Simulated Species: The Question of the Animal in Digital Games
First author: BianchiYear: 2018
Abstract
While scholars examine how art, literature, and film shape concepts of the animal, the recent proliferation of computer technologies demands research investigating how the digital mediates notions of a human-animal divide. Digital games, as transmedial objects and as medium, offer one significant avenue for such explorations. As media studies and animal studies scholar Tom Tyler observes, the unique properties of games allow players nuanced and insightful engagements with animal ontology, otherness, and agency. Still, representations of animals in digital games remain mostly neglected by scholarship in animal studies, game studies, and other related fields. This dissertation attempts to address this paucity of scholarship by providing an interdisciplinary approach to reading animal representations within the medium. Simulated Species argues for scholarly engagement with animal representations in specific computer game genres. The project proposes a framework for understanding how different genres address animals by drawing on the works of media studies scholars such as Terry Harpold, Ian Bogost, Alexander Galloway, and others. Scholarship in animal studies, posthumanist theory, play theory, and game studies inform my analysis of how storytelling, user interfaces, and game mechanics respond to dominant discourses about animals. In reading several games, such as Zoo Tycoon (2013), Goat Simulator (2014), Splatoon (2015), and others, Simulated Species argues that some games uniquely model nuanced understandings of animal ontology and human-animal biopolitics, suggesting ethical approaches to both human-animal interactions and to game design. The first chapter of this project reviews relevant scholarship, each subsequent chapter attends to distinct game genres. The first and second body chapters examine genres that cast players as human characters and simulate their institutional and individual interactions with nonhuman species. The fourth and fifth chapters explore games that (re)imagine human-animal relations through games that have players play as (rather than with) digital animals. These latter games can teach players to acknowledge and appreciate biological others beyond the confines of the game world while also challenging notions of the player as predominantly, if not exclusively, human.Details
Language: EnglishCountry of affiliation: United States
Published in: dissertation
Publication type: Dissertation
Source: https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UFE0052485/00001
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