https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i2.048
Playing with the Anthropocene: Human–Animal–Technological Entanglement in the Video Game Stray
NAVANEETHA SURESH
PhD Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus
Abstract: This study investigates how the video game Stray (2022) narrativizes the Anthropocene through a post-human, multi-species lens. By using the perspective of a stray cat navigating a post-apocalyptic, human-absent world, Stray centres a feline protagonist, through which the player embodies and interacts with a decaying technological environment. The non-anthropocentric narrative foregrounds interspecies entanglement, animal agency and technological co-survival challenging the Anthropocene. This paper draws on interdisciplinary frameworks from environmental humanities, animal studies, and post-humanism to analyse how the game reconfigures human-animal-technological relations in a world shaped by ecological collapse.
The analysis is structured around one entanglement mode which is the kinaesthetic embodiment. This examines how feline movement reshapes player experience and disrupts normative human perspectives. The research argues that Stray functions as an “eco-narrative,” which lets the player embody non-human vulnerability, mobility and relational ethics. This facilitates a unique contribution to Anthropocene storytelling by making the spatial and affective dimensions of non-human experience visible.
By assimilating video game analysis into the environmental humanities, this paper adds to interdisciplinary dialogues on how digital media can actually be useful mediums to discuss the question of animal. In doing so, Stray exemplifies how video games, mostly labelled as an anthropocentric medium, can contribute to narrating and reimagining the Anthropocene. This paper argues that such games offer compelling pedagogical and imaginative potential within the environmental humanities by modelling speculative, affective, and multi-species futures.
Keywords: Non-human, Post-humanism, Embodiment, Anthropocene, Video Games, Entanglement
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