The Digital Landscape of Game Environments; Ecocriticism

In video game studio Naughty Dog’s video game The Last of Us, players witness the aftermath of a global pandemic (no, not that one). Without human maintenance, nature in all of its variegated and luxuriated forms has reclaimed buildings, roadways, and other man-made structures. Weeds poke through cracks in the pavement, tree limbs rupture through building walls, and vines ensnare abandoned cars. The digital environment is strikingly greener as opposed to the dusty orange, brown, and grey shades that embody other post-apocalyptic counterpart games, and the result is a hauntingly beautiful landscape. The game’s environment is by no means purely graphical spectacle, however; the greenery purposefully works to tell a story, thus triggering a powerful aesthetic response in the player.

In order to elicit such strong emotional responses to the environment, Naughty Dog developers used the rhetorical device, juxtaposition, to trace players' ecological awareness. In the city, where the streets are littered with grime n’ crime, there is little greenery to be seen–a miserable grey hue clouds the surviving civilians, and a strong military presence looms. In navigating these industrial spaces, a feeling of entrapment and dread ensues. Players directly witness the consequences of collapsed order and structure, as well as the ugly side of humanity under desperate conditions. In the occasional moments where the player is able to escape these urban spaces and return to nature, the result is the awareness of the world’s new ecological order and its synergetic relationship with the surviving humans.

Arguably, the most powerful moment in The Last of Us occurs towards the end of the narrative in a scene that many gamers explicitly recall. As Joel and Ellie make their way through a decrepit bus depot, Ellie, in a completely out-of-character fashion, lets out a childlike squeal and runs off to an area out of sight. As the player, you quickly follow her, conditioned to believe that your teenage companion has encountered danger. After ascending from a long, dark stairwell, we emerge onto the roof of the depot, and sunlight illuminates the entire area. We soon learn the cause of our companion’s juvenile enthusiasm: a herd of giraffes lumbers across a baseball field, with the skyline of downtown Salt Lake City in the background. Here, Joel and Ellie share a rare moment of respite and tranquility from their otherwise long, wearying journey. When the young girl has the chance to express compassion and tenderness towards the animals, she gently caresses a giraffe’s mane, and softly whispers “Hey, there.” At this moment, players have an opportunity to return to their own childlike fascination with the grandeur of nature, and to also reconcile their own connection to the outdoors.

The Last of Us is a worthwhile example of ecocritically conscious game design, which can invite players to a call to action in the real world. It also serves as a reminder of the fragility of our home and the real possibility of a similar catastrophe as depicted in the digital story world. From the beginning of the game, the player is confronted with the stark reality that their world is collapsing. Stripped of complete agency, we’re guided down a storyline of inevitable death, suffering, and turmoil. We’re consistently reminded of how such cataclysm came about, plagued by remnants of the past such as the infected and artifacts of a bygone era. After experiencing the terrors of a decaying society, the impact of the giraffe scene is intensified. As we watch the magnificent creatures cross the land, we realize that nature is reclaiming itself, and a new order of life can emerge. Should we seek out (and protect) such utopian spaces outside the virtual realm, perhaps we can preserve the physical beauty of our natural world.

The tacit ecological message in The Last of Us was conveyed through developers’ careful consideration of both the urban and natural landscapes that players encounter. Without being told explicitly, an environmental message was embedded into the design of the 3d spaces. Neither was the joy of gameplay sacrificed by exposing players to realistic scenarios of collapse, instead, players were able to derive their own meaning from the fall of society and rebirth (and return to) nature. Although The Last of Us presents a valuable case study for shaping environmental attitudes and promoting environmental scholarship through games, it would be remiss of me to not consider the ecological impacts of the technology which facilitates all gameplay. When the ubiquity of digital technology is built upon a global industry of resource extraction, unscrupulous labor, and e-waste, the line between the virtual and the real becomes muddied.

As much as some escapist purists would bemoan, we are never truly separate from reality—video games are realms where the natural and digital collide, as we can observe in any game which uses visual, spatial, or auditorial means to replicate the natural. Whereas the physical leaf is made up of a composition of carbon, nitrogen, and other organic and mineral substances, the equivalent in-game model would either be sculpted with polygons or made of planes. The digital world, of course, can never take place of the physical world and its complex conglomerates of matter. But as new eras of 3D graphics are ushered in, and the virtual landscape bears further resemblance to the actual, we cannot forget that despite all its replicated beauty and splendour, it does not come without a cost to the health of the natural environment and ourselves.

While games continue to undergo the rapid expansion into the mainstream, with consoles and other increasingly high performance devices taking up residence in the household, it is easy to take for granted their computing and operational power. When we launch, stream, or download a game, we are running them on engines of play such as Unity or Unreal. These game engines, like the mechanical engines we use to transform fuel into motion, are running on computers that expend energy to render the digital, natural landscapes of player experience. It is only until our hardware acts up that our attention is brought to the energy and heat exchanges of computing—somewhere, as electricity passes through the circuits and wires of RGB-laden PC components, an uncomfortable gamer sweats.

Although gaming offers a reprieve from the usual bombardment of reality, it also threatens to be a technological presage of climate disaster. It is no secret that, since its inception, the games industry has had a substantially negative impact on the environment. Electronics manufacturing, which is inevitably coupled with the games industry, demands the extraction and use of raw materials and rare-earth metals, some of which are known as “conflict minerals,” natural resources that drive human rights abuse and armed conflict. The mining of raw materials for electronic components also results in the loss of biodiversity, land degradation, water contamination, and deforestation. The rate at which we discard our electronic devices, replacing them with newer models, has never been greater. The trashed devices of Westerners are then shipped to the “developing” world, now marked as e-waste, or electronic waste, to be recycled at a great cost to the workers who are exposed to the toxic elements.

Presently, “the cloud”, a metaphor for remote data using networked locations, has arrived in terms of meta gaming. Because the rhetoric of the cloud removes the need for physical considerations, some may find it surprising that wireless networks are not more efficient than wired internet. In this scenario, input signals from a player’s device are transmitted to a distant data center where a new game state is computed and then sent back. This requires a substantial amount of energy use on the remote end, which is why data centers are equipped with high-end CPUs and GPUs capable of high processing loads. Watercooling, which offers a higher thermal conductivity and heat capacity than air circulation, is a popular choice for gamers looking to upgrade their system—but it is also a necessity for cooling the server farms at data centers. Returning to the energy and heat exchange examples, consider the data center: electricity and water go in, and data and heat go out. Unfortunately, the power required to cool the microelectronic components with water is on par with the energy consumption of the servers themselves.

What remains incontrovertible is that usage matters; behind every click or tap, some kind of heat/energy exchange occurs. There is no returning to the pre digital media era—players will continue to demand quicker processing, speedier internet connections, and better performance hardware. The rise in the consumption of electronics will drive mining, resource demand, and the mountain of subsequent e-waste will grow to precarious heights.