“Games of Ecology?” – Dennis Jansen

During last year’s seminar series, I wrote a blog post on the increasing attention being paid to “ecological matters” in game studies. The ecological themes in Carl Lavery’s recent TiM lecture and broader work offer a good opportunity to revisit that topic and expand on some of the topics raised in that earlier post.

If, as Lavery argues, theatre can be “a form of ecological doing” (2016, 230) through its ability to “make the world problematic, multiple and complex” (233), how would this work for videogames? Several scholars have already made arguments about how videogames are quite capable of evoking and commenting on the natural world through their spatial logics, as well as on the persistent tendency in many titles to frame the environment as passive, a resource to be exploited or an enemy to be defeated (e.g. Chang 2011; Abraham and Jayemanne 2017; Jansen 2019). The rising trend in especially high-budget videogames to depict vast, open spaces with apparently their own ecosystems and rhythms, which in itself might promote an appreciation of the ecologies we live in beyond the digital, is counteracted by the long-standing tradition of colonial violence as one of the key dynamics of videogame play. The untamable, sublime wilderness that threatens the player at the start of any installment of The Elder Scrolls is soon to be mastered and pastoralized (cf. Martin 2011), and the harmful ‘virgin lands’ trope that lives on in many real-time strategy videogames usually also means there is no obstacle for the player to strip those lands of every last tree.

Some efforts are being made to change these trends and to show that videogames are indeed capable of bringing about positive ecological depictions as well. The recent EcoPlay Symposium at Utrecht University is a prime example of this: with cases ranging from regenerative utopias in commercial videogames to the gamification of climate governance, it became clear that there are ways for digital media to contribute to conversations and imaginations around global warming and ecological destruction. Still, the focus on the ecological contents of videogames foregoes one of the central questions I posed in my blog post from last year: what of the environmental impact of videogames as material objects, and the materials that surround them? (I have since published a piece that partially deals with this on First Person Scholar.) In the meantime, it has become unavoidably obvious that videogame consoles are the perfect mix of neocolonial resource extraction and techno-fetishism and that the move to cloud-based gaming is going to exponentially increase the amount of energy used during play. I cannot help but see my careful optimism being squashed and pose a new question instead: what does it mean when the medium we use to make people more environmentally conscious is itself a microcosm of the ways in which we are destroying the environment?

References

• Abraham, Benjamin, and Darshana Jayemanne. 2017. “Where Are All the Climate Change Games? Locating Digital Games’ Response to Climate Change.” Transformations, no. 30: 74–94.
• Chang, Alenda Y. 2011. “Games as Environmental Texts.” Qui Parle 19 (2): 56–84. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0057.
• Jansen, Dennis. 2019. “The Environment at Play: Confronting Nature in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and the ‘Frostfall’ Ecomod.” Press Start 5 (1): 1–18.
• Lavery, Carl. 2016. “Introduction: Performance and Ecology – What Can Theatre Do?” Green Letters 20 (3): 229–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2016.1206695.
• Martin, Paul. 2011. “The Pastoral and the Sublime in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 11 (3). http://gamestudies.org/1103/articles/martin.