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Die Rolls, Casting Spells, and Meeples: Examining Environmental Values in 21st Century Video, Board, and Card Games

Sat, March 17, 8:30 to 10:00am, Riverside Convention Center, RC E

Abstract

In The Greening of a Nation?, historian Hal Rothman noted the pervasiveness of environmental values in popular culture, but lamented that the values reflected little deep thought or effort. Environmental history has begun to incorporate popular culture sources, including movies and fiction, to understand how environmental values are absorbed or rejected within certain time periods. Various types of games, however, including video, board, and card games, have received little to no attention.

As with other popular culture sources, a game’s interaction with (or resistance to) culture can be purposeful or merely reflect the biases and perceptions of the game designer or the players. For example, in the popular farm-building app Hay Day, designers appeal explicitly to environmental values, describing crops as “organic,” and offering a “wildlife preserve.” Yet in many ways, the game directly contradicts long-ingrained ideas about land, farming, and ecosystems. Game designers ignore soil exhaustion, crop and animal disease, and insect attacks. Hay Day simply commodifies nature as a part of the capitalistic system as a game mechanism. Other games also reveal attitudes about nature that lack modern environmental sensibilities. In the board game Wilderness, players must imagine themselves in an unpopulated area, navigating violence, criminal acts, “hunger, thirst, exhaustion, bad weather, sickness, and wild animals.” Players “win” by reaching civilization, not by finding spiritual renewal or aesthetic beauty in the wilderness. Some games, however, incorporate environmentalism more explicitly. CO2 forces players to combat climate change by developing renewable energy sources, for example.

This paper will untangle the narratives within a variety of these games to evaluate the “power of ideas” of the modern environmental movement. Far from being mindless recreation, games yield significant information about how people incorporate or ignore environmental values.

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