This entry is still work-in-progress.
With the Vallis Undermind expansion, Digital Extremes added a content update to its live-service ‘looter shooter’ game that, while not having an overtly educational or environmental focus, clearly taps into a heightened sensitivity and receptiveness towards human/nature themes in popular culture. Pertinent design choices include:
- A playable fungus character (Nokko), the first in the games roster of 60+ characters embracing nature as a a theme (except maybe for the werewolf warframe Voruna1)
- Mushroom collecting as a new minigame type that slightly departs from previous gameplay elements but builds e.g. on earlier minigames like fishing and animal conservation, which, however, were not as deeply integrated into the game/expansion’s story and lore
- The expansion features the corpus faction, an in-game allegory of hypercapitalist excess, as enemy and elaborates on the anti-capitalist rhetoric and imagery that was introduced into the game with the faction earlier, elaborating on the motif of extractivism and resource accumulation. This motif had been previously represented e.g. by the Thermia Fractures event2 symbolizing fracking.
- An NPC and quest-giver who is framed as a fungus aficionado and visually appears like a human/fungus hybrid.
- In-game dialogue which frames the corpus enemies as “invasives”, i.e. using the ‘invasive species’ framing to reframe the role of human/capitalist intervention.
- See e.g. Bianchi, Melissa. 2016. ‘Claws and Controllers: Werewolves and Lycanthropy in Digital Games’. Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural 2: 127–45. ↩︎
- See e.g. https://wiki.warframe.com/w/Thermia_Fractures. ↩︎