Ludic Fox Tales: Metamodern Hope, Biophilic Play, and Animal Fable Games - Paidia

This paper introduces the ‘animal fable game’ as a distinct mode of storytelling, which offers the human player a simultaneously didactic and whimsical opportunity to step into the paws of a non-human animal protagonist. Drawing on Edward O. Wilson’s idea that humans possess an innate urge to connect with the natural world (i.e. biophilia), it argues that such games function as biophilic playgrounds and engage players in what might be termed ‘biophilic play’. Focusing on ludic fox tales as animal fable successors to the long-standing vulpine narrative tradition, this paper demonstrates how animal fable games achieve this with the help of strategies shaped by the aesthetics of informed naivety characteristic of the presently dominant cultural mood of metamodernism.