Playing in and with Ecological Crises: Ecocritical videogames between attitudes and performance effects

Abstract

In this paper, I problematize the relation between videogames and the ecological crisis. Connecting ecocritical advances in game studies with the emerging wider paradigm of digital environmental media studies (DEMS), I interrogate if and how videogames, play, and game development can contribute to solving humankinds most existential challenges – climate change, species extinction, biosphere depletion, and soaring inequalities. Taking a materialist perspective on the politics of entertainment media as my departure point, I see as those games as potentially transformative that invite collective conscientization and politization rather than only constituting spaces for seclusion and individual healing. Within this framework, I argue that the implications of videogames for issues such as sustainability, necessary de-growth, and progressive political mobilization need to be assessed at three intersecting levels: 1) Game content and the conveyed ideas and attitudes, 2) game production and the ecological and societal implications of the industry, and 3) the direct performance effects of released titles. Using an expanded version of Aarseth and Calleja’s cybermedia model and combining it with insights from Paglen and Gach’s approach to political art, I develop a template for the critical assessment of possible transformative effects of games on societies and the environment and demonstrate the evolving framework through brief analyses of the titles Horizon Zero Dawn (2017) and Survive the Century (2022).