Random discovery this morning while looking at various academic publications this article called Entomoludology: Arthropods in Video Games by Matan Shelomi, published in American Entomologist, a journal that is not really focused on digital cultures and machine mirabilia.

As its author mentioned in the introduction, this piece is "a cultural entomological review of insects in video games", relying on an inspiring method:

"For this review, I compared all recorded video games from the time of their invention in the 1950s (two decades before 1974’s Pong) until 2018, identifying any with potential entomological references. I mined the video game listings on Wikipedia.org and the comprehensive database of nearly 100,000 games on MobyGames.com for any game with an entomological name or details suggesting entomological content. I checked all games to verify that they actually involved insects; games with “bug” in the title surprisingly often referred to the Volkswagen Beetle. When possible, I scanned online gameplay videos, transcripts, and screenshots for entomologically relevant content. I also found appropriate video games using the entomology-related tropes at tvtropes.org, a wiki-type website that compiles media tropes and attempts to list all examples of each. In this way, I could find games with entomological content even if their content was otherwise inaccessible. Mobile games (games for smartphones and tablets only) and browser games (Internet-only games) were excluded from this review, because their production is unregulated and they are far too numerous to analyze."

This "entomoludology" led the author to an insightful discussions on various topics: arthropods' roles in the games as antagonists, allies or player-protagonists, the importance of insect items and building collections... and perhaps more interstingly, "eusocial insect behaviors" that overlap with science-fiction elements.

Why do I blog this? NPCs and avatars certainly belongs to the machine mirabilia I'm interested in. Besides the methodology presented in this paper, I find it interesting to discover how a certain perspective, the one of an entomology researcher, consider certain dimensions of digital creatures. The paper also reminds me of Alenda Chang's book Playing Nature: Ecology in video-games.