Hello everyone!
My name is Alice Fox, and my paper is GAIA is a Cyborg: Exploring Ecological Personhood
in Horizon Zero Dawn.
So, my paper focuses on the tradition of phenomenology So, it's a bit difficult to run down in terms
of a 2 minute presentation on the research methodology because it's a bit more complex
than that...
This paper tries to follow the outline of Donna Haraway's Speculative Fabulation, which
is a future building and problematization technique that explores possible futures in
order to unveil novel solutions to problems.
I focus on the video game Horizon Zero Dawn as a ludic device that engages players in
a quasi-world to...
not mimic experience but to create new experiences that would otherwise be unavailable to them
in their daily lives and to us in our daily lives.
So, this type of question is asking does this experience through a ludic device such as
a video game and Horizon Zero Dawn specifically give rise to new ways of conceptualizing personhood
that we would not normally engage with?
Just without video games, essentially So in lieu of actually playing the game, I set a
few scenes up in the Power Point so you can see how closely related nature and personhood
are in this game.
The scenery and the background also works with technology as you can kind of see in
that right-hand corner where the technology kind of blends into and becomes part of the
landscape and constitutes not only the enframing background but also the point of interaction
with the game.
One [the player] must constantly be and dialogue and interaction with and engagement with technology,
nature, and the player character in the ludic device.
So, here's another example of directly interfacing with these types of biomimicry technologies.
I deduced 2 conclusions from this exploration into the video game: the 1st one is that you
can add 2 different criteria of personhood based on this video game the 1st one is incipiency--coming
into being with different devices and different natural surroundings than someone would otherwise
be exposed to in reality.
And the 2nd one is flexibility so learning how to make do with the parameters of the
game in order to instantiate new variations and versions of personhood that we don't traditionally
think of as personhood.
Both of these concepts, also playing in with the ludic device, are concepts derived from
cybernetics and put into dialogue with the literature from that aspect as well.
So, Gaia is better thought of and better dealt with in a moral way when we conceptualize
nature as a cyborg and not as a standalone background frame.