Forests in Digital Games - An Ecocritical Framework

Abstract

Forests are, both culturally and ecologically, one of the most important environments on our planet. As such, there are countless<br/>representations of them - with Digital Games being no exception. In<br/>this paper we adopt the perspective of ecocriticism, which regards<br/>the analysis of the textual portrayal of physical environments of<br/>the natural world. In particular, we propose here a framework for<br/>the analysis of forest representations in digital games, mindful of<br/>the many different layers that coexist together: cultural, discursive,<br/>representational and ludic. In order to test our framework and to<br/>showcase its potential, in the last section we present a brief analysis<br/>of the slicing game Jack Lumber and of the ideological tensions<br/>that emerge from the game