“Personal Experience and the Ignorance of Ecological Matters in Videogame Studies” – Dennis Jansen

When speaking about digital media and cyberspace, we—scholars, critics, users—still tend to forget that even the most ephemeral-seeming media have a material past, present, and future. While this kind of alienation is a problem of all consumption under global capitalism, awareness of the specific histories of digital commodities like videogames strikes me as only a fairly recent phenomenon (cf. Apperley and Jayemane 2012). Robert Mejia argues that, “[b]ecause the satisfaction offered by video games operates in a digital environment, it can be difficult to remember the ecological infrastructure that undergirds such pleasure” (2016, 182). At first glance, videogame players are not expected to think about the labor and resource exploitation that brought them their preferred entertainment medium in apparently much the same way that consumers in the West are generally discouraged from considering the genesis of the clothing they wear or the lives of the animals they eat. Moreover, in an interesting and not altogether unsurprising parallel, videogame scholarship and criticism have shown very little concern for these ecological matters, even though one of the earliest significant works in the field (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and De Peuter 2003) addressed some of these more dubious aspects of the videogame industry quite explicitly and aptly.

A part of this surely has to do with the videogame industry itself, which has, over time, carefully cultivated the ‘gamer’ as a consumer identity (e.g. Cote 2018). Those people who came to identify as gamers—often white, straight, and male—would subsequently also be the ones most likely to move beyond videogame play and into sectors within or surrounding the industry. They became QA testers, designers, journalists, critics, and scholars too (Vossen 2018), and therein lies the rub. While I cannot say there is something inherently wrong with having a personal passion for one’s object of study, there is a risk of uncritically taking for granted (or plainly ignoring) the facets of that object that do not directly relate to one’s personal experience. I needn’t even look beyond my own work to see this dynamic in action: my academic interest in videogames is fueled by experience as a life-long amateur of the medium, and only recently have I become interested in matters beyond the sheer content of the finalized products. The primary factor that allowed me to ignore matters like the labor conditions of videogame developers (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009) or the racializing ecological impact of hardware production (Mejia 2016), I would argue, is that I simply have little to no experience with those phenomena to begin with. The hegemonic Western-centric bias in videogame studies meant that I could afford to consider such things to be unimportant to my research without repercussion, and only very occasionally will these subjects be discussed with any depth in general videogame culture. However, the times are changing, and as the scope of videogame studies finally begins to widen, so too, hopefully, will mine.

References

• Apperley, Thomas H., and Darshana Jayemane. 2012. “Game Studies’ Material Turn.” Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 9 (1): 5–25. https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.145.
• Cote, Amanda C. 2018. “Writing ‘Gamers’: The Gendered Construction of Gamer Identity in Nintendo Power (1994–1999).” Games and Culture 13 (5): 479–503. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412015624742.
• Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig De Peuter. 2009. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Kline, Stephen, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter. 2003. Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
• Mejia, Robert. 2016. “Ecological Matters: Rethinking the ‘Magic’ of the Magic Circle.” In The Play versus Story Divide in Game Studies: Critical Essays, edited by Matthew Kapell, 171–86. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
• Vossen, Emma. 2018. “On the Cultural Inaccessibility of Gaming: Invading, Creating, and Reclaiming the Cultural Clubhouse.” PhD diss., Waterloo: University of Waterloo. https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/13649.