Ecological In/congruence: Becoming Sensitised to Nature in Video Games through Humanistic First-Person Research

Ecological In/congruence: Becoming Sensitised to Nature in Video Games through Humanistic First-Person Research

Ecological In/congruence: Becoming Sensitised to Nature in Video Games through Humanistic First-Person Research

Velvet Spors, Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk, Juho Hamari

Abstract

"The ongoing ecological crisis is the current biggest threat for our species. As we attempt to address the situation through policy, in-terventions, and education, we urgently need to understand how people encounter and relate to nature: As it is, in the world, and portrayed through different media. As an exemplary medium fa-cilitating digital nature, this paper focuses on video games. Using first-person research methods, we report on the first author sensitis-ing themselves to nature as a ubiquitous feature, theme, and actor in video games. They played eight nature-focused games for three months. Through auto-ethnography, close reading and “noticing” (after Tsing), we make sense of their experiences using the humanis-tic concept of ecological (in)congruence: We draw out the relational gap and potential meanings between real nature and its virtual equivalent. Based on these insights, we outline two design impulses for how the HCI community might approach nature—within games and beyond."

Reference

Spors, V., Buruk, O. ‘Oz’, & Hamari, J. (2024). Ecological in/congruence: Becoming sensitised to nature in video games through humanistic first-person research. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). ACM. https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3613904.3642659

Keywords

Humanistic Psychology, Human-nature Interaction, Video Games