Animal Games
Game
2 documents in the library are about Animal Games, from writers such as Academy of Media Arts Cologne, DiGRA and Goldsmiths University of London. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Animal Games, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about Animal Games
To be Non-human: From Player Reviews to Design Opportunities for VR Animal Games
To be Non-human : From Player Reviews to Design Opportunities for VR Animal Games SIQI YU∗, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), China SHUAI LIU†, Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Germany YIQING TIAN, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom MAR CANET SOLA, Tallinn University, Estonia TENGJIA…
- Effective de-anthropocentric VR design should prioritize selective mimicry and algorithmic assistance over full morphological simulation, as direct one-to-one mapping of human limbs to animal bodies often results in clumsy or unstable controls.
- Twelve actionable design opportunities were identified for VR animal embodiment, including using AI to automate limb coordination, splitting control of a single avatar among multiple players, and converting physical player fatigue into in-game animal pacing.
- Player reviews of existing VR animal games revealed that reliance on upper-body-centered interactions—such as arm-swinging or head-bobbing—frequently leads to physical strain, motion sickness, and broken immersion.
On Inhabiting Nonhuman Bodies: Review of Research Perspectives
This review synthesizes existing research perspectives on "animal games," defined as digital games where players embody nonhuman animal avatars.
- The review argues that a substantial body of work on animal games already exists across animal studies, environmental humanities, and game studies, but lacks an organized discourse in which its contributors recognize themselves as part of a shared conceptual field.
- Its central analytical question is whether inhabiting a nonhuman animal avatar can convey what it is like to be that animal, and it presents this as a methodological and ethical debate rather than a settled finding.
- Gualeni (2011) sees games as spaces of experimental ontology that can transcend human subjectivity, Eggertsson (2022) argues they convey nonhuman animal experience through a blend of biological fact and narrative fiction, and Caracciolo (2021) rejects this as illusory and warns it may reinforce human superiority as a colonizing act.