ABSTRACT This article explores the ecological dimensions of the videogame Animal Crossing: New Horizons by analysing paratexts created and shared by players within online communities. Our ecocritical perspective illustrates player experiences characterised by the active production of idealised images of landscapes and ‘nature’, systematised resource extraction and consumption, and the reproduction of capitalist economic values as common ecological dynamics emerging through gameplay. Our analysis reveals that gameplay in New Horizons is deeply entangled with the material and political conditions of the Capitalocene era. New Horizons demonstrates how, counterintuitively, seemingly ecologically conscious mainstream videogames and their players come to work in service of the very political and economic regimes that have fuelled our planet’s compounding crises.

ABSTRACT This essay reads Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker as exploring the gap that exists between caring about mass species extinction and taking meaningful action to prevent it. The novel, at first, undermines the conventional reasons for caring; however, one of its protagonists is then revealed as having become willing to die for the issue. Equally, the reason for this change proves strangely hard to locate. This essay argues that the real reason for caring about species extinction in Venomous Lumpsucker is connected to a transcendence of the self that aligns the novel with both science fiction and spiritual traditions; however, this reason is so unappealing that it can manifest in the text only in disguised and tortuous forms. Venomous Lumpsucker enables new insights into the connection between spirituality and species extinction in the current moment, and suggests further questions that might be explored in the light of this.