Manchester Game Centre co-director, Chloé Germaine, will be giving a presentation at the inaugural symposium for the Society of the Study of the Eco-Weird on Saturday 30th September.
The Society for the Study of the Eco-Weird is an interdisciplinary academic organization aiming to bring together like-minded scholars. The society and the event are organised by
Brian Hisao Onishi, at Penn State Altoona and Nathan M. Bell, Dallas College.
In their words, the eco-weird originates in the cross section between environmental thought and weird fiction, where the wondrous horror of weird fiction provides an appropriate model for the uncertainty and anxiety of ecological crisis. Most fundamentally, the Eco-Weird is an approach that takes seriously the alterity of the natural world and the unknown in ecological change and that recognizes horror, wonder, and uncertainty as appropriate responses. The Eco-Weird is conceptually based on diverse schools of philosophical thought, and we seek to build it up further through contributions from a variety of disciplines and approaches. While weird fiction in literature provides our original model, we are excited to see contributors explore similar themes in television, film, games, and other media, as well as through experiences of interpretations of the natural world.
Chloé will be discussing ‘Tabletop Ecoweird: The Intimate Estrangement of Gaming in a Time of Climate Crisis’. This paper understands tabletop games as modes of string figuring, of speculative fabulation, and of ways of ‘somehow’ (re)negotiating belonging on a ‘wounded earth’, as Haraway describes it. Tabletop, or ‘analogue’, games have unique affordances in comparison to other media used for storytelling and world-making such as novels, films, and video games. Tabletop gamers are not only audiences, readers, nor even merely ‘players’, but rather co-enactors of worlds, forging new possibilities from the material and immaterial assemblages that constitute gameplay. This investigation of tabletop games emerges in the wake of game studies’ material turn and takes seriously the more-than-human collectives that comprise the performances of games (see also, e.g., Sicart 2021; Germaine and Wake 2022; Wake 2022). With a focus on tabletop games that seek to enweird, trouble, or else draw attention to human-environment relationships, this paper will develop the concept of the Ecoweird through three distinct case studies, considering (1) story-based roleplaying games (story rpgs) such as Trophy Dark (2022), (2) ‘sandbox’ style board games such as Sleeping Gods (2021), and (3), euro-style, or socalled ‘abstract’, board games such as Forests of Pangaia (2023). Each type holds distinct affordances as a game medium and therefore elucidates the ecoweird as a cultural modality and ethical proposition in surprising directions.
The board game, Sleeping Gods, by Ryan Laukat
Key contentions include that games are emergent performances (Wake 2022) that assemble more-than-human actors in collectives with humans, and that, as such, they invite intimacy between humans and environments, whilst, simultaneously asking human players to consider the historical separation of these domains, and the wounds that have emerged as a result. The paper also holds that games are particularly apt media for the development of ecoweird ethics. In their abstract, or ludic, forms, games also offer a kind of ‘open source’ and hackable ‘system’, one that reveals and allows players to reconfigure networks of more-than-human relations through play.
Other papers in the symposium discuss a range of literature, film, and the influence of video games on EcoWeird fiction.