Life as We Don’t Know It: Cyclical Time and Collectives in Horizon: Zero Dawn

Taking cues from both posthuman studies and video game stud-ies, this essay dives into the narrative of the video game Horizon:Zero Dawn (2017) to examine the ways in which entanglements of different forms of life (such as the coexistence of humans, non-humans, and technology) as planetary collectives are tied to re-interpretations of linear and cyclical time. More specifically, I ar-gue that the reconfiguration of collectives beyond the human as a radical challenge to conventional human-nonhuman relationships requires an equally significant reconfiguration of time. To do so, I examine the narrative and gameplay of Horizon: Zero Dawn as a theoretical endeavor in thinking about collectives in terms of en-tanglements between life-forms made possible through a reimag-ining of linear and cyclical time.