This essay offers an ecocritical approach to studying games that accounts for the relationships between nature, technology and culture as they are configured by game design. By performing a reading of rhetoric and technological recapture in Electronic Arts’s (EA’s) The Sims series, the essay untangles how game design and game technology reflect ideologies – sometimes even conflicting ones – about how humans should relate to and interact with nature. This essay also argues that advancements in digital game technology afford designers and players the option to explore and perpetuate more complex and diverse ideologies about humans and nature that move away from anthropocentric and speciesist perspectives.