“I’m Traversing My Own Death Throes”

Abstract

This paper offers a queer ecological reading of the 2012 video game Dear Esther , an approach which exists at the intersection of queer theory, queer ecology, and video game scholarship. Queer theory working in concert with ecological thought traces the affinities between human, geological, animal, and atmospheric forces within the game; these affinities compound and trouble categorical distnctions, instantiating a porous “time-space where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment,’” anchoring “complex modes of analysis that travel through entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual” (Alaimo, “Trans-Corporeal” 238). Dear Esther enacts a series of immanent encounters with more-than-human material entanglements, revealing a world “waterlogged” by fluid slippages between body and island, feather and flesh, and bones and stones to offer, ultimately, a contribution to the nascent field of queer video game scholarship that makes a case for video games as a media uniquely capable of disclosing fluid, dynamic, and complex relations between human and nonhuman matter and environment (Pinchbeck and Briscoe).