Virtual gardening: Identifying problems and potential directions for ‘ecological awareness’ through soil management and plant recognition gaming

Gardening and farming are relatively common themes for videogames. Farmville (Zynga, 2009), Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe, 2016) and Caesar III (Impressions Games, 1998) are examples of successful games with a strong concern for (prominent theme of?) nature. From farming and life simulators to survival games to management games, a large variety of games about nature are available to players. Nevertheless, it is extremely rare that video games would take an approach that could be (is?) beneficial for environmental education. As noted by Alenda Chang, video games “exert an important influence on how millions of players conceptualize country life, food production, and right relations (Is this phrase in the original quote?) between humans, animals, and the environment. Contemporary farm games represent an array of missed opportunities to model more meaningful game ecologies” (Chang 2012: 251)

Thinking and Doing: Challenge, Agency, and the Eudaimonic Experience in Video Games

The nascent growth of videogames has led to great leaps in technical understanding in how to create a functional and entertaining play experience. However, the complex, mixed-affect, eudaimonic entertainment experience that is possible when playing a video game—how it is formed, how it is experienced and how to design for it, has been investigated far less than hedonistic emotional experiences focusing on fun, challenge and ‘enjoyment.’ Participants volunteered to be interviewed about their mixed-affect emotional experiences of playing avant-garde videogames. New conceptions of agency emerged (Actual, Interpretive, Fictional, Mechanical) from the analysis of transcripts and were used to produce a framework of four categories of agency. This new framework offers designers and researchers the extra nuance in conversations around agency, and contributes to the discussion of how we can design video games that allow for complex, reflective, eudaimonic emotional experiences