Title (eng)
Won with Nature
The problem with video game ecosystems
Author
Kevin Mercer
Description (eng)
Mainstream video games have continually enriched their virtual ecosystems with endemic life. Historically, plant and animal lifeforms have lent credibility and detail to game environments and have served as resources to collect, use in crafting, or sell. However, as developers have built increasingly detailed depictions of and behaviors for lifeforms, established systems in which these lifeforms interact, and, generally, achieved greater degrees of naturalistic and realistic worlds, I often feel conflicted: I experience a deep appreciation for a game’s complex ecosystem, yet the game itself requires me to dominate said ecosystem through violence. Through this experimental, diaristic/intertextual, humanities-minded opinion paper, I will discuss a number of video games which generate this very problem. I will touch upon specific cases to highlight past and present connections between gameplay and environmental systems. I will chart how nature’s role has changed over time and arrived at this present moment in which dynamic and complex in-game ecosystems are subordinate to the player’s will. This paper will argue that contemporary games are poised, graphically and mechanically, to offer players simulated natural worlds that do not solely allow for domination, but for integration, learning, and stewardship.
Keywords (eng)
action-adventureecosystemsendemic lifenaturalismvideo game spaces
Type (eng)
journal article
Language
[eng]
Persistent identifier
https://door.donau-uni.ac.at/o:6071
DOI
10.48341/s404-h127
Is in series
Title (deu)
Mad Opinions
Publication
Zentrum für Angewandte Spieleforschung, Universität für Weiterbildung Krems
Date issued
2026-02-24
License
All rights reserved