Nature and Humans: “Retro Violence as a Paradoxical Fight for the Environment”

TEXT: Fernandes, A. (2026). Retro violence as a paradoxical fight for the environment: The nostalgic circular video games economy. Media, War & Conflict, 17506352261421845.

Introduction

These days one easily meets discourses linking the question of games to that of climate and the environment. Articles appear in no small number: the more material resources are poured into gaming hardware and consoles, the greater the problem of e-waste; the longer gamers play, the higher the carbon emissions. Game play has become nearly inseparable from the problem of environmental harm, and game companies now find themselves in a situation where developing a game necessarily means weighing sustainability.

The paper introduced here — “Retro Violence as a Paradoxical Fight for the Environment: The Nostalgic Circular Video Games Economy” — attends, against this background, to the possibility that the recent revival of retro video games might, paradoxically, help address the problem of climate and environment. Ordinarily, playing video games about war and violence is perceived as something liable to harm the environment, and prior research has repeated the debate over how much such games provoke human aggression. But the author, drawing on earlier research of their own, argues that the re-release of retro games on current consoles, or their porting to smartphones, has the effect — at least on the “material plane” — of cutting the cost of purchasing new games and consoles and lowering the accumulation of e-waste. This is summed up in the phrase “circular economy of nostalgia.”

Does (gaming) “nostalgia,” which looks environmentally harmful on its face, really conflict with the values of conservation and sustainability? Or might it, conversely, affect those values positively? It is time to analyze the structure of the retro video game’s circular economy. To understand it, though, one must grasp how the material effects occurring outside the game and the virtual practices carried out inside it interact. To that end, this study focuses on how nature is represented within violent retro video games, aiming to analyze what meanings and what agency are conferred on it.

Method and Materials

For its analysis the study takes Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) as its approach, and orients itself toward an “object-oriented approach in videogame studies.” So as not to explain the complex relations of nature, technology, and society reductively, ANT grants priority to none of the three strata — which makes it a useful method for understanding the relations among war, video games, and the environment as well.

One principal trait of ANT is that it analyzes non-human elements — which traditional sociology had treated as “non-social” factors — as actors in the formation of social relations. In the social sciences, “actor” had been treated as a concept premised on the agency of the human subject. Latour, borrowing the idea from the actant of semiotics, proposes instead a concept of the actor as “something that acts or to which activity is granted by others” — a concept holding relational rather than fixed properties. Under Latour’s schema, the range of agency extends beyond society into technology and nature, and the concept of the actor likewise extends onto a relational plane beyond the human.

Video game research to date has centered only on the “human” who plays. With ANT, the game can take on the standing of an actor that (besides being played by humans) exerts a certain force on the player. The author explains that viewing games through ANT allows one to move beyond understanding the video game as “a space responsible only for one’s own conduct” (which the author also describes as a mechanism reproducing neoliberal culture), and to problematize even elements that look value-neutral, such as in-game difficulty or the odds of victory. An ANT analysis of games focuses on the concrete process of interaction between game and player, and on which actors are composed in that process — and so necessarily comes to include not only the game’s internal elements but external ones as well: the material environment outside the game, the platform, the player’s human relationships.

To analyze how “nature” appears in video games, the study grasps the video game itself as a “network.” This network is not given in advance, nor determined one-sidedly by the game’s external conditions or by human actors and then represented inside the game. Rather, the game forms the meanings of nature and technology through the interaction of the various actors composing it: color, gameplay, viewpoint, elements that operate actively in the game and elements placed passively, elements hierarchically emphasized and elements marginalized. The study does not employ ANT’s classical concepts formed in the particular context of science and technology studies (STS) — associations, obligatory passage points, inscription devices — but seeks to follow ANT’s performative demand: to describe how things are composed through what they do to one another.

The study takes as its objects representative retro video games that unfold war narratives against natural settings, selected under the following requirements: 1) retro games for consoles of 16 bits or below (of higher ecological value than 32/64-bit-based games); 2) games with high play counts on retro-game sites; 3) games whose principal material is the military, firearms, and armed conflict; 4) games containing elements of “more-than-human nature” (the perspective, in ecological philosophy and the humanities, that regards the human as an element in a web of relations equal with non-human beings) — thus excluding from analysis games set indoors or in space, or post-apocalyptic games in which sustainability is not foregrounded as a central issue. The “retro” adopted here, meanwhile, could at the conceptual level be a problematic notion for ANT, insofar as it constructs a linear and teleological view of time; this study uses it only in the dictionary sense of “video games made long ago.”

The games selected on these criteria are three: Contra (1987), Battle City (1985), and River Raid (1982). First, Contra — the most-played among retro video games — is a run-and-gun action game in which two commandos halt an alien invasion on a nameless island in South America. Its stage names and screen elements consist entirely of natural environments — grassland, snowfield, river, mountain, forest — with military hardware placed within them. Battle City is an omnidirectional top-view shooter in which the player pilots a tank, destroying enemy tanks and defending a home base. Though “city” stands in its name, it has none of the elements that call an ordinary city to mind — roads, sidewalks, windows. The game arranges assorted natural terrains and obstacles — destructible brick walls, indestructible steel walls, tanks hidden in the brush, ice that hampers movement — and ends when the player’s base is destroyed or the lives run out. River Raid is a scrolling shooter in which the player pilots a fighter plane, attacking enemies while avoiding riverbanks and enemy fire; the game ends when the plane crashes or the fuel is spent.

Analysis: The Unnatural Nature?

Consider Contra first among the three. The player’s mission is to cleanse the aggressive human/technological actors by removing the enemy machinery installed in the natural environment — yet when the player destroys an enemy device, the nature in which it sits is never destroyed. Nature looks like nothing more than the immovable ground that lets the player stand, run, and jump. Exceptionally, broken terrain appears — cliffs and drops the player must jump, falling rocks to be dodged — and the fact that it is “nature,” not animals or plants, that drives these situations likewise shows how little human action touches nature. Yet this immutable nature is caught in the blast and burns at the finale, when every enemy is dispatched and the player escapes. The destruction of nature, that is, is presented as the positive result of having destroyed all evil, from the human point of view. By binding enemy and nature together, Contra composes the perception that nature’s own moral worth is interdependent with the morality of the beings who dwell in it. Nature in Contra ends up programmed as a being granted vulnerability and immutability at once, for the sake of human-centeredness: easily destroyed for human purposes, untouched by any attack at every other moment.

The nature of Battle City appears in a more active role. Among its natural elements, the brush is camouflage concealing enemies, while water and ice appear as beings that hamper the movement of the player’s tank. The player must dispatch the enemy while avoiding them — and this nature, meanwhile, is never destroyed or affected by the player. Nature, that is, exists indifferent to the human purpose of war, yet appears in the game as ceaseless constraint, performing the role of exposing the limits of the human player’s capacity. The one situation in which the human can escape nature’s constraints in this game is to dismantle the city of brick walls — at the price of greater exposure to enemy fire. In this respect the nature of Battle City may be called a neutral actor operating independently of human intent: untamed by the purposes of humans and their war, it exercises, one-directionally, the power to decide war’s outcome — the game’s victory or defeat.

River Raid is designed for infinite play, a loop structure repeating forever without any definite ending. The player can, in effect, remain within nature without limit; but since the game ends the instant the plane strikes a riverbank or the fuel runs dry, conditions attach to attaining that infinity. The technology of the video game lets one imagine nature persisting forever, indifferent to humans — and thereby exposes, in the end, the essential finitude of human existence. As the riverbank collisions show, the natural environment in River Raid appears as what directly prescribes the progress of play; and since the player, once dead, can never again witness that nature, infinite nature is presented as a being beyond the understanding of the essentially finite human. The only way for the player to remain within this nature is to keep resupplying the plane so that the fuel never runs out. To sustain a perpetual relation with nature, that is, the human is placed in a situation of having no choice but to exploit another nature.

* From left: play scenes from Contra, Battle City, and River Raid. (Source: Google Images)

Discussion: The Video Game’s More-Than-Human Nature

The in-game natures that appear in Contra, Battle City, and River Raid all signify a “dead nature” — a nature incapable of forming the kind of relation we experience with nature in reality. Nature in these games is a passively programmed backdrop, neither changed nor destroyed by the gamer’s in-game actions. The nature of all three games, that is, remains in a form with which no “interaction” by the player is possible. Why was it made so, and what does this show? One could object, of course, that these are games of the 1980s, and the programming constraints of the day left no other way to represent nature; or that, as simple shooters flying no eco-friendly banner, the manner of nature’s representation was simply no concern of their studios.

According to the author, however, a dynamic nature was perfectly possible even with the technology of the time — witness the falling rocks of Contra or the riverbank collisions of River Raid. The author proposes viewing the nature in these games philosophically, beyond a mere technical shortcoming of the era — arguing that the “nature that does not sufficiently interact with humans,” the “nature that does not always answer in humanly intelligible ways” revealed in the three games shows, rather, the possibility of a more-than-human nature. That the human can relate to nature only within limits inside the game is a limit programmed as inherent in nature itself, not a simple matter of technology. And this very inaccessibility and infinity of nature is a result composed only through the assemblage of finite technological actors and human actors. In this respect, through technology the human gains a vantage beyond the human, and the video game, too, becomes a medium that lets humans form some perspective upon phenomena that human experience can never fully capture — a medium that, to borrow Deleuze’s phrasing, puts us in relation with that to which no relation can be had.

The author says the video game displays the difference Kant drew between noumenon and phenomenon: nature in itself, inaccessible to the human — the noumenon — as against nature as phenomenon, presented by the video game in humanly intelligible form. Though the human cannot know the thing (nature) in itself (an sich), one can (through the game) think it metaphysically. The video game, too, by presenting nature as a being irreducible to the human point of view, lets one think the concept of a nature humans can never fully grasp — just as in Battle City, where nature is indestructible at the plane of the “thing in itself,” while the city, human-made and of the “phenomenal world,” turns out to be the one thing in that game the human can destroy.

A case of more-than-human nature can be confirmed in River Raid as well. Consider the case in which the player, in order to participate in infinite nature, must consume the very condition (the fuel) that makes it possible. By consuming fuel and generating pollution, the human stands, paradoxically, in the position of having to extinguish nature’s infinity itself. The paradox arrives: the human condition for witnessing nature’s infinity is identical with the condition that destroys that infinity. The game structure of endless, conclusionless play likewise presupposes that to continue forever the player would have to be an immortal being. What ends this game, that is, is nothing other than the human’s own finitude — and it is that very finitude, the study shows, that makes it impossible to gaze upon or experience without limit the nature programmed into the video game. This displays the essential limit of any attempt to understand nature entirely in human terms, or to place it under human control.

Relations between human and environment in video games are thus hard to explain with the four classic types alone proposed in prior research (Abraham & Jayemanne, 2017). This study argues that the environment plays a further role — not only backdrop for the human player, source of resources, human antagonist, or object of exploration, but “back-ground.” The “back-ground” here is no mere backdrop: it means the ground the human stands on and, at the same time, a being that endlessly shakes that ground, dismantling human-centeredness. The video game, that is, is itself another more-than-human actor that performatively discloses the limits of human capacity for action. The back-ground concept lets the human experience the limits the in-game environment reveals not simply as walls that cannot be crossed, but as the very relation that exists between human and nature. Seen this way, the video game cannot be regarded merely as having failed to realize an interactive, realistic nature; from the vantage of a post-anthropocentric nature, it presents a world that is, rather, true.

The author stresses, as the most important point of the discussion, that retro video games must not be understood simply as media that represent nature unrealistically. Even if one built a war game of painstakingly eco-friendly design, showing the natural environment actually destroyed through interaction with humans, the indestructibility of nature revealed in the retro game would repeat the moment the game was reset. (Conversely, a game in which the environment could never recover from the player’s actions would be one humans could not play for long.) Even if the newest video games make interaction with nature richer, that would if anything reinforce the anthropocentric view of nature as an object humans can manipulate and understand. Because such games would always present a nature that answers humans only in ways humans can understand, the view that nature is essentially inaccessible to humans could, as a result, be obscured instead. It is worth recalling that nature includes silence and unresponsiveness.

The video game’s unconscious thus performs, realistically, the fact that the human–nature relation is one defined essentially by limits — while at the same time making possible, through technology, a posthuman human–nature relation that exceeds those limits. Through the technology of the video game, nature shows itself as a being that can never be fully totalized; the video game discloses the limits of the human relation to nature and, at the same time, lets the human relate to nature beyond their own boundary. Of this relation the author stresses that the video game at least makes inaccessibility something experienced as inaccessible. The human cannot fully cross the limit — but can at least reach the position from which the limit can be seen.

In Closing

This study’s ANT analysis of video games has the merit of making us think about the relation between nature and humans in a form different from the customary one. That nature is given in games as an object that cannot be destroyed, or that does not answer the player, looks on its face like a simple technical limit or a lack of representation — but in fact it can make possible, for the human player, a new perception of nature. Even if the game carries no message about environmental problems or sustainability; even if its material is war and violence. And yet — perhaps because the impression of straining to avoid reductionism toward any single term of human(society)–technology–nature runs so strong — it was hard to escape the sense that the paper’s concrete approach and discussion are overwrought. Its limits read, broadly, as follows.

First, the study fundamentally regards the retro revival and replay as a valid, indeed indispensable, condition for a sustainable circular economy in the video game industry. Though grounded in the author’s prior findings, the premise that “playing retro games is, in the end, eco-friendly” deserves questioning: today’s consumption is likely closer to “expansion” than “substitution” — one buys the retro games and the consoles, and runs the emulators besides. The link between the introduction’s discussion — that retro games contribute to a circular economy — and the main text’s — that retro games draw nature as a more-than-human being — is, moreover, exceedingly weak. It reads like a claim that the latter finding makes the former problem the more worthy of attention; but since the introduction in effect calls for a separate analysis and research question of its own, setting up such a causal relation does not seem warranted.

Second, one must ask whether this study really performed an ANT analysis. Its gist — declining the basic classical concepts attempted in ANT analysis while professing agreement with ANT’s performative approach — weakens the essay’s claim to be one. To analyze a video game with ANT would require, as the author notes, not only the game’s internal elements but the various external elements connecting them: the technologies that must have gone into building the natural environments and terrain, the matters of the developers, the hardware characteristics at the time of porting, the game market and industry — the agency of countless components, and a process of following those actors to grasp the network and bring its substance to light. Yet the study confines its analysis to the game’s internal elements, and appears to perform a semiotic, philosophical reading of the game text grounded in non-anthropocentrism rather than a concrete network analysis of actants. My view as presenter, then, is that this should be seen less as a study performing ANT than as posthuman criticism grounded in an object-oriented approach.

Third, my interpretation of the “unresponsive nature” in these games differs from the author’s far too widely. The author says the unresponsive nature shows a more-than-human nature and lets the human sense its inaccessibility. But is unresponsive nature not, rather, the result of nature having been objectified — quite literally as backdrop — whether from technical constraint or from the absence of any thought for nature? In that case, the nature represented in the games can be read as an even stronger anthropocentrism. My shallow reading of the relevant theory makes it hard to go deeper, but the ontological approach assumed by object-oriented ontology, or by ANT, appears to explain the actors’ network as ontologically meaningful regardless of the perceptions and intentions of developer or researcher — and then to unfold it (paradoxically, through the epistemology of the researcher, a human actor). That the interpretation “the game shows a more-than-human nature” arises from a human actor strikes me, somehow, as a contradiction.

Be that as it may, I think the study offers an interesting point worth a moment’s thought for developers who, as production technology advances, must expand interactive elements — and weigh nature among them. For the more interactivity one builds, the more one may be building a world that moves only as the human answers it: a game that reinforces human-centeredness.