Sebastian Möring, Macromedia University, Berlin

In this paper I wish to explore the topics of repair and maintenance in the light of green game studies (Beke et al., 2024; Chang, 2019) as well as green media studies (Parham, 2016). Popular culture – both radical and mainstream – has an important role to play in supporting environmental awareness and translating ecological values in ways that are meaningful to our everyday lives. This comprehensive survey of green media and popular culture introduces the reader to the key debates and theories surrounding green interpretations of popular film, television and journalism, as well as comedy, music, animation, and computer games. With stimulating and original case studies on U2, Bjork, the animated films of Disney, the computer game Journey, and more, the text reveals the complicated and often contradictory relationship between the media and environmentalism. Green Media and Popular Culture is a critical starting point for students of Media, Film and Cultural Studies, and anyone else researching and studying in the rapidly growing field of green media and cultural studies (Parham, 2016; Parks & Starosielski, 2015). The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure–transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like–intersect with everyday life. Essayists confront the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways networks are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails. Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus. Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri (Parks & Starosielski, 2015), and waste studies. It has become a common trope in games that players can make their characters collect objects that can be used to repair or maintain other objects that in turn are often integral to the freedom the players of games can enjoy (Leino, 2014). The first quests of games such as Walden, A Game (Fullerton & USC Game Innovation Lab, 2017) or No Man’s Sky (Hello Games, 2016) require the players to gather a diverse range of objects the gameworlds of said games in order to repair either a hut in the forest (Walden, A Game) or a spaceship (No Man’s Sky). In other games, parts of tool or machines deteriorate after some use. These have to be repaired or replaced such as the pickaxe in Minecraft (Mojang, 2011) or a range of car parts in Jalopy (Minsk Works & Excalibur Games, 2018) in order to keep the functionality they provide. Jalopy is set in the time between the fall of the German Wall and the reunification of the two Germanys. The main character drives with an old Laika (a simulated version of the East German car Trabant) from Berlin to Istanbul. Reaching the goal is highly dependent on the successful maintenance of the fragile vehicle which is always on the brink of breaking down. The game is set in an everyday culture known for its dependence on repair knowledge (Hanstein et al., 2022). In light of the current climate crises, we need to understand how our cultures of waste and consumption can be modified to cultures of maintenance and repair. I believe that the analysis of how such cultures are represented in computer games will be of help in this endeavor.

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Dr. Sebastian Möring is a professor of Game Design at Macromedia University in Berlin. In 2021 he received the Teaching Award of the State of Brandenburg. His research focuses on the philosophy and aesthetics of computer games, in-game photography, green game studies, and games in educational contexts. Most recently he co-edited the anthology Screen Images. In-Game Photography, Screenshot, Screencast (Kadmos, 2023) and co-authored the chapter “Climate–Game–Worlds: A Media-Aesthetic Look at the Depiction and Function of Climate in Computer Games“ (in Ecogames. Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis, Amsterdam University Press, 2024). For further publications and more information see http://sebastianmoering.com.