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"How popular debates about the so-called digital generation mediate anxieties about labor and life in twenty-first-century America"--

This article investigates the potential for digital games to advance environmentally responsible attitudes by attending to their own material conditions, since the production, consumption, and disposal of games and the platforms on which they run enact ecological harm. I examine how Tomorrow Corporation's puzzle game Little Inferno (2012) and Molleindustria's political mobile game Phone Story (2011) address their own participation in ecological harm through rendering visible the very games themselves being played as material commodities. In doing so, they acknowledge their own complicity as well as that of their players in existing processes of environmental degradation. Moreover, both games challenge conventional expectations of fun as harmless or inconsequential, since this environmental destruction results from digital entertainment. I argue that digital games advancing environmentally responsible attitudes must address the ecological devastation tied to their materiality as well as support players in accepting responsibility for and remedying the harm players enact. Consequently, digital games of environmental responsibility must also question the dominant mode of fun that drives ecological devastation by reminding us that we dwell in a world where we need to be responsible for the fun we choose to have. Resumen Este artículo investiga el potencial de los juegos digitales para fomentar actitudes responsables hacia el medioambiente atendiendo a sus propias condiciones materiales, ya que la producción, el consumo, y el desecho de los juegos y de las plataformas en las que funcionan representan daño ecológico. Examino cómo el puzle Little Inferno (2012) de Tomorrow Corporation y el juego político para móvil Phone Story (2011) de Molleindustria abordan su propia participación en el daño ecológico haciendo visible el que los juegos en sí mismos sean productos materiales. Al hacerlo, reconocen su propia complicidad, así como la de los jugadores en los procesos de degradación medioambiental. Además, ambos juegos ...

This article investigates the potential for digital games to advance environmentally responsible attitudes by attending to their own material conditions, since the production, consumption, and disposal of games and the platforms on which they run enact ecological harm. I examine how Tomorrow Corporation's puzzle game "Little Inferno" (2012) and Molleindustria's political mobile game "Phone Story" (2011) address their own participation in ecological harm through rendering visible the very games themselves being played as material commodities. In doing so, they acknowledge their own complicity as well as that of their players in existing processes of environmental degradation. Moreover, both games challenge conventional expectations of fun as harmless or inconsequential, since this environmental destruction results from digital entertainment. I argue that digital games advancing environmentally responsible attitudes must address the ecological devastation tied to their materiality as well as support players in accepting responsibility for and remedying the harm players enact. Consequently, digital games of environmental responsibility must also question the dominant mode of fun that drives ecological devastation by reminding us that we dwell in a world where we need to be responsible for the fun we choose to have. ; Este artículo investiga el potencial de los juegos digitales para fomentar actitudes responsables hacia el medioambiente atendiendo a sus propias condiciones materiales, ya que la producción, el consumo, y el desecho de los juegos y de las plataformas en las que funcionan representan daño ecológico. Examino cómo el puzle "Little Inferno" (2012) de Tomorrow Corporation y el juego político para móvil "Phone Story" (2011) de Molleindustria abordan su propia participación en el daño ecológico haciendo visible el que los juegos en sí mismos sean productos materiales. Al hacerlo, reconocen su propia complicidad, así como la de los jugadores en los procesos de degradación medioambiental. Además, ambos juegos ...

This article examines the fan practice of Let's Plays—video recordings that video game players create of themselves playing that include live commentary or riffing. I argue that the riffing accompanying game play footage in Let's Plays highlights how players play idiosyncratically by constructing and performing game-playing personalities. These videos emphasize the performative nature of video game players as fans who actively negotiate with the video games that they play through presentations of individual playing styles and experiences. I show that in accounting for how and why they play the way that they do, Let's Players demonstrate what I suggest are various modes of playing in which players can engage with video games generally. Consequently, creating, sharing, and discussing Let's Plays can render visible a wider diversity of game-playing identities, experiences, and styles.

This analysis of Make, a US parenting magazine, focuses on how the periodical attempts to democratize science and technology through do-it-yourself (DIY) politics by rendering it a problem of child-rearing. Positioning the magazine within a broader context of contemporary interest in making and DIY practices, I argue that Make magazine deploys constructions of creative children to naturalize risk-taking as integral to future innovations, as a response to tensions between risks and responsibility underlying DIY modes of science and technology. Make magazine's content performs what I define as the workshop-function, which distributes protocols through mass media for inaugurating spaces of scientific work outside of professional laboratories run by amateur scientific and technologic subjects. Make magazine highlights how DIY science and making intersects the politics of social reproduction, since the creation of amateur workshops and their operation become integral functions of the home, tying citizenship and political legitimacy to domestic labor in support of scientific and technological innovation.