On Inhabiting Nonhuman Bodies: Review of Research Perspectives

This review by Iwona Marinov organizes and formalizes research perspectives on animal games, digital works that position players within the embodied perspective of a nonhuman animal avatar, and situates them within the broader field of ecogame scholarship. Its central argument is that a substantial body of work at the intersection of animal studies, environmental humanities, and game studies already exists, yet lacks an organized discourse in which its participants recognize themselves as contributing to a shared conceptual field. The review aims to draw the boundaries of that field and invite further development, including comparative studies and engagement with posthumanism, new materialism, and animal ethics.

The review traces the lineage of ecological thinking in game studies, citing foundational collective projects such as Ecozon@'s 2017 special issue and the anthology Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis. It catalogues the range of scholarly attention to animals in virtual worlds, from companions and labor tools to targets of player violence, and identifies representative titles, including Stray, the Shelter series, and Endling: Extinction Is Forever, that have drawn interdisciplinary interest. The scope is primarily digital games within contemporary game studies, with the review engaging a range of Anglophone and Polish-language scholarship.

Methodologically, the work is a conceptual and literature-based review rather than an empirical study, and it does not report survey or sample data. Its analytical core is a comparison of positions on whether inhabiting a nonhuman avatar can convey the experience of being that animal. Gualeni (2011) treats games as spaces of experimental ontology capable of transcending human subjectivity, Eggertsson (2022) argues that such play conveys what it would be like to be a nonhuman animal within a balance of biological fact and narrative fiction, and Caracciolo (2021) rejects this possibility as illusory, warning that such play may reinforce human superiority and amount to a colonizing act. The review positions these debates as a productive basis for future research.