Beyond gardening games
How is it August already? My next few weeks are lined up to be ridiculously hectic, full of wild context switching and deadlines. I’m not sure how much time I’ll get to write and think until later in the year. I wanted to get a bunch of these thoughts out now, so I can return to them later when things calm down a bit.
Biddybids
An illuminating review of ‘The Long Dark’ by Gabrielle de la Puente about the UK heatwave, the resonance of survival games with chronic illness and way interaction between stats shapes narratives.
Game Design in the Imperial Mode by Meg Jayanth asks if there really is a future for game design, perhaps repudiating many of my thoughts below, or perhaps providing a motivation to continue looking for other ways forward.
Fantastic Narrascope keynote about the 50 Years of Text Games project by Aaron Reed. Also announced at Narrascope: Inform now has an official RFC process for changes to the language.
This Inform proposal to introduce a new format for dialogue is of particular interest to me, given I’m currently in the midst of working out a structure for generating interactive stories embedded in a fake text messaging or phone UI.
Research and design
Prototype of a fictional phone UI (and potential exporter/play button concept for Fictive) which started from an idea for a story about avoiding answering calls and workplace surveillance.
This is still basically a dialogue tree, but a somewhat deranged hypertext variant with branches interleaved between touch screen controls and standard text lines.
Not quite sure if it’s possible yet, but I would love to figure out a way to publish this as a tool for authors who are interested in telling these embedded stories. What could we do with a fake mobile OS and messaging interface that can be generated from a relatively standard text script?
Beyond gardening games
Every day, I see discourse on important and urgent topics undermined by brainwormed comms frames set up to bolster polarising dialectics, a lack of precision in rhetoric, and incoherent causal models based on oversimplified flawed statistics.
An example of one of these topics that’s bothering me is the public policy of planting forests as carbon sinks. As this idea became more politicised in Aotearoa New Zealand—despite the best efforts of scientists and experts in ecological economics—it degenerated into an adversarial ‘pine trees vs native trees’ debate based on accumulation and maximisation principles.
We can always make accountancy debates richer and more complicated with scientific data. We can produce curves showing differences in the rate of carbon uptake over time between various tree species. We can leverage increasingly intricate models to spit out more accurate predictions.
The question that gets missed is why we’re stuck in with adjudicating showdown between two forest biomes predicated on the same massive industrial land use strategy.
What about wetlands and swamps?
How do local climates, topography, geology, soil and watershed conditions influence the type of trees best-suited to storing carbon?
What are the feedback loops and pathways that link forests with soils and microbiology?
How does the increasing risk of catastrophic forest fires change predictions of stored carbon?
How do we deal with regulatory and policy capture by the forestry industry?
Not to say that this knowledge is entirely ignored, but little of this detail seems to pass through the filters of policymaking and industry consultation to influence common sense and public thinking.
It’s a similar story with other politically-entangled existential crises like climate change adaptation vs mitigation and issues around car dependency and urban design.
How can we make knowledge of the feedback loops tangled through ecological, biological, physical and social systems admissible to debate and inform long-term decisions? I keep wondering if there’s an effective way to short-circuit some of these debates by showing models of systems rather than didactically telling people what to think.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about the lack of synthesis between applied games (an active research subject in academia as well as a fairly large cohort of agencies and labs producing so-called ‘serious games’ to solve design problems), the recent trend of wildly popular exploration and simulation games that leverage mining, farming and gardening mechanics and the intellectual tradition of interactive computing and ‘tools for thought’ (which of course goes back to Alan Kay, but in this context, is best summarised in Seeing Whole Systems by Nicky Case).
Gardening games have been drawn in contrast to mining games, replacing “dynamics of extraction and consumption with dynamics of nurturing and caretaking”. The key distinction here is that the player’s presence in the world and their wandering interactions add to the system, making the world more interesting and richly-structured over time.
However, the most recent version of the characteristic gardening game Animal Crossing has been criticised for drifting towards neoliberal city planners and rehashing the ideology of terra nullius and extractivism of Minecraft in the form of cozy capitalism.
in most gardening games, plants never inconveniently bolt, or fail to fruit. you almost never see a field of slightly pallid, weird cabbages which are that way just because they aren't in the right soil type or climate zone. there often are minimal disease and insect models.
— loren schmidt (@lorenschmidt) July 3, 2022
and soil health is almost always a nonexistent concept, or, and i'm not sure this is better, has as its only feature cryptic bags of "fertilizer" which are portrayed as uncritically making everything better. there's often no such thing as resting soil, cover crops, or rotation.
— loren schmidt (@lorenschmidt) July 3, 2022
Rather than a contrast between mining and gardening, perhaps we could view it as a continuum. Gardening itself is practiced in a wide variety of ways, from an emphasis on control and petrochemical domination over nature, to small and slow nurturing and valuing of the marginal found in permaculture.
Here’s a very early and preliminary sketch of a typology for thinking about a potential new philosophy of regenerative games:
Extracting: World is a static structure with embedded resources to break, clear and refine. Player can undertake acquisitive actions.
Cultivating: Parts of the world can be conditioned and tended to sustain resources and higher yields. Player can undertake nurturing actions.
Sustaining: World has curves of growth and decay that exist beyond the player, but can be influenced by extracting and cultivating. Player can undertake reparative actions.
Regenerating: World is a dynamic system of feedback loops and emergent patterns. Extraction and cultivation perturbs flows and resource cycles. Players can undertake actions to co-evolve as part of the system.
As well as focusing on specific verbs or mechanics and how they define resources and influence the game world, another way of thinking about this typology is around which assumptions and values are naturalised by the choice to include or exclude certain representations of nature and ecology.
This is one of the reasons city building and farming games are frequently criticised as ‘neoliberalism simulators’. Not necessarily because they attempt to directly model economic policies, but from the implied ideology communicated through the consequences of actions in the game. Particularly, not just what actions are possible, but what is left out when those actions change the game world.
Purely extractive games represent a world set up entirely to enrich and support the player. Mining and acquisition is free-form with the world’s geometry yielding directly to block-breaking. Resistance is often introduced through grinding and tiered gear upgrades. Costs of extraction are externalised by omission.
At the other end of the spectrum, we can speculate on the kinds of things regenerative games could do. Rather than static units of resources, the world might be represented as subdivided living structure. Resistance might be introduced through abstractions like EROI or common externalities modelled as waste streams. Weeds might thrive in the margins of spaces where the player has intervened. Pests and invasive species might explode when loops go out of balance. Tending and nurturing a growing resource might feed back and flow through interrelated systems, rather than boosting or dampening qualities of that resource in isolation.
This typology also allows us to rethink the contrast between mining and gardening. Games that support sustainable and nurturing interactions may still be grounded in the paradigm of resource extraction. A mining game could have sustainable and regenerative aspects if things like tailings, groundwater contamination and indigenous land rights and protest movements are represented.
For entertainment and artistic games, it feels like there’s a fascinating design space here waiting to be explored.
Coming back to the question of applied games and ‘tools for thought’, a helpful goal to aim for is not to model or simulate systems in their entirety, but to communicate the qualities of these systems procedurally and interactively. If done effectively, it may be a way to help people think through the implications of the Anthropocene and how humans can adapt our systems of production to work in co-creation as part of a living whole, rather than continue reproducing the disaster mythology.
Many crucial systems insights are impossible to communicate through the standard frameworks of accountancy and equilibrium that dominate planning, policy-making and corporate governance.
Can some of these concepts of regenerative games be adapted to support climate reports and policy advice on adaptation and mitigation? Can we publish interactive models and playable systems that help people to understand the broader earth systems implications of possible political, industrial and economic decisions?
This is not to imply that what we face is a purely technocratic or education problem or that communicating these details accurately and effectively is useful in any way to confront the entrenched corporate monopolies and oligarchies who wage denialist and greenwashing campaigns and forcibly resist changing their business models. That is the place for mass popular action to block and shut down evil empires and put democratic pressure on politicians to do the morally right thing.
Beyond that urgent need for solidarity and revolution, as we do start to see targeted climate change policy happening with governments and corporates starting to move faster, these policies and decisions should be informed by accurate, detailed and nuanced models of systems, rather than stubbornly persisting with the limited range of balance sheets and oversimplified min/max economics.
But really, I’m mostly interested in helping young people understand ecology and society better, unlearn and free themselves from the mental models of extractivist ideologies, and see how the future could be different.