Deconstructing human relationship with nature in games

Overview & Synopsis

The dualistic paradigm of human-nature relationships that has been prevailing in Western societies tends to divide and hierarchize human beings and nature. Nowadays, this worldview has become an unconscious and unquestioned conceptual prison for our societies dealing with ecological crises. This research aims to help one explore and transcend this worldview by playing a simulation game. Indeed, this kind of artefact has proven to be a useful mean of transforming a participant’s apprehension of a subject both through a lived experience and the inherent capacity of games to blur their boundaries with reality. This research is inspired by Derrida’s concept of deconstructing dualistic polarities to help transcend them. It is articulated around and applied to the specific simulation game My Spot of Sea (Mon Lopin de mer in French), which was initially intended for education and awareness on littoral social-ecological systems. The first step consists in identifying and analyzing the game design elements that tend to reinforce the current worldview of the players (which had not been consciously designed for this purpose). The following step will be to adapt consciously these design elements to enable the players to live a deconstruction experience through the game and transcend their current dualistic relationship to nature. The poster presented focuses on the literature review and the first step of the research. It also highlights a few game elements that have been more generally identified as introducing dichotomous biases in games in order to propose design alternatives to objectify them.