Alenda Chang's Playing Nature in Science
Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games was reviewed in the journal Science! University of Minnesota Press published BCNM alum Alenda Chang's book in 2019. The review by Stephanie LeMenager, University of Oregon, Eugene, was in the January 2020 issue.
From the review:
But video games might not be enemies to planetary redemption. In Playing Nature, Alenda Chang, a media scholar and game designer, begins with the provocative claim that game worlds are kin to natural systems. She calls them “mesocosms”—experiments that incorporate or replicate aspects of the natural world—and cites games such as Colossal Cave Adventure, which deftly maps portions of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, and Firewatch, which accurately replicates the Ute Mountain lookout tower and various U.S. National Forest sites, as examples of games at the intersection of play and real life.
Read the review here.