Open World Structures: Architecture, City- and Natural Landscape as well as Eco-Critical Implications in Computer Games

• Applicant: Dr. Marc Bonner
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 362767459

Based on new knowledge gained from the prior research project on the architectonics of open world computer games, this follow-up project will further research the novel and transdisciplinary access through an ecocritical approach. Regarding the increasing correlation between open world topographies, their depiction of certain biomes, geological formations and endangered environments of actuality, it is necessary to amplify the research on open world structures by incorporating current ecological discourses.The follow-up project begins with the finding that computer games, as well as climate change and global warming have arrived in the middle of society. In addition, it is based on the insight, that open world games that flaunt their staging of eco regions, weather systems and other ecological topics and can thus evoke an ecological awareness in players. This aspect is further reflected under the prospect of the game industry’s role in essentially being co-responsible for CO2 emissions and e-waste. In the context of current geopolitical developments and these new findings, the follow-up project will research the cultural potential and ecological implications of open world games.Especially rural and rurban open world structures mirror established world views on the man-nature dichotomy that are nested in popular culture’s collective memory. They have the potential to actualize, reframe or critically question these pastoral, anthropocentric or ecocentric world views via their worldliness in the form of the landscape experience as an end in itself, the players’ agency and the game mechanic’s algorithmic impact on the players. The media-centered analysis will contain both approaches, aesthetics of production and aesthetics of reception. Thus, it will not only provide the heuristics for future computer game research but also expound the potential of an ecological awareness specific to the computer games and crucial for the current academic as well as pop-cultural discourses.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants