ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the view of Earth from space as a planetary landscape as the completion of a process of visual nominalism begun in the Renaissance, leading to the aesthetic form of the videogame. Highlighting important historical linkages between games, digital culture and ideas of planetary sustainability, this chapter draws out the geopolitical implications of urban resiliency, where games serve as a kind of planetary governance by design, emerging from accelerations in information communications and aerospace technologies to envelope the planet in a ‘magic circle’. This unfolds through an analysis of games proposed by Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand, each of whom turned to game design as a strategy for managing the complexity revealed by planetary-scale computation.
