Green Gaming. Vorschläge für eine Ökokritik des Computerspiels

Game Studies is an interdisciplinary field of research in which a wide variety of approaches and research questions have been formulated. Although environmentalists have repeatedly problematized the treatment and depiction of animal life in computer games, there exist only a very limited number of ecocritical approaches to the medium. This contribution gives an overview of said approaches and relates it to the by-now established ecocritical approach to literature, in order to sketch a method for a generalizable ecocritical approach to computer games. The proposed heuristic matrix is meant to highlight games' potential for provoking engagement with ecological questions and to demonstrate the medium-specific ways of engaging with encounters of with the non-human environment.