Article exploring queer pastorals among first in new journal

In one of the first articles published in the new peer-reviewed journal Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture, a UB faculty member calls on readers to rethink and re-examine their relationships with nature and the living beings they share the world with.

“Burning Closets and Nights in the Woods” by Cody Mejeur, assistant professor in the Department of Media Study, reflects on ecological alliances in video games by using anti-pastorals from Rust Belt environments to challenge the tendency to romanticize and idealize nature. Pastorals offer role-playing gamers a scene that evokes a sense of tranquility and the beauty of nature, while an anti-pastoral game takes place in dark, foreboding locations such as caves, ruins and tombs, and may challenge the pastoral themes by exploring underlying issues such as violence, poverty, social norms and destruction.

Mejeur teaches courses in game design and development, critical game studies, narrative and media, digital humanities and media, and queer, trans and feminist studies, with a focus on narrative, gender, identity and representation.

“My work examines how narrative is a playful process we use to understand ourselves and the worlds around us, including especially how our narratives are all different based on embodied experiences, the media we interact with and our positionality in society, among other things,” Mejeur explains. Their article aligns with the new journal’s focus on environmental humanities. Mejeur says the article reflects their work on how narrative forms structure our experience and relationships with the worlds around us.

“I got involved with this work as a natural extension of my research on queerness in games and play,” they note. “Gender and identity aren’t just about which characters are on screen and what body parts those characters have; they are also about power and relationships.”

In this sense, video games offer an experimental playground that can help audiences reflect on these dynamics. But Mejeur also sees room to extend their thinking beyond the complex relationships of human society into ecological studies.

“Often in games and in real life, the environment is either considered a collection of resources to exploit or gets romanticized as an ideal pastoral for us to commune with, and my article uses video games with queer environments to trouble both of these frameworks,” they explain. “I define queer environments not just through the presence or absence of queer humans and characters, but also through the lens of queer theory as environments that are different, strange or failed in some way.”

Specifically, Mejeur’s article explores the video games “Night in the Woods” and “The Vanishing of Ethan Carter,” both set in Rust Belt environments where natural beauty exists hand in hand with industrial rot and decay. “By looking at these virtual environments, I argue that we can engage playfully with the natural world around us, assuming neither that our environments belong to us nor that we have some special, positive kinship or access to them either,” they say.

Mejeur brought their exploration of video games through the lens of queer studies to Regeneration because they felt it was led by some of the foremost scholars of environmental and ecological studies. Bringing their work combining the relatively new use of video games as a medium and the burgeoning field of ecological studies to a new journal just felt like the right move, they say.

“My biggest hope is that the article will help push us past binary thinking, where our natural environments are either something for us to use or something we imagine ourselves as the defenders of,” Mejeur says. “In an interesting way, both sides of that binary are very anthropocentric, presumptuous and patronizing to the living beings we inhabit this planet with. Instead, I hope we can grow to respect the agency and value of the natural world as something we are a part of, that we have relationships and ethical responsibilities to, but that doesn’t belong to us or even necessarily want anything to do with us.”

Within the next few months, Mejeur will mark the publication of their new book, “Historiographies of Game Studies” — an edited collection about the histories of game studies, why the field is what it is today and what it might be in the future — and the release of “Trans Folks Walking,” a first-person narrative video game anthology of trans stories that is being published by Amatryx Gaming Lab & Studio.

Mejeur is also currently working on their first monograph, “Trans Narrative, Queer Play,” which explores the embodied, playful narrative processes we use to navigate our different worlds and experiences in them.