It’s easy to see how games like Fallout 4 (2015), Mass Effect 3 (2012), and Mad Max (2015) constitute a kind of premediation, rehearsing our collective anxieties over nuclear war, AI takeover, and ecological devastation, respectively. Yet premediation isn’t quite sufficient to describe the end of an MMO-SOE likely didn’t imagine or at least didn’t intend for Galaxies to suffer its gradual blackout. Premediation, like its prefix implies, is rooted in what comes before; by the time an MMO shuts down, it’s already too late. In this respect, all-but-forgotten Hellgate: London is an object lesson in this distinction, a game about an apocalypse that eventually fell victim to its own. 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?

An apocalypse can help bridge the gap between what we experience and why we experience it.

This post appears courtesy of Kill Screen.