‘Playing a game of worlds’: World building and its disruptions in video games

This article considers the inverse of world building in video games, which I call (adapting David Herman’s term) ‘world disruption’. I argue that world disruption in games speaks to contemporary anxieties surrounding ecological crisis, resonating with arguments in the environmental humanities on the need to rethink the destructive ontology (or ‘worlding’) of western modernity. I distinguish between two radical forms of world disruption in games involving (respectively) apocalyptic and metareferential framings. In the former, the end of the game world ushers in an entirely new ontological setup that is reflected in the game’s lore and narrative. In the latter, a metareferential device (an ontological metalepsis) reframes the game world as a fictional creation originating from another world. I illustrate these strategies by discussing a wide range of games, including Dragon’s Dogma 2 (Capcom, 2024), Hollow Knight: Silksong (Team Cherry, 2025) and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive, 2025). I show how, in different ways, these games negotiate environmental precarity and possible collapse, offering community building as an alternative to ontological stability.