Metro Animal is an archive video game that seeks to shed light on the operational opacity of digital infrastructures in Mexico. It highlights the extractivism enabled by these technologies—often hidden behind terms like “the cloud,” “chatbots,” and “generative AI”—by connecting these issues to Mexico’s water crises through an interactive narrative.
​It reimagines Mexico’s recent droughts, projecting a future where, by 2028, desertification leaves only a few survivors. The plants of the Anáhuac Valley migrate underground in search of water, only to encounter the subway. Their attempt at a symbiotic relationship fails, leading to their death and their ghosts becoming trapped within the decaying body of a buried animal.
Players can interact with the archive during the hybrid animal’s final day. The controls allow navigation with a virtual body through abandoned platforms of a dying being. Specters of plants haunt its hallways, while speakers and echoes narrate how this scenario came to be. All content is subject to “the moods of the Metro.” At any time, the code may deny the player control over the simulation of blinking, sleeping, or dreaming. The animal’s dwindling health determines these behaviors. As death approaches, the controls become less reliable. Screen resolution and brightness decrease until the animal dies. This cuts off all connection with the player and disables the software.
Metro Animal, as software, embodies a chimera of spectres, modern architecture, and a dying terrestrial body. As an archive, it preserves the memory of non-human individuals. It documents the impacts of water and geological extractivism tied to digital infrastructure development in Mexico. As an arcade machine, it is a physical cabinet that functions as both an interface and a sculptural object—the body of the buried animal. The player interacts through hardware inputs typical of arcade machines. The experience delivered is an interactive archive rather than a conventional game.