New Publication - The Call of the Eco-Weird in Fiction, Films, and Games
STRATEGIES are pleased to announce the publication today of research by WP6 lead, Chloé Germaine on ecological ethics, aesthetics and board games. The chapter, “Tabletop Eco-Weird: Gameplay Experience and Ecological Ethics”, appears in the new book, The Call of the Eco-Weird in Fiction, Films, and Games that is edited by Brian Hisao Onishi and Nathan M. Bell. It arises from the collaborative research carried out by various folks at The Society for the Study of the Eco-Weird, hosted out of Penn State university.
The edited volume identifies and analyses the Eco-Weird as an interdisciplinary theoretical tool for engaging in fictional, philosophical, filmic, and ludic texts. It is the first volume to engage in the study of the Eco-Weird, which is a developing field at the intersection of environmental thought and Weird fiction, broadly construed to include literature, games, films, art, and television shows. The Eco-Weird has intersections with other literary and scholarly fields, including horror studies, game studies, phenomenology, literary criticism, and eco-criticism, but provides a unique set of tools to engage both its texts and the ongoing environmental crises of climate change, environmental justice, pollution, and more.
Eco-Weird and Games
As Chloé argues, the eco-weird is not only a genre but an aesthetic experience encapsulated in games. Tabletop games are weird because they emerge from an entanglement of more-than-human subjectivities and, so, make plain the fallacy of human exceptionalism upon which our perceived separation from ‘nature’ is founded. Games are co-created performances that conjure temporary worlds through which players experiment with alternative forms of being and relating, and with different ways of dwelling. Here, dwelling describes our ‘becoming with’ the environment, an echo of its use in philosophy to denote ‘staying within’, ‘housing’, and the home. These ‘homely’ aspects of subjectivity are precisely what the play of board games disrupts, despite the construction in the popular imagination of games as a cosy activity. The chapter offers a method for paying attention to how we play, giving reflective and analytical space to the eco-weird experiences that can arise across the tabletop and to moments of discomfort and strangeness that emerge in gaming.
