A scene in Hellgate: London (Flagship Studios)

Whether it’s the final horror of The Matrix Online or the somber last acts in ToonTown Online, it isn’t hard to see how the end of an MMO constitutes an apocalypse of the first and second kind (i.e. “the end” and that which resembles the end). From the perspective of the characters who inhabit a doomed MMO’s diegesis, it is truly the end of everything, their world, as the poet Philip Larkin put it, “[soon] to be lost in always, not to be here, not to be anywhere.” For players, the apocalypse is, of course, not real, but nevertheless imparts a real experience of what the apocalypse might be like, to see a world they have come to care about lose its ability to be. But what about the third form of the apocalypse, that which helps us understand the end? How do MMOs help us come to terms with the causes and effects of an apocalypse on any scale?

The media scholar Richard Grusin attributes the popularity of end-of-the-world scenarios in popular media to a phenomenon he calls “premediation,” the representation of cataclysm to build the public’s expectations for a real cataclysm. The plausibility of these scenarios matters little; the point of premediation, Grusin holds, isn’t “prediction” but “practice”—we steel ourselves for any number of possible futures so that we might overcome whatever trauma awaits us, like swallowing a pill to prevent the heartburn we know is coming. Because we know, deep down, that apocalypse awaits us on every scale. Premediation helps us rehearse our reaction so that, in the event of real chaos, we might behave in a manner more rational and productive.

It’s easy to see how games like Fallout 4 (2015), Mass Effect 3 (2012), and Mad Max (2015) constitute a kind of premediation, rehearsing our collective anxieties over nuclear war, AI takeover, and ecological devastation, respectively. Yet premediation isn’t quite sufficient to describe the end of an MMO—SOE likely didn’t imagine or at least didn’t intend for Galaxies to suffer its gradual blackout. Premediation, like its prefix implies, is rooted in what comes before; by the time an MMO shuts down, it’s already too late. In this respect, all-but-forgotten Hellgate: London is an object lesson in this distinction, a game about an apocalypse that eventually fell victim to its own. But if not because of premediation, why should we care about the end of MMOs at all? What knowledge is there that isn’t present elsewhere?

If there can be said to be any good in an apocalypse, it’s that it almost always reveals something about what went wrong. As The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in an op-ed just days after Hurricane Katrina transformed economic marginalization into mass death, apocalyptic disasters “wash away the surface of society … expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities.” In the days after Haiti’s horrific 2010 earthquake, it became clear that the landslides that killed so many were tied to decades of strip-logging in the forests nearby. (This phenomenon was itself tied to the nation’s sovereign debt, which replaced colonial occupation as a means of imperialist domination, in a chain of injustices stretching back to the European encounter, depicted at the end in Mel Gibson’s historical epic named, not coincidentally, Apocalypto.) There are no such thing as natural disasters, just fantasies we entertain to excuse our inaction. In other words, an apocalypse can help bridge the gap between what we experience and why we experience it, to negotiate between our lives as individuals and the systems that establish the limits of our experience. In an article in The Atlantic, Ian Bogost argues that what games offer, above all else, is an “operable argument … that shows us something about the world outside ourselves, something incomplete and grotesque, but something we ought to see.” Through simulation, we transcend the need for personal identification and focus instead on systems we are embedded in. On this count, Bogost surely has a point. But it’s only half the story. Life might occur within systems, but it is not itself a system. Identity or system, narrative or simulation, representation is always a failed project—if a game could represent everything, it wouldn’t be a game at all, but (and just) a perfect simulacrum of the real. What’s unique and valuable about the end of an MMO is that it can be read as a kind of representation, but it’s also a kind of “real” event that destroys representation, the destruction of an imagined world. With that duality comes the ability to wander between personal identification and reflection on the institutions that give rise to identification. Looking back at Galaxies, Hellgate, ToonTown, and everything else that occupies the immaterial junkyard of discarded universes, the signs of their impending doom are all too obvious. In Galaxies, the attempt to simplify combat galled old players; the subsequent reversal of these changes alienated new ones. In Hellgate: London, the lack of new content for players to experience in-game signaled that something was deeply wrong outside of the game; Flagship Studios filed for bankruptcy in July 2008 and all of its intellectual property was seized as assets, halting the creation of new material. And closure doesn’t have to be about failing revenues; it can be about building new ones. Contrary to conventional wisdom, ToonTown didn’t shut down on account of dwindling subscriptions. Rather, as Disney Interactive wrote in the press release announcing its end, “we are shifting our development focus towards other online and mobile play experiences, such as a growing selection of Disney Mobile apps.” The simplicity of ToonTown’s mechanics lent itself to the uncomplicated interfaces of mobile devices, the preferred platform for the game’s target demographic, children age 7 to 12. In every case, built into the experience of play is something larger about the architects of the machines in which we play. And when those machines shut down, even (and especially) when their indifference doesn’t match our own investment, we should know that the heraldry of the end times were there all along. There’s always truth in a ruin. An apocalypse cares for nothing but its own being, bought at the expense of everyone else’s. Only a hopeless optimist would think that games can save us from whatever fates await us, as individuals or more. But whether at most or at least, the end of a world, even a virtual one, can help us understand both our own experiences and how “made” those experiences are, no matter how natural and private they feel to us. Before it can be changed, it must be understood. Eventually, there will be nothing to save but ourselves. This post appears courtesy of Kill Screen.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.