Imagining the degrowth strategy game

Carlos Moreno Azqueta, Carlos Moreno Azqueta and Carlos Moreno Azqueta

Chapter Chapter 11 in Dialogues for Degrowth, 2025, pp 140-148 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Strategy games are often games about exponential growth. As players exploit natural resources surrounding their political community, the games reproduce an imagined idea of the history of humanity: a constant, exponential, and potentially infinite growth in economic, technological, and populational terms. Such growth is impossible considering the current biophysical constraints of earth, but these games display diverse strategies to present it as possible. These include the programming of resources as infinite, the exploration of a never-ending space to colonize and exploit, the use of techno-utopianism or the enactment of a post-apocalyptic circular temporality, that enables the abrupt ending of civilization just to re-create it as it was. Growth seems, in fact, embedded in the idea of a strategy game. How could we make, then, a strategy game based on the idea of degrowth? Drawing on some examples from Half Earth Socialism, this chapter tries to answer this question. Strategy games need to give the players a challenge that has to be resolved through an efficient allocation of resources, but can play with a diversity of objectives, limits, and futures. What characteristics could the degrowth game have?

Keywords: Strategy games; Biophysical constraints; Technology; Technoutopianism; Degrowth games; Limits (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035320769
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