Alarming environmental trends are increasingly the subject of a variety of games that suggest surprising new approaches to both game studies and environmental advocacy, traditionally conceived. Such games raise an interesting complex of questions: how do games model “nature” and relevant scientific theories, and how do code-based representations of nature differ from those in more traditional media? Do games potentially permit a better understanding of natural processes by moving past the mere visualization of data to procedural or algorithmic embodiment? As the work of Ian Bogost and Alexander Galloway, among others, suggests, digital games and networked media offer promising avenues not only for rendering the realities of environmental crisis—nature as problem space—but also for schematizing possible solutions in ways that leverage the unique affordances of the computer, the Internet, and player collectives.

Playing Nature proposes new methods and objects for environmental inquiry through ecologically minded engagement with the imaginative worlds of contemporary gaming. The work recognizes that though some of the most sophisticated scholarship on natural representation has evolved within literary environmental criticism, as a humanistic field steeped in Romanticism, ecocriticism has tended to exclude designed landscapes and modes of mediated interaction perceived as detracting from direct experience of the natural world. At the same time, new media theorists and practitioners have generally overlooked the ways in which emerging technologies are implicated in and by natural systems. Most mainstream games, for instance, offer game environments as simplistic vehicles for graphical spectacle or extractive resource management.

Rather than perpetuate the popular notion that the natural and the digital are realms inherently inimical to each other, Playing Nature contends that our experience of the natural world is not only increasingly mediated by digital technology, but also that our interactions with these technomediated natures inevitably shape our conceptions of individual and collective agency in relation to our environment. Despite the present historical moment, in which environmental movements are often stymied in their efforts to depict the scale and urgency of global environmental crisis (most notably in the case of climate change), games remain largely untapped in terms of their potential to allow players to explore manifold ecological futures. Because successful gameplay requires that players negotiate environments by discovering their operative logics, games are structurally predisposed toward creating meaningful interaction within artificially intelligent environments and modeling dynamics long at the core of ecological thinking, among them interdependence, feedback, scale, and human limitation. Games offer imagined worlds that can compress centuries of change into the matter of hours, range from microcosmic to macrocosmic extremes, and dramatize recuperation just as readily as catastrophe, virtual ecologies that are mirrors to our modernity.

This dissertation demonstrates how performance studies, as a field, is well-positioned to address a gap in the study of video games broadly, and of role-playing games, specifically. By considering role-playing games as community-based performance, it charts the practice of role-playing across the platforms players employ and the spaces they create: material, digital, imaginative, actual, hybrid. It argues, moreover, that these spaces offer much-needed insight into the hybridized zones of engagement that digital publics occupy as both explicit performing grounds and as a quotidian mode of being in the world and in civic community.Noting how certain forms at particular times maintain an outsized presence in their cultural contexts (the dramatic, the novelistic, the filmic, the televisual, for example), the author positions the gamic as an overarching formal and cultural force in the present moment. This dissertation is an initial theorization and accounting of gamic theatre and gamic performance that—by employing close readings, ethnographic fieldwork, and online platform and activity analysis—moves across traditional theatre venues, digital playhouses, and hybrid play practices. Its objects include Qui Nguyen’s “geek theater” play She Kills Monsters (2012), one amongst many recent performed texts which stage the practice of role-playing for a popular audience; A Stage Reborn, a US-based not-for-profit creating theatre within Final Fantasy XIV (2013), an MMORPG produced by a Japanese transnational corporation; and the revitalized community that has both formed around, and is reforming, tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons (1974). The author’s analysis of She Kills Monsters demonstrates how staging play within a play can both enact a shared communal ethos; and structure formal conventions drawn from gaming practices and cultures. Drawing upon ethnographic participant-observation of an online theatre production in Final Fantasy XIV, the author highlights how digital play- and performance-making necessitates a negotiation between creative projects and the realities of the corporatized networked spaces furnished by online platforms; and theorizes the manners in which both player communities and video game producers operationalization memory through play. Lastly, in considering Ancestry & Culture, a player-produced publication that modifies the received systems and narratives of Dungeons and Dragons (which are often underwritten by racist worldviews and tropes), the author explicates how open license agreements and online content marketplaces pave a path, for both franchises and for players, towards the enactment through play of a more inclusive popular imagination. Ultimately, by articulating role-playing games as community-based performance, the author considers both the stories we tell about role-playing games, and the stories we tell through them. This yields a story of its own: of our cultural hopes and anxieties; and of the ways in which we live, now, enmeshed between and across online and material spaces and platforms.