Persisting Dualisms in Contemporary Digital Environments: Ethics and Aesthetics in Minecraft’s Pastoral Landscape

This paper examines contemporary digital environments, specifically focusing on video games, to analyze enduring dualistic conceptual biases in the representations of the natural world. It emphasizes the ethical questions and the dualistic and anthropocentric implications prompted by—and entrenched in—a traditional understanding of pastoral imagery surfacing in contemporary video games’ landscape construction, particularly in light of the human–nonhuman relational urges presented by the Anthropocene. The study adopts a transdisciplinary approach, encompassing literary and cultural studies, posthuman philosophy, and media studies, to investigate the challenges and opportunities presented by the pastoral aesthetics in the landscape design of Minecraft, especially as exhibited in the opening sequence of the video game. The research also encourages a critical perspective towards long-standing dichotomies underlying pastoral narratives and their paradoxes, which, beneath an apparent reliance on environmentalist values, often carry latent implications associated with issues such as resource exploitation and nonhuman objectification.