Welcome to the Field

Videogames offer vast potential for critical reflection by humanities scholars, but the tendency of existing game studies scholarship to treat the rules of a game separately from the game’s social meaning suggests that videogames have no place in humanistic disciplines. This article challenges that notion by contrasting a cultural view of videogames with the dominant mere-technology view. Ecocriticism functions as a prestige language for videogames that permits entrance into what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the field of cultural production. Ecology simultaneously provides metaphors for explaining videogame technology while allowing games to enter ongoing critical and cultural conversations. Humanists interested in but unfamiliar with videogames should therefore start with those with environmentalist themes. This article presents Horizon Zero Dawn (2017) as a case study. Horizon Zero Dawn presents a stylized pastoral pseudo-utopia that embraces ecofeminist calls to reconstruct rationality while challenging existing sexism in computing fields.