Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games

308 Pages·2019·5.092 MB·English

by  Alenda Y. Chang

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PLAYING NATURE
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Electronic Mediations
Series Editors: N. Katherine Hayles, Peter Krapp, Rita Raley, and Samuel Weber
Founding Editor: Mark Poster
58 Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games
AlendA Y. ChAng
57 Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art
JAmes J. hodge
56 Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed
FenwiCk mCkelveY
55 What Is Information?
Peter JAniCh
54 Deconstruction Machines: Writing in the Age of Cyberwar
Justin Joque
53 Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading,
Making, and Breaking Videogames
stePhAnie Boluk And PAtriCk lemieux
52 The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering,
and Scientifiction
hugo gernsBACk, edited BY grAnt wYthoFF
51 The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age
dArin BArneY, gABriellA ColemAn,
Christine ross, JonAthAn sterne,
And tAmAr temBeCk, editors
50 Mixed Realism: Videogames and the Violence of Fiction
timothY J. welsh
49 Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and
the Making of a Computational Planet
JenniFer gABrYs
48 On the Existence of Digital Objects
Yuk hui
(continued on page 295)
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
P L AY I N G N AT U R E
ECOLOGY IN VIDEO GAMES
AlendA Y. ChAng
Electronic Mediations 58
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
MINNEAPOLIS • LONDON
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Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book.
If any proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encourage copyright
holders to notify the publisher.
Different versions of portions of the Introduction and chapter 1 were previously
published as “Games as Environmental Texts,” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2011):
57– 84. An earlier version of chapter 2 was previously published as “Think Galactically,
Act Microscopically? The Science of Scale in Video Games,” Sustainable Media, ed.
Janet Walker and Nicole Starosielski, 215– 31 (New York: Routledge, 2016). Portions of
an earlier version of chapter 4 were previously published as “Back to the Virtual Farm:
Gleaning the Agriculture- Management Game,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature
and Environment 19, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 237– 52, reprinted by permission of
Oxford University Press.
This project was supported in part by funding from the University of California
Presidential Faculty Research Fellowships in the Humanities, MR- 15328710.
Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chang, Alenda Y., author.
Title: Playing nature : ecology in video games / Alenda Y. Chang.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2019] |
Series: Electronic mediations ; 58 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lCCn 2019007795 (print) | isBn 978-1-5179-0631-3 (hc) |
isBn 978-1-5179-0632-0 (pb)
Subjects: lCsh: Nature in video games.
Classification: lCC gv1469.34.n37 C43 2019 (print) | ddC 794.8—dc23
lC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007795
UMP BmB 2019
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For Ed
who made this possible
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Contents
Introduction: Edge Effects 1
1. Mesocosm 17
2. Scale 69
3. Nonhuman 107
4. Entropy 145
5. Collapse 187
Acknowledgments 237
Notes 241
Gameography 275
Index 283
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Introduction
Edge Effects
Perhaps it is precisely in the realm of play, outside the dictates of teleology,
settled categories, and function, that serious worldliness and recuperation
become possible.
— donnA J. hArAwAY, Staying with the Trouble
Walden is now a video game, and that’s really not as heretical as it
sounds.
In April 2016, I watched as Tracy Fullerton, director of the Game Innova-
tion Lab at the University of Southern California, ambled through a nearly
complete prototype based on Henry David Thoreau’s classic nature memoir,
Walden.1 Fullerton is one of the first game designers to receive funding under
revised and more inclusive National Endowment for the Humanities grant
guidelines, and she and her team have spent more than a decade transform-
ing this staple of nineteenth- century American literature into a compelling
playable experience. Over the years, they have purposefully engaged with a
diverse network of specialists, not just game designers and developers, but
also experts on Thoreau’s life and literary philosophy. Even those unfamiliar
with Thoreau’s writing are likely to associate him with his two- year stint at
Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, from late March 1845 to Septem-
ber 1847, what he dubbed an experiment in self-r eliance but what today we
might anachronistically label “going off the grid” or an early form of surviv-
alism. And despite some recent disfavor, Thoreau remains an indispensable
name in the nature-w riting canon.2 Walden, a game was released in July 2017
to coincide with the bicentennial of Thoreau’s birth, and has since garnered
1
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