By Leah Govia, Roberta Hawkins, Eric Nost, and Jennifer J. Silver
Whether inviting careful attention to the lives of individual animals through social media or using artificial intelligence for ecosystem mapping, digital technologies have been a part of nature recovery efforts for many years now. Many ethical considerations, however, accompany such technologies, including concerns about privacy, data ownership, and animal welfare. In our paper, we describe how an interactive fiction game can help people reflect on and navigate some of these ethical considerations.
We developed Ethemblage, an online interactive fiction game that brings users into the story of a fictional conservation organization called Ecolution. Players take on the role of the organization’s new project manager, whom the organization has tasked with conducting project reviews with a robot assistant, Ethie. Together with Ethie, players can travel to five different sites to meet with the Ecolution team and the nonhuman characters affected by Ecolution’s projects. At each site, the player learns about a specific ethical dilemma the human and nonhuman characters are facing. Players then complete the story by selecting one project for Ecolution to prioritize and based on the project selected, the game shows a unique ending.
Through active participation in the story, players pay attention to human and nonhuman bodies, abilities, and experiences, noticing how they influence each other and are interconnected. They also learn how people sometimes miss or leave out certain voices, both human and nonhuman, when making decisions about how to recover nature, what technologies to use, who is included in nature recovery, and what outcomes are desired.
In sum, our paper describes how Ethemblage can support player learning about ethics, technology, and nature. Our game encourages people to consider how technology can be made and implemented in ways that recognize a diversity of needs, both human and nonhuman. Ethemblage and its companion teaching/learning guides are free and available online at https://natureculturepolitics.uoguelph.ca/ethemblage/. We are actively collecting feedback on the use of Ethemblage and would love to hear your feedback!
Relational Thinking 