Enjoyment in the Anthropocene: The Extimacy of Ecological Catastrophe in Donut County

This paper, by Benjamin Nicoll of Queensland University of Technology, offers a psychoanalytic reading of the climate crisis through the lens of the 2018 videogame Donut County. Its central thesis is that effective environmental action requires recognizing that humans may derive unconscious enjoyment, or jouissance in Lacanian terms, from ecological deterioration. Rather than relying on consciousness-raising, which the author argues is insufficient, the paper contends that this unconscious satisfaction must be acknowledged and redirected toward anti-capitalist, environmentally sustainable ends.

The analysis proceeds through a close reading of Donut County, in which the player controls a hole that swallows a town and its surrounding environments. The author argues that the game models subjectivity not as a conscious, nature-dominating individual but as a void or gap in material reality, a conception the paper positions against the dominant new materialist, realist, and historicist approaches in contemporary ecocriticism. In the game's narrative, townspeople ultimately seize the hole from its owner and turn its destructive capacity toward sustainable purposes, which the paper presents as a model for collectively mobilizing rather than repressing death-driven enjoyment.

The paper's methodology is theoretical and interpretive rather than empirical, drawing on psychoanalytic concepts and a single case study without survey data or quantitative sampling. Its scope is therefore conceptual, situating itself within debates in ecocritical theory and game studies, including critiques of "serious games" approaches to climate persuasion. The author concludes that Donut County is valuable not because it communicates an argument about climate change, but because it confronts players with something they unconsciously know about the crisis, a function the paper suggests more conventional climate science and ecocriticism cannot fully achieve.