Donut County
GameBy Ben Esposito · Released Aug 28, 2018
Documents about Donut County
Article
Enjoyment in the Anthropocene: The Extimacy of Ecological Catastrophe in Donut County
This paper, by Benjamin Nicoll of Queensland University of Technology, offers a psychoanalytic reading of the climate crisis through the lens of the 2018 videogame Donut County.
- The paper argues that effective environmental action requires acknowledging that humans may unconsciously derive enjoyment (jouissance, in Lacanian terms) from ecological deterioration, rather than relying on consciousness-raising, which it deems insufficient.
- The author contends this unconscious satisfaction should be redirected toward anti-capitalist, environmentally sustainable ends rather than repressed.
- Using Benjamin Nicoll's close reading of the 2018 game Donut County, the paper models subjectivity as a void or gap in material reality, positioned against new materialist, realist, and historicist approaches in ecocriticism.
DiGRAJun 2023
Article
The Playful Attitude and the Critical Attitude
Braxton Soderman's paper argues that scholars and commentators have grown excessively enthusiastic about the ludic and playful while dismissing the critical attitude as outdated, and that this enthusiasm warrants skepticism.
- Braxton Soderman argues that the playful and critical attitudes are conceptually distinct: critique depends on suspicion and doubt toward dominant norms, which playfulness does not inherently carry.
- The paper contends that playful perspectives increasingly constitute dominant reality rather than resisting it, linking this to Alexander Galloway's concept of ludic capitalism and playful forms of entrepreneurship.
- Soderman concludes that the critical attitude must be turned upon playfulness itself, since play can remake structures from a distance without removing their oppressive features.
DiGRAJan 2020