From Restoration to Extinction: Intersectional Pleasures in Ecological Game Reception

This study compares player reception of two ecological games, Terra Nil (Free Lives, 2023) and Endling: Extinction is Forever (Herobeat Studios, 2022), across Steam and YouTube, drawing on 3,478 public comments. Grounded in affect theory, procedural rhetoric, and intersectional ecofeminism, it asks how players affectively interpret ecological messages and whether that engagement translates into ecological awareness. The central thesis is that emotional intensity does not reliably produce ecological consciousness, challenging assumptions that games are effective vehicles for environmental messaging.

The data reveal sharply divergent affective profiles. Terra Nil elicits predominantly joy and calm, with players describing it as meditative, while Endling generates sadness and love, with players reporting crying and maternal feelings toward its fox protagonist. Despite these contrasting emotional registers, ecology-focused orientation converges at roughly 13 percent for both games, and the study identifies a structural ceiling on consciousness-raising. Endling players personalize their responses through grief and parental identification at higher rates, while rejection of the games correlates primarily with mechanical frustration rather than refusal of their messages. The authors describe a "crying-but-recommending" pattern in which devastation signals quality rather than ecological engagement.

The methodology combines deductive and inductive coding across six dimensions, with inter-coder agreement of Cohen's Kappa 0.728 on a stratified subsample. The authors acknowledge that voluntary public comments cannot be disaggregated by demographics, and that platform differences, such as YouTube amplifying sadness and suppressing love in Endling, shape the results. The authors conclude that eco-games likely require explicit reflective mechanisms linking gameplay emotion to real-world implications, and that measuring affect alone is insufficient for assessing climate communication outcomes.