Liquid Forest
machinima, color, sound (soundtrack: Gaël Manangou, Congo), 8’ 37”, 2023/2024, France/Congo
created by Isabelle Arvers
Does the white man really not know that if he destroys the forest, the rain will stop? And that if the rain stops, he won’t have anything to eat or drink?” This question, posed by Yanomami activist and philosopher David Kopenawa in La chute du ciel, strikes at the heart of today’s ecological crisis. Scientist Antonio Donato Nobre, in his 2010 TEDxAmazonia talk, deepens this understanding of interconnectedness by describing how each tree “sweats,” releasing over 1,000 liters of water into the atmosphere daily—an essential part of what he calls vertical rivers. Without forests, these rivers vanish, and with them, water itself. This crisis is not confined to the Amazon. In West Africa and Madagascar, iconic baobabs — known for their spongy wood that acts as natural cisterns, storing water critical to local communities — have been dying at alarming rates over the past decade. Liquid Forest immerses viewers in these vertical rivers, offering a journey through baobabs and corals that dissolves binaries and unveils fluid, interconnected realities. The work invites audiences to inhabit a universe where everything is interlinked, delivering a sensory experience that highlights the fragile equilibrium of ecosystems and the pressing need to protect them.
Isabelle Arvers is a French artist, curator, and scholar whose pioneering work at the intersection of art and video games has shaped new media practices for over two decades. She holds a Ph.D. in Art & Games Decolonization, and her research focuses on the artistic, ethical, and critical implications of digital gaming. Arvers is widely recognized for her exploration of video games as a medium for artistic expression, particularly through machinima, which transforms video games into creative tools. As a curator, she has organized numerous exhibitions and festivals worldwide, from Playtime at Villette Numérique in Paris to Jibambe na Tec in Nairobi, and her work is deeply embedded in decolonial, feminist, and queer approaches to gaming culture. Arvers’s projects also focus on challenging borders – both digital and geographical – through initiatives like the antiAtlas of Borders exhibitions. In addition to her curatorial practice, Arvers’s activism and research have led her to collaborate with artists globally, particularly in non-Western countries. Her Art and Games World Tour sought to amplify the voices of marginalized game creators and explore how video games can serve as tools for resistance and alternative storytelling. Her association, Kareron, continues to produce projects related to cyber feminism and alternative media, including TRANS//BORDER, a tribute to Nathalie Magnan. Arvers has also contributed critical essays to a range of publications and curated workshops on machinima and game art to democratize these practices.
Matteo Bittanti: Could you describe the origins of Liquid Forest? How does this machinima connect to your broader doctoral research on art and games decolonization? In what ways does it push your exploration of the relationship between ancestral cultures and digital technology? The version featured on VRAL is slightly shorter than the 2023 version: what changes did you make for this new iteration, and how do they alter the experience or message of the piece?
Isabelle Arvers: While my Art & Games World Tour was in pause in Togo during the first episode of the pandemic in 2020, I held a machinima workshop with traditional Togolese storytellers and through this exchange of knowledge and skills, it gave a new dimension to my research, aiming towards the encounter between endogenous knowledge and games, using machinima as a medium to document and archive ancestral knowledge.
Liquid Forest is a sequel of Virtual Tree , a film developed during my EUNIC crea.sen residency in Senegal in 2022, dedicated to the baobabs, mixing live action and 3D animation using motion capture and a game engine. Inspired by the interviews I made in 2021 in Senegal with artists initiated into the powers of trees – Gael Manangou, Jah Gal Doulcy, Elon’M Tossou and Gadabia Kodjo – as well as traditional practitioners Ousmane Sow and Ismaela Cisse.
In Liquid Forest, trees are still present, but this time, they are mixed with the rain and the sea. This machinima merges shots I made in different game engines and computer games during my residency at Edit & Pollux in Saint Gilles, France, in 2022. While I was researching queer and trans identities in video games, I recorded gameplays I performed as a non-binary character in GTA Online, dancing, swimming, and doing underwater meditation. I also created a series of machinima forests in Moviestorm: like Infinitree,a never-ending tree; Spaceship Forest and a melting forest.
Recorded game footage is mixed with the 3D scans of the Baobabs made in Senegal and integrated into Cine Tracer. For this new machinima, I decided to remove all dialogs and I decided to collaborate with the Congolese musician Gaël Manangou for the sound creation. Gaël incorporated into his music all the sounds of the forests I recorded in Senegal and Gambia, as well as the sounds of the sea waves, to mix the sea with the forest, the trees with water, birds, and frogs, everything interconnected with mycelium.
This film draws inspiration from the words of Yanomami activist and philosopher David Kopenawa, quoted by scientist Antonio Donato Nobre in a TEDxAmazonia talk: “Does the white man not know that if he destroys the forest, the rain will stop? And that if the rain stops, he will not have anything to eat or drink?” Nobre explains how each tree “sweats,” releasing over 1,000 liters of water into the atmosphere daily, forming vertical rivers. Without forests, there will be no water. This ecological crisis is mirrored in the plight of baobabs in West Africa and Madagascar—trees with spongy wood that serve as natural cisterns, storing water for their communities. These vital trees have been dying at an alarming rate over the past decade.
Liquid Forest plunges you into these vertical rivers, inviting the viewer to swim in the baobabs, in the corals and to immerse yourself in a gender-fluid way, in a universe that is more than binary and in realities that are more than multiple, because everything is interconnected.
Matteo Bittanti: In Liquid Forest, the fusion between ancestral culture and technology is a central theme, mirroring key ideas from the documentary La puissance des arbres (The Power of Trees). Given that the word ‘technology’ stems from the Ancient Greek techne, meaning both craft, technique and art, what do you think machinima as a form of technology can offer in terms of deepening our understanding of nature, particularly in a world where technology massively contributed to its demise – today deforestation is rampant and 73% of wildlife animal species have disappeared since the 1970s?
Isabelle Arvers: I am not sure how to answer that question, but it made me think to the reaction of Fabiola Zerbini, the Brazilian Director of the Forest Department, who was very moved while watching Liquid Forest and who told me that watching this film could be ten times more efficient than discourses or documentaries related to deforestation, thanks to its poetic and supranatural dimension.
Gael Manangou, when he watched the images for the first time, to create the music, also told me that he was entering into a trance watching these images. So maybe entering the different dimensions of this mix of images produced by game engines is helping our mind to enter another dimension and feel a stronger connection to other forms of beings?
The first time I took mushrooms at 17, I felt an overwhelming desire to enter trees—a longing that I was finally able to realize in Liquid Forest. There, I could swim inside trees, experiencing the sensation of merging with them. This echoes a dream I explored in my earlier machinima series, La Mer: to swim into colors and evoke the same immersive feeling for others. I began to realize my abstract seas, from the moment I started free diving in 2014, and to appreciate this other universe that is the underwater world. Finally, if you think in terms of representation, if everything is constantly in motion, you cannot represent what you see smoothly. Everything is glitched, pixelated, animated, and filled with polygons.
Matteo Bittanti: The baobab tree in Liquid Forest plays a pivotal role, similar to El Aliso, the ancient sycamore in Alice Bucknell’s The Alluvials. As Harun Farocki explained in his series Parallel I-IV, “nature” in video games is often romanticized and idealized: how do you think machinima can present a more nuanced or “realistic” portrayal of nature, where realism goes beyond surface textures and speaks to broader ecological or cultural values? Can you cite some examples?
Isabelle Arvers: Most of the times, natural elements, trees, forests are exoticized and serve solely as landscapes and receptacles of exploration, but, in games created by first natives, nature stops being seen as exterior to human, but is shown as interconnected to us, like in ITA, a game created by Daniela Fernandez, a descendant of the Guaranis in Argentina, about her ancestors and the Guaranis spirituality or Huni Kuin, a game made with and by Huni Kuin kids with Guillerme Menenes in Brazil or Mulaka, a game dedicated to the Tarahumara, North Mexican people known as the best mountain runners who also believe in animal transformation. Or finally, in the new game by Lucas Lugarinho, The Pacifier, where nature thinks and reacts as the main character.
The original idea of The Pacifier was to create a non-colonial game mocking European scientists and anthropologists who go into the Rainforests and end up playing the “game” of extractivist companies thanks to their good relationships with natives. As Lucas Lugarinho states, “Pacifier seeks to repurpose usual gaming design tropes and subvert them through an anti-colonial perspective. In its portrayal of the jungle setting, for instance, it aims to confront the depiction of environments as passive, predictable, or domesticable entities, exchanging the usual certainty of terrains in game design with the unforeseeable nature of rainforests.”
It is also a game where the environment, the Rainforest that surrounds us in the game, takes back control and takes back the “weapons” to counter the rainforest trope, which “resonates like a call to rape” (Touam Bona, La Sagesse des Lianes, 2021, p. 32).
In my article, Cheats or Glitch? Voice as a Game Modification in Machinimapublished in a Leonardo volume by The MIT Press and edited by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson, and Theo van Leeuwen, I explore this issue in depth:
Machinima re-actualize the Situationist conception of cinema, in which images, voices in dialogs or interviews or voice over, act as different layers of content. Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, in a joint text written in 1956, added to the Situationist theory of detournement the point that cinema is the most efficient method of detournement where detournement tends to pure beauty. Machinima moves our mind to another range of perception, diverting us to immerse totally in digital images and allowing us to keep a critical distance while getting closer to characters in video and computer games.
Matteo Bittanti: Your work navigates the intersections of art, video games, and decolonization. Given that video games are largely commercial and often Western-centric, how do you manage the paradox of using this medium to critique and dismantle colonial legacies? What is your candid opinion on Audre Lorde’s famous quote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”?
Isabelle Arvers: One of the main reasons for the Art & Games World Tour, during which I conducted more than three hundred interviews with artists and game makers from non-Western countries was to be able to tell an entirely different kind of stories about games. Games that wouldn’t be Western centric, games that would take another point of view, not the one from the masters, from patriarchy, neither the one from the so-called winners. Games created by first natives, by African Brazilian, and by game studios from sub-Saharan Africa, depicting a world without colonization or depicting a world in which enslaved people would free themselves, would escape, would be the heroes. Telling digital stories from another point of view is crucial in terms of representation. There is a huge need to tell stories, but from another point of view, from a resisting point of view. As Djamila Ribeiro states,
What we are saying in short, therefore, is that we want and demand that the history of slavery in Brazil should be told from our point of view, and not only from that of the one who conquered, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin (…) I insist: despite the limits imposed, the dissonant voices managed to make noise and flay the hegemonic narrative. (Djamila Ribeiro, Lugar de Fala, 2017, pp. 86-87)
Here are some of the final lines of my dissertation:
These narratives don’t adhere to the linear paths of utilitarian progress; instead, they celebrate collaboration, hybridization, and mutual support. Rather than presenting mere counter-fictions, they are speculative fictions that unfold through inter-species cosmogonies, expanding the horizons of thought beyond Cartesian frameworks. This movement ignites reflections on interconnectedness, commons, and spaces, unfettered by developmentalist logics. The path forward is marked by the reclamation of dreams, a decolonization of the mind, and a recognition that the narratives of the ‘other’ are not the dreams we should be confined to. By heeding the wisdom of indigenous knowledge and embracing a more holistic perspective, we pave the way for a future where the multitude reigns, where the margins no longer exist, and where the digital and physical spaces are truly occupied by the kaleidoscope of human experiences.
Matteo Bittanti: Hacking and machinima are integral to your creative practice, both embodying inherently subversive qualities. How do you balance this rebellious ethos with the formal, and sometimes restrictive, frameworks of art curation? How do you navigate and negotiate boundaries within institutional settings?
Isabelle Arvers: Art curation is indeed a colonial process, and this journey allowed me to first start by self-decolonizing my own practice, understanding the power dynamics behind art curation. However, everything can be hacked and to hack a system you must enter that system.
I like the idea of disidentification by the Cuban American queer theorist José Esteban Munoz (1999), that “tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against, a cultural form” and creates a queer counter public. The point for the subject is not to identify/assimilate or to counter-identify/reject but to adopt a third strategy that works “on, with, and against,” while at the same time being a survival strategy: “Through disidentification, the disidentifying subject can rework the cultural codes of the mainstream to read themselves into the mainstream, a simultaneous insertion and subversion. By the mode of disidentification, queer subjects are directed towards the future” (José Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications, 1999, p. 11).
Matteo Bittanti: Your antiAtlas of Borders exhibitions delve into how borders mutate in the digital age. With video games often replicating real-world power structures, do you believe they have the capacity to transcend these borders, or are they ultimately bound to reinforce them in some form?
Isabelle Arvers: I will echo Wanda Nanibush speech about Resistance Among the Ashininaabe for whom the concept of resistance is tied to the act of planting, nurturing, and being nurtured by the land. How these practices can be mirrored in digital games, emphasizing the importance of reciprocal relationships and sustainable coexistence to create a New Canvas of Decolonized Creativity. As I conclude this journey, I gain a deep understanding of the power of art and games to decolonize narratives, redefine identities, and empower marginalized voices. The canvas of digital creativity is now a fertile ground for transformation, bridging cultures, smashing barriers, and rewriting history.
Decolonizing Art and Video Games stands as a testament to the potential of pixels and code to shape a more inclusive, equitable, and diverse world. Through the lens of this immersion, we are reminded that creativity, innovation, and resistance are not only tools of expression but also instruments of change in the ongoing endeavor of decolonization.
To achieve this new objective, I became We — with the Brazilian artist Livia Diniz and we decided to use pedagogic activism with green games to inspire new learning methodologies, to change the demand for videogames in the new generations, and to raise awareness about the environment using games as a medium. And in this process, all is about co-creation and co-production with and by the communities.
Matteo Bittanti: For the past two decades, you’ve championed machinima as an artistic medium. How have you seen the landscape of game-based art evolve during this time? Do you view the growing institutional embrace of this art form as a double-edged sword, potentially increasing visibility but also risking the dilution of its radical potential?
Isabelle Arvers: I have to admit, it’s pretty amusing to see institutions finally embracing game-based art. For two decades, I’ve heard countless declarations that machinima was dead (apparently it died in 2007, who knew?), that it wasn’t relevant anymore. I’ll never forget the artsy elites of the mid-2000s proclaiming that game art was over, like some kind of fashion trend past its expiration date. Meanwhile, I stuck with the alternative, experimental side of gaming, running machinima workshops in France’s suburbs and outskirts, and eventually worldwide. More recently, I’ve faced criticism for what some call my “sudden” interest in decolonization. But honestly, the work I started back in 2009 – taking machinima into prisons, favelas, and the so-called 4th world of France – was always about disrupting the status quo. It was my way of pushing game art beyond the confines of museums and galleries, where it could actually connect with people and, just maybe, make a difference. Turns out, doing the work quietly doesn’t get you the same headlines as a trendy label.
Using the virtual worlds of video games and diverting them to tell stories or use them as a means of expression allows us to manipulate the images that without this critical distance manipulate us by shaping our ways of thinking and seeing the world. To use Mbembe’s words in his Abiola conference in 2016, technologies plunge us into a cinematic vision of reality, and according to the hypothesis I have been working with, it can be taken as an opportunity to divert these technologies, to practice critical thinking and to reappropriate them tactically. Since 2009, I have been organizing and leading machinima workshops in which people learn how to use video games and virtual universes to produce films and thus transform an object of mass consumption into a means of expression.
Matteo Bittanti: As more artists adopt machinima, video games shift from mass-consumption objects to artistic tools. How do you see this transformation in terms of power dynamics? Is there a risk that machinima could lose its critical edge as it becomes more mainstream within the art world? After all, today machinima has become a staple in blockbuster exhibitions organized by world famous curators.
Isabelle Arvers: Ok, so… Here’s an exhibition for which I was invited to write the story of game art and not actually as a game art curator The irony? Just a few months later, the same art magazine was questioning whether we can even consider games as an art form. In 2023! Yes, really. Clearly, in France, there’s still a long way to go before games are fully embraced as mainstream art.
The first time I showcased machinima in France was back in 2005 at the Pompidou Center, featuring work by Rooster Teeth and Melon Dezign, some demo makers. The room was nearly empty, and people were openly joking about me. Fast forward almost 20 years, and machinima is now featured at the Pompidou Center Metz. I can’t help but find the whole thing quite funny, I’ll admit.
I spent years fighting to bring machinima into art schools and to support students who wanted to use games as a medium. It was an uphill battle, as most institutions and art schools were firmly against the idea of incorporating games into an artistic context. So, I can’t deny that it’s satisfying to see more game art and machinima appearing in art exhibitions now. Just the other day, I was thrilled to see Sara Sadik’s machinima featured in a MacVal exhibition, surrounded by installations, sculptures, and paintings
And why not? Machinima has always moved in cycles, rising and falling, from its roots in the deepest underground to its mainstream moment with narrative films in 2007, and later blending with other art practices. It’s a language, and its relevance depends entirely on who’s using it and what they’re expressing. I don’t buy into the hype; it fades as quickly as it arrives. That just means there will always be time to hack it again.
Matteo Bittanti: During your Art and Games World Tour, which focused on queer, feminist, and decolonial practices, did you encounter any significant tensions between these frameworks and the local contexts you visited? How did you approach or resolve such contradictions if/when they arose?
Isabelle Arvers: “If I have chosen to approach video game creation from a decolonial angle in the Art & Games World Tour of the Souths, it is because in 2019, the global gaming market was still dominated by Europe, the United States, and Japan, and to speak of the art and games decolonization is to echo works conceived on the periphery of this global and globalizing culture and to be able to immerse oneself in other types of representations, conceived and expressed in other languages, allowing one to evolve in other cities and landscapes and through other stories and cosmogonies. It is to accompany and promote the emergence of a market of content from the Souths. This is a recent phenomenon, linked to the rise of mobile phones and the Internet, which, as Mbembe points out, allows the younger generations to express themselves and have access to the media like never. In the field of video games, the market is no longer solely a market of subcontracting or localization of games produced in the West. Many independent studios are emerging in Asia, Latin America, and Africa and are producing content for the local market as well as for the global market.
The place of play is closely linked to epistemic privilege. Like any language, the production of a game requires a series of theoretical, technical, and practical. It requires commitment and dedication, a factor not always possible in the social contexts experienced by most of the Brazilian population. While such facts are verified, the promotion and construction of new paths is fundamental so that more people can tell their own stories. (Jaderson Souza, Tainá Felix e Paixão, Lugar de Jogo, Videogames, redes de afeto e implicações na cultura contemporânea)
It is thus that new voices emerge by reappropriating the narrative upon themselves to no longer be an exotic context but rather the enunciation of their representation itself. It is also to decolonize the imaginary by the co-construction of narratives born from the encounter of oral tradition, endogenous knowledge, and virtual universes of video games.” (Art& Games Decolonization, thesis by Isabelle Arvers, 2024)
Today, we must speak of neo-colonialism rather than post colonialism in which soft power plays a huge role in imposing a monopolistic culture. But a new generation of artists and activists is decolonizing: a new world is emerging and affirming its voice, stopping working for or like others, but rather re calling its history, its roots, and its beliefs. These tendencies resonate with the feminist book Don’t Liberate Us, We’ll Take Care of it written in by Bibia Pavard, Florence Rochefort, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel; and the quote from Felwine Sarr, “Decolonization has to be done in both sides of the mediterranean sea.” It is now possible to produce counter-fictions, strong enough to deconstruct and fight the soft power effects of cultural imperialism and send it back by reappropriating the tools, resources, and references. Making new alliances, new kin families alike, we can now reinvent discourses on ourselves.
Matteo Bittanti: In your collaborations with feminist and queer artists, how do you address the tension between using video games – a medium that has historically marginalized these identities – while also striving to create inclusive, subversive spaces that challenge these very exclusions?
Isabelle Arvers: At the Alliance Française of Bogota, I was able to engage in questions related to gender in the Tecnofeminismo exhibition (2019), in which works of transgender people and women were presented. The intention was to show that a much more fluid and much less binary relationship to technology can exist, and this approach can lead to politically engaged works. In the exhibition, the games revolved around issues about Colombian politics, guerillas, toxic masculinity, and the institutionalization of gender roles. The feminist movement in Colombia is strong and vibrant, and so is the queer scene, I was thus thrilled to work with some of my favorite artists who make up these radical scenes.
Before this exhibition, I led a machinima workshop that focused on gender and identity at the Red Comunitaria Trans (RCT)/Fundación Red Communitaria Trans located in the heart of Santa Fé, the main trans sex workers’ neighborhood of Bogota. This was done to begin a process of creative exchange with the members of RCT to create an exhibition with what was co-created during our encounters. They then decided to use the machinima methodology to document police violence done on trans sex workers in Santa Fé. It was during these workshops that I trained Nadia Granados who integrated the machinima technique into one of her videos, Plata o Plomo, which was exhibited at Tecnofeminismo and was featured at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 2020.
In Colombia, where harassment is also very strong in the streets and on public transport, a mobile game has been created with the collaboration of different feminist collectives in Bogota. I was able to exhibit the game, Poder Violeta, co-designed by Carlos Torres in collaboration with the feminist collectives Polifonía, Degénero, La Liga de las mujeres, Rosario sin Bragas, Mujeres gordas sin chaqueta, Observatorio Contra el Acoso Callejero Colombia. Poder Violeta is a video game that provokes a reflection on sexual harassment in public transport. Recognizing that video games are one of the most powerful forms of cultural consumption, and that culture among many other things is the place where problematic notions about masculine nature are reaffirmed, Poder Violeta aims to use this medium to stimulate conversations about sexual harassment. Tecnofeminismo, Alliance Française de Bogota, 2019, taking up the words of Judy Wajcam, author of the book Technofeminism: “Does technology have sexual relations?”, it is time to rethink the question of gender linked to technology beyond machismo or about the privileged relationship of men with the digital. The idea is to appropriate the media and technologies to re-position this notion in a non-binary, fluid, and activist way. The exhibition Tecnofeminismo presents artworks in the form of a video game. Works of video art or performance. Some of these projects were created in collaboration with feminist collectives such as Poder Violeta or in the framework of a workshop with the Trans Foundation using video games as a medium for the creation of hybrid works between art and games.
Matteo Bittanti: Your association Kareron has produced projects centered on cyber feminism and ecosexuality, which challenge traditional narratives of technology and sexuality. How do you integrate these emerging discourses into the medium of video games, which often operates within more conventional, male-dominated structures?
Isabelle Arvers: The dialog between ancestral knowledge and counter-gaming can indeed immerse us in a world where humans are no longer at the center, in a world that can be apprehended from all points of view, from all species, from all dimensions and time as in David O’reilly’s game Everything. From the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from the planet to the micron, including all animals, plants, and minerals. Donna Haraway borrows the idea of “becoming with” from Vinciane Despret, who, in 2016, wrote “To be alive, as a way of being, is to be in becoming with others”. To be alive is to be, for, and with others. It means paying attention to all the attention/s we receive. The names Vinciane Despret and Donna Haraway recall Nathalie Magnan, to whom I dedicate my thesis.
Nathalie Magnan was Donna Haraway’s assistant in the late Eighties and translated A Cyborg Manifesto into French in 2002. When Nathalie Magnan passed away at the end of 2016, we imagined this tribute – Trans//border, the teachings of Nathalie Magnan at the Mucem in 2018, to restore all her teachings in all their diversity: cyberfeminism, hacktivism, boundaries between genders and spaces, the defense of internet freedom, eco-sexuality, situated knowledge.
As Donna Haraway wrote in Diffractions: Differences, Contingencies, and Entanglements That Matter,
Diffraction patterns record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, and difference. Diffraction is about heterogeneous history, not about originals. Unlike reflections, diffractions do not displace the same elsewhere, in distorted form, thereby giving rise to industries of [story-making about origins and truths]. Rather, diffraction can be a metaphor for another kind of critical consciousness. By contrast, diffraction allows you to study both the nature of the apparatus and the object. (Donna Haraway, 1997, p. 273)
Adopting a diffractive approach to the decolonization of video games means looking at video games not just as a text or medium, but also in terms of their materiality and relationship to the living world, from mineral extraction to waste treatment. It is also about video games’ ability to interact with us: what are we becoming with/against/in/for video games?
Matteo Bittanti: Your PhD research on art and games decolonization is timely and critical. Do you think digital platforms, such as gaming, offer more potential for decolonial engagement compared to traditional art mediums, or do they come with their own set of limitations? What were the most surprising or unexpected outcomes of your research?
Isabelle Arvers: Showing and distributing other types of games, showing other relationships to non-humans, showing universes in which we are part of and with various kinds of aesthetics, and gameplays could also contribute to changing the demand for other types of games, mostly AAA productions. The majority of people remain unaware of these games because it’s incredibly difficult for an independent studio or game maker to stand out in the vast ocean of games produced and published online each year. That’s why it’s our responsibility to engage in pedagogical activism with ambiental games, challenging the conventional notion of what makes a game “beautiful”. We need to start reverse-engineering game aesthetics, stripping them down to fewer details, encouraging conscious play, hacking the rules, and, ultimately, making our own games.
If, to take up Despret and Haraway’s idea, becoming with implies paying attention to the other living beings around us, who pay attention to us, then this is how we approach the notion of “care”, of dedicating attention to other living entities with video games. Learning to care through video games? Learning to collect leaves, bark, and branches, to learn how to take care of oneself in the forest, how to feed and be fed, to survive. “One can see how the interactivity of computer games might correspondingly enact animamorphic reflection on how we live alongside other beings, something explored in detail when working from Haraway, Melissa Bianchi explores how games cultivate multispecies relations.” (Alenda Chang, Green Computer and Video Games: An Introduction, 2017, p. 8)
Matteo Bittanti: Your Green Games Pedagogical Kit addresses sustainability through gaming. In light of the environmental toll of contemporary digital platforms, exacerbated by streaming and AI technologies, how do you envision the future of gaming in terms of its ecological impact? How do you reconcile gaming’s immersive potential with its growing environmental footprint, a topic central to Guillaume Pitron’s work?
Isabelle Arvers: Digital materiality, playing with/on/against extractive economy addresses the complex relationship between art, games, and extractive economies. It analyzes gaming projects like Chronicles of Klinu, a project created in the frame of Enter Africa in Accra, Ghana, by Prince Andrew and Tron’s Factory, a game created by Afrane Makof in Kumasi in Ghana, shedding light on how digital materiality can challenge and transform our understanding of resource extraction and nowadays conflicts.
We find gaming on the two sides of labor exploitation in mines and e-waste recycling, almost happening in the same regions: Asia and Africa. Game makers and gamers need to be conscious about the harm gaming is doing to the environment and how, somehow it is transforming the earth into a cyborg, digesting e-waste and producing minerals to make game components in a cyborg symbiotic cycle.
The importance of engaging players in this paradigm shift cannot be overstated. Just as “becoming with” implies a deeper awareness of other living beings, games offer a unique medium to cultivate multi-species relationships and instill a sense of care for our environment. The emotional aesthetics embedded in games can serve as powerful agents of change, moving players to action through empathy, understanding, and participation. In this quest for a transformed perspective, digital art and games emerge as powerful tools. They enable counter-gaming, a realm where games critique themselves and shed light on post/neo/anti/non-colonial, political, social, and environmental issues. Environmental consciousness finds its ally in the green gaming movement, advocating for technology that transcends power and energy consumption.
This approach challenges traditional research paradigms and invites us to reimagine the world of art and games as intertwined with broader socio-cultural, ecological, and spiritual contexts. By diffracting, we see beyond linear narratives and occupy the digital art and games space. We are no longer outside digital art and games, we have a response-ability towards the games we play, how they are made, and how they are recycled.
Nonetheless, we think there’s a huge amount of work to be done on the demand side, on the consumer side, to open up the tastes of millions and millions of gamers around the world to other types of aesthetics and games, and to make them aware of what playing in high definition so quickly means for the planet…
It is essential to participate in educational activism to promote and distribute these games, but also to create other games, environmental games to raise awareness of environmental issues and collectively imagine other types of games based on other cosmogonies and cosmologies.
The field of vision that people have about games needs to be broadened and overcome the idea that the more “realistic” a game is, the more beautiful it is, and that only hyperrealism is a viable aesthetic. No! pixels are wonderful, low poly is beautiful, large, solid-colored, abstract, cubic, non-Cartesian, non-figurative, non-human, unreal shapes are beautiful. Especially when we propose other cosmogonies, other visions of the world, other relationships with the non-human, other relationships with the living.
Showing and distributing other kinds of games, showing other relationships with non-humans, showing universes we’re part of and with other kinds of aesthetics and gameplay can also help change the demand for other kinds of games that aren’t primarily AAA games. Most of the time, few people know about these games, because it’s hard for an independent studio or game creator to get noticed in the ocean of games produced and published online every year.
That’s why we need to do educational activism with environmental games and change the common view of what a “beautiful” game is and start reverse-engineering the aesthetics of the game with less detail, to play consciously and hack the rules and create the games.
How to use emotional aesthetics to change people’s behavior, knowing that emotion has a greater influence than reason, and allows us to better understand abstract and distant concepts. Emotions drive us to act and make us want to participate.
Learn to heal yourself with games like Arida, a Mexican game in which you learn to find water sources in arid lands or to feed on manioc. Learn how to heal yourself and honor the spirits by familiarizing yourself with different species of baobab, tamarind, cola seeds, aloe vera and, as the game progresses, start learning about plant healing by incorporating trees into your game. Why not imagine games like Huni Kuin, ITA or Laidaixai, Mulaka or Wagadu Chronicles becoming introductions to reconsider trees, plants and animals, no longer as consumable products, but as an interconnected whole of which we are part, due to the same substance, between virtual and composite worlds. We can feel like stones, sculptures, sculpted beings endowed with artificial intelligence, as in Sahej Rahal’s work.
Shinkle’s argument is particularly applicable to an ecocritical reading of games, as games’ multisensory alliance between vision and affective properties such as touch, sensation and movement creates a phenomenological ontology that perceives incessant flux and our co-creative involvement in change as intrinsic to being human in the world. Milburn, drawing on Haraway’s When Species Meet, argues that a sense of environmental responsibility is grounded in an ability to respond — “to affect and be affected” by other people, other species and “the otherness of our own planet” (Alenda Chang, John Parham, Green Computer and Video Games: An Introduction, 2017, p. 9).
Matteo Bittanti: Thank you for this wide-ranging and insightful conversation, Isabelle! I have a few questions for Gael Manangou. First, your work often merges traditional and contemporary sounds, as seen in your creation of a handmade instrument like the Kulumenta. When composing the soundtrack for Liquid Forest – which explores the fusion of ancestral culture and technology – how did you bring these diverse influences together?
Gael Manangou: Ever since I started, I’ve enjoyed mixing the past with the present. It’s my main source of inspiration. For Liquid Forest, it was not an easy task to bring all these influences together because I had to connect with nature through dance, trance, musical instruments like the balafon, the sanza and especially my voice. Because I think my voice added a percentage of trance to my work.
Matteo Bittanti: Additionally, how did the visual elements of the machinima influence your creative process?
Gael Manangou: My music is mainly visual, which means that every image inspires a sound, so the machinima project only plunged me further into this green universe that I’ve always known and lived in and that has always given me so much.
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