Social media abounds with posts along the lines of “the apocalypse is around the corner, but you remember you play survival games”. They contain young, presumably White men posing with axes, constructing shelters, or relaxing around a campfire. These posts place whiteness and maleness in a position of skillful mastery over nature, and their captions connect games and memetic phrases from digital culture to the end of the world. Behind such posts we see the assumption that society as we know it will collapse, that knowledge of living with and within nature is essential for survival, that playing survival games can facilitate such knowledge, and that the (white) men who play them are the future survivors.
We explore these gendered intersections between survival games and survivalism through ethnographic fieldwork in a project we are calling SURVIVE. As three of the research group members have met through the Center of Excellence in Game Culture Studies (Matilda Ståhl, Aska Mayer and Rainforest Scully-Blaker), we want to show our appreciation to the CoE through this update and share our progress into what we see as a timely new direction for multidisciplinary research into the cultural significance of games during intensifying cultural and climatological crisis. By way of introduction, we lay out both the thematic and methodological layers that our team develops through this work.
Themes: Survival gaming and masculinity
To generate a bottom-up understanding of survival games as they are perceived by the player communities, we have been doing an qualitative exploration of the subreddit r/SurvivalGaming, focusing on themes, design elements, and game titles made relevant by the players. Our initial impressions include a high presence of discussions on perceived ‘realism’ in relation to existing survival games and hypothetical games the participants would like to play. Here we see a connection to prepper communities, as both ‘tinkering’ and ‘the wilderness as a male proving grounds’ were central in constructing a masculine prepper identity (Kelly, 2016, p. 8) as well as being are considered central features in survival games (Reid & Downing, 2018). It is possible that this shared understanding of and emphasis on ‘realism’ on the subreddit is connected to players longing for a sense of agency and experiencing that through survival game titles.
We had the opportunity to present our first paper draft at the New Perspectives on Men and Masculinity in Gaming Culture workshop at the Center for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen November 20-21, 2025. The workshop was organized by Kristine Jørgensen, Martin Lüthe and Synnøve Lindtner as part of the research project Understanding Masculinity in Gaming. We are grateful for the feedback from the workshop participants, especially our assigned commentator Bodil Stelter (University of Bremen, Germany) for her highly helpful and constructive comments about structure, focus and suggestions for further reading! Going forward with the analysis, our focus will be on romanticized and gendered notions of solitude and lone survivors in r/SurvivalGaming.
Methods: Survival gaming and ethnography
Early next year, Matilda and Aska will be representing the project group at the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry 2026 where the topic this year is Global Flows, Connections, Dialogues and Collaborative Practices in Challenging Times in Athens, Greece. Based on our previous experience of doing participatory fieldwork, we here see a potential challenge in our ambivalent and hybridized relationship to survival gaming communities. Though we intend to conduct the research with full transparency regarding our interests and institutional positions, we are also ourselves survival gaming enthusiasts who engage in many of the other practices espoused by this community: prepping, survivalism training, and civil defense preparedness. Though we intend to conduct the research with full transparency regarding our interests and institutional positions, we are also ourselves survival gaming enthusiasts who engage in many of the other practices espoused by this community: prepping, survivalism training, and civil defense preparedness. Through this presentation we wish to synthesize and extend discussions of researcher positionality and researcher safety in participatory research, particularly amongst communities who frequently view academic research with suspicion or scorn, however while still doing so through dialogue and mutual respect.
The Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation has generously provided Matilda with a personal stipend for the academic year 2025-2026 to get this project started. We are currently looking for opportunities to kick off this project on a larger scale with plans to extend it through partnerships with our colleagues in Canada. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you wish to collaborate!
References
Kelly, C.R., 2016. The man-pocalpyse: Doomsday Preppers and the rituals of apocalyptic manhood. Text and Performance Quarterly, 36(2-3), pp.95-114.
Reid, S. and Downing, S., 2018. Survival themed video games and cultural constructs of power. Loading…, 11(18).
This blogpost is based on the following presentations:
Ståhl, M., Mayer, A., Hope, R., Scully-Blaker, R., & Taylor N. (2025). More man vs nature mechanics? Exploring realism, agency and masculinity in r/SurvivalGaming. [Paper presentation]. New Perspectives on Men and Masculinity in Gaming Culture Workshop, University of Bergen (Norway, 2025) organized by Kristine Jørgensen, Martin Lüthe and Synnøve Lindtner as part of the research project Understanding Masculinity in Gaming.
Ståhl, M., Mayer, A., Hope, R., Scully-Blaker, R., & Nicholas Taylor. (2026) Sustainable research in challenging contexts and challenging times? Ethnographic explorations of the intersection between survival games and survivalism. [Paper presentation] European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Athens (January 2026).
Project illustrations have been provided by Ludwig Sandbacka.
Authors’ bio and contact info
Matilda Ståhl is a Postdoctoral Researcher affiliated with Tampere University Game Research Lab. Her research is focused on communities, primarily online, centered around games and gaming, the norms that shape these communities as well as the communication that take place within them. Ståhl has co-authored the open access book “Learning and Identity in Competitive Gaming: An Empirical and Methodological Discussion” with Fredrik Rusk (Ståhl & Rusk) which is listed to be published in May 2026.
Contact: matilda.stahl(at)tuni.fi
Aska Mayer is a Doctoral Researcher in the research cluster CONVERGENCE of Humans and Machines (Tampere University) and affiliated with Tampere University Game Research Lab. Aska’s research is focused on peripheral technology practices, DIY user cultures, and games as testing grounds for future imaginaries.
Contact: aska.mayer(at)tuni.fi
Robyn Hope is currently an independent scholar based in Canada. She recently defended her dissertation (2025), a media archeology of bunkers in Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media, North Carolina State University, USA. Hope has published chapters on digital and analog gaming as well as livestreaming. She has also produced a video essay on the phenomenological experience of illness in digital games (Hope 2024).
Contact: robyn.aly.hope(at)gmail.com
Rainforest Scully-Blaker (he/him) is a Research Affiliate in the Intersectional Tech Lab. He earned his PhD in Informatics from UC Irvine in 2022. He has also worked as a Lecturer in Game Design at Uppsala University and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies at Tampere University. His research concerns critical approaches to the study of games and those who play them, and he is interested in exploring how play can both uphold and dismantle hegemony. His current book project with Duke University Press is about exhaustion as a systemic feature of neoliberal capitalism and how video games enable and may yet work against the exhausting status quo.
Contact: rainforest.scully-blaker@tuni.fi
Nick Taylor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada, and coordinator for the department’s new program in Communicaiton, Social Media and Public Relations. He has written broadly on the intersections of gaming and masculinities, including the monograph The Grounds of Gaming (Indiana University Press, 2024). His current project, “Building Good Relations (with Bad Media)”, considers both the environmental harms and political possibilities of LEGO.
Contact: ntt@yorku.ca