Introduction to Paper

If you were curious about my paper, I will include the first few paragraphs below, but you can view my final paper here, my final presentation here, and my raw data here.

In recent decades, a growing understanding of climate change has put the natural world, and humanity’s connection to it, into the focus of a wide range of media. Particularly, the emphasis on human activities causing irreversible changes in the environment is a prevalent theme in the numerous academic journals, articles, and papers published every year. While these sources have certainly been present for well over half a century and undoubtedly contain the most accurate information available, the vast majority of people are not interested. Simply put, the immense popularity of books, movies, TV shows, and, more recently, video games suggests that people find them much more accessible and captivating than academic literature. In fact, despite arguments that these pieces of media just waste time, Alenda Chang, an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara criticizes that they leave “little room for forms of media to be productive agents for social and environmental change” (8). In other words, despite the reservations some people have about popular media, they can still be effective tools for spreading environmental messages. That being said, it is important to consider that representations of the natural world can vary greatly, from the accuracy of documentaries and high-end science-fiction to the harmful stereotypes of some video games and cartoons. Realistically, these forms of media are more often concerned with entertainment value than accurately portraying the environment. However, it is certainly possible, and perhaps even more beneficial, to achieve both of these at the same time in order to present important environmental topics in an interesting and appealing way.

To evaluate how a piece of media is representing the environment, an ecocritical analysis is required. Simply, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the natural environment (Kumral 6). The field of ecocriticism is relatively new itself, and the rapid growth of the video game industry has inspired a lot of recent academic work on ecocriticism in video games, including this research. Several sources make it clear that literary analysis, like ecocriticism, can be easily applied to video games by arguing that if movies can be considered a visual form of literature, then video games can be considered an interactive form of a movie and thus be subject to literary analysis (Barton; Davis 99; Kumral 6). Michael A. Davis, a Professor of Physical Sciences at Kurtztown University, in addition to Chang, emphasize that video games allow players to get hands-on experience with complex topics, themes, and systems that would be hard to convey otherwise (Chang 8; Davis 99).