Playing New-World Dreams and Nightmares: Utopia, Apocalypse, and the Myth of the Frontier in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Video Games

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.