Virtual lawns and weeds: Reframing videogame environments

This chapter explores the significance of ‘grass’ assets, bringing Critical Plant Studies (Hall 2011; Marder 2013; Pollan 2001) and the Anglo-American lawn’s cultural historiography (Marusek 2012: Robbins 2007; Steinberg 2006) to textual analysis of ludic backdrops. While Alenda Chang critiques the “functionally inert” plants of “predominantly visual” videogame environments (2019a, 23), this risks reinforcing the treatment of plants in purely instrumental ‘functional’ terms and repeating what Michael Marder (2013) identifies as Western marginalisation of flora’s rooted, headless alterity, and reifying narrow anthropocentric values of agency and centrality. Indeed, passivity is key to videogames (Fizek 2018; Keogh 2019), and Game Studies regrettably marginalises visuality (Keogh 2018). I propose that questionably ‘visual’ and ‘inert’ background assets (exemplified by grass) offer rich and under-examined terrain for analysis wherein the ‘plantscapes’ dwarfing humanity (Hall 2011, 3) might challenge disciplinary understanding of agency/interactivity and foreground/background.