Configurations最新文献

The Anthropocene is characterized in geological terms by the stratigraphic inscription of human impact. Donna Haraway refigures the Anthropocene as a boundary event, the surpassing of which requires the formation of trans-genealogical kinships between biotic and abiotic actors. In the interest of such kinships, we turn our attention to plastic, a biogenic material derived from ancient zooplankton and algae, and, as we show, one with its own vibrant life history and phylogeny. Taking an approach informed by Haraway’s “kin-making” and Nicolas Nova’s The Bestiary of the Anthropocene, this article is a taxonomic description of Plasticus gen. nov. sacculi sp. nov., a new deep-sea “species.” Based on a real observation of a plastic bag in the deep sea, we describe the distribution, life history, and phylogeny of Plasticus sacculi.

This essay argues that to understand coral communication, we need a new interpretive method that incorporates a creative insight into living oceans and aquatic species or a new conceptual viewpoint that considers their capacity for creative expressions, marking the coming-to-voice of their significance. Since this method combines scientific research and creative engagement with oceanic ontologies in a context where nonhuman languages, creative expressions, and stories compellingly shape the life worlds of all aquatic beings, I name it “the scientific poetics of water.” It allows us to read corals and all aquatic agencies as part of the collective semiotic creativity of life, as storied beings.

This article reads the seminal text-based computer videogame Colossal Cave Adventure (1976–77) as a key document to understand videogame and computing history’s fraught relationship with race. It situates its simulation of underground exploration in the context of the actual location that inspired it: Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave system, a destination that was immensely popular with tourists in the mid-nineteenth century, but also relied heavily on the labor of enslaved Black men. This article examines what it means for one of the foundational videogame texts to be modelled after a space historically marked by Black slave labor; it positions Adventure and the programming culture from which it emerged, and in which it was so enthusiastically received, as crucial sites to understand how the ideology of whiteness as an unraced, universal position came to be so enmeshed with videogame and computer culture. The ramifications of Adventure’s relation to race are explored through a reading of Cardboard Computer’s critically acclaimed videogame Kentucky Route Zero (2012–2020), which pays homage to Adventure by using the Mammoth Cave as a setting for its magical realist exploration of the entanglement of media history, labor, and dispossession in America, but ends up providing a whitewashed account of the labor that shaped the region.

This chapter draws on metaphors and themes developed in the television show Westworld to stage a close reading of the games Minecraft and SimEarth, using Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s interface theories to examine the ways earth-centered games diverge from Bernard Stiegler’s theory of epiphylogenesis and the co-constitutive evolution of man and tool, to propose a theory I have coined, supraphylogenesis, wherein, instead of an equal evolution, one surpassed the other; man surpasses the capabilities of technics, or technics and in these games their equivalent, the earth, exceed humanity (Wardrip-Fruin 2009; Stiegler 1998). This chapter seeks to trouble our understandings of video games that create a relationship between the player and the earth and what types of systems and mechanics these types of games prioritize. Are earth-based games only successful if the relationship that is cultivated falls into strict categories wherein the earth either exists as a tool for player (human) control, creativity, or knowledge, or as a form of capital? In this binary between man and machine, must earth always fall into the same category as machine? Finally, what of games that do not fall into this binary, and instead prioritize the earth and its autonomy?

Wholesome games are those that eschew dominant fight-or-flight logics and instead embrace softness, kindness, and warmth. While most academic and popular writing on such titles frames wholesomeness as an aesthetic or affect, in this paper I emphasize its politics in an effort to understand how these games variously reify and combat systemic oppression. My analysis focuses on the competing discourses that emerged from the first Wholesome Direct, a video showcase of then-forthcoming cozy video games. I read these perspectives from industry professionals through critical concepts from feminist media studies and queer art spaces, including nostalgia, exit, and radical softness. Through a distinction between what I call comfort and rest, I conclude that wholesome games must wear their politics on their sleeve if they wish to address the systemic issues that make many people seek them out.

We position games as ludic time machines; beyond simply representing neurodiversity, they can prompt players to consider neurodivergent temporalities. In the 2D psychological adventure game To the Moon (Gao 2011), players control two scientists who travel through the memories of a man on his deathbed. Digging ever deeper into their seemingly neurotypical client’s past, the scientists learn how his marriage was strained by the complexities of cross-neurotype communication. We show how To the Moon’s storyworld and gameplay destabilize fixed understandings of neurotypicality, encourage deeper mutual understanding of temporal embodiment, and prompt players to reconsider their relationship to neurodiversity.