About

Alenda Y. Chang is an Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She has a multidisciplinary background in biology, literature, and film, and specializes in merging ecocritical theory with the analysis of contemporary media. Her work includes developing innovative ecological frameworks for understanding and designing digital games, as exemplified in her 2019 book, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Chang is also a co-founder of the digital media studio Wireframe, established alongside Professor Laila Shereen Sakr. Wireframe supports collaborative research and teaching in new media, emphasizing global human rights, social justice, and environmental concerns. The studio provides a space for production and critical engagement across various media including games, data visualization, virtual and augmented reality, installation art, and social media. Her research interests encompass environmental media, science and technology, digital media, and games, and she has contributed to edited volumes and journal articles in these fields.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Humanities
• History
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Gender studies
• Art history
• Pure mathematics
• Archaeology
• Biology
• Mathematics
• Visual arts
• Ecology
• Law

Selected publications

• Change for Games: On Sustainable Design Patterns for the (Digital) Future

  2025-10-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The United Nations Environment Programme launched the Playing for the Planet (P4TP) initiative in the fall of 2019, closely followed by the International Game Developers Association’s (IGDA) Climate Special Interest Group (SIG) in the fall of 2020. While the P4TP alliance has focused on company-level interventions, the IGDA Climate SIG has worked in a more grassroots fashion to develop both game and design-patterns databases. These parallel efforts invite important philosophical and practical questions. What are sustainable games? Are they the same thing as sustainably developed games? Are they games with overt environmental messaging, or oneswhose production or consumption carbon footprints have been minimized? Or, most radically, are they the games we refuse to play?

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding games as a site of utopian resonance

  Futures · 2025-07-02 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The games sector is acknowledged as a major actor in the current media landscape. Games have been studied as a medium that can inspire new futures. But games are part of enormously popular wider media ecosystems where public reflections in the form of reviews, video essays, podcasts and more play a major role. These public reflections have not been examined in a futures context as a site for societal reflection on utopia. This paper combines theories on utopia as method, on resonance, and on orientation to action to create a framework for understanding the societal value of public reflections on games. Selecting four popular games with utopian elements, we coded a number of games reviews, podcasts and video essays about these games to surface common themes found in these public reflections. We find that engagements with the specifics of worldbuilding, of language and in-game community are connected with various resonances described in the public reflections, tied to a variety of affects. We go on to discuss how resonance can help understand how public reflections on games act as a site for societal orientation. Public reflections on games can orient further game design as well as orienting societal discourse and action. • Games are the largest popular medium globally • Public reflections on games are intrinsic to the medium • Games and their public reflections can be sites of utopian resonance • We analyse a range of public reflections on four popular games • Utopian games inspire resonant reflections that offer societal orientation

  PublisherDOI

• Change for Games:

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2024-01-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Where the Model Ends

  Configurations · 2024-03-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT: The particular pathways by which natural models show up in games remain largely invisible and undertheorized. If models shape what is knowable and which actions can be taken, how might a closer attention to modeling—specifically, natural modeling in the worlds of digital games—encourage us to reevaluate our relationships to electronic artifacts and the biosphere? Drawing on work in data justice and digital modeling, this essay reflects on whether existing modeling resources, such as popular digital asset libraries, largely replicate the anthropocentric and cultural biases of the people that make them. A brief examination of player modification practices and two projects, Wao Kanaka and the Taiwan Digital Asset Library, suggests ways that games can include greater ecological and cultural variability while broadening access to the tools and practices of asset creation.

  PublisherDOI

• 1. Change for Games: On Sustainable Design Patterns for the (Digital) Future

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2024-01-30 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Change for Games: On Sustainable Design Patterns for the (Digital) Future

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The United Nations Environment Programme launched the Playing for the Planet (P4TP) initiative in the fall of 2019, closely followed by the International Game Developers Association’s (IGDA) Climate Special Interest Group (SIG) in the fall of 2020. While the P4TP alliance has focused on company-level interventions, the IGDA Climate SIG has worked in a more grassroots fashion to develop both game and design-patterns databases. These parallel efforts invite important philosophical and practical questions. What are sustainable games? Are they the same thing as sustainably developed games? Are they games with overt environmental messaging, or ones whose production or consumption carbon footprints have been minimized? Or, most radically, are they the games we refuse to play?

  PublisherDOI

• Micro/Climates of Play

  2023-08-04 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Video games are one of the paradigmatic media forms of the twenty-first century. They are thus ripe for interpretation as ecomedia, from an ecocritical attention to game content—that is, the stories, images, and processes constitutive of gameplay—to a more elemental attention to the environmental contexts of digital gaming, which extend from the mining of rare earth minerals to game devices’ disposal as electronic waste. Specifically, this chapter draws attention to two ambient scales that pertain to play as it happens: first, the microclimates of play, as in the site-specific, small-scale atmospheres in which play occurs, and second, the broader climates of play, where climate is what we typically understand scientifically to be the long-term general weather conditions for a region. We can think about these linked approaches as a way to connect game studies to wider discussions about the cultures, infrastructures, and environments of media use.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Review: <i>Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity</i>, by Tom Tyler

  Afterimage · 2023-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  “With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.”John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”1The summer of 2022 witnessed, by chance, the simultaneous release of two games featuring animal protagonists: Stray (2022), a postapocalyptic cyberpunk adventure in which players steer a cat who has fallen into a subterranean city populated by robots, and Endling: Extinction is Forever (2022), where players embody a fox mother trying to keep her kits alive in the wake of wildfire and anthropogenic environmental harms. Stray, in particular, seemed to tug a cultural heartstring, with scores of videos being shared across social media platforms featuring real cats (and dogs) watching their owners play the game.2 Actual cats watched, chirped, and sometimes smacked the orange tabby prowling across the screen, while their owners obligingly manipulated the feline avatar to make it meow, scamper, or break the fourth wall with its gaze. All of this gave expanded meaning to the notion of companion species, and augured fresh questions about for whom these games might be intended.Tom Tyler’s Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity was published just before Stray became a minor sensation, but the book clearly speaks to the fascination that humans and nonhumans alike have felt for such visually and narratively rich forms of animal gameplay. The book brings to bear Tyler’s broad knowledge of how animals have figured in language and culture through centuries of coexistence with people, while also assessing the new representational possibilities for animals posed by video games. With an arresting orange cover sporting a pixelated bunny standing at attention, Game suggests in its very title Tyler’s recurring interest in wordplay, and the ambiguities evident not only in our discourse about animals, but also animals’ audiovisual and procedural mediation. “Game,” of course, speaks both to histories of play and sport, and animal life insofar as it is hunted and eaten.Game is a collection of essays reflecting on particular facets of animal experience or, more often, on our limited understanding or portrayal of such experience. For instance, in the chapter “A Singular of Boars,” Tyler considers collective nouns for animal groups (as in “a crash of rhinoceroses”), zeroing in on the wild boar (Sus scrofa) as it appears across texts and games in order to grapple with the constant danger of metonymic conflation of individual animals with their taxonomic species, or of animal parts or behaviors with the unknowable complexities of their full lives.3 In “How Does Your Dog Smell?” Tyler lingers over Dog’s Life (2003) for the PlayStation 2 to point out what he calls the “anthroponormative” perspective bias of most video games where first-person or even supposedly “objective” third-person viewpoints are really those of your average hominid, playing to our capacities for color, depth, breadth of field, and so on. Drawing on Jakob von Uexküll’s proto-ecological notion of umwelt, or the idea that organisms inhabit distinct lifeworlds according to their forms and faculties,4 Tyler praises the game’s odd but thought-provoking use of canine “smellovision” and briefly considers the possibility that media that more accurately reflect nonhuman sensory regimes could generate greater empathy for animals.It is sometimes difficult to discern an arc or linear progression in the sequence of Game’s chapters, conceivably due to much of the book’s material having been previously published in journals or edited collections. There are also moments when the connection between games and animals gets a bit tenuous. However, there is a virtue in this designed slack. One could easily assign a favorite chapter or three in an undergraduate or graduate course, depending on what aspect of animal studies or game studies one wanted to highlight. The chapters can and do speak to each other in interesting and sometimes surprising ways, like the way that “Playing like a Loser” (about zombie games and humans as prey) resonates with “Misanthropy without Humanity” (about plague games and humans as viral hosts). That said, Tyler does seem to save some of his thorniest material for last, including a critique of difficulty settings in games and philosophical rationales for and against veganism. The assembled chapters chart a slow but noticeable course toward frankly assessing humanity’s species-level foibles, including a reluctance to regard ourselves as animals.As someone who studied history, philosophy, and cultural studies and now specializes in the history of ideas, animals, and video games at the University of Leeds, Tyler is arguably more concerned with animality and its intellectual mediation than with game studies, per se.5 Games researchers eager to pick up a volume on animals in games may be startled, or even a bit dismayed, when it turns out that every chapter invariably trots out the Oxford English Dictionary or a similar reference to scrutinize the etymological roots of a term, or when asides to classical literature from the late medieval period or Latin phrases begin to outnumber contemporary sources. But Tyler for the most part manages to balance his more esoteric catalog with lively and detailed discussions of games themselves. Game is actually striking in the generic variety and historical scope of the games it touches upon, with the bulk of its titles hailing from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s and spanning consoles, handhelds, and personal computers. For its ludography alone, then, Game would be valuable, but even handier are the encyclopedic lists shared in each chapter on their respective topics—for example, games that feature excrement in memorable ways in “Total BS!”Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the book’s bibliography, which features Aristophanes and Plato but omits all but a handful of games researchers or designers. This is both a weakness and a strength. After all, every discipline wrestles with canon formation and the insularity of networks of citation. Game studies scholars ought to welcome more game scholarship that turns, not to itself, but to other disciplines, if only to avoid the circularity of reference that inevitably occurs in small communities. For Tyler, this often means turning to texts and people who had their heyday well before modern video games were invented, but he still manages to engage with questions essential to games research, regarding things like agency, identification, algorithmic or coded bias, narrative, perspective, etc. One lamentable side effect of the reliance on classical literature, however, is a real dearth of diversely situated perspectives—with a few notable exceptions, such as the inclusion of the Australian philosopher Val Plumwood. At other times, the lack of engagement with existing games research feels like a missed opportunity, as in “Playing like a Loser,” where Tyler celebrates games in which failure is rampant, often with players meeting untimely ends as prey. The now extensive treatment of ludic failure by theorists like Jesper Juul or Bonnie Ruberg, or even permadeath in games, haunts the perimeters of this work.Ultimately, Tyler’s book should be taken as playful and exploratory. It does not aim to be definitive, but rather to forge conceptual linkages across forms and contexts. In fact, Tyler has a tendency to end chapters just when they are getting interesting. One chapter, titled “An Inkling,” is just three pages long. Another, “Enumerating Ruminants,” dwells on sheep-counting stories in classic tales and the games of Jeff Minter, only to consider the difference between enumeration and rumination (listing and iteration) as different styles of game development. In other words, Tyler has left considerable room for others to contribute further analysis about game animals, for instance training and therapeutic relationships (I think of Temple Grandin’s work), activist media (games made by groups like the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), and serious games, such as the conservation-minded endless runner Kākāpō Run: Animal Rescue Game (2020). Some readers might want to reconsider the work of hunting, eating, and observing animals in games, recalling Richard White’s provocative essay in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1996) on logging as a valid way to be closer to nature.6 While the veiled argument for veganism, first developed in the “Cows, Clicks, Ciphers, and Satire” and “Meanings of Meat” chapters, then driven home rather appropriately by the final “Trojan Horses” chapter, might leave readers feeling somewhat bamboozled (in finding a campaign against meat-eating couched in game analysis),7 Tyler makes his case with style and compassion. In an era of egregious mistreatment and collective willed ignorance about animals and their lives, Game offers both innocent fun with its roster of virtual swine, dogs, ducks, cows, fish, cephalopods, rabbits, and so forth, but also an unapologetic investment in the welfare of animals, less as on-screen personalities than collateral damage in humanity’s purported technological ascendance.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2023-08-04

  book-chapterOpen access

  This Handbook introduction offers a historical overview of ecomedia studies, situating it within a continuum of related fields, such as cultural studies, American studies, postcolonialism, ecocriticism, and ecocinema. The chapter broadly conceptualizes ecomedia studies, converging into three streams: (1) ecomedia are media of and about the environment; (2) ecomedia involve a revised and expanded definition of media; and (3) ecomedia works through iterative circuits consisting of four critical areas of ecomedia scholarship: ecomateriality, political ecology, ecocultures, and eco-affects. Ecomateriality and eco-affects register the material and affective “turns” that distinguish ecomedia studies from media studies. This introduction then offers an overview of the Handbook’s chapters.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Playing at SLSA: A Game Studies Stream Retrospective

  Configurations · 2023-09-01

  article

  ABSTRACT: This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of game studies at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) annual meetings. The first game studies stream was organized in 2011 and brought together a series of interdisciplinary scholars, presentations, and panels on video games, virtual worlds, art, storytelling, war, time, platform, and identity. The stream was then and continues now to be a community of graduate students, scholars, developers, teachers, and artists, some of whom have published in Configurations . These are a few of their stories.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Adrian Ivakhiv

  University of Vermont

  5 shared

• Joost Raessens

  4 shared

• Kristóf Péter

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  4 shared

• Stefan Werning

  4 shared

• Hans-Joachim Backe

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  4 shared

• Janet Walker

  Portland State University

  2 shared

• Miriam Tola

  2 shared

• John Parham

  2 shared