As popular as it is to make games about war, more and more I’m drawn to those that investigate peace. Specifically, those fraught peacetimes that can be lost as surely as war, that can demolish a country, a people, a future more surely than any cannonade.

John Hague’s forthcoming The Last Summit is one such examination. Like many of our cultural landscape’s speculations for the day after tomorrow, The Last Summit presumes the collapse of civilization and the advent of apocalypse. Unlike its peers, however, it also presumes that we’ve somehow waded through to the other side. Humanity’s leaders have come together to negotiate the shape of the new world. It’s a chance to work together to quell the excesses that pushed the globe over the brink — or to capitalize on everybody’s exhaustion to seize power for yourself.

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