Consciousness raising seems to be the most pressing task facing any project for environmental sustainability today. A psychoanalytic interpretation of the climate crisis, however, reveals that a far more urgent challenge is recognizing that we might be deriving jouissance, or unconscious enjoyment, from the very worsening of the crisis. This paper contends that videogames are the ideal medium through which to grasp the form that our unconscious enjoyment takes—and, if mobilized against self-destructive capitalism, the emancipatory form our enjoyment could take—in the Anthropocene. Drawing on an analysis of the videogame Donut County, it makes two psychoanalytic interventions in ecocritical theory. The first is that any theory of the climate crisis must account for the subject of the unconscious—not as a nature-dominating individual, but as a hole in material reality. The second is that any project for environmental sustainability must avow the subject’s death- driven enjoyment rather than repress or avoid it.
Benjamin Nicoll is a Chief Investigator in the Digital Media Research Centre and a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies in the School of Communication at the Queensland University of Technology (AUS). Nicoll's research focuses on the critical theory of media and technologies, particularly videogames. His main theoretical influences are psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, critical social theory, and queer theory. He is the author of Minor Platforms in Videogame History (Amsterdam University Press, 2019) and co-author, with Brendan Keogh, of The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software (Palgrave, 2019). He is a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery project, "Artistic Practice in Australian Videogame Development". His research has appeared in journals such as Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Social Media + Society, Games and Culture, and Thesis Eleven.
