Games studies literature

Kunzelman and Jayemanne in Transformations Issue 30 (2017)

not enough climate change games are climate justice games: in assuming a unified human agency that acts to affect change, do many such games push aside questions of uneven development and environmental impact...?

Cameron Kunzelman in Paradoxa 31 (2020) Climate Fictions

• Modelling
• Affective
• Direct Intervention

Megan Condis in Game Studies volume 20 issue 3 September 2020

Representation of climate apocalypse often avoids naming the human causes of climate change, or even fabricates some other fictional cause

Pasi Väliaho in Body & Society Vol. 20(3&4) 113–139

Theoretical readings of rhetoric in games, connection to affect

• Sentimental education (Geertz)
• Neuropower (Neidich)
• Environmental intervention (Foucault)

Queer games critiques of "empathy games"

• Aubrey Anable (2018) Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect. University of Minnesota Press
• Teddy Pozo (2018) "Queer Games After Empathy: Feminism and Haptic Game Design Aesthetics from Consent to Cuteness to the Radically Soft," Game Studies 18:3
• Bo Ruberg (2015) "No Fun: The Queer Potential of Video Games that Annoy, Anger, Disappoint, Sadden, and Hurt," QED: A Journal in LGBTQ Worldmaking, 2:2 pp. 108-124
• Bo Ruberg (2020) "Empathy and its Alternatives: Deconstructing the Rhetoric of 'Empathy' in Video Games," Communication, Culture and Critique, tcz044

Affective readings such as empathy should be separated from representation, and instead connected to the embodied and material production of a political subject - of the developer and the player.

Laura op de Beke, First Person Scholar, 2022 (access online)

"Griefing" in Eco

Room for sabotage as well as collaboration, affective imaginaries of melancholy vs nostalgia

Ben Abraham

Representation of climate change is less important than enacting climate action through game development processes!