Playing Nature: the Virtual Ecology of Game Environments
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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Playing Nature: The Virtual Ecology of Game Environments Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9ch2w332 Author Chang, Alenda Y. Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Playing Nature: The Virtual Ecology of Game Environments by Alenda Y. Chang A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in New Media and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor David Bates, Chair Professor Charis Thompson Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha Professor Gail De Kosnik Spring 2013 Abstract Playing Nature: The Virtual Ecology of Game Environments by Alenda Y. Chang Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric Designated Emphasis in New Media Designated Emphasis in Film Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor David Bates, Chair Playing Nature proposes new methods and objects for environmental inquiry through ecologically minded engagement with the imaginative worlds of contemporary gaming. This work recognizes that though some of the most sophisticated scholarship on natural representation has evolved within literary environmental criticism, as a humanistic field steeped in Romanticism, ecocriticism has tended to exclude designed landscapes and modes of mediated interaction perceived as detracting from direct experience of the natural world. At the same time, new media theorists and practitioners have generally overlooked the ways in which emerging technologies are implicated in and by natural systems. Most mainstream games, for instance, offer game environments as simplistic vehicles for graphical spectacle or extractive resource management. Rather than perpetuate the popular notion that the natural and the digital are realms inherently inimical to each other, Playing Nature contends that our experience of the natural world is not only increasingly mediated by digital technology, but also that our interactions with these technomediated natures inevitably shape our conceptions of individual and collective agency in relation to our environment. Despite the present historical moment, in which environmental movements are often stymied in their efforts to depict the scale and urgency of global environmental crisis (most notably in the case of climate change), games remain largely untapped in terms of their potential to allow players to explore manifold ecological futures. Because successful gameplay requires that players negotiate environments by discovering their operative logics, games are structurally predisposed toward creating meaningful interaction within artificially intelligent environments and modeling dynamics long at the core of ecological thinking, among them interdependence, feedback, scale, and human limitation. Games offer imagined worlds that can compress centuries of change into the matter of hours, range from microcosmic to macrocosmic extremes, and dramatize recuperation just as readily as catastrophe—virtual ecologies that are mirrors to our modernity. 1 CONTENTS List of Figures ii Acknowledgments iii Introduction On Slow Violence, and a Proposal for Ecological Game Studies iv 1 Game, Environment, Text 1 2 Scalar Environments 23 3 Back to the Virtual Farm 42 Postmillennial Homesteading in the Agriculture-Management Game 4 Serious Alternatives 69 The Gamification of Everyday Life Conclusion Game Over? 89 Notes 95 Bibliography 106 i LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 Instructions for the online Discovery Channel game Mission: Planet Earth 2 Figure 1.2 Start screen for the Starbucks-sponsored Planet Green Game 4 Figure 1.3 Juggling Brazilian national policy, economy, and science in the CO2Fx game 4 Figure 1.4 Human peasants extract gold from a mine in Warcraft III 5 Figure 1.5 A WoW player mines copper ore from a rocky hillside 6 Figure 1.6 A map of the convoluted cave system popularized by the early text game Adventure, drawn by Bruce Beaumont 12 Figure 1.7 A windswept hillside in thatgamecompany’s Flower 17 Figure 2.1 Life as an ocean microorganism, during Spore’s first game stage (the cell) 23 Figure 2.2 The Daisyworld scenario made playable in SimEarth 24 Figure 2.3 Flying a spaceship around a planet during Spore’s final game stage (space) 26 Figure 2.4 An expanding bird’s-eye view in the film Powers of Ten 32 Figure 2.5 Futurefarmers Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine picnic with Ananya Roy, professor of city and regional planning (105) at the University of California, Berkeley 38 Figure 3.1 The webcomic xkcd’s humorous representation of the online world, circa 2007 43 Figure 3.2 The webcomic xkcd’s updated representation of the online world, circa 2010 44 Figures 3.3 Scarlett of the Farm Frenzy series and Maggie the farming witch of & 3.4 Fantastic Farm 51 Figures 3.5, Ginger Agronovich of the Farm Craft series, Farmer Jane, and Anna of 3.6, & 3.7 Farm Mania 51 Figure 3.8 Farm Mania’s “Gramps” and Anna 52 Figure 3.9 Temporary workers available for hire in Farm Craft 53 Figure 3.10 My crowded farm in the FarmVille English Countryside in 2011 57 Figure 3.11 A billboard advertising the release of CityVille by my FarmVille farm 62 Figure 4.1 Games selected for exhibition in The Art of Video Games 68 Figure 4.2 Five seminal games (Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., The Secret of Monkey Island, Myst, and Flower) were featured as playable in the main exhibit space. Flower is shown here 68 Figure 4.3 One of the air-quality sensors used in Black Cloud, an environmental alternate-reality game 75 Figure 4.4 The AirQuest in-game map depicting the eight counties of California’s San Joaquin Valley 77 Figure 4.5 The German energy-management board game Power Grid 78 Figure 5.1 A Journey player faces her distant mountain destination during the first level of the game 88 Figure 5.2 A Journey player activates a wall of ancient glyphs, which reveals a portion of the game story 89 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work has benefited from too many associations, both chance and planned, to allow me to properly thank all those involved. Nevertheless, my deep appreciation goes out to my advisers David Bates, Charis Thompson, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Gail De Kosnik, for their advice and enthusiasm throughout the research and writing process. David, in particular, deserves special thanks for his responsiveness and much-needed levelheadedness during those hectic final years of combined disserting and academic job-seeking. I am also thankful for the research support that I have received over the years from Berkeley’s Arts Research Center, Rhetoric Department, and Center for New Media (BCNM). My gifted cross- campus colleagues at BCNM have regularly rescued me from disciplinary tunnel vision, and I will always be grateful to Greg Niemeyer for giving me the unique opportunity to practice what I preach about game design while on the AirQuest game-development team. Thanks are also due to the editors, co-panelists, and like-minded scholars with whom I have shared my work over the last six years—at meetings of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment, and the Modern Language Association; at Routledge, Ant, Spider, Bee, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Qui Parle; and at Berkeley, with the working groups in New Media, Visual Cultures, and Mediating Natures. I should also acknowledge David Gleeson, Michael Mansfield, Chris Melissinos, and Georgina Goodlander, for their inside look at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibit on video games, and Jason Haas and Konstantin Mitgutsch for my brief visits to the GAMBIT Game Lab and Education Arcade at MIT. Most of all, I would like to thank my family—my mother, Gail, who passed early but bestowed a lasting stress on the value of hard work, my father Ben, for not being too disappointed that both his kids turned out to be English majors, my brother, Edmond, for paving my way through the trials and joys of academic life with his own intellectual individuality, and finally my husband and closest friend, Brian, for his love, patience, and indefatigable reminders that games are supposed to be fun. iii INTRODUCTION ON SLOW VIOLENCE, AND A PROPOSAL FOR ECOLOGICAL GAME STUDIES On Christmas Day, 2012, the front page of The New York Times featured an intentionally disquieting article about the growing ties between the video game industry and firearms manufacturers, no doubt meant to follow in the wake of public outcry after the tragic Newtown, Connecticut mass shooting on December 14. Given the accessibility and popularity of the assault- grade weapons used by the shooter (including a Bushmaster semi-automatic military-style rifle and Glock pistol), the article’s authors draw attention to the licensed representation of purchasable guns in well-known, first-person shooter games like Electronic Arts’ Medal of Honor and Activision’s Call of Duty titles. However, the article is far less interesting in terms of its predictable media-effects finger pointing, than in its evidence for both the increasing commercialization and branding of game content and the persistent and problematically narrow ideal of realism in game design. For decades, violence and video games has been a particularly fraught topic for anyone involved with games, from scholars and researchers to industry employees. Having regularly come under Congressional examination, most often after high-profile shooting sprees of the Columbine and Newtown variety, video game violence is no doubt the issue that most people, non-players especially, are most likely to have encountered in the mainstream media. Though in June 2011 the Supreme Court struck down a California law prohibiting the sale of violent video games to minors, ruling that games, like gruesome fairy tales, were Constitutionally protected as cultural forms of free speech, members of Congress continue to introduce legislation and convene hearings over video game violence and its potential effect on minors and pathological individuals.