MONOLOG: Matilda Davidsson och Anna Ishchenko "Video Games in Times of Climate Crisis: Playful and Narrative Engagements with Vanishing Worlds"

”Video Games in Times of Climate Crisis: Playful and Narrative Engagements with Vanishing Worlds"

In this dialogue, Anna will talk about the potential of narrative-focused video games to change players' attitudes toward the ecological crisis, addressing award-winning titles such as Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer, 2020), Disco Elysium(ZA/UM, 2019), and Norco (Raw Fury, 2022). Focusing on how these games tell their stories, Anna will discuss the ways in which they make us feel and think about cultural, societal, economic, and environmental collapses --- engage our emotions and moods and prompt reflections on the ecological crisis conditions.

On her part, Matilda will explore how animals are represented in video games. Often portrayed as allies, enemies, or resources, animals in games are simplified and shaped by the medium. However, some games take a different approach. By examining Stray (BlueTwelve Studio, 2022) and Endling: Extinction is Forever (HeroBeat Studios, 2022), she will discuss how these games challenge the human/animal divide by allowing players to experience digital worlds from a non-human perspective.

Anna Ishchenko is a PhD student in English at the Department of Languages at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Her doctoral project, tentatively titled Environmental Melancholy and the Transmediation of Ecological Crisis Conditions in Narrative Video Games, is part of the MID-world graduate school (Multimodality and Intermediality: Humanist Research in a Digital World) and is affiliated with the Green Research Cluster at the Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University.

Matilda Davidsson is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Linnaeus University since 2021, researching video games through intermedial and multimodal perspectives.

(OBS! Föreläsningen kommer hållas på engelska.)