Writing fragments.
This project is maintained by cwylo
Directly inspired by this article on factory games and climate change. This article written on 2021-03-09.
There are plenty of games that have, as a basic premise, the idea that the player needs to extract resources of some sort from the land in order to advance.
You only have to look at the legacy of the entire factory game genre: it is a premise that lends itself rather easily to a certain kind of fun and engaging puzzle about maximum resource extraction from a hostile, or at least resistive, environment. Unfortunately it also falls in line with a particularly insidious line of colonial thinking, one that posits that humanity and the environment writ large are:
In the realm of game design, this is a model that is easier to express using the language and vocabulary that we are familiar with. It also goes hand-in-hand with other commonly-expressed myths in the world of games: the tech tree (assuming that progress is linear), the terra nullius myth that prior to colonization, land was empty and therefore free for settling, and the general idea that land exploitation and maximal resource extraction drives progress.
Again, it’s the basic premise that forms the engine of these factory games: you crashland on an untouched alien ecosystem (terra nullius), and in order to (linearly) progress to the apex of human capability, you need to extract as many resources from the land as possible in as efficient a manner as you are capable of doing.2 The arc of these games is partly in overcoming resource scarcity (by making your production ever-more efficient, or by finding and exploiting new resources), and overcoming obstacles generated by “the environment” as a response to your pillaging and general despoiling (generally expressed as angry bitey alien dogs trying to rip your face off).
Plenty of people have pointed out these rather troubling assumptions about humanity’s relationship to their environment; the article that inspired this one does a very fine job of it. And plenty of people have wondered whether or not it’s worth telling a counterargument: what if pollution actually meant something non-trivial in the course of the game? What if addressing the environmental impact of your actions was an important part of gameplay? While these are definitely interesting questions to ask, they’re still ultimately taking the same core assumptions as these factory building games, just with a more critical eye.
My question is this: what if a game could portray a fundamentally different relationship between humanity and our environment? One where the relationship is reciprocal, capable of mutual benefit, where both are genuine actors capable of shaping the contours of that relationship? 3
I am fairly certain this was accidentally done by Loop Hero, of all games. Bear with me. (Mild spoilers for tile interactions in Loop Hero ahead.)
Loop Hero is definitely one of the notable hits of the current moment, along with Valheim. It’s a mash-up of incremental games with the roguelike genre, which works unsurprisingly well considering both make use of repetitive cycles of gameplay aimed at generating enough meta-resources or player expertise (usually both) to make future repetitions go more quickly and efficiently.
In Loop Hero, the world has been erased by some kind of powerful magic ritual, and your protagonist awakes in an utterly blank featureless landscape, doomed to walk on a circuit forever. Shortly, though, they find that both they and the land itself starts to remember things as they were, and the land (and the monsters inhabiting this loop) starts to reconfigure itself.
What this means in mechanical terms is that you’re dealt a hand of cards, each representing some sort of landmark: forests, mountains, spider caverns, roadside lights. You place them down on a grid surrounding your procedurally generated loop. Each one of these cards has an effect on the world. Some of these tiles will grant your hero better statistics. Others spawn more dangerous enemies (which provide better loot and rewards, provided you can defeat them), or resources for you to pick up when you walk over those tiles. These tiles can also interact when placed in certain patterns or configurations, changing the functions of one or more of the tiles involved.
What starts as an utterly barren stretch of wasteland slowly evolves as the player nurtures a carefully placed configuration of flower-filled meadows, old haunted cemetaries, battlefield remnants, small villages, wooded thickets and more on and around the central loop. As this land develops, so too does its inhabitants. An endless stretch of slime-infested wasteland becomes populated with spiders, skeletons, ghosts, ratwolves, harpies, goblins and the like. They are, of course, almost all trying to kill you - but that is ultimately to the player’s benefit, if they are able to defeat them, since stronger enemies drop better loot which ultimately allows players to survive through more and more iterations of the loop.
The striking thing, for me, is that most of these constituent elements don’t provide direct and obvious benefits to the player - and even the ones that do tend to have some kind of drawback. The mountain tiles, for example, increase the player’s maximum HP, but place too many and a goblin camp will spawn - a particularly nasty enemy fully capable of cutting your loop short. Pop a vampire mansion next to a village and it’ll transform the village into a ruin, generating a gang of ghouls in place of the village’s usual HP-restoring function - but a few loops down the line, it will transform again, into an even better version of the regular village capable of healing more and providing better loot. In other words, many of the tiles you place down interact with each other and evolve with the passage of time.
On top of that, the meta-resources that you collect with each successful run also have their own demands on the landscape of the loop. Want stone? Easiest to fill up this run with mountain tiles, with all the challenges those bring. Need Orbs of Expansion? Better set up a deck and a world to produce a particular configuration of enemies on the regular. It is a fascinating response to the question of how players get stuff: rather than pull it from a world that doesn’t want to relinquish its bounty to the player without exacting a cost, players create the resources they want with the meticulousness of a gardener. Rather than extracting as much as you can right now to hoard against future calamity, it benefits you to plan ahead; it’s alright if you don’t have the most perfectly optimized setup for the moment, because if you can pull through for now you can still access the payoff later.
Loop Hero demands that you walk the line between filling the world full of things too deadly to survive, but not so easy that your needs soon outclass what it can provide. It requires that you understand how to cultivate a landscape that not only provides you with what you need at the present moment, but which provides enough opportunity so that one, two, three loops down the line you’ll be able to change this starting board into something even greater. The land that you walk this run isn’t an antagonist so much as it is a key partner in how well you’ll do. Your actions shape it, and in turn it reciprocally demands that you adjust your strategies to account for the realities of its twists and turns, and play the cards you’ve been dealt the best you can. Master this push and pull, and you’ll not crawl through the loop so much as reap the fruits of what you sow with every tile you traverse.
Obviously it’s not a perfect analogy: I highly doubt that expressing an alternative interpretation of relationship between humanity and the natural world was high on the list of design priorities. As much as there are still certain tiles that have global effects, most of them still center on the player - it’s still a game about you, not about your relationship to the board, which you will only live with for this one short run. But Loop Hero still provides a fascinating, accidental, model of a different way of thinking through how players can relate to the world around them.
The gendered nature of this dynamic is also worth considering, and a major topic on its own that I won’t be getting into for now. ↩
I also find it fascinating that “victory” in Satisfactory and Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program is ultimately about leaving behind the husk of a world(s) you’ve made in favour of some idyllic off-planet life. I’ll grant that most of these are in early access and subject to change, but I doubt the overall narrative justification for either will change much. ↩
This idea very much brought to you by indigenous philosophies regarding humanity’s responsibility to the land. ↩