Pixelated Frontiers: Videogames and the Sublimation of Nature
First author: SellersYear: 2019
Abstract
Continuing a legacy begun with cyberspace’s metaphorical alignment with explorable “frontiers,” videogames (re)mediate environmental aesthetics and spatial experience. To examine this phenomenon, this thesis begins dissecting the trope of ecological recovery. This structuring logic redeploys Cartesian dualism and purity politics while addressing the player’s desire to enact a meaningful connection with “nature.” The subsequent analysis builds from this tension between the game’s structuring logics, which endorse violent rhetorics of mastery and control, and the player’s affective attachment to “greenness” as such. Chapter 1 defines the aesthetics of open world game design to unwind the ethical orientations this design model both inhibits and facilitates. This unwinding characterizes open world as a design practice that articulates unbounded freedom while occluding its own limitations. While the logic of open world instrumentalizes player exploration, this chapter positions the ambiguous practices of slow wandering as defiant of the violent consumption of space. To further untangle how games organize player desire and organize the player’s experience of space, Chapter 2 describes developments of map designs in the Legend of Zelda franchise as a case study. These maps enforce the system’s strategic practices, interpellating the player as romantic explorer, master of landscapes, and colonialist. Chapter 3 develops a system of categorization for understanding how nonhuman animals signify and function in games and how they determine player orientations. Together, these interrogations concentrate on specific aspects of the game experience to demonstrate how games not only train players in certain subjectivities but also translate player desires to the screen. Digital games, as the defining medium of our time, sublimate the desires that the contemporary consumer subject holds toward environments. The study of these games and their environmental aesthetics allows us to interrogate these desires and their relationship to the structuring logics of this moment in contemporary capitalism.Details
Language: EnglishCountry of affiliation: United States
Published in: dissertation
Publication type: Dissertation
Source: http://hdl.handle.net/10822/1054938
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