Meadows and Coal Mines

Popular media are prolific at presenting everyday lives, routines, characters, atmospheres and politics through their aesthetic und ludo-narrative game design. Players get immersed in worlds, previously obscure and unknown. The games “Thank Goodness You’re Here” (Coal Supper – Will Todd ) and “Mundaun” (Hidden Fields – Michel Ziegler) both present unique perspectives on specific cultural spaces, historical periods as well as their respective structural feelings. The former places the player in a humoristic post-industrial English town and the latter in a rural Grisons farmer village with its underlying Folkhorror.

As perspectives on the world, Ethnographic studies try to immerse oneself in a chosen field of research, perusing its texts and talking to its subjects. In this process a text emerges that is filled with microscopic and structural analysis as well as the reflection of the researcher’s positionality in the field. Be it videogames or ethnographies: Both forms of media deal with the difficulty of closeness to the specific field, the production of knowledge on it, and aesthetic decisions that try to capture it.

How can we connect both forms of aesthetic media as ways of understanding the everyday life as well as opening up discussions surrounding those lives?