Forests in Digital Games - An Ecocritical Framework




Thibault Mattia, Galeote Daniel Fernández, Macey Joseph, Jylhä Henrietta

Karpouzis, Kostas; Gualeni, Stefano; Pirker, Johanna; Fowler, Allan

International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery

2022

FDG '22: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

ACM International Conference Proceeding Series

978-1-4503-9795-7

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1145/3555858.3555941

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555858.3555941

https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/177913457



Forests are, both culturally and ecologically, one of the most important environments on our planet. As such, there are countless representations of them - with Digital Games being no exception. In this paper we adopt the perspective of ecocriticism, which regards the analysis of the textual portrayal of physical environments of the natural world. In particular, we propose here a framework for the analysis of forest representations in digital games, mindful of the many different layers that coexist together: cultural, discursive, representational and ludic. In order to test our framework and to showcase its potential, in the last section we present a brief analysis of the slicing game Jack Lumber and of the ideological tensions that emerge from the game.


Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 19:27