Playing Video Game Ecologies

PERFORMANCE OF THE REAL James Tregonning BALANCING ACT: PLAYING VIDEO GAME ECOLOGIES ABSTRACT This paper explores the modelling and performance of ecological systems within the video game medium. Drawing on games from both the survival and management genres (Don’t Starve and Block’hood, respec- tively), I show how video games can position players in simulated ecological systems, recontextualising sustainable behaviour within a framework of ludic advantage and disadvantage. That is, in order to win the game, players must play or perform in an ecologically friendly manner, working within and alongside systems that model parts of our real-world environments. I also explore the role of genre in orienting these games towards specifc perspectives on the environment, suggesting that each game informs our perspective on the environment without necessarily invalidating or causing obsolescence in the other. Neither fully eco-friendly nor total eco-hazards, games such as Don’t Starve and Block’hood strive to increase awareness of environmental issues while also struggling with the limits of their own material form. Keywords: Don’t Starve; Block’hood; Video Games; Ecology; Game Mechanics INTRODUCTION player and virtual environment, with an implicit connection back to the relationship between the Over the last twenty years, the video game player and their real environment. For example, industry has become a sizable force on the media games in the survival genre such as Don’t Starve, landscape. While the global flm industry brought Subnautica, or ARK: Survival Evolved , ask the in $41 billion at the box ofce in 2018 (Hughes player to scrounge for food and shelter in the 2018), the video game industry raked in over wilderness, foregrounding our dependence on three times that amount, at nearly $135 billion the land and our place within wider ecosystems. (Batchelor 2018). As the industry grows, the video Alternately, city-building games increasingly game medium continues to diversify, producing incorporate ecological systems. For instance, in scores of thoughtful and intelligent games Oxygen Not Included , a more recent title from Klei that look to engage deeply with contemporary Entertainment (the team behind Don’t Starve), themes and social issues. One such theme is our players are asked to manage water treatment, current ecological crisis. Of course, video games basic agriculture, and air quality, all of which themselves are associated with an unsustainable interact with environmental conditions such cycle of digital waste, with e-waste production as temperature, air pressure, and the presence “on track to reach 120 million tonnes per year by of bacteria. In this article, I explore how the 2050 if current trends continue” (United Nations environment is constructed across diferent Environment Programme 2019). Colin Milburn video game genres, drawing special attention (2018, p.175) describes the so-called ‘green game’ to the dynamics of control and dominance in as oxymoronic, as an attempted “mystifcation the relations between player and virtual world. of its own material context”. However, despite I begin with the theoretical framework ofered their clear material efect on the environment, by James Newman (2004), which implies that video games are at the same time capable of video games as a form are fundamentally tied critically refecting on environmental concerns to patterns of dominance and exploitation. I and the impending climate crisis. A growing then draw on the examples of two games, Klei number of games use their core gameplay Entertainment’s Don’t Starve (2013) and Plethora structures to highlight the relationship between 122 Project’s Block’hood (2017), to refne Newman’s superfcial framework for a spatial adventure. approach and locate a theoretical foundation He sees games as an extended transition from from which video games may bring the player abstract, potential sites for action into colonised to engage with environmental themes and ideas. sites, which “have been acted upon, explored, Where Newman sees the experience of play as colonized” (p.113). This structure applies neatly to about developing control and dominance over games such as Modern Warfare, where in order to a given virtual space, I give more weight to the win the game, players must take ground from their role of the virtual environment in shaping and enemies, invading foreign territory or defending determining the conditions under which players that which has been conquered. The levels set in engage with the game’s fctional world. In short, the Middle East only accentuate the themes of I argue, the virtual worlds of video games are colonisation and empire under the auspices of designed spaces. The player is no marauding the American military-industrial complex. Even overlord, bringing wrack and ruin to virtual in games that do not revolve around gun violence, environments – unless the game allows them to the spatial dynamic of colonisation remains. For perform in such a way. example, in SimCity, each new game opens with a sprawling forested island. Within the structure of Broadly speaking, issues of control and dominance the game, the forest is treated as an empty space, are well-trod concerns across video game rather than an autonomous ecosystem. It is scholarship. For instance, video game theorists treated as a space of pure potential, an otherwise regularly draw parallels between video games wasted opportunity to build. By the end of the and diferent forms of imperialism. Nick Dyer- game, the forest has become a sprawling urban Witheford and Greig de Peuter (2009) suggest city-scape. It has been acted upon, explored, and that “video games are a paradigmatic media of colonised. Newman’s theory again holds true: Empire – planetary, militarized hypercapitalism” the natural forest environment is positioned as (p.xxix). They point to the links between the potential space, and the urban city as actualised video game medium and military systems, space, space conquered and remade for human arguing that video games “originated in the US purposes. Crucially, the conception of the forest military-industrial complex, the nuclear-armed as potential space refuses a more ecological core of capital’s global domination, to which they perspective, one that might see the forest as remain umbilically connected” (p.xxix). Many already-actual, with a thriving ecosystem that games especially involve a kind of Eurocentric exists outside and before systems of human capital othering, where a white male protagonist guns and colonisation. Newman’s concerns clearly down hordes of enemies, be they demons, as do describe the representation of space and the in DOOM, aliens, as in Halo, or Arabs, as in Call environment in some video games. However, I of Duty: Modern Warfare. Really the example of would suggest that they do not account for all Modern Warfare only makes apparent the implicit games; on the contrary, some ofer meaningful xenophobia of these other games, which are engagements with the environment and with governed by a ludic structure of ‘white self against broader ecological themes. By considering two inhuman other’. In those games, cross-cultural such games, we may develop counter-examples communication and empathy are elided in favour to Newman’s argument, and recognise some of of armed confict. Demons and aliens function as the potential avenues by which video games may a symbolic shorthand, nestling alongside recent engage with ecological themes and ideas beyond political eforts to demonise migrant caravans, this destructive colonising impulse. for instance, or to scaremonger about Muslim communities. COPING MECHANISMS These patterns of control and dominance can The frst game under consideration here is Klei also be conceptualised in spatial terms. Players Entertainment’s Don’t Starve. Released in 2013, exercise violent control not only over enemy Don’t Starve is a well-known example of the survival bodies, but over diferent environments. Newman genre, where the player is positioned within writes that the plot in a video game is often a a series of ecological systems and is expected become familiar with diferent locations. In the to survive, despite inhospitable conditions. In mind of the player, the environment moves from contrast to games like SimCity, survival games are unknown to known, from potential to colonised predicated on the notion that the player does not space. But that is not to say that players have control their environment. One can learn to live somehow tamed or overcome their environments. within the environment, and alongside it, under It would be more accurate to say that the player its rules and systems, but the player is not the has been confgured towards the environment by master. In Don’t Starve, for instance, the player the game’s ludic structure. One might think of it must fnd cover when it rains, or risk a sharp as a sort of environmental determinism for video decline in their sanity. Other weather systems games. further dictate player behaviour. If it gets too hot, the player needs to cool down. When it gets cold Environmental determinism is a geography during winter, the player needs warmer clothing, term that basically refers to the infuence of the or risks frostbite. During a thunderstorm, a bolt of environment in shaping human societies (Meyer lightning might strike the player’s house or farm and Guss 2017, p.6). It carries something of a and start a fre. Each of these elements can be stigma among academic geographers, owing to managed, but that does not mean the player is in its most extreme uses, where the environment control. They cannot stop the rain, or determine is fatalistically treated as a singular or the order of the seasons. At best, they can adapt overwhelmingly determinative factor in human to their environment and develop a series of development. Despite this stigma, geographers coping mechanisms to perform according to the William Meyer and Dylan Guss are among those constraints of the existing ecosystem.

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