This chapter is an exploration of the materiality of digital play. I want to discuss how it relates to environmental sustainability and how the video game industry addresses the issue. The chapter will provide a hermeneutic analysis of selected parts of the Green Games Guide in a wider ecocritical media context. One of the most crucial questions this chapter wants to address is how the industry responds to the climate crisis and how to read this response vis-a-vis the neoliberal culture of exponential growth, optimization, and planned hardware obsolescence. In other words, are green game-making commitments and self-regulatory initiatives rhetorical PR stunts or could they be read as catalysts of a deeper cultural and political shift within the games industry?

Via citizen science games, players are invited to contribute to the production of knowledge.In their chapter, Fizek and Dippel see the games as laborious playgrounds, with qualities associated previously with leisure or pastimes and with productive or useful time.The chapter investigates citizen science games as new modes of work/play, surpassing a strictly dualistic mode of thinking and showing how the capital-oriented logic of a productive human existence is encoded into play.Fizek and Dippel argue that such blurring lines lead us into an age of post-ludification, urging us to consider these playful technologies and phenomena as empowering, engaging, and participatory, or to observe them with caution, restraint, or even suspicion.

This study engages with Karen Barad's philosophy of agential realism and demonstrates its relevance to the analysis of computer-mediated play. This posthumanist perspective challenges the cybernetic understanding of play as symmetrical communication between clearly defined entities: humans and machines. Rather than conceptualizing play as a unidirectional process in which the human player exerts unilateral agency over the game object, this approach reconceptualizes play as emerging from intra-actions among human and nonhuman agents: players, hardware, software, rule systems, representations, material practices, and ethical circumstances. Play is thus framed as a material-discursive practice of active configuration and reconfiguration. Analyzing it through the lens of agential realism and intra-action enables an understanding of play as an entanglement of human and nonhuman forces, surpassing notions of unilateral human agency. The author argues that game studies require an ontological perspective capable of addressing both the ordered qualities and the open-ended messiness of play.

This contribution explores the practice of contemplative play or what the author proposes to call “nature playing”. This concept marks a continuity between the literary genre of “nature writing” and the way nature may be contemplatively experienced in video games, especially those with open-world natural landscapes. The author will discuss modes of nature playing within the mediated environments of the sports simulation game Riders Republic (Ubisoft, 2022). Nature playing will be analyzed as an aesthetic practice which may be fostered by purposeful design, or it may emerge from the player's own nature-driven sensibilities triggered by the aesthetic qualities of the game world. The author frames contemplative nature playing within a variety of concepts such as in-game wandering, slow play as well as ludic boredom. The article culminates in three autoethnographic ludic interventions, in which nature playing is captured in three contemplative pieces of nature writing.

A growing number of game design and development programs in higher education are beginning to incorporate environmental considerations into their curricula. This aligns with the broader push for more responsible and environmentally conscious practices in game production, consumption, and education. This article introduces two ongoing European inter-university projects: the Erasmus+ Greening Games project and the Nordplus-funded Nordic Alliance for Sustainability in Gaming network. Using them as case studies, the article reflects on the lessons learned and the challenges encountered while implementing the projects’ pilot stages, as well as their implications for environmentally conscious game design education more broadly.

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This contribution sketches the emerging practice of slow play, which is framed as a reaction to the ever more present bombardment of digital stimuli and a way to carve out spaces to contemplate within the oversaturated digital sphere. Slow play is characterized by aimless wandering in the gameworlds or contemplating their surroundings rather than engaging in the challenges of structured and/or competitive gameplay. It may also point towards a sensory engagement with soothing software (self-care, meditation, and ambient music game applications).

Cases of domestic terrorism have increased in the last few years. Although executed in often remote locations worldwide, they share a lot of resemblances, the most striking ones of which have resulted in their recent gamified character as seen in achievement systems and first-person shooter esthetics. This chapter is an attempt to understand the so-called “gamification of terror” by looking for answers not in videogames per se but in their capacity to build communities, however destructive they might turn. The authors propose to see gamified acts of terror as dark rituals “played out” in liminal spaces to argue with the anthropologist Victor Turner.