Playing the Animal: Imagining the Nonhuman Animal in Two-Dimensional Action and Adventure Games

The unique affordances of computer technologies make video games a useful medium for speculating on nonhuman animals and our relationships with them. Scholars have demonstrated how games as speculative fictions can encourage players to acknowledge animal embodiment and agency as well as how games (mis)represent and challenge real-world human–animal interactions. Still, scholarship about representations of animals in video games remains relatively scarce and primarily focused on specific styles and genres of games despite a plethora of diverse animal character designs. This chapter broadens studies of animals in video games by attending to their designs in two-dimensional action and adventure games, specifically Frogger (1981) and The Plan (2013). By examining these games as works of speculative fiction, this chapter identifies how they imagine the marginalized position of animals in the Anthropocene and reflects on the broader implications of these artifacts for developers creating video games that critically consider animals.