You should read
Triple Canopy if you aren't already, or at least this one article that has special relevance to video games:
"The Anatomy of Ruins," analyzing our relationship to ruins and what that means.
In video games, that usually means romanticizing them in some way, making them oddly beautiful or otherwise visually arresting. It makes sense, after all, seeing as the vast majority of FPS games are about destruction and the spectacle of the remains. And, well, guns and explosions and things that go boom.
Some games (World War II-themed games,
Fallout 3) are content to use ruins to demonstrate some mundane truism like, "look at all the destruction that war has wrought -- look at all these empty houses! Man, war sucks and displaces innocent civilians, even if you do believe in a theory of just war!" Indeed,
war can be pretty bad.
The
Halo series and the
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion treats the ruin as a mysterious "other," the result of an alien civilization that had strange uses for these ruins, uses that we struggle to comprehend.
Other games celebrate the ruin as a reflection of player agency: the
Red Faction series and the
Battlefield: Bad Company series come to mind. In it, the player actively creates the ruins.
Red Faction celebrates it as revolution,
Bad Company treats it like good ol' fun.
Half-Life 2 manages the feat of accomplishing both... sort of: you begin in the derelict remnants of an Eastern European city. The structures are intact, but the social fabric of civilization is in ruins and disrepair. Then, when you return later and the city is in ruins -- specifically a setpiece where fellow rebels tear down a Combine screen in the plaza amid cheers and applause -- it is both liberation from the old world / the oppressive new world order.