Sarah Bresnahan

With the ever-increasing popularity of videogames, billions of people engage with the medium’s depictions of digital environments and ecosystems every year. Exploring portrayals of nature in post-2010 videogames, this project will employ case studies to assess the ecocritical significance of the mechanical, narrative, and aesthetic functions assigned to these natural environments. Considering the implications of human creators and players, as well as the complex convergence of player and character identities, this project will discuss, analyse, and adapt ecocritical theory to explore how players consume, destroy, or nurture videogame worlds. This in-depth investigation will determine the extent to which natural environments across a range of game genres are anthropocentric, assessing whether current design conventions reinforce and reward exploitative interactions with nature.