Issue 2: Ecoplay, Digital Games, and Environmental Rhetoric

Collaborating with Dr. Melissa Bianchi, this journal issue collects articles exploring the concept of “ecoplay.” Ecoplay, a portmanteau of “ecology” and “play,” refers to gameplay that happens with, in, and as active and agential environments as opposed to gameplay that occurs on or against static environmental backdrops. It also captures a shift in the design of games from largely solo affairs focused on the actions of a single human agent, to games with a burgeoning ecological awareness depicting players within and among larger networks of plant, animal, and machine. The articles in this issue explore the ways that gameplay can be a rich site for studying contemporary ecological thought and conservation efforts.

NOTE: I strongly disown and disagree with Trace leadership's current academic nihilism towards the encroachment of AI on writing, learning, and education. Resignation to the forces of capital and empire are not what critical inquiry looks like, and I have no patience for half-hearted "resisting from the inside" or “you can’t fight city hall”-esque refrains that leverage our graduate work on the nonhuman to dress up acquiescent obedience as critical thought for career-driven purposes. AI is anything but nonhuman. Instead, it is a deep expression of humanity’s egotism, greed, cruelty, violence, and fear driven by key human figures of late capitalism whose motives are profit and exploitation. It is narcissus using nature to gaze into nothing but the void of his own reflection (while poisoning rural and minority communities, animals, and the planet), something our first and second issue intentionally critique. Issues one and two should be read as a nothing less than a sincere “fuck you” to anything and anyone pushing this technology. My sincerest apologies to the incredible authors who contributed their work to these issues for the current direction of the Trace Initiative. We can imagine a better world, and we don't need the tools of corrupt dickheads to do it.

These views are my own, and I do not speak for my co-editor.