In Defense of Play

In Defense of Play Alenda Y. Chang (bio) I suspect that many of the authors in this issue will suggest that it’s time to double down on serious, environmentally minded (or even better, environmentally accountable) scholarship, and similarly, that it’s also time to use any and all platforms available to us to get our work into circulation, with the aim of improving the public discourse around climate crisis, biodiversity loss, environmental justice, and so on. This means, of course, that in addition to publishing, teaching, and giving talks, we are expanding our typical audiences to those outside the academy. I am all for following such recommendations; in fact, my own work has gone in those directions since my first book on ecology in video games came out.1 I have the advantage of having opined on a topic that is terribly current in not one, but two ways: video games are a relatively recent and influential media form, not to mention hugely profitable, and the world is barreling past a series of checkpoints indicating a kind of collective environmental insanity. This means, in practice, that I get more than my fair share of journalists seeking my opinion on whether or not we can “play for the planet” (the name of a UN Environment Programme initiative looking to create green “activations” in the video game industry),2 but also interest from educators, mental health organizations, artists, museum curators, and tech entrepreneurs. But perhaps in a version of the “all work and no play” adage, I am going to propose here that along with ratcheting up the intensity of our moral and hermeneutic outrage, outreach, and activism, we also need to nurture our capacity for play and its many cousins—joy, comedy, pleasure, diversion, even, dare I say it, fun. This is likely why I have always felt an affinity for Nicole Seymour’s longstanding work on queer ecology, camp humor, and irony that gently points to the drudgery and [End Page 15] naïve earnestness bedeviling a great deal of contemporary environmental affect.3 Games in Novels Before detailing some of my rationale for the continued importance of play—whether as recreation or a mode of inquiry or a tactic for resistance—allow me a brief detour into my literary roots, if only to gesture to the environmental humanities’ largely textual foundations and the ongoing need for critical attention to visual and interactive media, like games. At certain risk of making an untenable generalization, I want to get an old gripe off my chest; namely that the games that novelists imagine are just awful. Despite marvelous prose, imaginative worldbuilding, and admirable character interiority, stories like Richard Powers’s The Overstory, Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era, and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy all feature games with narrative importance that otherwise fall flat in their depiction.4 I have come to dread these timely inclusions and see them more as clumsy nods to the prominence of games in culture than as revealing of games’ own constitutive affordances. For Atwood, it’s juvenile online and offline fare like Extinctathon, Intestinal Parasite, Barbarian Stomp, and Painball, suitable for encrypting messages and turning convicted criminals into televised battle royale spectacles but little else. Liu’s Supernova Era makes games more central but with a decidedly anarchic and patriotic flavor. Liu imagines a world upended by the radiation emitted by a massive supernova in Earth’s neighboring space that dooms anyone over the age of thirteen to death within a year. This precipitates a frenzied push for all adults, from garbage truck drivers to world leaders, to train children to run the world in their eventual absence. In this morbid scenario, according to Liu, once the adults perish, their children eventually turn to games both as a refusal of adult duties and as a means of resolving international tension. In a bloodthirsty version of the Olympics or maybe Prussian kriegsspiel, the children of the world willingly engage in a type of macabre World Games conducted on the Antarctic continent between nations, using tanks, bayonets, missiles, and so on, but less so naval ships and other equipment requiring extreme technical coordination and physical strength. The children

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