Introduction

“Once upon a time, a naughty fox named Rick was about to commit a little crime,” reads the opening caption of the introductory cutscene in the 2D, 16-bit style action platformer FOX n FORESTS.¹ Reminiscent of one of the earliest known Western animal fables, “The Fox and the Crow” (c. 620–560 B.C.),² in which a cunning fox schemes to obtain the piece of cheese the crow is perched with on a branch, this prologue sets up a similar conflict: the mischievous Rick the Fox, embodied by the player, prepares to feast on Patty the Partridge, while the latter is, unsurprisingly, “outraged”³ by this. However, unlike the original fable’s vulpine protagonist who outsmarts the crow by praising the beauty of the crow’s voice, FOX n FORESTS’s player-character Rick accepts his would-be prey’s enticing offer to save the forest in exchange for “gold, treasures and seasoned meals.”⁴ The player is invited to step into Rick’s paws and fight off an evil force that wishes to enforce a mysterious disastrous Fifth Season. At the end of their journey, the player will uncover that the forest’s Season Tree has been possessed by an evil Withering Witch, who has been “exploiting” the forest and its inhabitants all along. Rather than presenting an anthropocentric narrative of climate saviourism, FOX n FORESTS is a simultaneously didactic and whimsical appeal to the player’s sense of affinity with the natural world. As a contemporary reimagining of the animal fable, it casts the human player as a non-human animal protagonist with the purpose of emphasising, instead, both the empowerment and vulnerability of animals in the face of human exploitation and reminding them that the world is more than human.⁵

This paper identifies the ‘animal fable game’ as an important yet previously overlooked form, which I propose to define as a contemporary mode of storytelling that casts the human player as a non-human animal (whether anthropomorphised or not) within a ludic tale and, through doing so, immerses them in a simultaneously naturalistic and miraculous (game)world. The main recurrent lesson conveyed by such animal fable games is the human player’s rediscovery of being part of a multispecies, more-than-human world.

This paper situates the animal fable game within the enduring (primarily literary) tradition of animal fables and the broader history of animal representation. By doing so, it seeks to expand our understanding of games (digital games in particular) as an integral part of the repertoire of the post-postmodern era, widely recognised in recent cultural theory as metamodernism.⁶ As articulated by its principal theorists, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, the presently dominant cultural mood of metamodernism is defined by “the tension, no, the double-bind, of a modern desire for sens and a postmodern doubt about the sense of it all”; an oscillation “between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.”⁷ The metamodern sensibility shines through in such TV shows as Fleabag (2016–2019)⁸ and The Good Place (2016–2020),⁹ such novels as Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–1995),¹⁰ such video games as Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)¹¹ and Ghost of Tsushima (2020).¹² It emerges as a self-aware search for meaning amidst the meaninglessness of multiplying global crises, a melancholic longing for hope in an increasingly hopeless world.

Drawing upon Vermeulen and van den Akker’s understanding of this metamodern mindset as “informed naivety,”¹³ I would like to explore the return to fabular imagination (as a mode of seeing and interpreting the world associated with narrative naivety and simplification through allegory as an extended metaphor) as one of the defining features of metamodern poetics. This feature may be said to find particular prominence in digital games due to the unique sense of embodiment they offer. Unlike the manifestations of the animal fable in most other media that can only indirectly cast humans as non-human animals, digital games allow players to inhabit their non-human avatars and to inhabit the more-than-human lessons that such an engagement provides. These lessons, however, do not only encourage humility by challenging the centrality of human experience and the anthropocentric mindset in general.¹⁴ They remind us, through play, of the pleasure (rather than the nuisance) of feeling embedded within, and even dependent upon, the more-than-human world: as David Abram defines it, the world of “many-voiced creativity.”¹⁵

To understand the uniquely metamodern type of play that animal fable games invite their human players to engage in, I propose turning to the concept of biophilia. Derived from the Greek words for life and love, the term biophilia (i.e. love of life) was first introduced by social psychologist Erich Fromm and later expanded upon by biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson in his books Biophilia (1984)¹⁶ and The Biophilia Hypothesis (1993; co-edited with Stephen R. Kellert).¹⁷ For Wilson, biophilia constitutes “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.”¹⁸ As further elaborated on by Kellert, it is a “human craving for aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual meaning and satisfaction.”¹⁹ As biophilic creatures, our search for meaning is inherently tied to the world of which we are a part: the better we understand other organisms, the more we value both them and ourselves.²⁰

Coincidentally proposed at the dawn of the metamodern era, such a biophilia hypothesis appears to resonate deeply with metamodern thought: it bridges a scientific understanding (the naturalistic) and a sense of wonder about life (the miraculous). As such, the concept of biophilia lays perfect ground for my hypothesis: as a specifically metamodern mode of storytelling, animal fable games oscillate between the didactic and the whimsical, the naturalistic and the miraculous. In doing so, they function as biophilic playgrounds, i.e. spaces that enable the experiential way of (re-)discovering the world as a more-than-human world,²¹ through what I suggest to call ‘biophilic play.’ Whether conveyed implicitly or explicitly, the purpose of such biophilic play is to remind players of their deeply ingrained affiliation with nature as biophilic creatures.²²

Thus, the purpose of this paper is to add to the ongoing scholarly conversation on ecogames, i.e. games that address environmental themes and promote environmental awareness.²³ Specifically, it seeks to establish the animal fable game as a distinct form within the broader category of ecogames and to delineate the unique form of engagement they offer: biophilic play. By exploring the rootedness of this mode of storytelling in metamodern aesthetics, the paper emphasises the importance of contextualising ludic animal representation within the broader cultural changes that shape contemporary digital media.²⁴ Through examples from selected exemplary titles, I will examine one specific subgroup of animal fable games: vulpine games, which let players assume the perspective of a fox. A cursory search on Steam reveals that, as of 7 August 2025, 1,248 games are associated with the keyword fox. This number includes games associated with foxes in various ways, even if the word fox itself does not appear in their titles. By comparison, the keywords wolf, bear, dog, and cat are linked to 1,374, 2,163, 3,336, and 5,477 games, respectively. While foxes may not be the most prominent creatures in metamodern narratives (this distinction goes to cats), the vulpine narrative tradition is one of the oldest and most culturally significant as to its role in shaping the fabular imagination.²⁵ This makes it especially valuable for examining how the genre of the animal fable is adapted and expanded in the contemporary culture.

The Animal Fable

As succinctly defined by Chris Danta, the animal fable is commonly understood as “a literary mode of thought through which the writer turns toward the lives of other animals in order to understand what it means to be human.”²⁶ One of the distinguishable features of the animal fable is its use – alongside the fairy tale – of “the principles of magical thinking.”²⁷ In its traditional manifestation, the animal fable is often regarded as a naive form of allegory: a markedly laconic story that employs animal characters to convey a double (literal/fantastical and symbolic/didactic) meaning. The symbolic (didactic) meaning in a classic fable is made visible and even reducible to a proverb-like moralising maxim.²⁸ Some of the earliest known Western animal fables, Aesop’s fables (284 in Vernon Jones’s 1912 translation, about 10% of which feature the character of a fox, including “The Fox and the Crow” mentioned above)²⁹ offer moral lessons about human traits and behaviours rather than explorations of actual animals’ minds.

Seen as allegories rather than actual living beings, non-human animals remained archetypal stand-ins for humans for many centuries to come.³⁰ The fox, depicted as a cunning trickster, appeared in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” within his Canterbury Tales (c. 1400)³¹ as well as Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532),³² which advised rulers to embody the fox’s ability to recognise traps when navigating the political landscape. Only at the end of the eighteenth century did Western narratives featuring non-human animals begin – albeit gradually – to move away from the centuries-long tradition of representing animals as allegorical distillations of human qualities.³³ Inspired by the rise of the animal rights movement in the ensuing centuries, depictions of animals grew increasingly naturalistic and concerned with animal welfare. As specified by Lisa Bölinger in her overview of the emergence of animal subjectivity in narrative representation, stories like Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse (1877)³⁴ sought novel narrative methods to draw the public’s attention to the mistreatment of animals and novel ways to evoke interspecies empathy. Often written in the first-person perspective as autobiographies or memoirs, such stories gave animal protagonists a voice to recount their experiences of human-induced suffering.³⁵

In spite of the general departure from the fabular in animal representation,³⁶ the animal fable as a genre was, however, far from obsolete. Moreover, following Chris Danta’s Darwinian argument that “even the boldest Aesopian fable”³⁷ appears to be rooted in ethological observations of animal behavior, we can see that the fable has always been naturalistic. The novelty of the post-Darwinian animal fable, exemplified within the vulpine narrative tradition by David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922),³⁸ lies in its departure from the classic fable’s bipartite structure, which divides a tale set in the animal realm from a moral lesson associated with the human one. As Danta argues, the post-Darwinian animal fable is a biological, scientific fable that merges these two realms into one and “implicates readers in the biological order by forcing them to contemplate and confront the existential fact of their apehood.”³⁹

This paper wishes to trace this evolution of the animal fable to its present-day iterations, which means investigating the ways in which this form has been reinvigorated by the rapid development of new media formats and the changes in the cultural climate. Most commonly described as metamodern in recent cultural theory,⁴⁰ this climate may be said to be characterised by a newly rediscovered yearning for change and meaning amidst multiplying economic, political, and ecological uncertainties: a collective craving for hope in the hopeless world. This yearning is evident, for example, in Wes Anderson’s quirky films, including his 2009 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.⁴¹ As a metamodern phenomenon, quirky cinema, defined by film critic James MacDowell as a sensibility rather than a genre, is marked by an oscillation between knowingness and “charming naïveté,”⁴² ironic apathy and enthusiastic empathy, and a recurring interest in the themes of childhood and innocence.⁴³ As Vermeulen and van den Akker suggest, metamodern artifacts take on the mission of uniting “Reason and the miraculous,”⁴⁴ seriousness and whimsy, but they do so with an awareness of the inherent impossibility of this task. Wes Anderson’s cinematography showcases such a metamodern craving for this self-aware playfulness, “a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism.”⁴⁵ In Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson’s cinematic contribution to the vulpine narrative tradition is both serious and playful in its exploration of the anthropomorphised protagonists’ “true natures and pure talents”⁴⁶ as wild animals. Even more curious, however, is the film’s ingenuous use of a 2D side-scrolling camera perspective to portray this wildness: we cannot but be reminded of 2D platformers when Mr. and Mrs. Fox jump over obstacles and move objects around, solving game-like environmental puzzles, on their way to steal pigeons from Berk’s Farm.⁴⁷

The Animal Fable Game

Inherently playful,⁴⁸ metamodern times, thus, find an ideal avenue for renewing fabular imagination: digital games.⁴⁹ While Wes Anderson’s cinematic contribution to the vulpine narrative tradition testifies to its expansion into various new media, it is in digital games that the metamodern animal fable takes on a distinctive form and acquires cultural weight. A closer look at vulpine games alone reveals the growing popularity of stories that offer human players a didactic yet whimsical opportunity to step into their protagonists’ paws and explore the (game)world as a more-than-human realm.

First of all, the animal fable game retains a key characteristic of its literary predecessors within the Western tradition: it presents a short-form⁵⁰ fictitious story centred on non-human animal protagonists. Like traditional fables, such games combine a simple, entertaining ludonarrative with serious messaging, and construct compact allegories that convey a clear overarching lesson, sometimes even summarised to the player in the form of a maxim (e.g. the reminder that “extinction is forever” in the title of Endling: Extinction is Forever). While most often episodic like their Aesopian predecessors, animal fable games tend to fundamentally favour an open, exploratory structure, either in combination with a fixed and finite narrative arc or as a fully open-ended gaming experience.

Overall, these games may be said to be characterised by two overlapping and recurring motifs:

Motif of intra-active survival, which emphasises the entanglement of human (player and, sometimes, human player-character) and non-human (player-character) agency. In line with Karen Barad’s understanding of intra-activity as a process in which “distinct agencies do not proceed, but rather emerge through, their intra-action,”⁵¹ animal fable games frequently envision more-than-human agency as a mode of being in and with the (game)world. At the more fundamental level of play itself, this dynamic aligns with Sonia Fizek’s elegant theorisation of the entanglement of the very entities of players and games within play as ‘intra-active play’: “Only through and within play do both unfold in a mutual ludic embrace.”⁵² While the motif of intra-active survival is often associated with a more commonly recognised emerging sub-genre of animal survival games, I would like to suggest that games exhibiting it differ significantly from their human-centric counterpart. This distinction is evident in vulpine titles such as Endling: Extinction is Forever,⁵³ Never Alone/Kisima Ingitchuna⁵⁴ and its DLC Never Alone: Foxtales,⁵⁵ The First Tree,⁵⁶ The WILDS.⁵⁷

Motif of re-enchantment,⁵⁸ which is associated with ludic tales whose non-human player-characters are tasked with rediscovering and/or restoring the inherent wondrous beauty of the world, often by countering the negative impacts of human activity. Notable vulpine examples include FOX n FORESTS,⁵⁹ Harmony in the Wild,⁶⁰ Spirit of the North.⁶¹ When it comes to non-human creatures more closely associated with the human realm (e.g. cats, mice, raccoons), this motif often manifests as an awe-inspiring rediscovery of human spaces (urban spaces in particular) through a more-than-human lens. This can be seen in such games as Little Kitty, Big City,⁶² Stray,⁶³ The Spirit and the Mouse,⁶⁴ or Raccoon Tales.⁶⁵

The main differences across animal fable games centered on different species appear to stem both from their protagonists’ culturally constructed associations with either human or non-human spaces and from the actual degree to which the given species is currently integrated into human environments. Playing as a fox, for instance, most often means playing the wilderness (or, as in Endling: Extinction is Forever, playing the consequences of human impact on that wilderness). Meanwhile, playing as a cat, whether domesticated or not, typically involves navigating urban environments. The difference, however, extends beyond the game’s setting and often manifests in the varying degrees to which human-like behaviours (importantly, those likely to be perceived by players as endearing, cute) are mechanically integrated into gameplay. While the cat in Little Kitty, Big City is visually non-anthropomorphic, the game allows players to collect and wear 42 whimsical hats (including ones shaped like a ladybug, apple, banana, cactus, onigiri, turtle, and other types of food and animals). Similarly, in Stray, the player can earn achievements for performing recognisably human-like activities, such as “playing” basketball by rolling a ball into a basket or browsing all available television channels.

By contrast, the mechanical embodiment of non-human behaviours remains largely consistent across games featuring different non-human player-characters. One of the most recurrent mechanics is the ability to produce a species-specific sound by pressing a dedicated button, often accompanied by a quantitative meta-achievement that rewards the repetition of this action: as a cat, the player can meow in Stray (meowing one hundred times unlocks the Steam achievement “A Little Chatty”) and in Little Kitty, Big City (meowing ten times in a row unlocks “What Sweet Music”); as a mouse, the player can squeak in The Spirit and the Mouse (squeaking one hundred times unlocks “OK, I heard you!!”); finally, as a fox, the player can bark in Endling: Extinction is Forever (barking at the Roamer unlocks “A Barking Fox Doesn’t Bite” and barking three times in a row when it is raining results in “Barking in The Rain”).

Biophilic Game

As such, ludic animal tales may be said to invite their human players to engage in biophilic play, a type of play aimed at rediscovering the world as a place of mystery, wonder, and multispecies exuberance. This invitation to partake in biophilic play is an invitation to experience a Baradian entanglement of human and non-human agency. Given the chance to assume the perspective of a non-human creature, the human player is encouraged to experience agency as emerging through this shared action. The player’s agency is no longer merely human, it transforms into a more-than-human mode of being in and with the (game)world.

For instance, the ludic tale of Endling: Extinction is Forever thrusts the human player into a world brought to ecological collapse by humanity as Earth’s last surviving fox. Much of Endling’s gameplay revolves around the nightly routine of leaving the safety of your lair to scavenge for food to sustain yourself and your cubs. However, success in navigating the game’s post-apocalyptic world, which includes managing to keep the cubs alive, is highly dependent on your understanding of your in-game non-human nature and the equally non-human needs of your cubs: using your sense of smell (visualised as a green scent trail) to track the scarce prey, stalking and pouncing to capture it (i.e. using a fox’s hunting technique called “mousing”), barking to direct your cubs or to startle a chicken out of its cage, making sure you return to your lair before dawn, and developing a broader environmental awareness to evade human traps and non-human predators.

The player’s embracement (or even mastery) of their avatar’s nature as a wild animal is further reinforced by a series of meta-achievements that are at once naturalistic in their reflection of animal behaviour and whimsical in their naming: examples of these include such Steam achievements as “Chicken Dinner” (for hunting a chicken for the first time), “A Barking Fox Doesn’t Bite” (for barking at the Roamer), “Tasty” (for entering your lair with a full stomach), “Barking in The Rain” (for barking three times in a row when it is raining), “For a Better Tomorrow” (for learning all cub skills), “Omnivore” (for letting your cubs eat every kind of food in the game). Failure to grasp the dynamics in which your non-human nature controls you and your player actions leads to the inability to sustain the continuously depleting bar of your cubs’ hunger level and may result in their death(s),⁶⁶ an irreversible consequence following, or even haunting, you until the end as a skull icon in the bottom-left corner of the screen, which can be seen in Figure 1. Eerily cute just like the overall visual aesthetics of the game, it becomes the epitome of the simultaneously didactic and whimsical underpinnings of such an animal fable game and the biophilic play it engages its human players in.

Figure 1: The skull icon indicating the death of one of the player-character’s cubs in 'Endling: Extinction is Forever' (Author’s screenshot from 'Endling: Extinction is Forever').

Endling’s lesson in foxness, however, interweaves embodiment of non-human behaviours with emotions that are more intuitively relatable to the human player: the fox the player inhabits is a wild creature struggling for survival, but it is also a mother searching for one of her cubs who has been taken by The Scavenger, a human character later revealed to have lost his own daughter. This affinity between the human and the non-human is conveyed across multiple layers of the game, including its narrative of parenthood (i.e. the search for the player’s avatar’s abducted cub revealed in parallel to the abductor’s own story of loss), its care-based mechanics (such as feeding the cubs, teaching them new skills, or soothing them when they are frightened), and the encouragement of care-based actions within the game’s achievement system (such as teaching all cub skills, regularly petting the cubs, or managing to keep them all alive by the end of the game).

Interestingly, while Endling’s vulpine protagonist is non-anthropomorphic, its representation retains echoes of the cunning traditionally associated with foxes. To distract the Furrier, a hatchet-wielding human who poses one of the main threats to the game’s mother fox, the player can leave claw marks at certain spots “to mislead” (as phrased in the English version of the game) this human villain about their location. Unlike in Aesop’s fables, however, the fox’s (and, by extension, the player’s) cunning is tied to survival rather than trickery for its own sake. At the same time, associations of foxes with the human-like quality of deceit are still sometimes superimposed by players themselves onto their non-human avatar, which reflects a deeper ingrained cultural bias against this animal. For instance, these attitudes surface in YouTubers’ playthroughs of Endling in such remarks as: “I’m a fox, I don’t really care so much [about stealing food from a badger]. Finders keepers”.⁶⁷

The biophilic play associated with animal fable games emerges as an embodied interaction (or, more accurately, intra-action) with the game(world), experienced through the perspective of a non-human avatar.⁶⁸ This avatarial embodiment is often emphasised by the on-screen presence of the controlled creature’s body, typically viewed by the player at a slight remove. An interesting example of this can be found in The First Tree, a game centered around two intertwined stories: a story of a man reflecting on his relationship with his father (presented through subtitled voice-over conversations with his partner) and a story of a fox searching for her family (revealed through the player’s exploration of the (game)world). Curiously, the fox, embodied by the player, turns out to be the fox from the game’s human protagonist’s dream. Such a revelation is highlighted through the human narrator’s admission of embodied affiliation with the fox from his dream, the fox controlled by the player: “The fox looked high and low, searching for any sign of her cubs. Points of light showed the way to this ancient tree. It was as if each one had a story to tell all their own. The land was trying to tell my story too. I felt like I was right behind her the whole time.” As such, it reawakens the player to the wondrous texture of the game as text and the multimodal language it uses to convey meaning. But even more importantly, it posits the human player’s embodiment of a non-human character as a dreamlike, more-than-human experience.

“With no widespread common language between species,” argues Joshua Schuster, “the gap between humans and animals needs to be traversed by any available means, including a constructive use of fantasy.”⁶⁹ A constant reminder of embodied animality, the on-screen presence of the non-human animal body functions as a ludic implementation of the rhetorical device of zoomorphism, i.e. a device that metaphorically links human beings to other animals. The human player is invited to imagine as if they were a non-human animal. However, unlike post-Darwinian fables, which seek to confront readers with their own animality/“apehood,”⁷⁰ these games play with the narrative perspective to uncover the individuality and subjectivity of non-human entities themselves, in a manner partially reminiscent of nineteenth-century autobiographical animal stories.

An intriguing emergent trend exemplifying this interest in animal subjectivity is the option, offered to human players, to customise their non-human animal avatar’s body. For example, as Figure 2 demonstrates, the early access game The WILDS not only gives its players the opportunity to decide which wild animal to play as,⁷¹ but also provides a selection of various subspecies.

Figure 2: The character customisation interface in 'The WILDS' (Author’s screenshot from 'The WILDS').

Specifically, for the fox as a player-character, players can select from ten distinct subspecies, each characterised by variations in fur colouration. While this customisation is limited to altering “skins,” i.e. aesthetic/cosmetic features that modify the avatar’s appearance without influencing gameplay, it nevertheless marks a significant shift away from generic portrayal of animals in video games.⁷² Enabling such individualisation in a didactic yet playful manner, The WILDS encourages reflection on both the individuality and diversity of our non-human neighbours. As seen in Figure 3, a similar option to customise the appearance of the vulpine player-character’s cubs is presented to the player at the beginning of Endling: Extinction is Forever as well.

Figure 3: Customisation of vulpine player-character’s cubs at the beginning of 'Endling: Extinction is Forever' (Author’s screenshot from 'Endling: Extinction is Forever').

Such customisation also plays into the animal fable game’s uniquely metamodern poetics of quirky meta-cuteness, i.e. poetics meant to “evoke childlike innocence and simplicity” within the nevertheless serious context.⁷³ Biophilic play, as quirky meta-cute play, re-enchants non-human creatures by revealing the eerily fascinating appeal of their “true nature” (in Wes Anderson’s terms of reference). Their portrayal is neither purely naturalistic nor fantastical, but, rather, oscillates between these two poles and appears to trigger positive, eco-appreciative emotional reactions in human players. For example, YouTube playthroughs of Endling: Extinction is Forever sometimes include commentary on the perceived cuteness of the characteristics of a fox as a wild animal: “I can pick up my cubs, that’s so cute,”⁷⁴ “I can bark […] That’s cute,”⁷⁵ “[Laughing about catching fish for the first time] I got it.”⁷⁶

Similarly, the YouTuber VivixxFox’s twenty-minute-long recording of playing The WILDS as a fox is permeated by an appreciation of such a simultaneously naturalistic and fantastical meta-cuteness of its vulpine player-character: “Oh my goodness, look at the floppy ears,”⁷⁷ “Such a little scamper,”⁷⁸ “Such a cutie,”⁷⁹ “Yum-yum [imitating the game’s chewing sounds], that sounds so good,”⁸⁰ etc. In spite of the fox being one of the more vulnerable player-characters within the game (advertised as an animal simulator survival game), it does not present wilderness as an exclusively hostile environment. More reminiscent of the Thoreauvian tradition of nature writing, The WILDS, rather, offers a neo-romantic re-enchantment of wilderness as an eerily cosy, quirkily meta-cute refuge from civilisation.

All the more significant in an era where so little remains unknown, the innocent and childlike rediscovery of the world as a place of wonder is as experiential as it is linguistic. In animal fable games, language (i.e. a lens through which we interpret reality) becomes a tool of (re-)interpreting, or even (re-)constructing, the (game)world as a more-than-human world. The human player’s embodiment of their non-human avatar gets enhanced through the common strategy of addressing the player directly.

Figure 4: The loading screen in 'Endling: Extinction is Forever' (Author’s screenshot from 'Endling: Extinction is Forever').

For instance, even though Endling: Extinction is Forever’s gameplay is largely a wordless experience from the perspective of a non-anthropomorphic fox, the human player’s embodied foxness is reinforced through loading screen tips that directly address them with the help of the second-person pronoun you, as can be seen in Figure 4.

Another linguistic strategy employed by ludic fox tales consists in a uniquely whimsical (re-)invention of the (game)world as an animal-centric world through animal-related puns and jokes.

Figure 5: The pause menu in 'The WILDS' (Author’s screenshot from 'The WILDS').

The English version of The WILDS, as depicted in Figure 5, displays the word pawsed when you pause the game, which constitutes a play on words of similar sound (paw and paused). In its turn, FOX n FORESTS offers such fox-themed puns as foxtastic (play on the English words fox and fantastic) and to outfox (play on the association of this English verb with foxes). Within the biophilic playground of the digital game as text, its multimodal language itself evokes the (game)world that the human player gets immersed in as a markedly more-than-human world. Such an integral element of digital games as the loading screen is just one of the many elements that get recurrently zoomorphised in a variety of fascinating ways: in The First Tree, the traditional horizontal progress bar is supplemented by an animated image of a trail of paw prints; in Endling: Extinction is Forever, the progress indicator displayed on the loading screen is portrayed as an animated image of a fox tracking prey.

By infusing all its available layers with a more-than-human perspective, these ludic tales repeatedly emphasise the continuity between species and equally repeatedly remind us of our kinship with other animals.

Conclusion

Research indicates that optimistic and uplifting messaging may be more effective in promoting pro-environmental, sustainable behaviours than pessimistic reminders of the dire state of the planet.⁸¹ What I have attempted to demonstrate in this paper is the emergence of the animal fable game as an important new mode of cultural expression forged by such a collective craving for hope within the increasingly hopeless world. Defined by the return to fabular imagination within the contemporary age of uncertainty, these games are, however, naive in a uniquely self-aware way: through simultaneously didactic and whimsical play, they seek to reconnect us with our innate biophilic tendencies and, specifically, with our ability to thrive through a sense of affiliation with other living organisms. Innocent yet informed in their aesthetics, animal fable games do not ignore humanity’s environmental impact, but, rather, recurrently deliver one simple message: acknowledging that the world is more than human is an important step towards imagining a more harmonious future for our planet.

Funding Acknowledgements

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project No.: 522053894.

Media Index

Games

Alblune: The Spirit and the Mouse (Microsoft Windows). USA: Armor Games Studios 2022.

BlueTwelve Studio. Stray (Microsoft Windows). France: BlueTwelve Studio 2022.

Bonus Level Entertainment: FOX n FORESTS (Microsoft Windows). Germany: EuroVideo Medien GmbH 2018.

Double Dagger Studio: Little Kitty, Big City (Microsoft Windows). USA: Double Dagger Studio 2024.

Echomune: Raccoon Tales (Microsoft Windows). N.A.: Echomune 2022.

Gluten Free Games: The WILDS [Early Access] (Microsoft Windows). USA: Gluten Free Games 2022.

Herobeat Studios: Endling: Extinction is Forever (Microsoft Windows). Germany: HandyGames 2022.

Infuse Studio: Spirit of the North (Microsoft Windows). UK: Merge Games 2020.

Lumo Creations: Harmony in the Wild [Demo version] (Microsoft Windows). Finland: Lumo Creations 2023.

Rockstar Games: Red Dead Redemption 2 (Microsoft Windows). USA: Rockstar Games 2018.

Sucker Punch Productions: Ghost of Tsushima (Microsoft Windows). USA: Sony Interactive Entertainment 2020.

Upper One Games, E-Line Media: Never Alone/Kisima Ingitchuna (Microsoft Windows). USA: E-Line Media 2014.

Upper One Games, E-Line Media: Never Alone: Foxtales [DLC] (Microsoft Windows). USA: E-Line Media 2015.

Wehle: The First Tree (Microsoft Windows). USA: David Wehle 2017.

Films, Television Series, and YouTube Videos

Anderson, Wes, director: Fantastic Mr. Fox. USA: 20th Century Fox 2009. Film.

CheesyBeeps, YouTuber: A STORY OF SURVIVAL – Endling: Extinction is Forever (FULL GAME). YouTube 2022. Video. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6eG55d62Hw> [19.07.2025].

DanQ8000, YouTuber: Endling: Extinction is Forever – Gameplay Walkthrough (FULL GAME). YouTube 2022. Video. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7p20rel4vM> [19.07.2025].

Schur, Michael, creator: The Good Place. USA: NBC 2016–2020. Television series (4 seasons).

VivixxFox, YouTuber: Escaping danger as a little fox in The Wilds. YouTube 2023. Video. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPA0EPRBP38> [19.07.2025].

Waller-Bridge, Phoebe, creator: Fleabag. UK: BBC Three, BBC One 2016–2019. Television series (2 seasons).

Texts

Aesop: Aesop’s Fables. Translated by Vernon Jones. London, England: Heinemann; New York, NY, USA: Doubleday, Page & Company 1912.

Abram, David: On the Origin of the Phrase ‘More-Than-Human’. In: Rodríguez-Garavito, César. (Ed.): More Than Human Rights. An Ecology of Law, Thought, and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing. New York, NY, USA: NYU Law 2024, pp. 341–347.

Barad, Karen: Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London, England: Duke University Press 2007.

Bennett, Jane: The Enchantment of Modern Life. Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, New Jersey; Oxford, England: Princeton University Press 2001.

Bölinger, Lisa: Animal Subjectivities and Anthropocentrism in Richard Adams’ Watership Down. In: Reitemeier, Frauke (Ed.): Refractions. Göttingen, Germany: Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2022, pp. 95–180.

Caracciolo, Marco: Animal Mayhem Games and Nonhuman-Oriented Thinking. In: Game Studies. 21, 1 (2021). <https://gamestudies.org/2101/articles/caracciolo> [19.07.2025].

Cengiz, Canan; Boz, Aybuke Ozge: Biophilic Playgrounds as Playscapes in Child-Nature Interaction. In: International Journal of Scientific and Technological Research. 5, 12 (2019), pp. 216–226. <https://www.iiste.org/Journals/index.php/JSTR/article/view/50568> [19.07.2025].

Chang, Alenda Y.: Playing Nature. Ecology in Video Games. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press 2019.

Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales. New York, NY, USA: Duffield & Company 1914.

Danta, Chris: Animal Fables after Darwin. Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor. Cambridge, UK; New York, NY, USA; Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press 2018.

Dember, Greg: After Postmodernism. Eleven Metamodern Methods in the Arts. In Medium. 17.04.2018. <https://medium.com/what-is-metamodern/after-postmodernism-eleven-metamodern-methods-in-the-arts-767f7b646cae> [19.07.2025].

Dempsey, Brendan: [Re]construction. Metamodern ‘Transcendence’ and the Return of Myth. 21.09.2014. <https://www.metamodernism.com/2014/10/21/reconstruction-metamodern-transcendence-and-the-return-of-myth/>[19.07.2025].

Elick, Catherine: Talking Animals in Children’s Fiction. A Critical Study. Jefferson, North Carolina, USA: McFarland 2015.

Farca, Gerald: Farming a Cosy Utopia. A Regenerative Escape to Simpler Times. In 2023: Conference Proceedings of DiGRA 2023 Conference: Limits and Margins of Games Settings. 0, 0 (2023), pp. 1–24. <https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/1920> [19.07.2025].

Fizek, Sonia: Playing at a Distance. Borderlands of Video Game Aesthetic. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: MIT Press 2022.

Fuchs, Michael: Playing (With) the Non-Human. The Animal Avatar in Bear Simulator. In: Mengozzi, Chiara (Ed.): Outside the Anthropological Machine: Crossing the Human-Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies. New York, NY, USA: Routledge 2020, pp. 261–274.

Garnett, David: Lady into Fox. New York, NY, USA: Alfred A. Knopf 1923.

Johnson, T. W.: Far Eastern Fox Lore. In: Asian Folklore Studies. 33, 1 (1974), pp. 35–68. <https://doi.org/10.2307/1177503> [19.07.2025].

Kellert, Stephen R.: Introduction. In: Kellert, Stephen R.; Wilson, Edward O. (Ed.): The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington, D.C., USA; Covelo, California, USA: Island Press / Shearwater Books 1993, pp. 20–30.

Kellert, Stephen R.; Wilson, Edward O., editors: The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington, D.C., USA; Covelo, California, USA: Island Press / Shearwater Books 1993.

MacDowell, J: Notes on Quirky. In: Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism. 1, 1 (2010), pp. 1–16. <https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/film/movie/contents/notes_on_quirky.pdf> [19.07.2025].

MacDowell, James: Wes Anderson, Tone and the Quirky Sensibility. In: New Review of Film and Television Studies. 10, 1 (2012), pp. 6–27. <https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2012.628227> [19.07.2025].

Machiavelli, Niccolò: The Prince. Translated by Luigi Ricci. London, England: Oxford University Press 1921.

Murakami, Haruki: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Translated by Jay Rubin. London, England: Vintage 2003.

op de Beke, Laura; et al., editors: Ecogames. Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press 2024.

Raessens, Joost: The Ludification of Culture. In Fuchs, Mathias; Fizek, Sonia; Ruffino, Paolo; Schrape, Niklas: Rethinking Gamification. Lüneburg, Germany: meson press 2014, pp. 91–114.

Schaffner, Dorothea; Demarmels, Sascha; Jüttner, Uta: Promoting Biodiversity. Do Consumers Prefer Feelings, Facts, Advice or Appeals? In: Journal of Consumer Marketing. 32, 4 (2015), pp. 266–277. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JCM-11-2014-1220> [19.07.2025].

Schuster, Joshua: The Fable, the Moral, and the Animal. Reconsidering the Fable in Animal Studies with Marianne Moore’s Elephants. In Dubino, Jeanne; Rashidian, Ziba; Smyth, Andrew: Representing the Modern Animal in Culture. New York, NY, USA: Palgrave Macmillan 2014, pp. 137–154.

Sewell, Anna: Black Beauty. The Autobiography of a Horse. New York, NY, USA: World Publishing 1972.

Spencer, Jane: Creating Animal Experience in Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative. In: Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. 33, 4 (2010), pp. 469–486. <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2010.00318.x> [19.07.2025].

Tyler, Tom: Game. Animals, Video Games, and Humanity. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press 2022.

Uther, Hans-Jörg: The Fox in World Literature. Reflections on a ‘Fictional Animal’ In: Asian Folklore Studies. 65, 2 (2006), pp. 133–60. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030396> [19.07.2025].

Vermeulen, Timotheus; van den Akker, Robin: Notes on Metamodernism. In: Journal of Aesthetics & Culture. 2, 1 (2010). <https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677> [19.07.2025].

Vindt, Lidiya; Gelfand, Miriam; Parrott, Ray: The Fable as Literary Genre. In: Ulbandus Review 5 (1987), pp. 88–108. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/25748090> [19.07.2025].

Wilson, Edward O.: Biophilia. Cambridge, MA, USA; London, England: Harvard University Press 1984.

Wilson, Edward O.: Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic. In: Kellert, Stephen R.; Wilson, Edward O. (Ed.): The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington, D.C., USA; Covelo, California, USA: Island Press / Shearwater Books 1993, pp. 31–41.

Images

Cover Image: The loading screen in Endling: Extinction is Forever (Author’s screenshot).

Figure 1: The skull icon indicating the death of one of the player-character’s cubs in Endling: Extinction is Forever (Author’s screenshot).

Figure 2: The character customisation interface in The WILDS (Author’s screenshot).

Figure 3: Customisation of vulpine player-character’s cubs at the beginning of Endling: Extinction is Forever (Author’s screenshot from Endling: Extinction is Forever).

Figure 4: The loading screen in Endling: Extinction is Forever (Author’s screenshot).

Figure 5: The pause menu in The WILDS (Author’s screenshot).

1. Bonus Level Entertainment: FOX n FORESTS. 2018.[↩]
2. Aesop: Aesop’s Fables. 1912, p. 6.[↩]
3. As the next caption within introductory cutscene narrates, “Patty the partridge was outraged, told Rick that she doesn’t taste good and that he should look for some other food”; see Bonus Level Entertainment: FOX n FORESTS. 2018.[↩]
4. In the first scripted sequence featuring Rick, Patty, and the Season Tree, Rick announces that he does not do anything without a reward and wants “gold, treasures and seasoned meals” for his help; see Bonus Level Entertainment: FOX n FORESTS. 2018.[↩]
5. This paper builds upon David Abram’s understanding of the more-than-human world as a vibrant realm of which the human is only a part, and, more specifically, the scholar’s use of this term as a means of overcoming the notional “flatten[ing of] all other species into the passive backdrop of human life”; see Abram: On the Origin of the Phrase ‘More-Than-Human’. 2024, p. 342.[↩]
6. Vermeulen and van den Akker: Notes on Metamodernism. 2010. <https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677> [19.07.2025].[↩]
7. Vermeulen and van den Akker: Notes on Metamodernism. 2010. <https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677> [19.07.2025].[↩]
8. Waller-Bridge: Fleabag. 2016–2019.[↩]
9. Schur: The Good Place. 2016–2020.[↩]
10. Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. 2003.[↩]
11. Rockstar Games: Red Dead Redemption 2. 2018.[↩]
12. Sucker Punch Productions: Ghost of Tsushima. 2020.[↩]
13. Vermeulen and van den Akker: Notes on Metamodernism. 2010. <https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677> [19.07.2025].[↩]
14. Cf. David Abram’s suggestion that the current geological epoch should be called “the Humilocene – the Age of Humility”; see Abram: On the Origin of the Phrase ‘More-Than-Human’. 2024, p. 346. Emphasis in the original.[↩]
15. Abram: On the Origin of the Phrase ‘More-Than-Human’. 2024, p. 342.[↩]
16. Wilson: Biophilia. 1984.[↩]
17. Kellert and Wilson, editors: The Biophilia Hypothesis. 1993.[↩]
18. Wilson: Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic. 1993, p. 31.[↩]
19. Kellert: Introduction. 1993, p. 20. My emphasis.[↩]
20. Wilson: Biophilia. 1984, p. 2.[↩]
21. The biophilia hypothesis has found significant application in urban planning and design, especially in the design of children’s playgrounds. Among other things, biophilic playgrounds are envisioned as spaces where “[n]atural elements and materials provide open ended play opportunities that support creative discoveries”; see Cengiz and Boz: Biophilic Playgrounds as Playscapes in Child-Nature Interaction. 2019, p. 216. <https://www.iiste.org/Journals/index.php/JSTR/article/view/50568> [19.07.2025].[↩]
22. Cf. Gerald Farca’s pertinent concept of regenerative play that highlights the therapeutic potential of digital games as well as their affective power to engage players in environmental issues (e.g. farming games as utopian narratives); see Farca: Farming a Cosy Utopia. 2023. <https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/1920> [19.07.2025].[↩]
23. Cf. Chang: Playing Nature. 2019; Op de Beke et al., editors: Ecogames. 2024.[↩]
24. Cf. Caracciolo: Animal Mayhem Games and Nonhuman-Oriented Thinking. 2021. <https://gamestudies.org/2101/articles/caracciolo> [19.07.2025]; Fuchs: Playing (With) the Non-Human. 2020; Tyler: Game. 2022.[↩]
25. Uther: The Fox in World Literature. 2006, p. 136. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030396> [19.07.2025].[↩]
26. Danta: Animal Fables after Darwin. 2018, p. 191.[↩]
27. Danta: Animal Fables after Darwin. 2018, p. 65.[↩]
28. Vindt et al.: The Fable as Literary Genre. 1987, p. 89. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/25748090> [19.07.2025].[↩]
29. Aesop: Aesop’s Fables. 1912.[↩]
30. While this paper primarily draws upon the Western cultural tradition as chiefly shaped by Greco-Roman thought, it is essential to acknowledge the archetypal nature of the image of the fox and its specific recurrent, intercultural association with slyness, as well as its popularity as a “vehicle of didactic intentions of various kinds” across cultures; see Uther: The Fox in World Literature. 2006, p. 136. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030396> [19.07.2025]. For a succinct account of the role of the fox in world literature, see Uther: The Fox in World Literature. 2006. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030396> [19.07.2025]; for a discussion of East Asian “fox lore,” see Johnson: Far Eastern Fox Lore. 1974. <https://doi.org/10.2307/1177503>.[↩]
31. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 1914.[↩]
32. Machiavelli: The Prince. 1921, pp. 69–70.[↩]
33. Cf. Bölinger: Animal Subjectivities. 2022; Elick: Talking Animals in Children’s Fiction. 2015; Spencer: Creating Animal Experience in Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative. 2010. <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2010.00318.x> [19.07.2025].[↩]
34.   Sewell: Black Beauty. 1972.[↩]
35. Bölinger: Animal Subjectivities. 2022, p. 95; see also See also Elick: Talking Animals in Children’s Fiction. 2015.[↩]
36. Spencer: Creating Animal Experience in Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative. 2010, p. 470. <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2010.00318.x> [19.07.2025].[↩]
37. Danta: Animal Fables after Darwin. 2018, p. 42.[↩]
38. Garnett: Lady into Fox. 1923. [↩]
39. Danta: Animal Fables after Darwin. 2018, p. 19.[↩]
40. Vermeulen and van den Akker: Notes on Metamodernism. 2010. <https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677> [19.07.2025].[↩]
41. Anderson: Fantastic Mr. Fox. 2009.[↩]
42. MacDowell: Notes on Quirky. 2010, p. 13. <https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/film/movie/contents/notes_on_quirky.pdf> [19.07.2025]. Emphasis in the original.[↩]
43. Cf. MacDowell: Wes Anderson, Tone and the Quirky Sensibility. 2012. <https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2012.628227> [19.07.2025].[↩]
44. Vermeulen and van den Akker: Notes on Metamodernism. 2010. <https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677> [19.07.2025].[↩]
45. Vermeulen and van den Akker: Notes on Metamodernism. 2010. <https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677> [19.07.2025].[↩]
46. Anderson: Fantastic Mr. Fox. 2009, 00:59:18–00:59:22.[↩]
47. Anderson: Fantastic Mr. Fox. 2009, 00:03:00–00:03:44.[↩]
48. Cf. Joost Raessens’s recognition of the centrality of play/playfulness in contemporary culture and the scholar’s assessment of the “ludification of culture”; see Raessens: The Ludification of Culture. 2014.[↩]
49. While in line with the broader metamodern resurgence of the archetypal drive, this return to the fable as a concise, instructional imaginative form differs from the return of myth, which involves the cumulative construction of a totalising, world-ordering narrative (Dempsey 2014). The rise of fabular imagination may be seen in the increasing prominence of short-form storytelling with didactic undertones beyond digital games: for example, in the finite structure of miniseries that have largely displaced long-form television, or in the compressed allegorical force of short-form video content on such social media platforms as Instagram or TikTok, often distilled into a maxim; cf. Dempsey: [Re]construction. 2014. <https://www.metamodernism.com/2014/10/21/reconstruction-metamodern-transcendence-and-the-return-of-myth/> [19.07.2025]. [↩]
50. Such animal fable games typically have an average playtime ranging from 1 to 10 hours.[↩]
51. Barad: Meeting the Universe Halfway. 2007, p. 33.[↩]
52. Fizek: Playing at a Distance. 2022, pp. 67–68.[↩]
53. Herobeat Studios: Endling: Extinction is Forever. 2022.[↩]
54. Upper One Games, E-Line Media: Never Alone/Kisima Ingitchuna. 2014.[↩]
55. Upper One Games, E-Line Media: Never Alone: Foxtales [DLC]. 2015.[↩]
56. Wehle: The First Tree. 2017.[↩]
57. Gluten Free Games: The WILDS [Early Access]. 2022.[↩]
58. The notion of (re-)enchantment is understood here in Jane Bennett’s terms of reference as adopted into discussions of the metamodern sensibility: as “the experiences of wonder and surprise that endure alongside a cynical world of business as usual, nature as manmade, and affect as the effect of commercial strategy”; see Bennett: The Enchantment of Modern Life. 2001, p. 8.[↩]
59. Bonus Level Entertainment: FOX n FORESTS. 2018.[↩]
60. Lumo Creations: Harmony in the Wild [Demo version]. 2023.[↩]
61. Infuse Studio: Spirit of the North. 2020.[↩]
62. Double Dagger Studio: Little Kitty, Big City. 2024.[↩]
63. BlueTwelve Studio: Stray. 2022.[↩]
64. Alblune: The Spirit and the Mouse. 2022.[↩]
65. Echomune: Raccoon Tales. 2022.[↩]
66. Curiously enough, the only way to escape such an intra-active constitution of agency involves either re-starting the entire game or loading from the most recent checkpoint.[↩]
67. CheesyBeeps: A STORY OF SURVIVAL – Endling: Extinction is Forever (FULL GAME). 2022, 00:25:15–00:25:20. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6eG55d62Hw> [19.07.2025].[↩]
68. Cf. Michael Fuchs’ curious assessment of animal avatars in video games (using the example of Bear Simulator) through the distinctly postmodern lens of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of becoming-animal and the scholar’s conclusion of the discomforting nature of encountering the non-human; see Fuchs: Playing (With) the Non-Human. 2020.[↩]
69. Schuster: The Fable, the Moral, and the Animal. 2014, 138.[↩]
70. Danta: Animal Fables after Darwin. 2018, p. 19.[↩]
71. So far, The WILDS allows its players to adopt the perspective of one of the following wildlife species: wolf, bear, boar, cougar, deer, eagle, fox, moose, raccoon, and raven.[↩]
72. Cf. Tyler: Game. 2022.[↩]
73. Dember: After Postmodernism. 2018. <https://medium.com/what-is-metamodern/after-postmodernism-eleven-metamodern-methods-in-the-arts-767f7b646cae> [19.07.2025].[↩]
74. CheesyBeeps: A STORY OF SURVIVAL – Endling: Extinction is Forever (FULL GAME). 2022, 00:39:00–00:39:10. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6eG55d62Hw> [19.07.2025].[↩]
75. CheesyBeeps: A STORY OF SURVIVAL – Endling: Extinction is Forever (FULL GAME). 2022, 00:50:00–00:50:10. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6eG55d62Hw> [19.07.2025].[↩]
76. DanQ8000: Endling: Extinction is Forever – Gameplay Walkthrough (FULL GAME). 2022, 00:15:57–00:15:58. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7p20rel4vM> [19.07.2025].[↩]
77. VivixxFox: Escaping danger as a little fox in The Wilds. 2023, 00:01:46–00:01:50. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPA0EPRBP38> [19.07.2025].[↩]
78. VivixxFox: Escaping danger as a little fox in The Wilds. 2023, 00:01:53–00:01:54. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPA0EPRBP38> [19.07.2025].[↩]
79. VivixxFox: Escaping danger as a little fox in The Wilds. 2023, 00:02:06. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPA0EPRBP38> [19.07.2025].[↩]
80. VivixxFox: Escaping danger as a little fox in The Wilds. 2023, 00:07:40–00:07:42. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPA0EPRBP38> [19.07.2025].[↩]
81. Schaffner et al.: Promoting Biodiversity. 2015. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JCM-11-2014-1220> [19.07.2025].[↩]