Motif: Defamiliarization

In the context of media, defamiliarization is a technique where familiar media elements, such as narratives, visuals, or conventions, are presented in an unconventional or unexpected way. This approach disrupts the audience’s usual ways of processing media, encouraging them to reconsider and engage with familiar content from a new perspective. It can be seen in film, television, video games, or digital media through techniques like non-linear storytelling, unexpected plot twists, or unique visual styles, all aimed at prolonging the perceptive process and fostering deeper reflection.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/defamiliarization

In the context of media, defamiliarization is a technique where familiar media elements, such as narratives, visuals, or conventions, are presented in an unconventional or unexpected way. This approach disrupts the audience’s usual ways of processing media, encouraging them to reconsider and engage with familiar content from a new perspective. It can be seen in film, television, video games, or digital media through techniques like non-linear storytelling, unexpected plot twists, or unique visual styles, all aimed at prolonging the perceptive process and fostering deeper reflection.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/defamiliarization

The Edge of Water

BigMood’s indie adventure The Edge of Water avoids mechanics of environmental exploitation for gameplay systems built around stewardship, multi-species kinship, and ecological harmony. The game works most visibly by defamiliarizing our relationship with water and marine life, offering a serene but also notably romanticized experience of human-nature relations. The game’s lore states that long ago,

David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet

“My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future”. The British filmmaker and naturalist, David Attenborough, has devoted his career to educating people about nature and, more recently, the climate crisis. The 2020 documentary David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet weights in on the climate crisis by aiming to subvert the traditional nature documentary

Dungeon Meshi

The Netflix anime series Dungeon Meshi (Delicious in Dungeon) is unusual in that it constructs the dungeon, a common worldbuilding trope from role-playing games, as an ecosystem and as a metaphor for ecosystemic interactions.

Tree

Tree is a VR installation directed by Milica Zec and Winslow Porter that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2017 New Frontier Program, in which the theme was climate change. This virtual experience transforms participants into a rainforest tree. The experience begins with participants planting a real seed given to them by one of the Tree‘s

Plant Girl

From the Gamefound page: “Plant Girl Game is a tabletop roleplaying game about a family of plant children working together to prevent ecological disaster in their small town.” The designers describe the player’s role as follows: “You don’t have to be a girl, but you do have to be a plant. Your character’s gender is

After Earth

After Earth depicts a future where it is no longer safe for humans to live on planet Earth. The movie shows a theme of animal retribution, and that the antropocene -the age of humans- has passed.

Timberborn

Timberborn is a beaver city-building game with a unique architecture system, wooden machinery, dams and water physics. By labelling the game an examples of "lumberpunk" (supported e.g. by the title), Timberborn taps into the current trend of differentiate -punk movements, communicating topicality and a larger world view than just one game.