Video Games and Environmental Humanities

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.

• Section 1: Video Games and Environments.- Chapter 1: I Want to Be Free: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Minecraft, Free Guy, and the Pleasures of World Building in Video Games.- Chapter 2: Chernobylite: A Light in the Exclusion Zone.- Chapter 3: “It’s time to go on a low-carbon diet”: Carbon Footprints, Solar Panels, and the Eco Lifestyle of The Sims 4.- Chapter 4: Fuelling the City: On the Politics of Energy Resource Extraction in City-Building Simulators.- Chapter 5: Queer Thinking with Digital Stones.- Chapter 6: Piranha Plants, Volcanoes, and Turtle Shells: Sound, Music, and Place in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe's Fantastical Environments.- Section 2: Video Games and Ecology.- Chapter 7: Playing to Understand the Environment: From Superficial Skins to Truly Ecological Gameplays.- Chapter 8: “The Crystals’ Blessing”: Technogaianism and Skepticism in Final Fantasy and Stranger of Paradise.- Chapter 9: The Ephemeral Calm: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2 and the Importance of Post Crisis Aftercare.- Chapter 10: A New Digital Ecology: Death Stranding and Thing-Power Materialism.- Chapter 11: Wilderness Ecologies in Red Dead Redemption 2 & Horizon Zero Dawn.- Section 3: Video Games and Environmental Crisis.- Chapter 12: Auroral heliotropes of the Anthropocene and wandering the “quiet apocalypse” of The Long Dark (2017).- Chapter 13: Worldbuilding, Nuclear Engagement, Resource Scarcity and Raymond Williams’ Structure of Feeling in Bethesda’s Fallout 4.- Chapter 14: Call Me Corvo: Reading Kinship in Dishonored Through the Lens of Moby-Dick.- Chapter 15: Climate Change Ethics in Harvestella: Weirding, Disquietude, Choice, Lowell Duckert and A.R. Siders.