Virtual Catastrophe: Games, Play and Environmental Disaster in Online Games and Cyberpunk Fiction | Emma Nicoletti

Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Emma Nicoletti Climate change is usually addressed by scientists and policy makers; however, the dystopic alternate realities constructed in Jeff Noon’s novel Pollen and the online games Urgent Evoke and Project Bluebird suggest that by playing games rather than moiling. Or, more precisely, by conflating games and play with work. These works invert the common sense relationship between reality and virtual reality to suggest that real-world environmental and social problems can be relieved via game play in virtual worlds. This paper will explore how a semiotic analysis of the ludic excursions and inversions of these texts reflect current ambiguities towards the role of technology in contemporary society; particularly, attitudes regarding the way technologies render the boundaries between play and work, representation and reality, and human and machine indistinct, and the way technology is represented as both the cause and cure of climate change. Emma Nicoletti is a high-school English teacher. She graduated from the University of Western Australia with a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours) in 2005. Currently, her research is focused upon analysing the representation of games and play in the dystopic novels of science-fiction author Jeff Noon.