Contradictions
In Little Inferno, Miss Nancy is the "bad guy" Elon Musk style capitalist. Yet she is also an aging, curvy, female ball of fluff, a personified "marginalized group".
She's the definition of success, yet she is a failure. Oh how she dreamed to explore, to be a model, to "create new cities". But all she achieved was to run away from a crippling world.
She is bubbly, but not always: she spirals into dreary, dejected laments over lost time.
Her resignation is not only at the grave bygone aspirations, but more broadly at the possiblity of a good world: "it is no one's fault. We cannot control the weather."
She designed an entire gameworld, yet she believes the only way through is out.
Apocolypse/Survival
After learning that burning toys chokes up the sky, the player can do nothing but continue doing what they were already doing. Even the cartharsis of house demolition results in only the confirmation of disaster and an ambiguous survival.
What I really appreciate about Little Inferno is its implicit acknowledgement that ecological disaster is imminent, not in the sense that "climate change is real" and "we can still salvage it by signing for treatise". Not that political action is unimportant or futile--is it really the personal burning that destablized Earth climate?----but rather there is no fantasy that life as we know it could remain intact, to the degree where we use paper instead of plastic straws, and embrace Tesla the way we did Model-T.
Constricting player's world and affordances to a little inferno generates an experience passivity, a creative, intellegently-willed agent constrained by cold hard reality.
Failure
In class, we talked about the lack of success and failure is in a sense a mode of failing in Little Inferno. Lack of achievement rests on the impossiblity to fail this game, but also to "fail" in a game entails there needs to be some way to move succed in it.
But if failure wasn't a topic in this course, would anyone describe their experience as some sort of failure? Rather, we would map out what the game process is, and it happens to be one that does not have a clear sense of attainment.
I think LI really shows a layer of cognitive difference Anable doesn't articulate or address. To use a broken instance to question project--"failures of a larger ideological formation" implies two things. First, there is a better system, economic or ecological. Latent here is another construction of "success". Moreover, it is ultimately concerned with the technology of the system, how its ways are unable to attain its goals.
Technology is amoral, it doesn't answer "what do we want". It also isn't exploratory, unlike science or discovery, it seeks to expand the use but not the scope of already accumulated knowledge. It serves us bounty, but thinking about failure as a result of pure mechanism and technology is to presuppose an "want", an ideology. This puts intentionality and subjectivity into things we perhaps cannot will away.
Video games deliberately allows you to fail because through failing you figure out what are realities, and you recondition your desires and wants after discovering what it is. They might be not be immutable, but a subjective intepretation cannot write them away. Instead of subsuming realities into events of "want", "not want", "failure", "success", you have to suspend subjectivity and take in the event as incommensurable. This is the attitude we have to adopt in the face of drastic climate disaster, to first understand our past actions lead to and reveal conditions we must accept, and then see what we can do with it.