Radical Digital Fishing: From Minigames to Bad Environmentalism

This paper examines digital fishing in video games through a posthumanist and ecocritical lens, arguing that fishing mechanics can expose and complicate the binaries that separate human society from the natural world. Its central claim is that fishing functions in AAA titles such as Red Dead Redemption 2 as a counterpoint to neoliberal game temporalities, offering players a reflective pastime, yet tends to reproduce an idealized, escapist vision of nature that mirrors real-world angling attitudes.

The author draws on social science research on angling, particularly work by Adrian Franklin and Jacob Bull, which describes fishing as ambivalent: it can reinforce the modernist separation of humans and nature, but it also foregrounds embodiment and the materiality of water and flow. Against this backdrop, the paper proposes two case studies of "radical digital fishing." Ridiculous Fishing is read through absurdist humor and irony, while Dredge is read through a weird, grotesque conflation of human subjectivity with the nonhuman waterscape, drawing on Jeff VanderMeer's concept of the new weird.

The analysis situates these games within the broader field of ecogames, building on earlier work by John Parham and Alenda Chang. Its primary theoretical framework is Nicole Seymour's concept of "bad environmentalism," which the paper uses to argue that affects such as irony and weirdness can disrupt the earnest, sublime distance typical of Western environmental discourse. The work is a qualitative, interpretive study of selected games rather than an empirical survey, and its scope is limited to a small number of titles spanning mainstream and independent development.