Analog Game Studies

This article examines the issue of the depiction of the human relationship to culture and nature in games via a philosophical exploration of how similar issues have been depicted and debated in anthropology and archaeology as well as in environmental history. In recent years, parallel investigations of the representation of colonialist themes, and along with that the representation or indeed misrepresentation of race, traditional societies and other cultures more generally, have been much discussed in the tabletop and other games media and scholarship. This article contends that, while games scholarship has rightly recognized and documented the reproduction of colonialism in particular in tabletop games, there appears to be no comparable level of awareness that games typically cast the human relationship to anything in the game environment—other players, nature—as a transactional, means-ends relationship, which can have harmful effects and represent peculiarly modern rather than universal human preoccupations. A philosophical exploration of the history of such transactional depictions in the so-called homo economicus conception, social Darwinism, as well the examples from environmental history, will be offered to illustrate the arguments.