Our Artificial Wilderness: Virtual Beauty & Ecological Decay

The 1990s and early 2000s popularised Massive Multiplayer Online Games, or MMOs. Games that featured open, virtual worlds in which a player can freely explore and approach objectives and whose narrative is drawn from the environment and game mechanics. An open world game can be single or multiplayer, but it relies on interactions beyond the main game components or storyline.

Open world games are extremely valuable. Last decade, a handful of open world video games together were amongst the highest grossing properties across all forms of entertainment. They are the direct descendants of the early "online world" entrepreneurs who believed that people would spend time in digital spaces -- gaming, shopping, socialising and interacting. The genre of each game shapes how people interact inside them. Some worlds centre primarily around combat or PvP (Player versus Player) competition but for games that focus on the world itself, players are encouraged to engage with the environment and each other on more diverse terms. For more popular games, these interactions necessitated bridges into the real world. Players would create content and avatars outside of the digital spaces and import them into the game.

Amongst the countless examples worldwide, there are three that capture this bridge between the real and virtual worlds. All have taken place in the last ten years. Although they are drawn from vastly different cultures, they all illustrate how meaningful and misunderstood the bridged space is.

Minecraft is possibly the most well-known and culturally significant open world game ever made. Since its release in 2009, Minecraft now influences a second generation of players worldwide. Minecraft refined a simple set of mechanics for exploration, procedural world generation and experimentation, and wrapped this in a calming, non threatening aesthetic. The mechanics of Minecraft spark decentralized creativity and self-determination in an artificial space that mimics many of the environmental components that make up our own planet. When combined with a simple in-game ecological ruleset, such as player hunger, animals and realistic proceedual world generation, Minecraft’s potential was fully realised. With no context, players start a new game of Minecraft with nothing and inhabit an anonymous character. From here, they form identity through self expression and interaction with others, then build tools, gather food, find shelter and explore the vast generative landscape.

Minecraft is a roguelike game. Encounters with hostile creatures - such as the iconic Creeper - became defining cultural artifacts during the 2010s. Players drew narratives both from their interactions with each other, and the unexpected surprises thrown at them from the game’s systems. As a result, Minecraft feels somehow alive, and its visual limitations give way to a convincing and immersive, meaningful world that continues to generate untold numbers of shared, profound experiences.

Minecraft’s popularity has endured over the decade. It ebbs and flows generationally, resurging in 2019 after a mid-decade dip. In search of more customisation and control over their worlds, players teach themselves rudimentary system administrator skills in the real world to set up and administer their own customised servers. Teenagers learn the basics of networking and software modding, administer their own spaces and social groups form within them.

With a youthful demographic, many of these servers are transient that are discarded as players come of age and abandon the game. In this timeline, where computing power is abundant and cheap, this leads to a poignant and fragile phenomenon. Thousands of servers run persistent Minecraft worlds, each a machine slotted away in a server farm, abandoned but still somehow online thanks to an overlooked monthly single digit charge on a parent’s credit card.

By the end of the decade, the open world genre had matured, buoyed by developments in hardware and refinement of the mechanics inherent in a world of simulated freedom. Designers had a deeper understanding what was possible and meaningful, having moved beyond the narrow scope of combat-based 2000s MMOs and stiff Second-Life virtual worlds. Players increasingly found rewarding experiences in semi-generative narrative structures that relied on complex simulation systems, technical and artistic flair, and player imagination.

In late 2018, Rockstar published the highly anticipated Red Dead Redemption 2, an open-world masterpiece that enjoyed the largest opening weekend in the history of digital entertainment. On the surface, its mass appeal seemed unlikely: Set in the early 1900s, Red Dead Redemption 2 is primarily a single player experience that tells the story of a comraderie of bandits as they travel across four fictional states in the American South and Midwestern wildernesses. Unlike traditional action games - fast paced, chaotic and adrenaline-fuelled - the pace of Red Dead Redemption is substantially slower, meditative, clumsy. Players must negotiate this vast landscape and are encouraged to roleplay in this world, crafting ammunition, sheltering from the weather, or browsing for supplies in intricately detailed general stores.

By far Red Dead Redemption’s biggest drawcard is its immersion. Eight years in the making, the game is breathtakingly beautiful – full of soaring landscapes, sunrises and sunsets, distant lightning, wildlife, a living, breathing, teeming world. In this place, each second of its eight years of development had been seized upon and no detail was spared – right down to the insects in the moonlight. Each mechanic is designed to compel you into this world, to inhabit this blurred space between civilization and wilderness.

The vivid world of Red Dead Redemption 2 invokes a form of climate grief through its beautiful, uncanny simulation. This grief connects many open world games from the last ten years. Much like its contemporaries – Far Cry 5, Subnautica, Abzû – the world of Red Dead Redemption is based on actual locations. They may be fictionalised, but their landscapes are drawn from modern ecologies. One by one, each of these titles were published and each one took a step towards breaking through the uncanny valley, and into a hyperreal simulated diorama of the natural world. At the same time the real world locations they are based on went from endangered, to distressed, to, just gone. The vibrant forests of Far Cry, the teeming coral of Subnautica, aquatic serenity of Abzû. All received glowing praise for their opulent depictions of real worlds that no longer exist.

As the open world game came of age, it served a secondary purpose: for the first time, we produced simulations of real places that then – within our lifetimes – ceased to exist. A perverse sort of reverse-fiction, these real world ecologies slipped beyond our grasp, into sarcophaguses of glass and silicon, preserved via systems like Unreal and Unity, and buried in remote servers as binary executables and downloadable content.

When loading the world of Red Dead Redemption, the dramatic reality of the Anthropocene is laid bare. Like a Minecraft digital memory, it’s tempting to speculate on how long it will take for these games to move from entertainment to memorial. Perhaps over the coming years we will come to consider each and every install of this game as a painful and permanent diorama of what our world once was.

The counterweight to the deep celebration of nature offered by Red Dead Redemption launched with jarring speed, arriving barely a year later in the form of Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding. Set in a post-extinction United States, Death Stranding is an open world game with simple mechanics based around nation rebuilding, navigation, hiking and isolation. As its protagonist, players traverse an inhospitable Icelandic inspired landscape delivering packages to survivors you never meet, and connecting the remaining cities to the backbone of a future internet. Without a doubt, it is a product of the zeitgeist, and its treacherous landscape, fragile protagonist and unbearable isolation mirrors 2020 with an uncanny clairvoyance.

Beyond its exploration of deep adaptation and social distance, Death’s Stranding’s mechanics anticipates one of this new decade’s most pressing questions. Can societies maintain communities, organise, and work cooperatively in the face of ecological disaster and pandemic? While at first glance Death Stranding appears to be a single player affair, it is actually a globally connected experience with traces of the international player base everywhere. Others who have navigated the landscape before you leave landmarks, signposts or tools to help you traverse the inhospitable landscape. In response, players can ‘react’ to these artefacts with a like – a Facebook-style like - and these are visible on each item in the world, creating an obscure and detached form of global accreditation and solidarity.

Much has been written about this simple, constrained mechanic as a form of collectivism, of an anonymous playerbase lifting each other up, completing each other’s tasks, or leaving small visual messages that become deeply poignant once players are fully absorbed in the world. The relief of a well placed ladder that helps you escape from a terrifying enemy is at once palpable, and somehow, paranormal. An ephemeral representation of solidarity in the face of overwhelming images and isolation.

Death’s Stranding’s simple interface for collaboration and gratitude are limited, built from nothing more than object placement and a repurposing of the clunky utility of social media valor. But in the game’s timeline, in the landscape of the game’s United Cities of America, it is a way to project yourself into a beautiful, painful space. Death Stranding uses the hidden, powerful role of interfaces in an open world to foster a form of solidarity to a global consciousness all playing together. At the same time, its limitations are a strong criticism of how digital interfaces shape and atomise us, as the game deliberately amplifies the separation between the individual and the global network.

Starting in 2015, the second renaissance of Virtual Reality began with the competing releases of the HTC Vice and Facebook Oculus headsets. Its hardware is still niche, but is fledging and now established on the outer realms of internet culture. VR and the Open World genre are natural fits, and the exploration of new mechanics and the lowering costs of hardware offer a promise of deeper immersion.

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. We ignore the rise of these platforms at our peril. VR-headsets registered on the gaming platform Steam are up 80% year-over-year. Despite or perhaps because of this, the bridge between the real and virtual world is wider in other ways. Data connectivity, hardware costs and even physical, playable space are class-based economic luxuries that determine who exists in this frontier, and who is excluded. Perhaps, amongst the digital mausoleums of ecologies lost, amongst the new attempts to grapple with deceleration and the shrinking range of industrialized transport, we will be drawn into the open world and find answers or solace in its mechanics. If this happens, we must understand the economic costs of the demands of the open world and it’s bridge to the real world. We must not treat this bridge as we treated the web before it. The politics of gender, sexuality, ecological terraforming, access and class all apply here, drawn from the politics and beliefs of player collectives, world designers, software publishers, platform operators and hardware manufacturers.

Whether attending a virtual Furcon, or navigating a hyperreal open world, we must consider ourselves as inhabiting not a real or online world, but a bridge between the two, one driven by politics and class and whose rules are not yet settled. As we gaze upon the open world, full of lo-fi creativity, or hyper-real uncanny detail, we must see these spaces and their interfaces as essential new frontiers and resist immature groupthink of the 90s’ vision of a virtual world.

The future is not a Zoom call and it is not a Facebook account. The social web we are confined to today is a corrupted, bloated, paranoid mess of conspiracy theories. Their desire to force inferior copies of our identities and experiences into digital space is a sickness that must be eradicated. That we grapple with this incarnation of the digital realm indicates a cartel in decline whose reign draws to an end. In its place is a vacuum. The open worlds and their bridges to ours are not yet claimed. These are contested spaces. Never trust someone who says the internet is boring. The internet, its engines and its hardware have never been weirder. And as we enter virtual beauty against the backdrop of ecological decay, understanding these bridges has never been more urgent.

Cade Diehm

River Goblin

Autumn 2020

This essay was originally presented with support from New Models at their Berlin event, NM SIMSOCIETY.