News/Research

Watch Alenda Chang Talk on Playing for the Planet

25 Apr, 2021

Watch Alenda Chang Talk on Playing for the Planet

BCNM alum and UCSB media studies professor Alenda Chang is a featured speaker in the Univeristy of Delaware "Intersections of Video Games and Culture" speaker series. In her talk, Prof. Chang discusses how games could offer us as meaningful a natural experience as going outdoors. She also talks about what players, designers, and game companies can do to acknowledge the ecological crises at hand, and how they can construct more environmentally intelligent game worlds and more equitable human and nonhuman futures. The talk is of particular interest to those curious about video games, culture, and the environment.

From the talk:

Games offer unique and playfully persuasive opportunities to engage with environmental issues. They can even foster moments of empathy, loss, care, experimentation, and optimism—ways of understanding and confronting phenomena ranging from extinction to disaster capitalism. At the same time, game industries are complicit in a variety of unsustainable practices, whether of resource extraction, labor, planned obsolescence, or the self-fulfilling prophecy of Moore’s Law.

Watch Alenda's talk here!