Artistic In-Game Photographs as Media of Care

This paper argues that many works of artistic in-game photography can be understood as media of care, drawing on feminist care ethics, game studies, and photography theory. Its central claim is that these photographs exhibit specific care structures, either thematically, structurally, or materially, and thereby take part in contemporary discourses on social and ecological responsibility. The author extends the pandemic-era recognition of video games as spaces of connection and self-care to the practice of photographing within them, showing how such images can articulate pressing social questions and make marginalized interests visible.

The analytical framework distinguishes two care structures. Existential care arises from the gameplay condition, in which players are responsible for keeping their avatars alive and sustaining the game's continuation, a constraint that the author argues persists even when a photo mode suspends play. Relational care, adapted from Puig de la Bellacasa's concept of matters of care, describes how games become embedded in broader ecologies extending beyond play, with in-game photographs serving as nodes where diverse concerns converge. Together these concepts underpin a qualitative, media-aesthetic and photography-theoretical analysis rather than a quantitative study, with no survey sample or dataset reported.

The paper examines a set of key works, including Joanna Zylinska's Flowcuts, Pascal Greco's Place(s), Natalie Maximova's The Edge of the World, Marie-Lena Höftmann's Women of Sekiro, Thomas Spies' Americana, and Lorna Ruth Galloway's Twentysix Gasoline Stations in GTA V. These are grouped into categories: pandemic images created during lockdowns as a form of reverse escapism; marginal spaces that expose the edges of virtual worlds and reflect on the medium itself; social and economic critique addressing gender representation and precarious labor; and environmental critique linking video games to the fossil-fuel resources they depend on. The author concludes that care serves as a productive analytical category for artistic in-game photography, while acknowledging the paradox that video games themselves participate in the exploitative structures these works critique.