Post-Apocalyptic Ruins in Digital Games as Indexical Storytelling Devices

This paper investigates how ruins are used in digital games as indexical storytelling devices, referring to a form of storytelling in which traces are used to point to the events that have generated them, effectively turning the player into a detective whose goal is to reconstruct what happened. After discussing in the first part of the paper the connections between ruins and gameworlds, the narrative potential of ruins, and the concept of the post-apocalyptic, the second part of the paper will analyse as case studies the games Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games 2017) and Disco Elysium (ZA/UM 2019), in which the use of post-apocalyptic ruins as indexical storytelling devices holds a prominent role in the construction of the game narrative.