Digital Environments

Sidney Dobrin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315461311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

With the title serving as an umbrella term to distinguish simulated places from real places, Digital Environments signifies a shift in how we think about interactions with places and spaces, both real and simulated. The very idea of digital environments, though, complicates such distinctions, asking simultaneously (and perhaps reductively) as to how agents engage networks, and if there can be such distinctions between virtual and real place, between agents and networks.

For ecocritics, the term brings together two concepts that are frequently cast as oppositional: digital standing in for technology/technological and environments often used to represent nature/wilderness. Thus, reading digital environments as technological nature asks us to consider not only the relationships between technologies and natures, but the very idea that there can be such distinctions, or that there might be technological natures and natural technologies. In this way, then, the play of digital/environment exposes complexities in how we theorize both technology and nature, complexities that often result in the inevitable exclusivity and polarity between the two ideas. The real and the simulated, the technological and the natural, all unfold in flagrant and complex ways that make evident the need for framing technological theories within the gaze of ecocriticism and the need for framing ecocritical theories within technological gazes.

This collection considers the possibilities of bringing ecocritical approaches into conversation with digital environments. The intent is to initiate a dialogue between two areas of research often understood as disparate. This book was originally published as a special issue of Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism.

Rhetoric and recapture: theorising digital game ecologies through EA’s The Sims series

Melissa Bianchi

Department of English, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA

This essay offers an ecocritical approach to studying games that accounts for the relationships between nature, technology and culture as they are configured by game design. By performing a reading of rhetoric and technological recapture in Electronic Arts’s (EA’s) The Sims series, the essay untangles how game design and game technology reflect ideologies – sometimes even conflicting ones – about how humans should relate to and interact with nature. This essay also argues that advancements in digital game technology afford designers and players the option to explore and perpetuate more complex and diverse ideologies about humans and nature that move away from anthropocentric and speciesist perspectives.

Despite the current popularity of digital games research, there is a relative paucity of scholarship that addresses how games simulate natural environments, animals and our interactions with them. Recent work with games has focused largely on human culture and its interactions with technology (see, e.g., Anthropy [2012], Juul [2013], Colby, Johnson, and Colby [2013], etc.) without exploring how the medium situates these two spheres in relation to nature. This humanist approach to game studies, although important, often overlooks the ideologies that games communicate about nature’s relation to technology and culture. Furthermore, this primarily humanist discourse for game studies ensures the exploitation of nature both within and beyond digital environments. As Cary Wolfe observes in Animal Rites, ‘cultural studies situated itself squarely, if only implicitly, on what looks to me more and more like a fundamental repression that underlies most ethical and political discourse … an unexamined framework of speciesism’ (2003, 1). Wolfe’s critique of speciesism’s damaging role in cultural studies discourses suggests that speciesist discourse will ‘always be available for use by some humans against other humans … to continue violence against the social other of whatever species – or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference’ (2003, 8). Speciesism, however, is not limited to our discourse and social interactions, and as Wolfe suggests, it is also a problem in our research methods. This is particularly evident in game studies where scholars have attended to the marginalisation of human subjects within games, but ignore how game practices reduce and marginalise nature, the environment and other animal species.

Thus, this essay offers an ecocritical approach to studying games that accounts for the relationships between nature, technology and culture as they are configured by game design. By performing a reading of Electronic Arts’s (EA’s) The Sims series, I offer one way we can consider how games inextricably link nature and technology together rather than maintaining an oppositional divide between them. Looking at the games’ rhetoric and technological recapture, I untangle how designer’s intentions and game technology produce arguments – sometimes even conflicting ones – about how humans should relate to and interact with nature. Moreover, I argue that advancements in digital game technology afford designers and players the option to explore and perpetuate more complex and diverse ideologies about humans and nature that move away from anthropocentric and speciesist perspectives.

Many game scholars, most notably Kurt Squire (2006) and Ian Bogost (2007), have argued that the rhetoric of a digital game’s semiotic elements (text, images, cinematics, etc.) and interactive processes (rules and game mechanics) communicate its ideologies. Semiotic elements and interactive processes, however, are shaped equally by game designers’ intentions and the capabilities and limitations of the technology viable to them. As such, procedural rhetoric is a crucial concept for reading and critiquing games, and it provides a critical foundation for understanding nature and technology within digital games. Bogost defines procedural rhetoric as argumentation that relies on rule-based interactions as a mode of signification. He explains that in games, ‘arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behaviour, the construction of dynamic models’ (2007, 28–29). Put another way, rules and processes mediate player interactions in digital games, and the way players negotiate this mediation creates specific arguments about players and their relations to certain signifiers within the game.

While game designers author these rules and procedures, their work is often also limited by the hardware’s technological constraints. Media scholar Terry Harpold explains that ‘Gameplay is the expression of combinations of definite semiotic elements in specific relations to equally definite technical elements’ (2008, 91, emphasis in the original). Harpold’s definition suggests that reading ideologies in games must also account for the relations between signifying features and the technologies that influence their in-game presentation. The limits of a game’s hardware and software determine, to varying degrees, the objects and rules within its world (2008, 92), which means that digital games’ cultural signifiers – especially those for animals and nature as a whole – are inherently bound to and governed by material limitations (i.e., processing speed, memory, graphical capabilities, keyboard and mouse controls, etc.) and not just the cultural context of the designers and players.

Furthermore, because designers use narrative elements to recuperate hardware failure, constraints and compatibility, these technical elements play a significant and material role in representation. Harpold explains this concept as recapture. Recapture occurs

on the cusp of a sort of crisis in representation: exactly at the moment where entanglement threatens to bring forward the game’s determinism by its definite technical situation, that determinism is turned back into the gameworld, so as to seem to be another of its (arbitrary but consistent) rules. (2008, 93)

In essence, moments of recapture obscure or rescript the technical elements that make up the game world in ways that seem consistent with the game’s rules or narrative. Recapture then has narrative implications for games, however, it can also impact a game’s rhetoric. Despite designers’ intentions for internal consistency, instances of recapture in digital games can produce procedural rhetoric that subverts the rhetoric of other elements within the game. Examining The Sims series allows us to see how the insertion, removal and redesign of procedural representations and recapture can change the games’ arguments and ideologies about the natural environment in productive ways.

I analyse The Sims series in particular because of its widespread popularity and longevity in the digital games market, as well as its observable changes in game design over the last decade and a half. Each of the base games in the series – The Sims (Maxis 2000), The Sims 2 (Maxis 2004) and The Sims 3 (The Sims Studio 2009) – along with their corresponding expansion packs have sold over 150 million units internationally as of May 2011 (Sacco 2011). Because of their record-breaking sales, the game series has seen several remakes with an upcoming fourth iteration in 2014. Upgrades to the technologies (both hardware and software) available for designing and running The Sims have significantly allowed the games to reimagine how we conceptualise the links between humans, animals and machines. Over time, the series appears to move away from an anthropocentric understanding of these relations, in part, a result of its improved technology, which enable the series to embrace both ecocentric and posthumanist perspectives. These changes illustrate how rhetoric and recapture shape and dismantle categorical binaries like nature and technology as well as human and animal. By analysing how these categories are re-scripted across The Sims series, it is evident that (1) as technology improves and the need for recapture in The Sims games disappears, their ideologies about nature become more ecocentric and (2) technological upgrades allow for a more complex play experience that challenges speciesist and anthropocentric conceptualisations of the relationship between humans, animals and objects.

A brief overview of EA’s The Sims

EA’s The Sims was released on 4 February 2000 for personal computers (PCs) and since then has spawned a number of expansion packs and sequels for various game platforms. The Sims games are classified as life simulators because they use an agent-based artificial life program to direct the actions of simulated life forms or Sims. Programmed with an artificial intelligence system, Sims respond autonomously to environmental conditions within the game world. Using what the game calls ‘free will,’ Sims will attend to their ‘needs’ or ‘motives,’ which include biological factors, such as hunger and energy, as well as psychological ones, such as fun and socialising. The satisfaction of a Sim’s needs is measured by several green bars that will turn red if the Sim does not perform the actions necessary for satisfying the need. The role of players in The Sims is to direct and manage the actions that Sims perform because their ‘free will’ tends to lead them astray from performing actions that effectively satisfy their needs. Satisfying a Sim’s needs often has positive consequences in the game, while ignoring them often has negative results. Additionally, there are some actions that Sims will not perform without player input to do so, such as conceiving children, finding a job and paying bills.

Beyond the games’ simulated life forms, several aspects of gameplay have remained relatively the same across The Sims, The Sims 2, The Sims 3 and their expansions packs. For example, different game modes pose particular constraints on the actions that players can take within the game world. In Live mode, players can control the passage of game time as well as instruct their Sims to interact with objects or other Sims. In contrast, Buy mode and Build mode automatically pause game time so that players can purchase and arrange furniture in their Sims’ house or construct and renovate their home or neighbourhood. Additionally, each of the base games contains a Create-a-Sim mode in which players build and customise the physical appearance and personality of their Sims. Each of the iterations of The Sims game has added to the number of customisation options for each of these modes of play. How players interact with and use the game’s artificial intelligence, architecture systems and play modes remains largely undirected by the game itself. This design promotes open-ended gameplay with no clear way of winning or losing.

In describing some of the major aspects of The Sims series, the anthropocentric design of its in-game procedures becomes evident. Most obviously, this is because the game is targeted at human players, but it is also because human Sims are the primary focus of the play experience and its processes. In 2002, however, EA released an expansion pack for The Sims entitled The Sims: Unleashed (Maxis 2002), which integrated animal Sims into human Sims’ households. The popularity of Unleashed among the series’ fans spawned similar expansion packs for the second and third iterations of the game, which were simply entitled Pets. How these expansion packs alter the gameplay of the original games and how they too have changed over time demonstrates that our changing conceptions of the links between humans, animals and technology are not independent of one another, but rather shaped by an ecological and co-evolutionary process. The Pet expansion packs push towards a contentious perspective of nature that destabilises players’ anthropocentric perspectives through ecocentric and posthumanist representations of a digital ecology.

Navigating the borders between neighbourhoods and nature

In The Idea of Wilderness, Max Oelshlaeger outlines several conceptions of nature that we can use to read the design of ‘nature’ in The Sims. Oelshlaeger argues that contemporary wilderness philosophy is fractured among several different ideologies, which include resourcism, preservationism, ecocentrism, deep ecology and ecofeminisim. Each of these ideologies offers a unique ethical perspective of how humans should interact with the natural world. The Sims and similar simulation games perpetuate these ideologies through the ways that procedural rhetoric and recapture shape their rules and determine how humans (both players and Sims) interact with representations of wilderness. Moreover, as game studies scholar Miguel Sicart (2009) argues, games are themselves designed ethical systems and experiences, and their rules have moral values that affect players. This understanding of games as ‘ethical objects’ and also as digital environments makes them uniquely suited for simulating the ethical systems Oelshlaeger outlines in his work. Using The Sims games, I demonstrate how the values of resourcism, preservationism and ecocentrism are implemented in the games’ designs as technological upgrades to the game engine and its hardware facilitate more complex human–nature interactions while reducing the need for moments of spatial and environmental recapture.

The design of the neighbourhood in The Sims suggests that humans are estranged from, rather than a part of, nature. In the original game, players engage with the neighbourhood screen, an interface that contains 10 rectangular residential lots of varying sizes arranged along a road that loops through grassy, forested and mountain terrain. Players can click on these lots to ‘enter’ them and interact with the land, house and Sims. Clicking any of the surrounding greenery on the neighbourhood screen, however, does nothing. The neighbourhood’s natural surroundings are procedurally ‘dead,’ and players cannot enter into these areas in the same way that they do residential lots. The neighbourhood’s natural environment is not interactive because there are no coded processes supported by these areas of the map. Only land to be developed (the residential lots) serves a functional purpose for players, and so these spaces are highlighted when the cursor is moved over them. In part, this design choice is both a technological and a conceptual one. To make the trees and mountains on the neighbourhood screen interactive would take more processing speed and random access memory (the minimum requirements for The Sims are 233 MHz and 32 MB for Microsoft Windows and 233 MHz and 64 MB for Mac) or a reallocation of these resources to do so. Because the game was originally intended to simulate human domestic life, the outdoor environment of the game was not as highly prioritised, and thus, it was kept inactive and removed from human players’ accessibility out of technological necessity.

For similar reasons, human Sims cannot be placed by players or interacted within the game’s simulated natural environment. Any procedures and processes players choose to have their Sims perform are confined within the neighbourhood’s lots. Within the lots themselves, any land, fauna or flora that lies beyond the residential domain remains greyed out and ‘dead’ – another design choice made to cut down on loading times and memory usage. Clicking on these grey spaces in the game world elicits no response from the interface, and like the ‘dead’ space of the neighbourhood screen, they visually and procedurally separate players from the game’s representation of natural environments. This type of interface design reinforces what Oelschlaeger calls resourcism. He explains that resource conservationists view wild nature as ‘a means only to human ends,’ and as such ‘humankind is understood not as a part of but apart from the green world. Nature is presumed to be merely inert matter-energy devoid of value until the humanizing force of civilization is forced upon it’ (Oelschlaeger 1991, 316). The natural spaces in The Sims model Oelschlaeger’s definition as they remain inert features of the games interface. In contrast, the interactive house lots – spaces upon which humanising forces (the player and Sims) may act – have more value as the sites where the majority of game play occurs. The game highlights their significance both visually, when the residential lots are moused-over, and procedurally, when players interact with these spaces allotted for development.

By designing a game in which simulated nature is predicated on, if not synonymous with, technology and its limitations, game designers link nature and technology together so that conceptions about and interactions with one directly influence the other. For example, many of the features that The Sims: Unleashed adds to the base game change how the separation between nature and technology is perceived by remapping how players interact with and control land in the game world. The expansion pack ups the minimum requirements of The Sims to 350 MHz processing speed and 64 MB of RAM for Microsoft Windows, and as a result, it is able to increase the size of the base game’s neighbourhood from 10 lots to over 40. For the first time in the series, players are granted the ability to rezone these lots for either residential or community use. While residential lots are dedicated living spaces for Sims and their homes, community lots function as commercial hubs in which players can build shops, restaurants and other similar establishments. Players can opt to build natural parks in commercial lots and have their Sims visit and interact with these areas as pseudonatural areas. The emphasis placed on the processes of land acquisition and development in Unleashed illustrates how improvements in the game’s technology, particularly through offering players more memory and options, in the game environment, can still coincide with conceptions of nature as a resource and yet simultaneously offer players a comparatively more interactive relationship with representations of nature.

When EA released The Sims 2 in 2004, advancements in computer hardware allowed players even more interactions and control over the design of land in the game. As a result, the procedural rhetoric o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Frontier 2.0
• 1 Rhetoric and recapture: theorising digital game ecologies through EA’s The Sims series
• 2 Ecocomposition: writing ecologies in digital games
• 3 Rub trees, webcams, and GIS: the wired wilderness of Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’ Bear 71
• 4 Reading environment(s): digital humanities meets ecocriticism
• 5 Signals of nature, prestidigital ecology
• 6 The sustainability of our digital environments: the language of the upgrade path and e-waste
• Index