Terribly Bored Lizards: Resonating with the Captive Animal in Jurassic World: Evolution

This document is a scholarly paper from the Proceedings of DiGRA 2024 that uses textual analysis and Animal Studies and Affect Studies approaches to examine how Jurassic World: Evolution (Frontier, 2018) represents captive animals. Its central thesis is that constrained game "playgrounds" can create indirect affective and speculative relationships with the nonhuman, and that the game's systems of captivity, repetition, and park maintenance generate a space of "resonance" in which players become bored with the animal rather than encountering it "in itself." The argument situates the game within broader debates in Green and Eco Game Studies and draws on theorists of boredom, crisis, and modernity.

The paper's key claims center on the game's reception and design. It notes that critics frequently described Evolution as repetitious and boring, observing that dinosaurs nap more often than they fight, that escapes are routinised, and that players must balance a narrow set of parameters for animal and visitor happiness. The author reads this monotony as deliberate: the game's slow systems expose players to dinosaurs after the initial moment of wonder has faded. The dinosaur is characterised as an ambivalent figure that resists Janski's typology of game animals as opponents, background assets, or resources, since it is simultaneously enemy, tool, actual animal, and speculative construction. The analysis also connects the player's anxious boredom to contemporary digital culture and to neoliberal conditions of crisis management.

The study's scope is conceptual and interpretive rather than empirical; it draws on a single game, its franchise films (Jurassic Park, 1993; Jurassic World, 2015), and comparable titles such as Zoo Tycoon and farming simulations, without reporting survey data, sample sizes, or quantitative measures. Its methodology is textual and theoretical, grounded in animal studies, affect theory, and critical readings of zoo and spectacle culture. Its conclusion is that Evolution does not break with patterns of exploitation in media representations of animals, but enacts an ethical entanglement in loops of captivity that offers a tentative, resonant aesthetic space between human and nonhuman.