Pixelated nature: ecocriticism, animals, moral consideration, and degrowth in videogames

Abstract

The field of ecocritical game studies has grown significantly in recent years. Reading videogames through the demands of the climate crisis and the social debates around what ecology and nature mean helps us assess their role in culture and as culture. This paper combines the analysis of game content and of the ways of playing afforded by that content to delineate a draft of a map of games about and in defense of nature. The guiding questions are how they create their discourses and what strategies they use for that, distinguishing between representation (or how nature appears) and ecocriticism (or what is said about the relationship between people and their environment), as well as what type of player behaviour they allow and favour. To study that, I employ three central intellectual concepts: ecocriticism, the theory of moral consideration in animal rights philosophy, and the economic theory of degrowth.