Tag: Ecogames

Son of SunBlock: Building a Variable Power PC Client for Playing Minecraft

What we want is a client system that can facilitate players’ reflexive practice with respect to the energy infrastructures and carbon footprint of their own gaming habits, and of digital culture in general. We firmly believe that game culture remains an important pivot point for rethinking, reimagining and remaking our relationship to the planet but our focus is on maximizing the agency of players by extending the boundaries of gameplay to include the energy infrastructures that make their games possible.

Manufactured Landscapes Part 1 – Firewatch

Where we as individuals and we as members of communities fit into environments and ecologies is crucial to what we’re exploring with this project. In fact, we’ve gone through quite a few different titles for our modpack, many of them touching on the relationship between the player and the trees or the forests that we hope will return to the landscape- “Forest Keepers”, “Forest Wardens”, etc. What kind of relationship to the forest does the tower represent? Is the tower occupant a sentry or a witness? Is it a position of authority or a position of supplication? How does that relationship change once the forest is gone? If the tower were a monument, what would it be for?

Planting the Seeds of Our New SMP

In For The Trees, real-time energy data from our solar server appears on a HUD in-game, and players have access to a variety of solar powered tools and items to play in a bleak empty world devastated by ecocatastrophe. Using a variety of popular mods with our own custom progression, structures and quests, players will help regenerate the land with the goal of restoring the world’s biomes and regenerating the vast forests on the seemingly lifeless earth.

Making an Agential World in the Gaia’s Riddle Modpack

It is important to remember that Minecraft worldgen is not natural it is procedural. The natural world is a fiction of computation, and the real agency of the world is the agency of computation. This is why we prefer to work with Minecraft as a platform – one cannot mistake computer generated nature for real nature no matter how photorealistic the textures and shaders might be. I love modded Minecraft for this reason… especially for worldgen.  Its sublime and imperfect at the same time.

Ecogaming – By Daniella Odubayo

Week 1-2: Eco Ego & Early Childhood Education The initial angle I considered with video games and their intersection with eco consciousness was early childhood exposure to both. Using my own experience growing up between the 00s and 10s, the elementary school eco curriculum placed a heavy focus on “reduce, reuse, recycle”, energy conservation, introducing…
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