Zoheb Mashiur (NFH) presents his ideas on Eco-Misanthropy in Ecogames.
This is a presentation of the origins, inquiries, and results of thinking about the absence of the human being in ‘ecogames’. Ecogames are a broad category including games that wish to raise environmental awareness, or artistically meditate upon the human-nature relationship, and can be ‘serious’, commercial, or for entertainment (op de Beke et al. 2024). In this presentation, I use two commercial video games – Cloud Gardens (Coatsink 2021) and Terra Nil (Devolver Digital 2023) – as an opportunity to think through how games represent ideas about our presence in the natural world. It is my argument that these games (regardless of their aesthetic, moral, or entertainment merit) reproduce a pessimistic view of humanity present in ecological discourse. This is the little discussed philosophy of eco-misanthropy. Eco-misanthropy is the belief that the human presence is inimical to nature, that humans act as a virus or parasite on the Earth (Boudry 2025; Kidd 2022).
This presentation contextualizes modern ecogames as a response to a much longer tradition of ignoring or instrumentalizing the natural world in video games. This historical context helps us appreciate the aesthetic value of games that depict nature healing in the aftermath of anthropogenic climate change. The presentation also places these games’ narrative of nature only recovering in the absence of humanity within a misanthropic tradition of ecology, particularly stemming from the philosophy of ‘deep ecology’ (Naess 1973). In the absence of a critique of capitalist and colonialist modes of extraction the games’ reproduction of misanthropic environmental philosophy prevents the emergence of new paradigms of society and ecology. I gesture toward Bookchin’s paradigm of ‘social ecology’ (1993) as an alternative model of the human in nature.
This presentation builds on an earlier talk delivered alongside Melania Borit in 2024.
Zoheb Mashiur is PostDoc affiliated with the CRAFT research lab at NFH. His talk is organized by the ENCODE research group.