community, fueled by a strong desire to re-tain what already exists. Typically, the cases are carefully swaddled inappeals to skill, to being good enough, and to working hard enoughto make it. All these tropes are at the center of any sort of merito-cratic appeal. If the harassed were tough enough to take it, then theywould be able to reap the rewards of success. Systemic harassment setsthe terms on which players engage, giving stark advantage to thosewho are not targeted and retaining power for those who have alreadyclimbed the ladder.

storically speak-ing, as arcade games declined and home gaming consoles and personal com-puters grew more prevalent throughout the 1980s and 1990s, game design-ers began experimenting with more forgiving forms of gameplay, allowingplayers to save their progress and in cases of defeat or less than optimalcompletion, to backtrack and try again. Today, bolstered by cheap data stor-age, games routinely offer convenient save points, ample save files, penalty-free respawning, and even automatic saving

A paper publishedin the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in Decem-ber 2009 calculated that armed conflict could increase up to 54 percent insub- Saharan Africa by the year 2030, linked to the rise in temperatures. Theauthors acknowledge that economic well-being remains the single mostimportant factor in civil and transnational conflict, but nevertheless stress“a large direct role of temperature in shaping conflict risk.”16 Although clear-cut ties between warming and armed violence may be elusive, there seemsto be little overall controversy about more indirect connections, for instancethrough temperature-associated water scarcity and failures in agriculture.Social scientists have long understood that rates of many types of violentcrime exhibit seasonal fluctuation and are often highest in the summer,17and one cannot help but wonder what a worldwide fever will do to territorialtempers.

Farm games could make crop selection less arbitraryand more biologically meaningful, not only by encouraging smart crop-rotation practices (for example, planting crops with nitrogen-fixing bacteriaafter crops that leach nitrogen from the soil) but also by instituting impor-tant interspecies dynamics, among them predation, pollination, scavenging,and decomposition. Players should be able to increase crop yield or growhealthier plants by considering their temporal or physical proximity to otherspecies, both plant and animal, for instance, by planting a symbiotic ThreeSisters garden (squash, beans, and corn), or using animal waste to improvethe soil.

Listening just once to a song stored in the Cloud uses less energy than pur-chasing and shipping a CD, taking into account manufacturing and transportenergy. Listening to the song a couple of dozen times leads to more overallenergy used, largely because of greater use of the networks. The Cloud usesmore energy streaming a high-def movie just once than does fabricating andshipping a DVD.43Clearly, the cloud offers convenience and less visible clutter, at a price. Thereare power savings to be had with remote data storage and sharing if theservices are used infrequently, but many use the cloud less as archive thanwardrobe, a place to keep things that are used every day. If we downloadphotos often enough, we would do better to store them on our own comput-ers, rather than the cloud: “A laptop hard drive operates at ~1 watt whetheraccessing a photo twice a day (~0.1 downloads/hr) or accessing 100 photos.As download frequency rises the Cloud can consume over 10 times moreenergy to store and access information than storing on a laptop.”

Is playing a game online an environ-mentally dubious alternative to playing a game off one’s own computer harddrive? Are single-player, or better yet analog games the most sustainablechoices?

Tuan claims that vertically oriented cultures, like those of peasantsand subsistence farmers, tend to live by cyclical time, to see themselves aspart of a religious cosmos and seasonal shifts, rather than the secularizedand aestheticized horizontal expanses of modernity, indicated in our termslandscape, scenery, and countryside.Tuan’s broad-stroke observations support an interpretation of game envi-ronments that prioritizes their manipulation of the player’s experience oftime and distance. Rather than the physicist’s formula, distance = rate × time

Like stock photos or even cell phone antenna trees,35 digital plants are for themost part mass- produced clichés that are simultaneously hypervisible andinvisible, ubiquitous enough to pass beneath notice, designed to be seen andignored. Yet this is the nature we increasingly consume on our screens, thatis praised by industry elites, and in some cases, as with Avatar’s Pandora,found preferable to our own world. Meanwhile only a little digging revealsthat, as with much game technology, SpeedTree has partial roots in the mili-tary, since its founders developed their expertise while serving in the navy.

The deer cam pokes equal fun at connoisseurs ofthe GTA franchise and overly invested animal cam watchers, as in the caseof the now infamous Woods Hole Osprey Cam, which had to be takendown because of viewers’ irate behavior over a perceived “bad animal mom.”Whether or not Watanabe intended to gently lambast our tendency to proj-ect human morals onto animals, donations to the project ostensibly went tosupport the Humane Society.Even these select examples of animal gameplay invite new critical per-spectives from within and beyond the pale of conventional game scholar-ship, from the many varieties of posthumanist and multispecies thinking,prominent among them Donna Haraway’s work on the cyborg and compan-ion species and Anna Tsing’s “more-than- human sociality,”15 to the feministethics of care and its application to animal welfare. Caring for something,whether a toy creature, potted plant, or pet rock, is a potent and evolution-arily hardwired behavior, one which Turkle reminds us leads children tofeel compunction, even grief, over abusing a Furby or forgetting to feed aTamagotchi.

“macro-descriptions of historicalevents cannot form the main body of a mainstream literary work, for thenthe novel ceases being fiction and becomes a work of history.”82 Science fic-tion, however, can tackle macro-portrayals of history because that historyis invented. Reminiscent of Timothy Morton’s suggestion that ecologicalthought should be cosmological and darkly ecological, rather than locallyoriented and sunny in disposition, Liu argues that science fiction expandspost- Renaissance literature’s anthropocentric narcissism by deemphasizingthe importance of character and emphasizing the importance of world—while many have seen this as science fiction’s generic failing, for Liu it isundeniably an asset that sci- fi characterization goes beyond the individualto “species portrayal” and beyond that to world/environment portrayal.“Mainstream literature is limited to describing a single species (humanity)and a single world (Earth),” says Liu, dismissively.83 Liu remarks that his owncareer has seen a parallel shift from hard or pure sf, rooted in hard science,to an increased reconciliation and focus on the human relationship to thenatural world. For Liu, science fiction manages to do what both Chrono-Zoom and No Man’s Sky set out to do, with mixed results, and in a mucholder medium:Science fiction is precipitously expanding the descriptive space occupied byliterature, giving us the potential more vividly and profoundly to show Earth