Alenda Chang on Gamers with Glasses
BCNM alum and author of Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games, Alenda Chang, was interviewed by Gamers with Glasses editors on what games can teach us about nature, the difference between playing outside and playing video games, the significance of video games in advocting for climate change, the ecological costs of gaming, and much more.
From the podcast:
I was noticing this similarity between the rhetoric of send your kids or send yourself outdoors and somehow spiritual and moral enlightenment should follow. This does not mean to say - I mean I do believe that there is truth in spending time away from screens or spending time being attentive to your surroundings, but I'm also a part of these conversations about environmental justice and other research circles so I've been trained through science and technology studies and environmental justice to be really suscpicious of these hard and fast or easy lines between urban and nonurban environments or even between humans and the environment. I also think there are a lot of classicist assumptions in the idea that going outdoors will be profitable to you spiritually or intellectually because it assumes that the outdoors will be safe, that it will be accessible and financially feasible. There are all these embedded assumptions and I don't think that's true for a lot of children or even a lot of people.
Listen to the full podcast here!