In chapter five of Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games, titled “Collapse,” Alenda Y. Chang defines “permadeath” as “a game mechanism in which playable characters that die remain dead and therefore become unplayable” (Chang 213).
When players know that their characters cannot return to life, they act more carefully. Chang encourages us to extend this logic to non-playable entities such as trees, whose permanent eradication might eventually make play itself impossible (232).
The Warcraft series developed by Blizzard Entertainment uses nonhuman permadeath of trees to expose the logic underlying the justification of ecological exploitation. The player sends workers into the forest to harvest trees for lumber, yet it becomes remarkably easy to forget that the game’s progress depends upon environmental destruction. “Play” itself temporarily obscures this awareness.
In Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton traces this kind of ecological distraction to the “metaphysics of presence” characteristic of Western philosophy: because the world appears stable and continuously available to us, we overlook the extent to which modern industrial life depends upon an unusually stable ecological period in the history of the planet (48).
The game also challenges logocentric assumptions by juxtaposing the irreversible destruction of trees with the inconsequential rebirth of the playable Hero. Heroes respawn moments after death, but trees do not, even though it is arguably easier to imagine a play session without heroes than one without trees. For Morton, this kind of irreversibility is one of the defining features that make ecological collapse a “wicked problem” (37).
Morton argues that ecological thinking feels “weird” because we struggle to grasp how individual actions contribute to ecological catastrophe. This failure of comprehension, in turn, intensifies the catastrophe itself (6). Permadeath games reduce this “weirdness” by forcing players to confront mortality, the precarity of human and non-human life, and the interdependence between them.
Works Cited
Chang, Alenda Y. Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Columbia University Press, 2016.
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