Green Computer and Video Games: An Introduction

Whether framed as environmental communication, ’sustainable media’, ‘eco-media’, or ‘green popular culture’ environmental media and cultural studies constitutes an embryonic but rapidly developing body of research. The vibrant, multi-layered engagements of the eight essays collected here demonstrate not only that green gaming engages with all of the issues addressed in that research but also that games and game studies can expand the range of this incipient green media and cultural studies. This volume of Ecozon@is the first collection of essays to focus exclusively on the topic of ‘Green Computer and Video Games’. Working from these essays, we will demonstrate in Part I of this introduction how attributes specific to gaming might address and expand our understanding of environments and ecological relations; and, in Part II, how these essays might help develop green game studies itself.