New Article Out: “Metroidvania Ecologies: Exploration and the Environmental Imagination in Hollow Knight and Rain World”, wrote with Marco Caracciolo

In this new article, published on Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, a diamond open-access journal, me and Marco Caracciolo explore the ways in which the characteristics of metroidvania games - such as levels layouts, locking mechanics, power-ups, complicated lore and playable character’s vulnerability - foster environmental imagination in players.

Based on the theory of ecology of perception developed by Gibson, we argue that the peculiar kind of traversal required by metroidvania games foster environmental imagination (following Buell), that is a kind of awareness of the interconnected and interdependent nature of agents within the environment.

You can read it here.