Dredge

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.

• The paper argues that fishing mechanics in AAA games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 serve as a reflective counterpoint to neoliberal game temporalities, but tend to reproduce an idealized, escapist vision of nature that mirrors real-world angling attitudes.
• Drawing on social science research by Adrian Franklin and Jacob Bull, the paper characterizes angling as ambivalent: it can reinforce the modernist separation of humans and nature while also foregrounding embodiment and the materiality of water and flow.
• The paper proposes "radical digital fishing" as a category, reading Ridiculous Fishing through absurdist humor and irony and Dredge through a grotesque conflation of human subjectivity with the nonhuman waterscape, drawing on Jeff VanderMeer's concept of the new weird.