Green Media – serie

With the climate crisis and its repercussions becoming more and more tangible, games are increasingly participating in the production, circulation, and interrogation of environmental assumptions, using both explicit and implicit ways of framing the crisis. Whether they are providing new spaces to imagine and practice alternative forms of living, or reproducing ecomodernist fantasies, games as well as player cultures are increasingly tuned in to the most pressing environmental concerns. This book brings together chapters by a diverse group of established and emerging authors to develop a growing body of scholarship that explores the shape, impact, and cultural context of ecogames. The book comprises four thematic sections, Today's Challenges: Games for Change, Future Worlds: New Imaginaries, The Nonhuman Turn, and Critical Metagaming Practices. Each section explores different aspects of ecocritical engagement in and through games. As a result, the book's comprehensive scope covers a variety of angles, methodologies, and case studies, significantly expanding the field of green media studies.

Film and the Natural History of Destruction explores the interface between film, memory and ecological thought. It addresses several areas of crucial importance for contemporary film and media studies: biopolitics and ecological catastrophe, cultural memory and film in the Anthropocene, media archaeology and the environmental humanities and, of course, the abiding relevance of Walter Benjamin’s work for critical theory and film studies.Benjamin’s essays on media and modernity have long been regarded as important texts for film studies. The concept of natural history, however, remains a neglected tool in Benjamin’s critical arsenal yet may provide a valuable theoretical resource for analysing the visual culture of the Anthropocene. As a medium of preservation, transmission, transformation and decay, film is inherently bound up in processes of natural and historical destruction. Film images, like fossils or ruins, reveal the imprint of history as it is embedded in forms of nonhuman temporality and nonhuman life. Alan Wright brings such moments of discontinuity and dislocation into stark relief by examining images and scenes from the films of Roberto Rossellini, Belà Tarr and David Lynch, alongside recent work by Bill Morrison, John Akomfrah and Patricio Guzmán. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.