Playing Nature Reviewed in Media + Environment
BCNM alum Alenda Chang's 2019 book Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games was given a glowing and thoughtful review in Media+Environment by Başak Ağın.
From the article:
Chang ‘playfully’ opens her Introduction, secondarily entitled “Edge Effects,” with an epigraph quoted from Donna J. Haraway, underlining the unexpected power of the realm of play in making possible “worldliness and recuperation” (1). The author then turns our attention to Walden, a video game that derives its name and protagonist from Henry David Thoreau and his famous work. With the Walden example, she problematizes our relationship with nature and technology and points out the critical attitudes towards both: “Technology, particularly electronic technology, figures as the apotheosis of either human megalomania or human ingenuity, depending on your attitude toward post-industrial capitalism, while nature historically has oscillated between being that which is (terrifyingly or reassuringly) beyond human control and that which is subject to such control” (2).
Read the full article here!