| Description | This paper argues that closer attention to game environments and their connections to ecocriticism and environmental studies would yield new possibilities for finding and cultivating queerness in games, particularly given the medium's reliance on virtual space and heavy carbon footprint in actual space (Schatz, 2018). To demonstrate this, the paper focuses on two popular indie video games, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (The Astronauts 2014) and Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall 2017), that illustrate how natural environments in games can become sites of threatening and even violent queerness that resists both heteronormative family structures and romanticized notions of nature. |
