Staying in the Green: How Video Games Show the Interconnected Relationship Between the Economy, Environment, and Culture

• Elizabeth Roth, , University of Delaware

• Kedron Thomas, Anthropology, University of Delaware

Video games, as a genre for art, education, social interaction, and entertainment, are an increasingly powerful and common medium in the modern world. By developing games with unique relationships to economics, nature, and anthropologically diverse backgrounds, video games can inspire real change, representation, and ontological exploration.  This research examines games of various gameplay genres, cultures, and narrative themes within video games to understand the different systems of in-game economies and environments, as well as how the systems build on each other, and encourage the player to interact with these systems. Whether or not the environmental and economic systems are in ludonarrative harmony or dissonance may reveal how much attention and purpose developers put into these systems, reflecting the larger cultural trend of apathetic attitudes toward caring for the environment. The cultural aspects of these games were also examined to document real world mirroring, including features such as racial coding, othering of in-universe groups, and world-building. How economic and environmental systems and cultural aspects of the games are designed can be heavily influenced by being created by diverse cultural groups such as post-soviet communities and indigenous game designers. By closely analyzing these interconnected systems and the contexts in which they were created for wider consumption, developers can create more diverse, accurate, and progressive depictions of how the environment and economy can interact in a sustainable fashion within video games and promote greater cultural change.