Description
Videogames are perhaps an unlikely site to explore questions of engendering positive encounters with environmental activism. This paper explores the scope of progressive social engagement and resistance through the exploration of videogames as forms and sites of resistance. At one level, games have been made which productively create spaces for social protest alongside the production of games that are specifically designed to offer positive alternatives to present capitalist practices. The interactive nature of the game itself is thus integral to building a progressive form of politics and resistance to our present trajectory. At another level, activists have used existing game spaces as sites of political protest and activism, either through participation in game spaces and/or critical engagement with the media through social media. Here, therefore, the game-space is used to offer critique and is used as a site of hope and optimism in relation to the environment. What this paper demonstrates, however, is that a framing of progressive environmentalism is relatively underdeveloped within the medium – the environment often remains an arresting backdrop which alludes to impending catastrophe rather than the articulation of a productive alternative which offers optimism and hope within world politics.
