Configurations最新文献

{"title":"The Global Distribution, Life History, and Taxonomic Description of the Common Oceanic Plastic Bag: Plasticus sacculi sp. nov","authors":"Prema Arasu, Paige J. Maroni, Alan J. Jamieson","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a932027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a932027","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Anthropocene is characterized in geological terms by the stratigraphic inscription of human impact. Donna Haraway refigures the Anthropocene as a boundary event, the surpassing of which requires the formation of trans-genealogical kinships between biotic and abiotic actors. In the interest of such kinships, we turn our attention to plastic, a biogenic material derived from ancient zooplankton and algae, and, as we show, one with its own vibrant life history and phylogeny. Taking an approach informed by Haraway’s “kin-making” and Nicolas Nova’s <i>The Bestiary of the Anthropocene</i>, this article is a taxonomic description of <i>Plasticus</i> gen. nov. <i>sacculi</i> sp. nov., a new deep-sea “species.” Based on a real observation of a plastic bag in the deep sea, we describe the distribution, life history, and phylogeny of <i>Plasticus sacculi</i>.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"58 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141610928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Literary Studies and Well-Being: Structures of Experience in the Worldly Work of Literature and Healthcare by Ronald Schleifer (review)","authors":"Shawn Normandin","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a932029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a932029","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Literary Studies and Well-Being: Structures of Experience in the Worldly Work of Literature and Healthcare&lt;/em&gt; by Ronald Schleifer &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Shawn Normandin (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; Ronald Schleifer, &lt;em&gt;Literary Studies and Well-Being: Structures of Experience in the Worldly Work of Literature and Healthcare&lt;/em&gt;. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Literary Studies and Well-Being&lt;/em&gt; reminds us what real interdisciplinary scholarship can do. While interdisciplinarity usually results in the domination of one discipline by another, this book tries to keep literary studies and healthcare in a mutually illuminating equilibrium. Ronald Schleifer channels his literary curiosity into a project enriched by his many years of teaching medical students and conducting research with healthcare professionals. But his book also presents a theory of the differences between the hard (or nomological) sciences, the social sciences, and the human sciences. As it turns out, the book is more persuasive in theorizing these differences than it is in merging healthcare and literary studies.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Schleifer’s response to the declining attractiveness of academic literary studies is to defend their practical value (30). He claims that examining the relationship between &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 320]&lt;/strong&gt; healthcare and literature can enhance literary understanding (3). Though most work in the “health humanities” has focused on the ways healthcare practitioners can gain knowledge from literature, “the overall goal of &lt;em&gt;Literary Studies and Well-Being&lt;/em&gt; turns this inside out” because “the practical pursuit of well-being in healthcare reveals purposes at the core of our engagements with and understanding of literature itself.” Foremost among these purposes is the ethical instruction resulting from the experiences afforded by literary works (3). Literature and healthcare have a common goal: to solicit “practical wisdom” (7). Chapter 1 of &lt;em&gt;Literary Studies and Well-Being&lt;/em&gt; “defines ‘literature’ as verbal and narrative discourses, which present and provoke ‘experience’” (3). Indeed, experience is the book’s unifying concept. But it is a sophisticated concept. Involving more than immediate sensory perceptions, Schleifer’s experience is always “mediated through structures” and elicits an interpretive reaction he calls the “double-take” (23).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The second chapter provides a second introduction to Schleifer’s multifaceted argument. But the third chapter includes his best demonstration of the important role the experiential double-take plays in the humanities. He examines the shift in the history of the nomological sciences that occurred when physicists, no longer content to catalogue sense impressions, began to focus their research on the causes of such impressions. Physicists, for instance, began to conc","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"2012 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141615036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The End of the Anthropocene: Ecocriticism, the Universal Ecosystem, and the Astropocene by Michael J. Gormley (review)","authors":"Ian Hill","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a932030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a932030","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;The End of the Anthropocene: Ecocriticism, the Universal Ecosystem, and the Astropocene&lt;/em&gt; by Michael J. Gormley &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Ian Hill (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; Michael J. Gormley, &lt;em&gt;The End of the Anthropocene: Ecocriticism, the Universal Ecosystem, and the Astropocene&lt;/em&gt;. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021, 206 pp., ISBN: 1498594050. &lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The End of the Anthropocene: Ecocriticism, the Universal Ecosystem, and the Astropocene&lt;/em&gt;, Michael J. Gormley sheds the limitations of strictly earthbound ecocriticism and looks forward to an era of interplanetary colonization, which he terms “the Astropocene.” Through a series of close readings, Gormley theorizes about how humans might and should interact with novel environments—the moon, Mars, the vacuum of space—and employs ecocriticism in novel ways to interrogate the ethical ramifications of cosmic expansion. &lt;em&gt;The End of the Anthropocene&lt;/em&gt; does an admirable job of jarring ecocriticism loose from terrestrial confines and showing its universal value and applicability. In so doing, Gormley carves out new space in ecological discourse, though his efforts are slightly dampened by an overly optimistic view of the near future, an underemphasis on the history and implications of colonization, and a limited archive.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Gormley’s book follows the same path humanity has and (he predicts) will, beginning with wilderness before moving to the climate apocalypse in which we currently find ourselves, to near-space colonization, to outer-space colonization, all the while gathering theoretical and speculative momentum. The first chapter, “Ecocriticism and the Universal Ecosystem,” deals with grounded, terrestrial, and familiar subjects that both ecocritics and nonspecialized readers will readily grasp. The book begins with the wolf—a primally familiar figure—and returns to it throughout, just as it does to the dirty, hands-on practice of tracking. Though &lt;em&gt;The End of the Astropocene&lt;/em&gt; promises a scientific and perhaps even sci-fi reading experience with its title and lunar cover (and mostly delivers on these promises), it rarely loses sight of the immediate world around us. Gormley takes pains not to alienate the reader. After all, since “the true scope of this book is to prepare humanity for its fast-approaching integration with extraplanetary ecosystems,” it makes sense that he would want to welcome as many readers as possible (14). He even bakes this broad human inclusivity into the word &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 323]&lt;/strong&gt; “Astropocene,” preferring it over the more etymologically sound “Astrocene” to retain the human connection.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The second chapter, “The Biotic World,” concerns animals (human and otherwise) and how they interface with other creatures and their environment, all of which falls under the umbrella of “biotic identity.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"80 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141610931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a932031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a932031","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Contributors &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jérémie LeClerc&lt;/strong&gt; is a PhD candidate in English at McGill University. His SSHRC-CGS funded dissertation explores transatlantic romantic literature in relation to the development of field theory in nineteenth-century physics and mathematics.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Himali Thakur&lt;/strong&gt; is a scholar of literature and science and technology studies. Her current research is on the use of science fiction rhetoric in the conceptualization of smart cities. She is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Davis and holds a BA in English from Ashoka University.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Serpil Oppermann&lt;/strong&gt;, professor of environmental humanities and director of the Environmental Humanities Center at Cappadocia University, is co-editor of &lt;em&gt;Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities&lt;/em&gt;. She has served as the seventh president of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment (2016–2018). She is also a signatory to the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: Second Notice” (2017) and the “World Scientists’ Warning of Climate Emergency” (2020). Her most recent publications are &lt;em&gt;Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene&lt;/em&gt; (2023) and &lt;em&gt;Blue Humanities: Storied Waters in the Anthropocene&lt;/em&gt; (2023).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Prema Arasu&lt;/strong&gt; is a postdoctoral research fellow in environmental humanities at the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre. They are a writer and poet interested in the &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 327]&lt;/strong&gt; phenomenology of the deep sea. They have an MLitt in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture from the University of St Andrews and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Western Australia. Arasu is interested in how speculative fiction and experimental forms might provide us with new ways of talking about and conceptualizing the oceans, particularly in the context of the Anthropocene. Their approach is interdisciplinary, integrating the methodologies of literary studies, creative arts, environmental humanities, philosophy, and science communication.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Paige Maroni&lt;/strong&gt; is a postdoctoral research fellow in genetics at the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre. She is a marine molecular biologist with a particular interest in invertebrate evolution, systematics, phylogeography, and diversity. At the Deep-Sea Research Centre, Maroni employs molecular tools to understand the evolution and diversity of hadal fauna and to address questions of genetic connectivity by examining the phylogeographic structure of the organisms of interest. Her research involves species delimitation, genome sequencing, taxonomy, and at-sea sample curation.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alan Jamieson&lt;/strong&gt; is the founding director of the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre. He has over 20 years of exper","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141610930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reading Storied Corals with the Scientific Poetics of Water","authors":"Serpil Oppermann","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a932026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a932026","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay argues that to understand coral communication, we need a new interpretive method that incorporates a creative insight into living oceans and aquatic species or a new conceptual viewpoint that considers their capacity for creative expressions, marking the coming-to-voice of their significance. Since this method combines scientific research and creative engagement with oceanic ontologies in a context where nonhuman languages, creative expressions, and stories compellingly shape the life worlds of all aquatic beings, I name it “the scientific poetics of water.” It allows us to read corals and all aquatic agencies as part of the collective semiotic creativity of life, as storied beings.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141610927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gaming in the Dark: Colossal Cave Adventure, Kentucky Route Zero, and the Racial Imaginary of the Mammoth Cave System","authors":"Jérémie LeClerc","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a932024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a932024","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article reads the seminal text-based computer videogame <i>Colossal Cave Adventure</i> (1976–77) as a key document to understand videogame and computing history’s fraught relationship with race. It situates its simulation of underground exploration in the context of the actual location that inspired it: Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave system, a destination that was immensely popular with tourists in the mid-nineteenth century, but also relied heavily on the labor of enslaved Black men. This article examines what it means for one of the foundational videogame texts to be modelled after a space historically marked by Black slave labor; it positions <i>Adventure</i> and the programming culture from which it emerged, and in which it was so enthusiastically received, as crucial sites to understand how the ideology of whiteness as an unraced, universal position came to be so enmeshed with videogame and computer culture. The ramifications of <i>Adventure</i>’s relation to race are explored through a reading of Cardboard Computer’s critically acclaimed videogame <i>Kentucky Route Zero</i> (2012–2020), which pays homage to <i>Adventure</i> by using the Mammoth Cave as a setting for its magical realist exploration of the entanglement of media history, labor, and dispossession in America, but ends up providing a whitewashed account of the labor that shaped the region.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141610932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan by Paul Roquet (review)","authors":"Nicholaus Gutierrez","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a932028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a932028","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan&lt;/em&gt; by Paul Roquet &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Nicholaus Gutierrez (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; Paul Roquet, &lt;em&gt;The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022, 254 pp. &lt;p&gt;Paul Roquet’s &lt;em&gt;The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan&lt;/em&gt; begins with a simple question about the cultural politics of virtual reality (VR): “What calls people to hand over almost all their spatial cues about their physical place in the world to a computer?” (2). In the Anglophone world, answers to that question have often been framed through the problematic but enduring tendency to treat the technology as uniquely American, given the head-mounted display’s origins in US military research and the oft-repeated narrative of cyberspace as a virtual frontier. This understanding of VR is ultimately predicated less on the technology itself than on the cultural fantasies of its immersive potential, which mobilize Western tropes of medium transparency and physical transcendence into the space of representation. But VR’s reach has exceeded the Anglophone world for more than four decades, and, as Roquet points out, the VR headset is not a metaphysical gateway—it is literally a perceptual enclosure. The reason people willingly hand over their spatial cues to a computer is as much about what is bracketed out in discussions on VR as what is included, and perhaps there is no more glaring omission in Anglophone scholarship on VR’s history than the development and reception of VR in Japan. &lt;em&gt;The Immersive Enclosure&lt;/em&gt; remediates that omission, offering a much-needed contribution to VR studies that focuses on the cultural specificities and historical contingencies that have shaped the cultural politics of the perceptual enclosure in Japanese culture.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The first two chapters deal primarily with VR’s historical genealogies. Chapter 1, “Acoustics of the One-Person Space,” describes how the intersection between sound, space, and the built environment established the conditions for the popular acceptance of VR’s perceptual enclosure in Japan. Roquet links the normalization of headphone use to the postwar shift from multigenerational to single-family homes and an increase in urban, denser housing. As Roquet notes, “record numbers of Japanese relocated to urban environments at this time, often to live in wooden housing with notoriously thin walls and in close proximity to neighboring homes” (40–41). It was in these spaces that headphone use came to be seen as fun, “in part because it allowed for late-night listening where speaker playback would otherwise be bothersome (&lt;em&gt;meiwaku&lt;/em&gt;) for neighbors and family members in adjoining rooms” (40). By the 1970s, the emergence of the one-room apartment—notably represented by photojournalis","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141610929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"(In)Hospitable Games: Playing God, the Minecraft Effect, and the Supraphylogenesis of SimEarth","authors":"Ashlee Bird","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a924129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a924129","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This chapter draws on metaphors and themes developed in the television show <i>Westworld</i> to stage a close reading of the games <i>Minecraft</i> and <i>SimEarth</i>, using Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s interface theories to examine the ways earth-centered games diverge from Bernard Stiegler’s theory of epiphylogenesis and the co-constitutive evolution of man and tool, to propose a theory I have coined, supraphylogenesis, wherein, instead of an equal evolution, one surpassed the other; man surpasses the capabilities of technics, or technics and in these games their equivalent, the earth, exceed humanity (Wardrip-Fruin 2009; Stiegler 1998). This chapter seeks to trouble our understandings of video games that create a relationship between the player and the earth and what types of systems and mechanics these types of games prioritize. Are earth-based games only successful if the relationship that is cultivated falls into strict categories wherein the earth either exists as a tool for player (human) control, creativity, or knowledge, or as a form of capital? In this binary between man and machine, must earth always fall into the same category as machine? Finally, what of games that do not fall into this binary, and instead prioritize the earth and its autonomy?</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140568982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Politics of Wholesome Games: Conservative Comforts and Radical Softness","authors":"Rainforest Scully-Blaker","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a924126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a924126","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Wholesome games are those that eschew dominant fight-or-flight logics and instead embrace softness, kindness, and warmth. While most academic and popular writing on such titles frames wholesomeness as an aesthetic or affect, in this paper I emphasize its politics in an effort to understand how these games variously reify and combat systemic oppression. My analysis focuses on the competing discourses that emerged from the first Wholesome Direct, a video showcase of then-forthcoming cozy video games. I read these perspectives from industry professionals through critical concepts from feminist media studies and queer art spaces, including nostalgia, exit, and radical softness. Through a distinction between what I call comfort and rest, I conclude that wholesome games must wear their politics on their sleeve if they wish to address the systemic issues that make many people seek them out.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"255 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140569094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Embodied Simulations and Neurodivergent Temporalities in To the Moon","authors":"Sean A. Yeager, David Ciccoricco","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a924125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a924125","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We position games as ludic time machines; beyond simply representing neurodiversity, they can prompt players to consider neurodivergent temporalities. In the 2D psychological adventure game <i>To the Moon</i> (Gao 2011), players control two scientists who travel through the memories of a man on his deathbed. Digging ever deeper into their seemingly neurotypical client’s past, the scientists learn how his marriage was strained by the complexities of cross-neurotype communication. We show how <i>To the Moon</i>’s storyworld and gameplay destabilize fixed understandings of neurotypicality, encourage deeper mutual understanding of temporal embodiment, and prompt players to reconsider their relationship to neurodiversity.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140569084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}