Sustainable Play: Ecological Awareness and Sustainable Resistance in Slow Video Games
My dissertation project examines the potential of slow video game design to cultivate ecological awareness by challenging dominant paradigms of progress, speed, and extraction embedded in mainstream game design. Focusing on games like Dear Esther (2012), Stardew Valley (2016), Alba: A Wildlife Adventure (2020), and The Witness (2016), my research investigates how mechanics emphasizing slowness—such as walking, observation, and repetition—invite players to reimagine their relationship with virtual and real-world environments. I argue that slow games disrupt traditional notions of "fun" by replacing conquest-driven gameplay with contemplative experiences that foreground environmental being and ecological thinking.
In this project, I argue that slow games embody a counter-normative design ethos aligned with broader cultural movements, such as slow media and other sustainability movements, and challenge traditional ways of categorizing, conceptualizing, and performing play in virtual environments. By engaging players through embodied, place-based interactions, these games frustrate expected pleasures and aesthetics, and in so doing create space in which perceptual and ideological shifts might take place. For the genre and design elements focused on here—namely walking, seasonal cycles, photography, and environmental puzzles—I focus particularly on how these shifts might engender environmental awareness and ecological thinking. In this project, I also examine the historical and cultural contexts from which slow games arise, critiquing the extractive ideologies underpinning much of gaming history and their connection to broader technological modernity. By analyzing how slow games reframe environmental interactions through design and play, my project highlights games’ potential as tools for engendering ecological care and consciousness, and positions slow video games as a medium for influencing real-world ecological change by allowing players to explore sustainable modes of being and fostering an ecological ethics through play.