Forschungsprojekt ::

Video Game Ecologies and American Studies

Projektbeschreibung

“Video Game Ecologies and American Studies” seeks to examine the environments that video games affect and are impacted by through the lens of American studies theories and methodologies. It engages with the notion of ecology as a critical concept that not only allows to study the intermedial, social, and cultural relations that constitute video games and gaming culture. The term also suggests reflections on the impact of gaming and virtual worlds in mainstream media ecologies (c.f. Bogost, Eskelinen & Flanagan) as well as video game conceptions of human, posthuman, and natural environments (c.f. Chang, Condis & Dodson).
While Alenda Chang defines ecology according to how the term is used in biology, i.e. “the science of interrelation between organisms and their environments” (Chang 6), media studies use the term metaphorically to refer to media environments. In The Ecology of Games, Katie Salen writes: “Although there has been a considerable amount written on games and young people’s use of them, there has been little work done to establish an overall “ecology” of gaming, game design, and play, in the sense of how all of the various elements—from code to rhetoric to social practices and aesthetics—cohabit and populate the game world.” (2). The conference theme of video game ecologies seeks to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations on the cultural, literary, political, social, and ecological discourses pertaining to the medium. As Megan Condis writes: “Each game utilizes different mechanics to describe and model the relationship between the player-character and his or her environment, resulting in a different argument about the type of world we inhabit—or the one we might inhabit in the future” (“Live in Your World, Play in Ours” 90). The project reflects on the structures, relations, and imaginations involved in these world building practices and the environments they participate in and create.