Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse Xaver Boxhammer Introduction In 2017, Videocult’s post-apocalyptic platforming adventure game Rain World was released to mixed reviews, with critics lauding the game’s beautiful environment and animations but struggling with its unrelenting difficulty. IGN’s Joe Skrebels notes that Rain World’s “beauty can’t compensate for a design that works against the player” (2017) and PlayStation Country remarks that the game is neither “fun or easy and seems to actively frustrate any understanding of whats [sic] going on” (2017). These negative reviews notwithstanding, Rain World, designed by Joar Jakobsson and James Therrien, has since garnered a cult following in the independent games community and received two comparatively successful expansions, Downpour (2023) and The Watcher (2025). While a frustration with an unwillingness to provide any substantive help to the player might point to a salient attitude in contemporary games journalism that video games should be “first and foremost fun” (Ruberg 2015: 108), it is precisely the game’s frustrating non-player-centric game design that makes it a key site for exploring how digital games can productively engage with the nonhuman. This paper argues that Rain World engages with the nonhuman by exposing limitations to understanding nonhuman agents through nonhuman-oriented game design. The game subverts the anthropocentric paradigm that players can demand total comprehension from the video games they play by means of its complex story, fragmented narrative discourse, procedural simulation, and emergent creature behaviour. Thereby, Rain World functions as an example of nonhuman-oriented game design, because it creates strange environments and indifferent systems invested in deconstructing notions of human exceptional‐ ism. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Nonhuman perspectives and anthropocentric game design conventions Game Studies, at large, have participated in debates about the nonhuman from multiple perspectives. Scholars have been interested in questions of embodiment when playing animals (Fuchs 2021; Caracciolo 2021; Bianchi 2024) and plants (Seller 2020), often from a decidedly ecocritical perspective (Ruffino 2020; Tyler 2022; Ruffino 2024). They interrogate how digital games can foster empathy towards the nonhuman (Woolbright 2017; Fava et al. 2019), how games utilise affect to make statements about the nonhuman (Lyons and Jaloza 2016), and how player-game relations mirror human-nonhuman entanglements ( Janik 2021). Nonhuman perspectives are particularly invested in questioning to what extent games can make the nonhuman legible through “becoming-animal” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 275), and many serious games partake in this discourse. The underlying tension within this discourse revolves around whether digital games, interfaces created and operated by humans, can meaningfully represent the nonhuman beyond appropriating it as set dressing. While Lauren Wool‐ bright argues that “playing a nonhuman in a video game could help dissolve the separation we cultivate between our ‘human’ selves and our ‘animal’ selves and bring us into a clearer understanding of our natural context” (2017: 97), scholars like Marco Caracciolo criticise this perspective as an “illusion that, through videogame simulation, players may really be able to understand and appropriate animal ways of life” (2021). The central issue in representations of nonhuman agents in digital games is that, to make video games accessible to human players, digital games have to rely on anthropocentric game design conventions, both in their employment of narrative and their ludic makeup (Fizek 2018: 206): Nonhuman modes of perception are anthropomorphised, narratives featuring nonhuman actants follow standard linear templates of adventure fiction (Bianchi 2024: 65), simulated ecosystems locate agency only within player-characters, and nonhuman creatures move in predictable, scripted patterns (Ruffino 2024: 14). While, in many video games, the player-character might be a nonhuman creature, underlying mechanics humanise the nonhuman rather than making the player actually embody a mode of nonhuman cognition. How then, if any attempt to make the nonhuman playable necessarily anthropomorphises it, can digital games productively engage with the category of the nonhuman? In line with Michael Fuchs, this paper argues that it is precisely through exposing the medium’s “limitation on the part of humans [to comprehend the nonhuman], thereby undermining the notion of humankind’s undisputed superiority to other life forms on the planet” (Fuchs 2021: 268 f.). Through making overt the anthropomorphisms entrenched in established game DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 90 Xaver Boxhammer design conventions, digital games like Rain World can make arguments about the limits of human comprehension in relation to the nonhuman. In the subsequent analysis, I argue that Rain World, as a platforming adven‐ ture game, exists in a genre whose canon is particularly anthropocentric, often following archetypal heroic narrative conventions, both in plot and narrative discourse, and providing easily understandable scripted environments. The game actively subverts these generic conventions by constructing strange environments and indifferent ecosystems that decentre the player-character's primacy through using emergence as a core feature of its game design. Rather than playing a central role in shaping the gameworld, the player-character only plays a subordinated role in an ever-changing ecosystem that is largely indifferent to the player’s actions. Coupled with its unrelenting difficulty, post-apocalyptic setting, and a complex story that revolves around questions of nonhuman consciousness and artificial intelligence, the game challenges the assumption of player agency and human exceptionalism ingrained in the canon of platforming adventure games. Through this, Rain World invites players to reflect on the limitations of anthropocentric game design conventions that have become naturalised in the genre of the platforming adventure game. Aesthetics, plot, and the subversion of human/ nonhuman dualisms Most canonised platforming adventure games, such as the Super Mario (Nin‐ tendo 1985- ) series, make use of archetypal heroic narratives in which the player takes on the role of a human or humanoid protagonist. In these games, the division between the human and the nonhuman is clear: In Super Mario, Mario (human) has to save Princess Peach (human) by defeating Bowser (nonhuman) and his minions (nonhuman). To do this, he can enlist the help of nonhuman creatures like Yoshi and Toad, but these creatures only exist as set dressing or as tools for the player to use and often sacrifice in the process. Taking its cue from this influential and genre-defining series, the narrative setup of conventional platforming adventure games usually centres human experience, while the nonhuman is to be overcome or used for the purposes of human progress (Valeriano and Habel 2016: 478). Rain World breaks with this generic tradition by centring its narrative around chimeric creatures and artificial intelligences. In its plot and aesthetics, the game subverts generically entrenched human/ nonhuman dualisms and puts into question the established borders between the human and the nonhuman. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 91 In Rain World, the player takes control of ‘Slugcat’, a creature that, as its name suggests, presents as a hybrid between a slug and a cat. Having been swept away from its kin by a raging torrent, it traverses a strange world that consists of industrial ruins and a rich wildlife which has seemingly made these ruins its own. Rain World’s gameplay loop follows the generic structure of the survival game in that the gameplay is divided into cycles which Slugcat needs to survive through, each cycle being its own desperate race for sustenance in a hostile gameworld. The player must gather enough critters and berries to avoid starvation and then reach a shelter before the eponymous rain starts falling, delivering a swift death to any creature exposed in the open. There is no traditional tutorial; rather, the player, just like Slugcat, is thrown into this unforgiving world without any input about where to go and what to do. What is more, the gameworld is populated by a myriad of strange hybrid creatures, which, while not necessarily hostile, are far stronger than Slugcat and act as an immense threat to the player whose avatar seems to be at the bottom of the ecosystem’s pecking order. Driven by resource scarcity, the player explores the game’s different biomes and, through this, learns about the lore of the gameworld and Slugcat’s involvement in it. Aesthetically, the game engenders a stark contrast between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ in its use of colours. While the ruinous industrial landscapes, characterised by static pipes, tubes, gears, and fans, occur almost exclusively in deep purples, browns, and greys, the wildlife, which seems to have reclaimed the space, is characterised by neon greens, reds, and blues. Fig. 1: Screenshot from the game’s Sky Islands region (Videocult 2017). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 92 Xaver Boxhammer 1 Though it is never made overt, the ancients are coded as human through the aesthetics of the industrial infrastructure they have left behind. Figure 1 shows a room in the game’s sky island region. While the midground layer consists of a dilapidated megastructure with some satellite dishes, the background layer is made up of clouds. In the foreground, players can scale a sky island, a long-forgotten radio tower. Perched upon the radio tower is a ‘centiwing’ whose many wings oscillate between an iridescent blue and green. The colourful and dynamic centiwing starkly contrasts the static industrial structure, which is tinged in a sepia brown. Through its colour coding, the gameworld relates the notion that these ruins of a prior civilisation belong to the past, while the decidedly nonhuman creature that, in its positioning in the gameworld, resides atop this faded structure, is presented in vibrant, ever-changing colours. The only object that is not static is the continuously changing centiwing on the foreground layer, suggesting it has superseded the industrial age in which these structures were built. In its idiosyncratic pixel art aesthetic, the gameworld’s environment presents an assemblage of different textures and colours that form the sense of a past and faded civilisation superseded by new and vibrant wildlife. This maps binary sets such as static/ dynamic, dull/ beautiful, decaying/ thriving, past/ present onto the gameworld’s opposition of artificial/ natural. In doing so, Rain World deliberately reinforces a binary relationship between the ‘natural’ ecosystem and the ‘artificial’ industrial ruins by way of its visual language and narrative architecture, only to later deconstruct these dualisms through revealing the reality of the gameworld to the player. At the core of the game’s narrative is the theme of ‘ascension’, which the game sets up as the solution to the gameworld’s central conflict: The ‘great cycle’, a continuous loop of death and reset life that all creatures in Rain World are unable to escape from. The ‘ancients’, a technologically advanced civilisation that has long ascended this great cycle, only managed to solve the problem of ascension on an individual level but were not able to find a solution for the nonhuman creatures that populate the gameworld. 1 To find a way out of the great cycle for all creatures, the ancients constructed the ‘iterators’, artificially intelligent biomechanical superstructures the size of cities. Their purpose was to find a solution to this ‘big problem’ by iterating through all possible scenarios and simulations that could help the nonhuman creatures escape. These iterators were only allowed to stop iterating on the big problem if they found a solution that plausibly returns a confirmation which is portable and whose technical implementation is possible and generally applicable. This is referred to as the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 93 ‘Triple Affirmative’, which, at the time of the game’s events, has not been found yet. While the player cannot gather any concrete information about the logistics of the great cycle, she learns of the physical and emotional turmoil that resurrection entails. Structurally, this narrative setup serves as a convenient in-world explanation for why the player-character cannot die properly. Instead of the narrative inconsistencies that the ludic logics of failure and retry necessarily provoke in the narratively multiple medium of the video game (Mukherjee 2013: 110), the great cycle of death and rebirth is pulled into the diegesis as an obstacle to ultimately overcome by ‘ascending’. Through this, Rain World provides a canonical reason for the “violation of the truth-condition of singular mortality” (Ensslin 2015: 53) that is an integral part of most video games. Escaping the endless loop of death and reset life, both in the game’s plot and the experience of play, can only be achieved by beating the game. The parallels between the game’s mechanics and plot make the ludic conventions entrenched in the medium of the digital game graspable, thereby allowing for a moment of self-reflexivity on the medium’s structural necessities: Only if the player beats the game or stops playing out of frustration, can the gruelling cycle of death and rebirth, which is inherent to the logic of the gameworld, be broken. Throughout the course of the game, the player then learns that the computing power needed to solve the big problem was so immense that all the industrial landscapes which make up the gameworld and the entirety of the ecosystem that exists within it are parts of the iterators and that the Slugcats themselves were only created to clean out the iterators’ pipes. While players might have assumed they were playing an animal, they learn that their avatar is just as much part of the biomechanical constructs in this gameworld as it is natural; it has always been a cyborgian assemblage of human, technological, environmental, and material entities. Even the weather, in the form of the titular rain that ravages the gameworld at the end of each cycle, is the result of the iterators’ self-cleaning mechanism. The plot, with its consecutive revelations, serves to estrange the player from the conventions of human-centred video game narratives that are generically entrenched in the genre of the platforming adventure game. This decentring is further advanced through the iterators Looks to the Moon, Five Pebbles, and Sliver of Straw, which function as characters that are decidedly not human, as they are massive supercomputers tasked with solving an arithmetic problem, but, to the player, they are the most intelligible, as their actions and motivations are by far the easiest to comprehend. The artificial intelligences are fully conscious and have distinct personalities; they feel, they argue, they suffer, and they are the only entities that communicate in DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 94 Xaver Boxhammer speech. They are the ones who encode and decode the data pearls for Slugcat, being indispensable for making sense of the gameworld, and they provide the only directions the player gets. What is more, their inability to stop iterating on the big problem is hard-coded into their ontology through a line of code that prevents self-termination, mirroring the gameworld’s inability to ascend from the great cycle and the player’s mode of play. Condemned to endlessly toil away at the big problem and encouraged by Sliver of Straw’s apparent self-termination after broadcasting the triple affirmative, the iterators have been split into different philosophical fractions, some of which believe that the solution to the big problem would naturally result in self-termination (‘triangulators’) while others believe that there is no universal solution to the problem of immortality for all creatures, as it necessitates consciousness on an individual level (‘sliverists’). Essentially, their struggles mirror the ancients’ struggles and their debates about who can and cannot ascend are inextricably tied to differing positions on the hard problem of consciousness. This further blurs the lines between the technologically artificial nonhuman and the human. Against this backdrop, it becomes impossible to uphold the “conceptual or rhetorical dualisms that separate the human from the nonhuman” (Grusin 2015: x), which the game initially evokes through its aesthetics and its employment of the post-apocalyptic ruin. In this sense, Rain World plays with and subverts notions of biological essentialism. Who is conscious, who gets to perceive, know, communicate, affect, and die, is never fixed; it is constantly in a state of flux, at once tethered to and disconnected from the material realities of the gameworld. Each new twist in the narrative builds on this subversion and reveals new entanglements between the different agents and environments in the gameworld, but those revelations are always just shy of conclusively answering any of the big problems present in Slugcat’s world. Instead of posing that the iterators are just like the ancients or that the ecosystem itself is agentic and conscious, it invites players to challenge the human/ nonhuman dualism and, at the same time, accept the impossibility of ever knowing the concrete relationships between the two, reminding players of the limits of human understanding in depictions of the nonhuman. Non-anthropocentric narration as narrative mode This subchapter argues that Rain World employs a specific narrative mode which probes the presuppositions of anthropocentric narrative discourse entrenched in the conventions of platforming adventure games. In the majority of canonised platforming adventure games, narrative progression is teleological and linear. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 95 In Super Mario, for example, the mission-based gameplay only allows for a linear narrative progression towards Mario saving the princess, and the relationship between present and past is always clearly marked as linear. This not only holds true for mission-based platforming adventure games, but also for many open-world platforming adventure games, such as Hollow Knight (Team Cherry 2017), in which the player is free to roam the gameworld, but whenever she returns to the game’s main storyline, she is pulled back into a linearly structured narrative discourse that is teleological in nature. Rain World’s narrative discourse, through its fragmented storytelling, inac‐ cessibility, and iteration across multiple playthroughs, functions as a critical response to these generic conventions. This alienation from the conventions of the platforming adventure game operates not only through the foregrounding of nonhuman actants in its plot but also formally in the structure of Rain World’s narrative discourse. Rather than relying on a singular, cohesive narrative voice, the game’s storytelling emerges from a constellation of sources: data pearls that contain encrypted fragments of ancient communications, direct interactions with the iterators who offer cryptic philosophical musings, and entries in discussion boards that provide glimpses into the debates that different iterators have been having for decades. All written forms of discourse are also already mediated through the language of the iterators, which, as Rain World continuously reminds us, is not Slugcat’s own and has to be installed in it by fundamentally altering the way its cognition works (Figure 2). Fig. 2: The iterator Five Pebbles altering Slugcat’s brain chemistry in order to give it the ability to understand language (Videocult 2017). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 96 Xaver Boxhammer The ability to understand the written and spoken language of the iterators, which has been inherited from the ancients, is foreign to Slugcat, radically disjunct from its original constitution. As explicated above, the gameworld itself also functions as a narrative agent, with its architecture serving as a record of its history. Beyond this, the order in which information is conveyed to the player is often random because there are few hard-coded limitations to the sequence in which the gameworld is to be traversed by the player, and the game has to be replayed many times for the player to access the entire story. This engenders a mode of non-anthropocentric narrative discourse which is amplified through the player’s ability to replay the game as different Slugcat characters, each offering distinct perspectives and access to different narrative fragments, thereby turning the narrative experience itself into an iterative one. Iteration, hence, is not just a theme present in the game’s narration; it is also a fundamental process in decoding the game’s narrative. Through playing Rain World over and over again with slightly different paths and abilities, the mode of play itself mirrors the iterator’s processes of simulation. The result of this iteration is a narrative discourse that resists linear comprehension, instead requiring players to actively piece together meaning from disparate, often contradictory sources across multiple playthroughs. This, then, mirrors the archaeological nature of understanding in a post-human setting where complete narratives have been lost to time. The actual ‘story’ is continuously being obfuscated through temporal distance, iterators masking behind nicknames, and the narration of events which the player only comes to understand much later in the game. Thereby, the genre’s conventional relationship to temporality is continuously disrupted, allowing for a narrative discourse that challenges human-centric modes of narration (Caracciolo et al. 2022: 12). These narrative fragments remain fundamentally unstable and open to inter‐ pretation, as evidenced by the ongoing debates within the game’s paratextual community - fan forums, wikis, and lore videos on YouTube - where players continue to contest and negotiate competing theories about what exactly hap‐ pened in the game’s world, further pushing the game’s narrative to constitute a fluid and continuously evolving interpretive process. Rain World’s narrative resists definite comprehension in the sense that it needs to be understood as “a construction kit” (Alber 2016: 47) that players can assemble at will rather than a clearly defined plot that is easy to understand. Hence, any attempt at a summary of the gameworld’s lore will necessarily lay bare the epistemic limits of a game that never feels like it was built for the player. This makes overt the limits to understanding a nonhuman world from a human perspective. In line DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 97 2 Autotelic enactment describes a mode of interacting with media in which the narrative has to be enacted “through our own motivated actions rather than [through] being told about or shown events” (Ensslin 2015, 3). with this, autotelic, enactment (Ryan 2004: 349) 2 is a necessary precondition for the narrative to emerge, as decoding the game’s story requires immense effort. At no point during the gameplay is the player required to make sense of the story. Rain World can just as easily be played as an unnecessarily difficult platforming game with post-apocalyptic aesthetics and random cryptic musings about the nature of consciousness. In order to reach an understanding of the story, however, the player must complete the game multiple times with different Slugcat species, whose distinct stories take place at different moments in time and deliver different data pearls all over the gameworld. This makes narrative comprehension a challenge rather than a given, decentring the naturalised idea that complete mastery over the gameworld and its story is attainable. The game’s fragmented storytelling - always already mediated through technological infrastructure, from the iterators’ digital consciousness to the data pearls’ encrypted storage systems - thereby alienates players from generically entrenched linear and anthropocentric narrative modes. The technological su‐ perstructure that governs access to information about the gameworld’s lore mir‐ rors the game’s thematic preoccupation with post-human intelligences, where meaning emerges not from human intention but from machinist processes of data retrieval, environmental cycling, and systemic repetition. Hidden within the mechanical structure of replays where narrative revelations are gated behind repeated deaths and resurrections, the method of storytelling itself decentres the human in its logic - operating through patterns of iteration, accumulation, and algorithmic disclosure rather than the linear progression common to the genre. This form of technological mediation engenders a constant state of interpretive confusion, as players must navigate fragmented data streams and incomplete transmissions that resist coherent synthesis. By disrupting traditional linear narration through its reliance on technological intermediaries and cyclical revelation, Rain World’s narrative discourse therefore performs the limitations of understanding the nonhuman by rendering meaning-making dependent on multivalent nonhuman systems of information storage and retrieval. Notably, this mode of narration mirrors a shift in the human relation to contemporary technology in which emergent AI models exist as black boxes whose processes, enacted by self-attentive transformers, might be approximated but can, fundamentally, not be traced conclusively. Similarly, in Rain World’s setting, the continuous processes of iteration that the generative artificial intel‐ ligences which govern the gameworld are performing cannot be understood, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 98 Xaver Boxhammer 3 This type of emergence can be characterised as self-organising emergence in that the game’s systems produce patterns which “could not be understood, nor anticipated, through the analysis of the elements and their behaviours in isolation” (Soler-Adillon 2019). For a nuanced engagement with the multi-discursive concept, see Soler-Adillon (2019). and the narrative discourse, likewise, resists clear interpretation. The epistemic uncertainty inherent to contemporary AI systems, hence, is directly reflected in the player’s interaction with the iterators and the game’s narrative discourse. In this regard, Rain World, both in its plot and its mode of narration, highlights the changing relationship between the human and a technology that is shaping a contemporary society in which the computational processes that underlie the output of agentic AI cannot be traced anymore. This structural similarity further decentres the idea that, as humans/ players, total comprehension of the world/ gameworld is possible. Emergent systems and biocentric game design Beyond the game’s themes and its narrative discourse, Rain World is particularly interesting because of the way it makes use of emergent properties in the animation and simulation of its ecosystem to work against anthropocentric game design conventions. Emergence, in this sense, “occurs when interactions between objects in the game world or the player’s actions result in a second order of consequence that was not specifically planned by the game develop‐ ers” (Sweetser 2008: 11). This chapter argues that, rather than presenting a linear game experience that has been clearly mapped by the developers, Rain World simulates complex systems to achieve both local emergence (procedural animation, pathfinding AI) and global emergence (global ecosystem, reputation system). 3 This means that, while the systems that evoke the behaviour of non-player characters are defined by the game designers, the way in which these systems manifest specific behaviour of non-player characters is not anthropogenic. Therefore, the game’s emergent systems, again, work against the generic conventions of the platforming adventure game in which enemy behaviour is conventionally scripted in order to be predictable. Below, I explain on which levels emergence plays a role in Rain World and to what extent the different emergent properties of the game interact with one another. I argue that procedural animation and emergent creature behaviour serve to make it impossible for the actions of the nonhuman agents that populate the gameworld to be understood in easily predictable patterns, introducing a layer DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 99 of uncertainty to the game that is not usually present in platforming adventure games. All agents in the simulated gameworld are animated procedurally. This means that the way in which creatures and plants move is generated in real-time rather than being drawn frame-by-frame or replayed from pre-made animation sequences ( Jakobsson and Therrien 2016). When the player or an AI-controlled creature decides to perform an action, the game’s code calculates and produces the corresponding movement on the spot, resulting in context-specific and dynamic animations. The game benefits from a separation of the simulation of a creature’s underlying physics and the simulation of its cosmetic layer in that there is a one-way dependence between the different creatures’ simplified physics (weights and balances, gravity, flight) and the procedural animation. For instance, a creature like the Daddy Longlegs is simulated as a collection of points (representing joints) connected by virtual ‘sticks’ (limbs), with the simulation determining their positions in real time based on environmental interactions and AI decisions. The visual representation is then built on top of this structure, either by connecting these points with two-dimensional renderings or by drawing pixel art segments along the calculated paths, often using chains of interlocking images to create smooth, organic movement. This approach allows for highly expressive and context-sensitive animations: Tentacles, tails, or bodies bend, stretch, and react fluidly to obstacles, gravity, and other creatures, resulting in a dynamic aesthetic that is unpredictable due to its emergent qualities.-Elaborating on their reasoning for animating the agents of the gameworld procedurally, Jakobsson and Therrien explain: What procedural animation allows us to do is create a sense of agency and believability for all the individual creatures, because with procedural animation we can create a scenario where the AI behaviour equals the behaviour you see in the game […]. When a lizard is hunting, you can see it; you can understand its motivations, and when it can’t get directly to you, you can see it gets visibly frustrated because it's trying to, like, navigate around the environment. And that’s cool, because the player is then able to project personality into that, so you have this situation where […] the player will see a creature do something interesting that isn’t necessarily scripted behaviour and the player will infer from what’s going on that “oh, this creature is mad at me”, and that’s not really the case, but because we have all the ingredients visible, it makes this kind of, like, affect of personality for the individual creatures. (2016) To Jakobsson and Therrien, the personalities the creatures project are emergent interactions of procedural animation and player interpretation. It is these emer‐ gent properties that make embodied cognition beyond recognisably scripted DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 100 Xaver Boxhammer 4 For a more detailed description of the pathfinding algorithms, see Jakobsson and Therrien 2014. behaviour possible, but they also subvert the expectation that the player is to predict the underlying patterns that govern the aesthetic depiction of non-player characters in platforming adventure games. Beyond the aesthetic affordances of procedural animation, the locomotion AI on the creatures’ simplified physics layer, which governs where creatures put their limbs, how they orient themselves, and how they move through the world ( Jakobsson and Therrien 2016), often makes it impossible to predict how they are going to move. Contrary to many video games in which creature movement is scripted, creature movement as an emergent property makes it impossible to rehearse their next moves in order to circumvent them, because the way their movement is generated is complex and highly context dependent. While the player is able to figure out what a creature can do - the vulture can fly, the lizard can climb through pipes - and adjust Slugcat’s next actions accordingly, the player can only gauge how the AI will behave but never reliably predict a creature’s exact next move. This serves to make Rain World’s environment and the nonhuman creatures that populate it feel strange and unknowable. The locomotion AI, through this, also contributes to constructing an ecosystem that continuously points to the limits of understanding the nonhuman. This estrangement from the gameworld’s creatures is engendered not just through the creature’s distinct locomotion but also in their decision-making and pathfinding. To determine how a creature is going to path, the game’s foreground layer is conceptualised as a 2D grid system (Figure 3) and optimal pathways are designated based on a given creature’s locomotive affordances and the design of the room. 4 DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 101 Fig. 3: Screenshot from the AI debugging menu that showcases how tile-based pathfind‐ ing works in Rain World ( Jakobsson and Therrien 2014). For a given creature, the game indicates reachable tiles (blue), tiles from which the creature could not get back to its original position (red), and reachable tiles from which the creature could get back to its original position (green). All creatures also set goals and behaviours governed by their specific personality and characteristics. For example, Rain World’s most common creatures, the vibrantly coloured lizards, patrol their territory, scavenge for prey, and want to stay close to their den to seek shelter from the lethal rain and, at the same time, far away from any predator that might kill them. The different subspecies of lizard exhibit different personalities which heavily impact their decision-making. Green lizards are slow and lazy, blue lizards prefer to hang around walls and ceilings and wait for prey, and red lizards are constantly on the prowl. Lizards are more or less aggressive based on how hurt they are and some subspecies hunt in packs. While the possible actions of the different Lizard species can, through diligent observation, be approximated, it remains impossible to predict their next move to a similar degree as a player can predict the movement of a non-player character in a Super Mario game, where enemy behaviour is scripted by game designers in order to be predictable. Conversely, the nonhuman agents in Rain World resist pattern recognition and DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 102 Xaver Boxhammer remain unpredictable. This, again, points to the limits of human cognition in that it highlights the fundamental unknowability of the processes that govern nonhuman agents, rejecting the tendency towards anthropomorphising the behaviour of nonhuman entities present in canonised platforming adventure games. Creature behaviour is further complicated by Rain World’s reputation system, which impacts the behaviour different creatures exhibit towards each other and the player. Different actions, such as attacking, killing, stealing, or helping creatures, dynamically influence the player’s reputation with a given group of creatures in a given region (Figure 4). Killing a creature or stealing from them will lower your reputation, causing them to become hostile or fearful, while trading with them or assisting them in combat will improve your reputation, making them more likely to be friendly or allow you to pass through their ter‐ ritories unchallenged. This system is nuanced: reputation is tracked on several levels (regional, global, filtered local, and all reputation), and different creatures react to different reputation thresholds. Reputation is almost always invisible to the player, though it can be gauged by carefully observing creature behaviour. The game’s reputation system effectively decentres the player-character, as the player’s acts, while involved in shaping the ecosystem in accordance with their actions, is by no means the only influence on the gameworld’s creatures. Reputation exists and evolves independently of the player’s acts; different species will fight each other and change their reputation towards each other off-screen, and the habitat of different creatures will continuously shift without any interaction with the player. In conventional platforming adventure games, the behaviour of non-player creatures revolves fully around the acts of the player; they will die only when the player kills them and respawn only when the player acts a specific way. Rain World rejects this mode of player-centric game design by creating an ecosystem in which the player-character only plays a small part. Through this, the game challenges anthropocentric game design conventions, making the ecosystem appear like its own nonhuman, never fully knowable, actant. Fig. 4: Base game reputation table from Rain World’s DevTools (Videocult 2017) DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 103 Beyond emergent behaviour on a local level, Rain World continuously simulates interactions globally, i.e., between all creatures across all 1600 screens of the game, whether the player is in them or not. The game designers refer to this as the “abstract creature framework” ( Jakobsson and Therrien 2016). Complex ecological interactions, territorial disputes, hunting behaviours, and changes in social relationships between species unfold regardless of the player’s presence or awareness. This design choice generates emergent non-anthropo‐ genic micro-narratives ( Jenkins 2004) that can profoundly impact gameplay; a befriended scavenger might eliminate a threat the player could never overcome, entirely outside the player’s observation or control, and the player will stumble over this change without knowing what caused it. Rather than positioning the player-character as the central organising principle around which the gameworld revolves, the abstract creature framework relegates the player to the role of a minor participant within a vast, indifferent ecosystem. This systemic decentring, then, challenges the anthropocentric game design conventions that typically structure virtual environments in digital games, as players must confront the reality that no single agent can comprehend this gameworld and that mere survival in any ecosystem in which you are primarily prey is an achievement. Rain World’s simulation of a complex ecosystem, in its procedural animation, emergent creature behaviour, and reputation system, is indifferent to the player, as it does not centre the player-character. Emergence plays a vital role in destabilising the primacy of the human in favour of a nonhuman-centric approach to game design, precisely because no human made a direct game design choice in order for specific behaviours to emerge. In line with this, Gislam argues that “the use of procedural content generation algorithms [acts] as a non-human co-constructor of game space alongside the player” (2024: 29 f.). While Rain World’s space is not generated procedurally, the nonhuman systems that the game engenders through the procedural simulation of indifferent ecosystems come to define the game’s spaces and show that Gislam’s argument can be expanded beyond the category of game space to the realm of the game’s simulated ecosystem. Procedural generation and emergent behaviours make players confront the nonhuman by alienating them from a generically conditioned understanding of how nonhuman actants are supposed to look and behave. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 104 Xaver Boxhammer Conclusion Rain World, in its aesthetics, story, narrative discourse, and mechanics, presents a provoking engagement with the nonhuman through a decentring of anthro‐ pocentric modes of play. By distributing a fragmented story about nonhuman consciousness across multiple nonhuman agents, the game creates an unstable, technologically mediated narrative mode that resists linear comprehension and thereby mirrors the procedural arguments the game makes about entrenched game design conventions. Once players realise that they are only a minor participant in vast systemic processes that operate independently of human presence or control and are fundamentally unknowable to them, their sense of agency comes under scrutiny, ultimately resulting in an experience in which they can never exert full mastery over the gameworld, highlighting the limitations of human knowledge about nonhuman systems, be they animal or machinic. Yet, despite its intention to depart from anthropocentric game design, Rain World retains some conventional elements that anchor the experience in familiar narrative and ludic frameworks. Slugcat’s deliberate cuteness ( Jakobsson and Therrien 2016), which arguably played a significant role in funding the game in the first place, appeals to a distinct “popular aesthetics of video games” (Lukman 2023: 209). This encourages player identification and emotional investment in ways that popular video games employ, and the narrative of Slugcat’s ultimate trajectory toward ascension, which implies transcendence of consciousness and spiritual development, alongside alternative endings that suggest homecoming and reunion, reveals a loose adherence to classical narrative arcs of growth, transformation, reunion, and resolution. To what degree this means that the game ultimately fails at non-anthropocentric game design is up for debate. Either way, this tension between experimental game design and anthropocentric elements generates a productive ambiguity which illuminates the enmeshment between familiar and strange modes of meaning-making within contemporary digital media. While we may never know what it is like to be a Slugcat or truly understand the world and ecosystem it operates within, players can learn to appreciate these limitations of our comprehension and realise the ludic and narrative possibilities they provide. Works Cited Alber, Jan. 2016. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 105 Bianchi, Melissa. 2024. “Playing the Animal: Imagining the Nonhuman Animal in Two-Dimensional Action and Adventure Games”. In: -Castle, Nora/ Giulia Champion, eds. Animals and Science Fiction. Cham: Springer, 59-73. Caracciolo, Marco. 2021. “Animal Mayhem Games and Nonhuman-Oriented Thinking”. Game Studies 21/ 1, https: / / gamestudies.org/ 2101/ articles/ caracciolo. Caracciolo, Marco/ Marcussen, Marlene K./ Rodriguez, David. 2022. Narrating Nonhuman Spaces: Form, Story, and Experience beyond Anthropocentrism. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles/ Guattari, Félix. 2013. A Thousand Plateaus. 1980. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Ensslin, Astrid. 2015. “Video Games as Unnatural Narratives”. In: Fuchs, Matthias, ed. Diversity of Play. Lüneburg: Meson Press, 41-72. Fava, Fabrício/ Mangueira, Camila S./ Carvalhais, Miguel. 2019. “Playful design, empathy and the nonhuman turn”. Technoetic Arts 17/ 1-2, 141-154. Fizek, Sonia. 2018. “Automated State of Play: Rethinking Anthropocentric Rules of the Game”.-Digital Culture & Society-4/ 1, 201-214. Fuchs, Michael. 2021. “Playing (With) the Non-Human: The Animal Avatar in Bear Simulator”. In: Mengozzi, Chiara, ed. Outside the Anthropological Machine: Crossing the Human-Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies. New York: Routledge, 261-274. Gislam, Charlotte A. 2024. The Effect of the Non-Human on the Generation of Narrative and Space in Digital Games. Manchester Metropolitan University (Doctoral Dissertation). Grusin, Richard. 2015. “Introduction”. In: Grusin, Richard, ed. The Nonhuman Turn. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press, vii-xxix. Janik, Justyna. 2021. “The material world of digital fictions”. Images: The International Journal of European Film, Performing Arts and Audiovisual Communication 29/ 38, 57-72. Jakobsson, Joar/ Therrien, James. 2014. “Super long pathfinding update”. https: / / www.ki ckstarter.com/ projects/ rain-world/ project-rain-world/ posts/ 914855. Jakobsson, Joar/ Therrien, James. 2016. “The Rain World Animation Process”. Game Developers Conference 2016. https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=sVntwsrjNe4. Jenkins, Henry. 2004. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”. In: Wardrip-Fruin, Noah/ Harrigan, Pat, eds. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 118-130. Lyons, Sandy A./ Jaloza Lisa B. 2016. “More Human Than Non/ Human: Posthumanism, Embodied Cognition, and Video Games as Affective Experience”. Proceedings of The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference 2016. Lukman, Christopher. 2023. “Popular pleasures: Sharpening the tools for a popular aesthetic in video game criticism”. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 15/ 3, 209-227. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 106 Xaver Boxhammer Mukherjee, Souvik. 2013. “Sherlock Holmes Reloaded: Holmes, Videogames and Multi‐ plicity”. In: Vanacker, Sabine/ Wynne, Catherine, eds. Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle: Multi-Media Afterlives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 109-123. Playstation Country. "Rain World - PS4 Review". https: / / www.playstationcoun try.com/ rain-world-ps4review/ #: ~: text=Rain%20World%20is%20a%20sluggish,under‐ standing%20of%20whats%20going%20on. Ruffino, Paolo. 2020. “Nonhuman Games: Playing in the Post-Anthropocene”. In: Cow‐ ard-Gibbs, Matt, ed. Death, Culture & Leisure: Playing Dead. Leeds: Emerald Publishing, 11-25. Ruffino, Paolo. 2024. “Videogames, the Anthropocene, and Other Problems of Scale: Methodological Notes for the Study of Digital Games in Times of Ecological Cri‐ sis”.-Journal of Games Criticism-6/ A, https: / / gamescriticism.org/ 2024/ 10/ 27/ ruffino-6 -a/ . Ruberg, Bonnie. 2015. “No Fun: The Queer Potential of Video Games That Annoy, Anger, Disappoint, Sadden, and Hurt”. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2/ 2, 108-124. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2004. Narrative Across Media. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Seller, Merlin. 2020. “Vegetal Horrors: Blair Witch, Darkwood and Non-human Turn Game Studies”. Proceedings of DiGRA 2020 Conference: Play Everywhere. https: / / doi.o rg/ 10.26503/ dl.v2020i1.1176. Skrebels, Joe. 2017. “Rain World Review”. IGN. https: / / www.ign.com/ articles/ 2017/ 03/ 27 / rain-world-review. Soler-Adillon, Joan. 2019. “The Open, the Closed and the Emergent: Theorizing Emer‐ gence for Videogame Studies”. Game Studies 19/ 2, https: / / gamestudies.org/ 1902/ artic les/ soleradillon. Sweetser, Penelope. 2008. “Emergence in Games”. Game Connect Asia Pacific 2008, 1-50. Tyler, Tom. 2022. Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Valeriano, Brandon/ Habel, Philip. 2016. “Who are the Enemies? The Visual Framing of Enemies in Digital Games”.-International Studies Review-18/ 3, 462-486. Videocult. 2017. Rain World. Adult Swim Games. Windows Version. Woolbright, Lauren. 2017. “Game Design as Climate Change Activism”. Ecozon@: Euro‐ pean Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 8, 88-102. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 107