Playing New-World Dreams and Nightmares: Utopia, Apocalypse, and the Myth of the Frontier in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Video Games
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past five decades, (post-)apocalyptic narratives have become increasingly prevalent in popular media and often explore apocalypticism’s utopian core while also falling back on the American myth of the frontier when imagining post-apocalyptic conditions. While the intersection of apocalypticism, utopianism, and frontier mythology in literature and film has been the subject of various studies, there is a distinct lack of such research on video games. Drawing on literary studies, American studies, and video game studies, this thesis seeks to counteract this circumstance by examining five recent and highly popular post-apocalyptic games in order to facilitate a better understanding of their potential to influence players’ conceptions of utopia, the past, the present, and the future. Based on in-depth analyses of Ubisoft Montreal’s Far Cry New Dawn, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II, and Guerilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West, it argues and concludes that video games, much like other media, frequently envision the future in terms of a post-apocalyptic frontier and thus renegotiate central aspects of apocalyptic thinking, frontier mythology, and American history. Though games like Far Cry New Dawn often reinforce problematic myths and views of America’s past in this process of renegotiation, others, such as The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, and their respective sequels, contest the utopian capacity that American mythology attributes to the conquest of new worlds and confront their players with more nuanced and ambivalent visions of the post-apocalyptic frontier.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".