It is commonplace in our media to encounter images of the climate crisis that evoke the horror genre, especially in films and news reports that stage scenes of devastation and disaster. These representations of the climate crisis often promote a feeling that Simon Estok calls ‘ecophobia’. According to Estok, ‘the frustrations of not being able to hold and control nature have been very influential in how some genres have developed.’ In developing Rooted in Crisis, we wanted to address horror representations of climate change, challenging the ways that such representations provoke ecophobia. The feeling that ‘nature’ is out of control, or presenting it as the antagonist in a story in which imperilled humans must fight or flee, is hardly conducive to fostering a positive transformation in human-environment relations.
In my work, I have examined how the horror genre need not be destructive or negative. In many indie roleplaying games, for example, horror can promote reflection on ethical issues, prompt re-thinking about destructive human attitudes towards the environment, and, even, create moments of collaborative worldbuilding in which the environment becomes an active participant.
Games are good for this kind of work because, as Mary Flanagan (2009) has suggested, they function as a means for conceptual thinking. In his work on roleplaying, Nick Mizer (2019) has written about how games create interworlds that flourish as a result of the interaction of players’ imaginations and the constraints of the game rules. Developing this idea through Rooted in Crisis, we have identified horror roleplaying games as a site for a kind of worldbuilding that might promote ecological awareness. In this sense, the games presented within Rooted in Crisis are an example of ‘ecohorror’.
Ecohorror roleplaying games draw on the genres of the dark fantastic that have developed in literature since the eighteenth-century, including the uncanny, the weird and the gothic. The uncanny is typically traced to Sigmund Freud’s essay of the same name (1919), but more broadly names a type of literature that centers on the turn from the intimate and familiar to the strange and unfamiliar; it names that moment when the homely becomes distinctly unhomely. The gothic has a more precise definition, provided by the literary critic Chris Baldick (1992). It emerges from the combination of an inheritance in time (the past returning to haunt the present, the uncovering of old secrets) with the sense of enclosure in space (evoking feelings of being trapped or claustrophobia) leading to a ‘sickening descent into disintegration’ (of the mind, the body, or both). The weird is often traced back to early twentieth-century pulp writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, though its roots are older. Mark Fisher (2016) links the weird to the word’s archaic meaning (‘fate’) and its evocation of twisted forms of time and causality, and of experiences that seem alien to human perception.
Contemporary horror roleplaying games deploy the gothic, the weird and the uncanny through collaborative and emergent storytelling techniques, creating intimate relationships between game worlds and human players.
Examples of ecohorror roleplaying games include The Shivering Circle, designed Howard David Ingham (2018), and Solemn Vale, designed by Mark Kelly (2021), which adapt the folk horror mode into game systems. Expressed in such films as The Wicker Man (1973), folk horror invites players into rural locations where something sinister lurks under the landscape. Trophy, designed by Jesse Ross (2020), reworks the adventure roleplaying game through the genre of the Lovecraftian weird. Players take on the role of doomed treasure hunters entering a forest that doesn’t want them there. As players progress through the ‘rings’ of the forest, they encounter increasingly ruinous horrors. Trophy has inspired other games with political and ecological themes, including Oligarchy designed by Burkett and Kurtz (2021), in which players adopt the role of greedy elites trying to make profit as environmental crises engulf the planet, and They are Hollows of Desolation, designed by Gordie Murphy, in which players explore a collapsing ecosystem, their actions transforming the environment in unexpected ways. These roleplaying games expand the ethical potentials of ecohorror by making players active participants in the creation and destruction of worlds, and by asking questions about ecological belonging, about what it means to be ‘at home’ in the environments we build and share with others.
Rooted in Crisis adapts the gothic structure of the treasure-hunters’ physical and mental descent into disintegration, provided by Trophy. In our incursions, this descent becomes an exploration of the consequences of human behaviour, allowing for reflection on ethical obligations and interrelationships between species, generations, and social groups. As the incursions designed for Rooted in Crisis show, human-environment relationships are not comfortable and reassuring, but this does not mean turning to ecophobic representations.
Trophy has been a generative system for challenging ecophobia because it works against the norm whereby roleplaying games tend to construct player characters as agentic individuals achieving feats of mastery against the backdrop of a world that provides material for their development. Trophy, in contrast, evokes the kind of weird human-nature relationships depicted in, for example, Algernon Blackwood’s stories, in which protagonists merge with an animated landscape. Indeed, the tagline of the game, which tells us that ‘the forest doesn’t want you there,’ recalls Blackwood’s story The Willows (1907). In this story, two friends on a canoe trip down the Danube encounter sinister and numinous willow trees that attempt to lure them to their deaths. The landscape becomes an antagonist in Blackwood’s story, but it is also a membrane between, or point of contact with, an experience of the world normally foreclosed to the human. Trophy evokes similar dynamics, rendering its environments not only agentic, but also a means of disclosing different modes of being in the world than the human.
Ecohorror roleplaying games such as those developed for Rooted in Crisis are one way in which we might tell different stories to the ecophobic narratives that have tended to dominate our media. They can provide a way of thinking through our ethical relations with the more-than-human world. As Anna Tsing (2015) suggests, we are living in a world in ruins, and precarity is a condition that pervades all modes of life, not just human life. Our culture, politics, and daily lives have yet to adapt to these new conditions. We continue to be mired in destructive beliefs about our relationship to the Earth, imagining we might continue to treat it as a resource to consume or manage. An alteration of relationships between humans and more-than-humans—along with a transformation of human dispositions to the environments in which they are embedded—is the only way through the crisis. Roleplaying games invite alteration, fostering new dispositions towards the more-than-human world for the players who enter or build worlds as part of the game.