Dear Player – Games as Landscape: Learning to Live in Virtual Worlds
From side-scrolling levels to open-world fields of play, games generate space. From their inception, games have had to deal with the problems and possibilities of virtual spaces. In both making and playing we create spaces which are seen, heard and felt - psychological, philosophical and creative. Many games provide beautiful backdrops, but how do they allow us to interact with them as landscapes, to discover, break and reshape worlds? Recent improvements in procedural generation and augmented reality have pointed towards a future where the spatial limits of a game are no longer observable, while Art games have generated spaces free of competition and narrative. These raise questions about what the topography of a game world is, and its relationship to a player no longer necessarily restricted to levels and cells. Are generated spaces constructed or ‘found’? Can they be infinite? Can we have an aimless game? When does a game become a world? Could we take a holiday in one?
The days of draw-distance limitations are, if you’ll forgive me, vanishing behind us. We have fast-travelled a long way. Early games such as Pong and Space Invaders read the limits of the screen as the limits of the world - our movement was constrained to one axis, the world truly flat. But even at the beginning, there were models for infinite worlds - Asteroids 1979 was one of the first games to introduce wrap-around, where objects could exit the screen at one side and appear at the other. Indeed, ‘Space’ was one of the first kinds of open free-roaming environment, the easiest to model, it seemed to act as a kind of immanent virtual space. Objects could emerge from the black, and size alone was needed to convey distance.
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And so we come to Elite 1984 - one of the first ever free-roaming and procedurally generated games. More than just the ancestor of EVE Online and the X series, its 256 planets generated by a single number run through a series of algorithms was a paradigm shift. In part an invention of necessity, limited by the memory capacity of the early BBC Micro Disk, it’s vectors also lent itself an aesthetic - a limitless Euclidean utopia. But even in this open space of transparent, skeletal engines, the world frustrated the player. The limits of the world created friction, a resistance, with buggy regions inaccessible to the player’s engines. Yet these limits themselves were generative. For the player these were technically nothing but a seed number, but their potential left them a poetic existence - they felt like fully formed worlds just out of sight. Yet the cold hard vacuum can be a melancholy place.
Games live and die on the player’s desire and ability to make this imaginative leap. Once we know that behind a wall there is nothing, an absence, the imaginative environment changes entirely. We realise that the environment is completely dependent on our observation of it. We’re reminded of it with every loading screen, but if we are willing to project, we can feel as if a place on a map is a place that exists independently of us.
Skyrim is aptly lauded as an immense and immersive open world, but as a ‘world’ it remains one inwardly focused - the player is made the god-like apple of every NPC’s eye, in line with most blockbuster rpg-likes from Far Cry 3 to Mass Effect. But not all players are satisfied with this, and so change the logics of their environment. Passive plays involve committing to a life of little incident and negligible power avoiding narrative in favour of role playing as ordinary citizen of the world. The approach situates the player both closer and further from the game they play, as they make player ‘non-player’, camouflaged
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Community investment in mapping out new modes of experience in games also brings them to the game’s limits, where players used no-clip to discover the topographies of older games just beyond the limits of the Skyrim. But here the past was literally a low definition backdrop, an odd in-game shadow. Minecraft of course is also famous for being in itself a kind of medium, one capable of re-capitulating whole games, even movies, within itself. The notional intrusion of a game into another game, can work to increase immersion by layering fictions. An in-development horror game for the Occulus Rift uses this trick by placing the player on a virtual couch playing an older 3rd-person game in-game. when horror elements intrude into the second-order (first-person) experience, they affect the player deeply (read: lose their shit about what's real). Like waking from a dream only to find yourself still asleep.
However, for players probing these limits, the intention is deconstructive - the will to break a game by stepping beyond it. The player who looks for the glitch often seems to rehearse a journey to find the ‘sublime’ - a space fundamentally alien to the human subject, one which dwarfs and marginalises them. Players journeying to Minecraft’s Far Lands, like Kurt here, even poetically attempted to find the edge of an infinite world. Where errors creep in as the map gets larger, 12000km from the centre of the map great glitched gulleys and mangled mountains break into view, constituting peril for the player. As the rules of the world break down, deadly voids open, and subjective time slows down. As framerate crashes, the player eventually gets trapped by immobility at 32000km, a poignant illustration of games as temporal spaces.
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The world’s limitlessness here becomes so abject that the normal player is confined by it. For a game in which space is seemingly generated from both the interventions and observations of the moving player, to find a hard-coded geography in the game does more than break immersion, it makes the world Other to the player. This othering is something game developers have historically been working against, trying to fit a human player into a hospitable virtual world. So much were the Far Lands antithetical to the schema of player-centred space, one might argue, that that's why they were eradicated in a recent patch.
But this model of game environments as hostile/inhospitable to the player has made a resurgence. The introduction of ‘1999’ modes, the spread of ‘permadeath’, punishingly hard indie games, and the principle of creative failure (Dwarf Fortress, Sunless Sea).
Like the edge of a map though, we always want to know what lies beyond, but here there may also be monsters. For many games, especially open worlds, memory limits have meant that nothing ever existed beyond the visible horizon until the player crossed it. This leaves the unseen inherently menacing - not just in the sense that we fear the unknown, but that also knowing nothing-is-round-the-corner until you turn it gives the solipsistic world of the single-player game a melancholy ring. Developers have consciously toyed with the fear and melancholy that a mobile boundary creates, ever since that T-Rex popped out of the darkness in the original Tomb Raider. A decade after Elite, the limitations of early 3D draw-distances lead a foggy path to Silent Hill. The mists which saved memory, also curbed player agency, and heightened anxiety. This visual noise was complemented by audible noise in the form of a crackling radio indicating the proximity of a threat but not its form. These two dynamics highlighted at once the fragile but central place of the player as observer.
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What was truly scary, we might argue, wasn't the monsters, but the ambivalent push and pull of the game environment. Game worlds both affirm us as players, and Other us. As analogue creatures in a digital space, the interface of the protagonist with the game environment rehearses the imperfect interface of human and machine. We don’t need to dip into cyborg theory to see how this border, essential to video games, is problematic, and questions the place of the subject in the world we experience. But what might be less evident to the player is that this border tacitly haunts the landscape of games, whether metaphorically represented at the edge of a game map, or metonymically in the embodied play of the Occulus Rift. We either laugh or jump at the pixelly fog around our avatars. Every time the game world loads or hangs our ‘flow’ is broken, and with it the illusion of the seamless integration of player and level.
While the latest procedural games like No Man’s Sky promise limitless worlds free of loading screens, there will always be ‘borders’ to find, glitches that the next generation of pioneers will seek out. It seems that a limitless, seamless virtual is still far off if we conceive of attaining it by purely technical means, but we forget the other half of the interface. The imaginative leaps of the player change the world they live in, from passive plays to the fan-fictive narration of easter eggs. Landscapes lie not in perfect simulation but an awareness of the limits of a game, and changes in the social relationships we build with them.
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We’ve come a long way from game worlds that needed an observer, now games can continue without player intervention, and aimless wandering has itself become an aim. Now games like Second Life have their own tourist industry, a flaneur’s paradise. One of it’s artist guides even sees the mmorpg environment as something so simulacral, it exists as a fluid world, forever ‘found’ like the objects it’s users collage together:
SL is the perfect tourist destination, where all signs are equal – an artificial world that admits its artificiality.
For a game to overcome the tension of its limits, to truly become an inhabitable landscape, we’ve needed both the broken and the hostile to open new vistas to the player protagonist, but also changes in popular outlooks on the player-world relationship. What does it mean to get lost in a game, or to let yourself go? Now Indie games like Proteus have questionned the need for goals or competition - formerly definitive criteria for a game - and have opened the potential for aimless wandering. This may not sound like an explosive, climactic achievement, but it continues in the line of avant-gardes in Old Media who pushed art beyond its frame, and found nothing was essential to their medium - that everything was contestable.
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In Proteus we can wander at our leisure, sound and sight fuse as the pixels that populate it give way to polyphony - each encounter with a creature generating a sound which builds itself but never wreaks discord. In Proteus we can ‘dwell’, we can even take postcard as the seasons change - it is a game we inhabit more than play. To borrow a concept from Anthropology, it is a ‘temporal landscape’ (Munn, Ingold) - continuous with us, neither discrete from us nor fully dependent on us. The completely objective and the completely subjective can be equally alienating, but in the ‘temporal landscape’ of games like Proteus, we can let go and perform the virtual worlds around us with fresh eyes.
In the end, maybe it’s no coincidence that when we look up in Proteus, what we see is a minimal aesthetic close to Elite’s imperfect procedural depths.
Merlin Seller