UC Berkeley

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.