All the Polygons

Summary

How real is your world? How do you know? Maybe it’s the gentle sway of leaves in the wind. Or the sound of crickets chirping at dusk. Or the softness of the light in the summer. Take a step back, blink. Turn your head to the side. Are you sure? From the earliest 8-bit bush in The Legend of Zelda (1986) to the peatbog sublime of Death Stranding (2018), video games have long been on a quest for perfect simulation. The benefits are obvious: more convincing worlds equals more immersive gameplay; more immersive gameplay equals more profit. From real-time weather systems to 3D scanned rainforests, an economy of simulated nature has emerged to answer gaming’s demands. But is this desire for ecological simulation also a kind of capture? This essay explores how simulation in gaming carries echoes from the past even as its implications careen towards the future. The same computing platforms powering next-gen immersive gaming are also fueling long-range climate forecasts and evaluating proposals to modify the earth’s atmosphere. In other words, the same climate simulator powering the real-time weather system of the next Grand Theft Auto is also going to tell us whether geoengineering is a good idea. Consider the real-time digital Earth models currently being assembled of the planet—also known as digital Earth twins or Earth Virtualization Engines—as the conceptual sibling of a Natural History Museum, with all the related baggage. Consider the implications of this archive that floats incandescently above us in the cloud, the energy funneled into its maintenance ironically contributing to the slow death of the real thing. What new ways of relating to the world do simulation technologies open, and what do they inevitably foreclose? I. Two kinds of wind In cinema, there is the wind that blows and the wind blown by a machine. In computer games there is only one kind of wind.—Harun Farocki, Parallel I (2012) Harun Farocki, Parallel I, 2012, HD video installation, 2 channels, color, ...