Green Screens: Ecology and Video Games
Nate Schmidt, Contributing Editor
From whatever haunted tennis court the Pong paddles are playing on to the sprawling Tamriel of the Elder Scrolls franchise, games involve virtual spaces. Here’s a question, then: does the fact that games happen in a space always make them environmental?
See the difference? When you say a game is happening in a space, it feels abstract, far away—general. But if we call that space an environment, it’s suddenly a whole lot closer to home. Spaces could be anywhere, but environments…those are always somewhere, aren’t they? One way to define environments would be to say that they are spaces that we’re part of, spaces that we care about and that might (we hope) even care about us.
Once you put it that way, the age-old division between gaming and playing outside starts to go out the window, doesn’t it? Here I could cite the legendary story of Shigeru Miyamoto peeking under rocks and bushes as a kid, ultimately shaping that experience into The Legend of Zelda in 1986. Or we might look more recently, in the pages of this very website, at how The Breath of the Wild continues to scratch that itch for the outdoors in a time when nobody gets to enjoy things the way they used to.
I have many, many lived environments, because I have so many spaces that I care about and am a part of—as they, come to think of it, are a part of me. The frosty wastes of Skyrim, my little island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the tangle of underbrush behind my apartment where the sparrows are starting a family, the park down the road with the stream full of garbage. If ecology is about connectedness, then I just have to ask: What’s the relationship between all these environments? How do I exist myself within them in a way that shows how much I care?
Let’s stop asking if our commitments to virtual and imaginary environments matter and just assume that they do. They must, because we spend so much time with them! Now that we’re working on that assumption, we can start to ask: where do we go from here?
For this new series here at GwG, we’re going to offer a few answers to that question. These answers will vary pretty widely from each other, because there are just as many webs of connection, or ecosystems, as there are people who are asking the question. But if you’re a person who has spaces that you care about—real or imaginary—we hope you’ll join us for Green Screens: Games and Ecology.
ARTICLES IN THE SERIES:
Alenda Y. Chang and Ed Chang, “10 Games to Play on Earth Day.”
Christian Haines, “Nier: Automata and The Future of Planet Earth.”
