Hugging Pixel Trees

Welcome! I'm Joanna, a creator and enjoyer of games and playful media. I'm quite excited to be starting this newsletter because it will be dealing with topics that have become quite close to my heart: spoken broadly and inaccurately, it will be about game design viewed from an ecologically-minded perspective.

It all started out about two years ago, when I felt I could no longer ignore a question that had been bugging me: How come so many videogames allow players to exploit the in-game environment, seemingly without much consequence? This question distilled into a growing unease with some of the games I enjoyed playing the most: games where you craft and build and shape the world to your liking – games offering great freedom for creative expression, but also fostering exploitative modes of being that as a player left me feeling unsatisfied and guilty, and as a designer had me wondering how we might design games differently. I decided to turn this unease into my Master's Thesis. Hugging Pixel Trees was the nickname I gave to my research project that on paper had a much longer, unwieldy academic name. Diving into this topic felt a bit like setting out to pet a snake and finding it to be just a single tentacle of a many-armed creature: Looking into the (lack of) consequences of resource exploitation in videogames suddenly also had me studying how crafting systems depict the act of manual labor, and how inventories represent resources, and how maps communicate information about gameworlds, and many, many more aspects of games that I felt were all equally interesting and important, and all somehow connected.

Now, over a year after successfully defending my thesis, I feel like my project is still ongoing. Studying this topic has irrevocably changed how I approach games as a designer and how I experience them as a player: the lens I thought I'd be putting on for the duration of a six-month research project refuses to come off. This newsletter will be a way for me to condense my thoughts and open questions into shorter, more free-form and less academic texts. Some of them, like my first article "Levels of abstraction", will be focusing on specific games that I find interesting, others may discuss a particular phenomenon more generally. Some may present relatively self-contained thoughts, others may be more along the lines of thinking aloud about concepts I feel I'm only beginning to grasp. I hope some readers out there will be curious about the same topics! Thank you for reading!