How To Make Money In Zoo Tycoon

journal article

Zootycoon: Capitalism, Nature, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Ethics and the Environment

Published By: Indiana University Press

https://www. jstor .org/stable/40339090

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Abstract

This paper is a cultural studies analysis of the Microsoft computer video game, ZooTycoon™. Through a critical reading using the "circuit of culture," questions of the gamer's subject position, the role of wildlife and implicit and explicit messages about contemporary attitudes toward the environment are explored. Drawing on Susan Davis' book, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (1997), this paper unpacks the virtual theme parks created in Zoo Tycoon™ for their (dis) continuities with Davis's findings. The virtual animals are found to serve as both labor and products in this game that teaches capitalist business strategy and managerial skills. This popular culture text is an example of a product that harnesses the environmental impulse and redirects that impulse back into commodity capitalism.

Journal Information

Ethics & the Environment is an interdisciplinary forum for theoretical and practical articles, discussions, reviews, and book reviews in the broad area encompassed by environmental ethics, including conceptual approaches in ethical theory and ecological philosophy, such as deep ecology and ecological feminism as they pertain to such issues as environmental education and management, ecological economies, and ecosystem health.

Publisher Information

Indiana University Press was founded in 1950 and is today recognized internationally as a leading academic publisher specializing in the humanities and social sciences. As an academic press, our mandate is to serve the world of scholarship and culture as a professional, not-for-profit publisher. We publish books and journals that will matter 20 or even a hundred years from now – titles that make a difference today and will live on into the future through their reverberations in the minds of teachers and writers. IU Press's major subject areas include African, African American, Asian, cultural, Jewish and Holocaust, Middle East, Russian and East European, and women's and gender studies; anthropology, film, history, bioethics, music, paleontology, philanthropy, philosophy, and religion. The Press also features an extensive regional publishing program under its Quarry Books imprint. It is one of the largest public university presses, as measured by titles and income level.