“In English, the word “apocalypse”—ety. Greek, n. apo (un-) + kaluptein (-veil)—has three non-exclusive meanings.”
“The first and most common is simply the end of the world, whether by divine punishment or whatever transpires in movies directed by Roland Emmerich.”
“The second is any form of calamity, representational or real, man-made or no, that resembles the end of the world, like the 2010 Haitian earthquake, Chernobyl, or the movies directed by Roland Emmerich themselves.”
“The third is what the Greeks intended apocalypse to mean: the revelation of knowledge through profound disruption, which is why the final book of the New Testament is called “Revelations” (composed, it is thought, to reassure Christians during their widespread persecution by the Roman emperor, Domitian).”
“In other words, the apocalypse either is the end, looks like the end, or helps us understand the end.”
“The media scholar Richard Grusin attributes the popularity of end-of-the-world scenarios in popular media to a phenomenon he calls “premediation,” the representation of cataclysm to build the public’s expectations for a real cataclysm. The plausibility of these scenarios matters little; the point of premediation, Grusin holds, isn’t “prediction” but “practice”—we steel ourselves for any number of possible futures so that we might overcome whatever trauma awaits us, like swallowing a pill to prevent the heartburn we know is coming. Because we know, deep down, that apocalypse awaits us on every scale. Premediation helps us rehearse our reaction so that, in the event of real chaos, we might behave in a manner more rational and productive.”
“But if not because of premediation, why should we care about the end of MMOs at all? What knowledge is there that isn’t present elsewhere?”
“If there can be said to be any good in an apocalypse, it’s that it almost always reveals something about what went wrong. As The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in an op-ed just days after Hurricane Katrina transformed economic marginalization into mass death, apocalyptic disasters “wash away the surface of society … expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities.””
“In other words, an apocalypse can help bridge the gap between what we experience and why we experience it, to negotiate between our lives as individuals and the systems that establish the limits of our experience. In an article in The Atlantic, Ian Bogost argues that what games offer, above all else, is an “operable argument … that shows us something about the world outside ourselves, something incomplete and grotesque, but something we ought to see.””
“Through simulation, we transcend the need for personal identification and focus instead on systems we are embedded in.”
“On this count, Bogost surely has a point. But it’s only half the story. Life might occur within systems, but it is not itself a system. Identity or system, narrative or simulation, representation is always a failed project—if a game could represent everything, it wouldn’t be a game at all, but (and just) a perfect simulacrum of the real.”
“What’s unique and valuable about the end of an MMO is that it can be read as a kind of representation, but it’s also a kind of “real” event that destroys representation, the destruction of an imagined world. With that duality comes the ability to wander between personal identification and reflection on the institutions that give rise to identification.”
“An apocalypse cares for nothing but its own being, bought at the expense of everyone else’s. Only a hopeless optimist would think that games can save us from whatever fates await us, as individuals or more. But whether at most or at least, the end of a world, even a virtual one, can help us understand both our own experiences and how “made” those experiences are, no matter how natural and private they feel to us. Before it can be changed, it must be understood. Eventually, there will be nothing to save but ourselves.”