Video Games and Environmental Humanities

This edited collection investigates topics related to environmental humanities through their inclusion, exploration, or critique in contemporary video games. It focuses on how video games are a site for creating and interacting within environments, with analysis that showcases how environments are shaped within video games as well as serve as a reflection of our real world. This crossroad between the virtual and the real allows us to consider the ways in which the concepts, theories, and issues facing our real-world environment can be understood and studied through video games, particularly via the power of interactive play to teach. This book looks into how video games might empower their players to make real-world change through their immersive environments. Finally, the volume offers a consideration of ecological crises through an exploration of post-apocalyptic narratives in a wide variety of video games. This close textual analysis of video game narratives and play structures allows insight into how and why such stories were crafted and explores the various intersections between these fictional play environments and the conditions of our real world. Kelly I. Aliano is the author of Theatre of the Ridiculous: A Critical History and The Performance of Video Games, published by McFarland, Inc,. and of the forthcoming Immersive Storytelling. She holds a PhD in Theatre and currently serves as the Member-at-Large for Focus Group Representatives for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She works in the Education Department at New-York Historical Society and in the English Department at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. Adam Crowley is the author of The Wealth of Virtual Nations: Videogame Currencies (2017) and Representations of Poverty in Videogames (2022). His work has also appeared in edited collections on Resident Evil, the science-fiction western, and the Horizon Zero Dawn franchise. He lives in Bangor, Maine, where he works as a Professor of English and as the Associate Director of Online and Distance Education at Husson University.