Tabletop Eco-Weird: Gameplay Experience and Ecological Ethics, in The Call of the Eco-Weird in Fiction, Films, and Games, edited by Brian Hisao Onishi and Nathan M. Bell. Springer.

Author: Germaine, C.

Publication date: March 2025

This edited volume identifies and analyses the Eco-Weird as an interdisciplinary theoretical tool for engaging in fictional, philosophical, filmic, and ludic texts.

The eco-weird is not only a genre but an aesthetic experience. It names the feeling of ‘being ecological’ (Morton, Being Ecological. London: Penguin Random House, 2018) and offers a way of understanding the ambiguous human experience of being radically separated from, but deeply embedded within and dependent upon, ‘nature’. Tabletop games generate eco-weird experiences even if they are not about anything ‘weird’. Games are weird because they emerge from an entanglement of more-than-human subjectivities and, so, make plain the fallacy of human exceptionalism upon which our perceived separation from ‘nature’ is founded. Games are co-created performances that conjure temporary worlds through which players experiment with alternative forms of being and relating, and with different ways of dwelling. Here, dwelling describes our ‘becoming with’ the environment, an echo of its use in philosophy to denote ‘staying within’, ‘housing’, and the home. These ‘homely’ aspects of subjectivity are precisely what the play of board games disrupts, despite construction in the popular imagination of games as a cosy activity. This chapter offers a method for paying attention to how we play, giving reflective and analytical space to the eco-weird experiences that can arise across the tabletop and to moments of discomfort and strangeness that emerge in gaming.