WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:01.199 --> 00:00:02.199 Hello everyone! 00:00:02.199 --> 00:00:07.620 My name is Alice Fox, and my paper is GAIA is a Cyborg: Exploring Ecological Personhood 00:00:07.620 --> 00:00:10.450 in Horizon Zero Dawn. 00:00:10.450 --> 00:00:17.250 So, my paper focuses on the tradition of phenomenology So, it's a bit difficult to run down in terms 00:00:17.250 --> 00:00:23.490 of a 2 minute presentation on the research methodology because it's a bit more complex 00:00:23.490 --> 00:00:25.720 than that... 00:00:25.720 --> 00:00:31.810 This paper tries to follow the outline of Donna Haraway's Speculative Fabulation, which 00:00:31.810 --> 00:00:38.750 is a future building and problematization technique that explores possible futures in 00:00:38.750 --> 00:00:43.400 order to unveil novel solutions to problems. 00:00:43.400 --> 00:00:49.780 I focus on the video game Horizon Zero Dawn as a ludic device that engages players in 00:00:49.780 --> 00:00:53.180 a quasi-world to... 00:00:53.180 --> 00:01:00.760 not mimic experience but to create new experiences that would otherwise be unavailable to them 00:01:00.760 --> 00:01:03.420 in their daily lives and to us in our daily lives. 00:01:03.420 --> 00:01:08.350 So, this type of question is asking does this experience through a ludic device such as 00:01:08.350 --> 00:01:14.850 a video game and Horizon Zero Dawn specifically give rise to new ways of conceptualizing personhood 00:01:14.850 --> 00:01:18.520 that we would not normally engage with? 00:01:18.520 --> 00:01:25.729 Just without video games, essentially So in lieu of actually playing the game, I set a 00:01:25.729 --> 00:01:30.609 few scenes up in the Power Point so you can see how closely related nature and personhood 00:01:30.609 --> 00:01:32.069 are in this game. 00:01:32.069 --> 00:01:38.100 The scenery and the background also works with technology as you can kind of see in 00:01:38.100 --> 00:01:42.920 that right-hand corner where the technology kind of blends into and becomes part of the 00:01:42.920 --> 00:01:49.439 landscape and constitutes not only the enframing background but also the point of interaction 00:01:49.439 --> 00:01:50.549 with the game. 00:01:50.549 --> 00:01:55.619 One [the player] must constantly be and dialogue and interaction with and engagement with technology, 00:01:55.619 --> 00:01:59.689 nature, and the player character in the ludic device. 00:01:59.689 --> 00:02:07.079 So, here's another example of directly interfacing with these types of biomimicry technologies. 00:02:07.079 --> 00:02:13.730 I deduced 2 conclusions from this exploration into the video game: the 1st one is that you 00:02:13.730 --> 00:02:20.980 can add 2 different criteria of personhood based on this video game the 1st one is incipiency--coming 00:02:20.980 --> 00:02:27.459 into being with different devices and different natural surroundings than someone would otherwise 00:02:27.459 --> 00:02:29.700 be exposed to in reality. 00:02:29.700 --> 00:02:35.120 And the 2nd one is flexibility so learning how to make do with the parameters of the 00:02:35.120 --> 00:02:42.000 game in order to instantiate new variations and versions of personhood that we don't traditionally 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:44.189 think of as personhood. 00:02:44.189 --> 00:02:49.530 Both of these concepts, also playing in with the ludic device, are concepts derived from 00:02:49.530 --> 00:02:55.719 cybernetics and put into dialogue with the literature from that aspect as well. 00:02:55.719 --> 00:03:02.989 So, Gaia is better thought of and better dealt with in a moral way when we conceptualize 00:03:02.989 --> 00:03:09.020 nature as a cyborg and not as a standalone background frame.