Highlights
- Nihilism rejects the existence of meaning and significance in life and the cosmos, allowing individuals to focus on what they can control.
- Games like Tetris and Soma reflect the philosophy of absurdism, where individuals find purpose in irrational and futile activities.
- The experience of survival in games like This War of Mine and Returnal highlights the struggle for meaning and morality in challenging circumstances.
Nihilism is the cheery philosophy that certain fundamentals like knowledge, morals, political structures, etc. either have no meaning or don’t really exist. For example, existential nihilism says life and the human race have no special significance to the cosmos. This is fine, as cosmic nihilism says that the universe in turn doesn't matter to humanity outside curious astronomers.
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Anime that doubles down on themes of nihilism are often bleak and tragic but no less entertaining.
In other words, there’s no special intelligence affecting people’s lives or some meaning to their trials. They suffer and thrive alone because there's nothing to the cosmos but rocks, gas, and empty space. It can be liberating in the sense that people only have to worry about things they can control and let whatever they can't just pass on by. But as philosophers, songs, movies, and these nihilistic video games show, it can be the bitterest pill to swallow.
8 7 Days to Die
7 Days to Die takes place after World War 3 has ruined the world and turned most of the populace into zombies. The player has to find food, water, and other key survival items in and around Navezgane County, Arizona, without becoming zombie chow. That’s easy enough by day when they’re slow, but harder when night falls and their speed rises.
There was originally going to be a proper storyline to the game, as promised in the game’s Kickstarter goals. But it still hasn’t been implemented after a decade since its original release. There’s no narrative to follow, and surviving until later in the game isn’t any better than dying on the first night beyond seeing more of Navezgane. It’s an infinite struggle with no ultimate meaning beyond the player’s own joy and curiosity.
7 Tetris
One branch of nihilism is absurdism, where humans try to find rationality in an irrational universe. Albert Camus explained it by using the Greek myth about Sisyphus, who was forced to roll a boulder up a mountain for eternity. Whenever he got close to the top, it would escape his grasp and roll all the way back to the bottom, where Sisyphus had to start again.
Camus’ essay concluded by saying the struggle to the top can be “enough to fill a man’s heart” and thus “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.” It’s the same with Tetris and other Eternal Score Attack arcade games. Whether they’re the best players on earth or below average, the player will eventually lose and have to start from scratch. But it’s all good because they’re having fun prolonging their inevitable failure, like Sisyphus and his boulder.
6 This War Of Mine
This War of Mine
- Released
- November 14, 2014
- Developer(s)
- 11 Bit Studios
- Publisher(s)
- 11 Bit Studios
- Genre(s)
- Survival
This War of Mine is definitely about survival, though isn’t strictly about horror, though living in a warzone isn’t exactly threat-free. In the besieged city of Pogoren, the player has to keep a group of survivors alive, fed, and happy until a ceasefire is randomly declared. During the night, they can hunt for food and supplies, working with or against other survivors. They’ll get shot by snipers if they try that during the day.
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These survival games will have players fully immersed thanks to their dedication to realism.
Instead, they should use that time to do chores, cook food, craft items, heal ailments, and more while stuck indoors. On the one hand, it can show how people can persevere during even the most trying times, and that people can be fundamentally good inside. On the other, it can show how quickly morality and fair play lose meaning when survival is on the line. It’s up to the player to decide.
5 Soma
Made by Frictional Games, Soma is a first-person survival horror where Simon agrees to undergo a brain scan to avoid his fatal injuries. He wakes up from the procedure in PATHOS-II, an underwater research facility with a colleague called Catherine, who reveals the site is the last holdout for humanity after a comet landed and destroyed the surface world. Or at least it would be if it were that simple as neither Simon nor Catherine are still alive.
They’re brain scans in robot bodies fighting off a rogue AI and biomechanical monstrosities to send the remaining human brain scans into space via an interstellar black box called the ARK. It won’t bring back all that humanity lost, and the main copies of Simon and Catherine are doomed either way. But they found it worthwhile to give the digital copies of themselves and the rest of PATHOS' people some freedom from their dead planet.
4 Drakengard
When Yoko Taro and Cavia saw that most games involved players committing mass slaughter to get ahead (see Dynasty Warriors and its triple-digit combos), they thought of a game where its people would see this as normal. Rockstar North and Volition came to similar conclusions with the comparatively wacky open-world crime-athon Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row. But Cavia made the very dark fantasy action game Drakengard.
It tasked the mute psychopath Caim and his bitter dragon Angelus with saving the world by murdering lots of beasts placed under the whim of a possessed child. It's almost modernist as its unhappy endings could be seen as a narrative giving everyone their just desserts. That is until Ending E, which rewards players who got 100% with an annoying boss fight and a troll ending. Clearly, Cavia didn’t want to imagine Sisyphus happy in his proverbial struggle.
3 Dark Souls
Life, whether privileged or painful, inevitably ends in death, so it’s only fitting that Dark Souls pops up here. Part of the appeal was seeing how far one could get before getting killed by one threat or another. But the game goes beyond that. It also shows that the player’s deeds, whether good or bad, matter little in the grand scheme of things.
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Usually, when a player completes a side quest, they’ll get congratulations from the NPC, and maybe some cash/gold/gil, etc., and/or a key item. In Dark Souls, they’re not making anything better. Some characters even feel worse off if the player "solves" their conundrum. There’s no "good" ending either. Humanity either remains enslaved to the gods or gets enslaved by the player. Just two sides of a grimy, beige coin.
2 Nier Series
Drakengard completionists would get rewarded years later when Nier actually continued from the "E" Ending, though there’s so much lore separating the two games that they may as well be different. In turn, its own sequel Nier: Automata has enough distance from its predecessor to be played independently, which players may likely do as Automata’s gameplay is more refined and active. Yet they have very similar outcomes.
Their "humanity vs monsters/machines" plot turns out to be a big con, and humanity itself is doomed from the start. Completing the side quests won’t change that either, as NPCs will mock the player for doing so. They must have foresight as Nier forces players to wipe their 100% save to get the last ending. It hurts, yet even if it wasn’t required, the player would’ve likely wiped that save years later anyway. The effort made to achieve it is "wasted" either way unless the player personally finds it worthwhile.
1 Returnal
Housemarque’s Returnal is a roguelike where the astronaut Selene explores a procedurally generated planet called Atropos, so no one playthrough is the same. The game works its design into the plot, as it traps Selene in a time loop a la Groundhog Day. Just as Phil Connors eventually found that nothing he did made a difference, Selene finds herself returning to Atropos each time she does anything. Except Phil Connors eventually saw a tomorrow.
Whether Selene finds the source of the "White Shadow" distress signal, comes to terms with her childhood trauma, or gets rescued and lives out the rest of her life on Earth, she’ll always awaken back on Atropos. There are fleeting joys and painful struggles, but nothing changes. Her fate is rather like people's own lives: a constant, banal struggle for some potential happiness or answers. Except as far as we know, people's ends are more definite.