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This edited collection investigates topics related to environmental humanities through their inclusion, exploration, or critique in contemporary video games. It focuses on how video games are a site for creating and interacting within environments, with analysis that showcases how environments are shaped within video games as well as serve as a reflection of our real world. This crossroad between the virtual and the real allows us to consider the ways in which the concepts, theories, and issues facing our real-world environment can be understood and studied through video games, particularly via the power of interactive play to teach. This book looks into how video games might empower their players to make real-world change through their immersive environments. Finally, the volume offers a consideration of ecological crises through an exploration of post-apocalyptic narratives in a wide variety of video games. This close textual analysis of video game narratives and play structures allows insight into how and why such stories were crafted and explores the various intersections between these fictional play environments and the conditions of our real world.
List of contents
Section 1: Video Games and Environments.- Chapter 1: I Want to Be Free: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Minecraft, Free Guy, and the Pleasures of World Building in Video Games.- Chapter 2: Chernobylite: A Light in the Exclusion Zone.- Chapter 3: "It's time to go on a low-carbon diet": Carbon Footprints, Solar Panels, and the Eco Lifestyle of The Sims 4.- Chapter 4: Fuelling the City: On the Politics of Energy Resource Extraction in City-Building Simulators.- Chapter 5: Queer Thinking with Digital Stones.- Chapter 6: Piranha Plants, Volcanoes, and Turtle Shells: Sound, Music, and Place in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe's Fantastical Environments.- Section 2: Video Games and Ecology.- Chapter 7: Playing to Understand the Environment: From Superficial Skins to Truly Ecological Gameplays.- Chapter 8: "The Crystals' Blessing": Technogaianism and Skepticism in Final Fantasy and Stranger of Paradise.- Chapter 9: The Ephemeral Calm: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2 and the Importance of Post Crisis Aftercare.- Chapter 10: A New Digital Ecology: Death Stranding and Thing-Power Materialism.- Chapter 11: Wilderness Ecologies in Red Dead Redemption 2 & Horizon Zero Dawn.- Section 3: Video Games and Environmental Crisis.- Chapter 12: Auroral heliotropes of the Anthropocene and wandering the "quiet apocalypse" of The Long Dark (2017).- Chapter 13: Worldbuilding, Nuclear Engagement, Resource Scarcity and Raymond Williams' Structure of Feeling in Bethesda's Fallout 4.- Chapter 14: Call Me Corvo: Reading Kinship in Dishonored Through the Lens of Moby-Dick.- Chapter 15: Climate Change Ethics in Harvestella: Weirding, Disquietude, Choice, Lowell Duckert and A.R. Siders.
