Video Game Environments

Caleb Jones

All right. So I’m Caleb Jones, and this session is the nerdy title of it is the you can see on the screen here, Ontological, Normative, Strategic Roles of the Environment in Virtual Worlds. What I’m going to be exploring is here is what role do we does the environment play in virtual environments, and particularly video games? touching on that a bit and then offering some tools of how we might think about this. And then finally, maybe touch on what would a Mormon transhumanist view of this look like?

Caleb Jones

All right. So I’m not going to speak a lot to this, but just I think we’re all aware of this, that Virtual Worlds, particularly as they’re found in video games, is a major form of entertainment, and it’s a very largely growing form of entertainment. And so entertainment has the power to influence culture, create culture, change culture. So I think this is something we want to think about in terms of environmental rejuvenation, what we see the role in our relationship to environment being.

Caleb Jones

So at a high level, you can look at the environment in virtual worlds or in video games as really a passive world or an active world. And I contrast a few traits they might have where a passive world merely forms a boundary or is merely acting as a resource. to the player or the person inside the world. It tends to be transactional in its interactions. And often, there’s only a kind of singular direct concept There’s no secondary or indirect consequences that are modeled and play out in the world. And often the interactions can be pre-programmed, so things are scripted, closed, and deterministic.

Caleb Jones

where an active world would be the environment itself an actor within the world. The degree of agency it has could be could vary, but it has the ability to act independent of the player’s intent. The interactions often create a feedback loop interactive worlds where the player does something affects the environment, the environment does something affects the player, and you have that feedback loop there. There’s secondary and tertiary consequences. Sometimes that aren’t always that aren’t deterministic. or more complex, less predictable. And then the interactions are dynamic. You can think of some games where the world is generative Where it’s different each time. Minecraft is a good example of that. No Man’s Sky is another one. And stochastic in nature.

Caleb Jones

So there’s randomness that’s involved in it. So this is a high level how we might identify and understand whether we’re operating in a passive world or an active world in a virtual environment.

Caleb Jones

So I’m not going to read all of this, but there’s a book called Playing Nature, Ecology and Video Games written by Linda Chang. She’s a professor of, I think, media studies at UC Santa Barbara. S focuses on ecology. And she contrasts some of the she calls them hypercapitalist tendencies in a lot of video games, where the main goal is to level up and accumulate. and how that can lead to certain behaviors that don’t really encourage attitudes and subsequent behaviors that will help us address environmental crises. But she doesn’t feel like games and virtual worlds have to be that. She notes that games have their own natural system. She calls them megacosms. and that players could these games could teach players the gist of key ecological concepts, things like scale, entropy, collapse and things like that.

Caleb Jones

That. And I’ll give an example of that of a game that I grew up playing that did exactly just that for me. But I want to touch on this. There’s some work that’s great work that’s been doing to explore this concept. So what I want to do as a tool is talk about frame analysis, as a way to deconstruct some of the assumptions that go into worldviews and environments and then briefly go through what these could look like and what they do look like in different popular or maybe some less popular and some forthcoming. gains, and then end on a what what a Mormon transhumanist ecological frame might look like by looking at the Transhumanist Declaration and the Mormon Transhumanist affirmation.

Caleb Jones

So frame analysis, I’m going to go very high level here, but at its root well some aspects to it that are core are ontological, normative and strategic. So ontologicals think as they are, normative, but is good or bad. And strategic is what can or should we do. And this has been developed I forget the year on this book, but Frame Analysis, Essay on Organization Experience by Irving Goffman. And is an early work there. But in a single kind of word, we’re talking about facts and axioms, morals and goals And often they go from top to bottom there, right? Back to axioms form the language for morals, and the language for morals forms the language or symbols for goals.

Caleb Jones

So Minecraft, how might we frame this? Well, I actually got some of these at least for Minecraft, the idea of framing it this I don’t know if anyone’s familiar with this YouTube Channel like Stories of Old by Tom Vanderlinden. But he actually did this work deconstructing Minecraft and framing it. And so I’m going to touch on what he did here because I think it sets up a great application of this tool. And so long story short, he goes through a lot of great examples. He feels that ontologically, a virtual environment like Minecraft is the world is ultimately indifferent to the player and exists for the player’s manipulation.

Caleb Jones

So an example. So this is actually our own Jones family Minecraft server that we’ve been running for five years, and these are a few screenshots out of it. And so we’ve made certain decisions in impacts. In fact, in the lower left-hand corner, there’s an island with all the like a lighthouse and a fountain and all these different crops, I actually leveled that island. So I terraformed that island to produce that. I didn’t get any bonus points for doing that. I didn’t get any negative points for uprooting all the trees that were once on. That. And so ultimately, the environment is indifferent to some of our creations there.

Caleb Jones

On another extreme, these are screenshots of another Minecraft World called TB2T. It’s the longest running in Minecraft server. And so it is This is screenshots and top two pictures are screenshots from its world spawn, which is, for lack of a better phrase, a hellish landscape. And this is all done manually by the players. And so and then the lower right hand corner and sorry the bottom, you have walls that and barriers that are put up to prevent new players from getting out of this landscape. And so there’s but then in the lower right-hand corner, you also have subsequent almost surges and riots that people will burst through those. And so it’s an interesting kind of environment that’s playing out with anarchy as the as the the subsequent assumption underneath it. But ultimately, in either scenario, the world is indifferent, is acting as a passive resource.

Caleb Jones

So this radical agency enters the normative layer. So morality is more informed by what you might craft, by what it doesn’t discourage. The player from doing rather than what it encourages. And so, an example would be food collection. And so, these are a few screenshots of different approaches to food production, extreme approaches. People had sold slaughterhouses, have been created, both in terms of mass quantity, but also pre-cooking the food, burning the livestock alive, and things like that. Is totally possible, and there’s no negative points for doing that.

Caleb Jones

And the lower meth lower images, the YouTuber Muse Elk in a YouTube video, he called I trapped 100 villagers in Minecraft, created a work camp for them to do all of his crop work for him. And that screenshot with him kind of lifting up his hands is in a moment of that video, he talks a little bit about, you know. questions he has about the ethics of doing this. He doesn’t it’s not a big he doesn’t go into big ethical discussion, but it gave him pause as he was doing this in the game. Game.

Caleb Jones

So ultimately, in the strategic layer, you get resources, you build shelter, you upgrade items, conquer, domesticate the world. Pretty standard. You think back to that quote from the book previously. And the as like stories of old, he compares this to be and says it’s very influenced by the post World War two ecological frame. So nature is unaffected by human activity. we can treat nature as instrumental and we can extract resources, expand, build as much without much concern for the environment.

Caleb Jones

And he I’ll just read this real quick because I love how he talks about the potential that we’re not quite that we aren’t quite tapping in. He says, the thing I really want to experience is to experience Minecraft like I did when I first started playing it. Exploring, discovering, not really knowing what I’m doing. There’s an unmistakable charm to those early days in this virtual world of blocks. I would love to see a new mechanic to revitalize that feeling. I want to mess around in natural environments and find out what the consequences are. I want to learn about ecological cause and effect and utilize them to improve my base and the world around it. I want to feel the danger of new and unexpected environmental hazards, the joy of surprising opportunities. And the blissful sensation of after hours and hours of work standing within your own creation existing in peaceful harmony And if those mechanics were to invoke you to reflect in our natural world and your own ecological impact, to make you question your world view in a meaningful way, that to me sounds like a pretty great deal. So he doesn’t say that Minecraft is broken, but that there are additional directions that it could be taken into, and he used that frame analysis to do so.

Caleb Jones

So, another one, and I’ll go shorter on these, is I was thinking of Oregon Trail, but there’s actually a really interesting game called When Rivers Were Trails. And it is created by the Indian Land Tenure Foundation and collaboration with Michigan State University’s Gaines for Entertainment Learning Lab. And also it includes the art the artwork, writing and musician contributions from over thirty Indigenous writers. And so I played through this and it’s interesting because you pick a tribe or clan and then you traverse the terrain. And ultimately, you’re starting by being dislocated. and collecting what you can. You have well being foods and medicines. And as you go through this experience, you have to balance those things out and survive.

Caleb Jones

Ontologically, we could say your the axioms or the foundation of this game of this environment is the tension between well being from connection to the Your land or heritage and displacement from it. And so, as you go along, you get these warnings: you know, settlers are coming, allotment. Assimilation you deal with, you encounter other Indigenous people in similar circumstances, you exchange stories, you collect medicines, and you continue on a trip. Traversing the landscape here. And so, this hearing of stories is interesting because one of the meters that you keep up is called well-being. And as you engage with story exchange, And trading and even helping groups with hunting and entering hunting parties and things, you’re increasing that well-being. And so that starts to form some of the morality behind the environment and the

Caleb Jones

the player within that environment. And you get a lot of these from a diversity, trade and hearing stories, some positive stories, some negative stories Encountering, I think, that person in the lower right-hand corner of a UPI, or you’d call a cousin, someone you haven’t seen in a long time. And so the strategy here is you journey through the land, you trade join with displaced people and ultimately seek a new home. So that’s a frame analysis of that game that we could and I the thing about frame analysis, there’s multiple ways you could frame things, right? I’m just offering a way to frame it. There could be different lenses and frames that come at this from different angles. All right.

Caleb Jones

So SimEarth, and this I call my first transhumanist experience. So this is a game, came out in nineteen ninety, and it essentially models Lovelock’s A Gaia Gaia hypothesis. And ontologically, it kind of sits here in this foundation. The natural biota that collectively works to make the Earth optimal or favorable for life. And so what you can actually do is start early on and just let the game run. And you’ll see in the lower left hand corner that you can pull up these different charts. and see how the air, the biosphere, the air temperature, sea temperature fluctuate and affect one another Essentially, what they’ve coded up is more of a if you just let it go with some these default settings, you can play with the axial tilt, meteor impact erosion, you can play with all of these meters. But if you let it go with the defaults, it’ll just kind of cyclically go. And so that really is interesting because it creates the ability to play with the environment and see the impact. And play with that and experiment.

Caleb Jones

But what ends up happening is eventually you have sentience that emerges, and it goes through civilization eras. Stone Age and all the way through in nanotech. And so what emerges is kind of a strategic approach where you preserve natural processes and you want to minimalize the impacts of the artificial I call the artificial, but essentially the civilization impacts. And so you go through this cycle where you start off with evolution. You can watch the species evolve. Eventually, one, for my game, reptilian species became sentient. And then I see them go through the ages, and then eventually the culmination is nanotechnology and what calls the exodus. And the Exodus is where ev the the c civilization leaves the planet and then the lower left hand corner, they declare it a preserve. And then you start all over. You go back through another evolution and you might evolve again.

Caleb Jones

It might be reptilian. It could be mammalian. When I first played this game as a I must have been either preteen or teenager. I had mammals emerge first and then reptiles emerge. And seeing this cycle was really impactful on my experience. And I didn’t realize at the time, it was very transhumanist, seeing it go through these ages. and experiencing this on a deep time scale.

Caleb Jones

Now the Gaia hypothesis has these different modes, strong, moderate, weak. And the top two are really more discredited. The Gaia hypothesis is criticized for creating more agency giving more agency to the biosphere than than is is defensible. But there even its critics acknowledge that it it does an excellent job modeling or not modeling, but it’s articulating and pointing at the close links between evolution of life and the environment.

Caleb Jones

So last one that I’ll talk about here is ECO. And this is right now STEAM Early Access twenty twenty. And EECO is interesting because it is really bringing together it’s one of the best that I’ve seen, at least their attempt and their messaging around it. So here, nature is connected and reactive to human activity, and nature also faces global risks. So nature isn’t just in this perfect harmony all the time, and it actually does need stewardship. And so what you then need to do is you need to form these these kind of need to be mindful of our interactions with nature and see ourselves as beneficiaries and stewards within this environment. interacting with it. So you need to build your civilization, you need to build your town and so forth, drawing upon the resources, but they model the impacts, secondary, tertiary impacts of that into the game as well. And it’s interesting, they provide a data layer where all of the elements to the game have a model behind them or have data that you can go and explore and see the Impacts. And so it’s a very, very involved game. But ultimately, you need to create sustainable development, and the arc of the game is you’re essentially the meteor is approaching. And so you need to prepare to develop tools and technologies that can protect the environment from that while using the environment as a resource and dealing with the effects of your use of it. So it’s a really interesting concept there.

Caleb Jones

Lastly, I’ll talk a little bit about what might a modern transhumanist ecological frame look like. So we have the Transhumanist Declaration and we have the Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation. And I picked out different phrases out of those where we can start to see ontological, normative, and even Strategic ideas. So if we map those here, at the ontological level, Tantumus Declaration says we recognize that humanity faces serious risks. especially from the misuse of new technologies. There are possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most or even all of what we hold valuable. And then at the normative layer, it says you could pick a phrase like we need, right? That’s a bought. statement. So we need to carefully deliberate we need to carefully deliberate how best to reduce risks and expedite beneficial applications. And then at the strategic level, says we envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings involuntary suffering and our confinement to planet Earth. And I like that last phrase there. Remember, we just went through the sim Earth, right, that confinement to Planet Earth. And there are some Visions of transhumanism that sees our destiny as ultimately leaving planet Earth. Others see it as rejuvenating planet Earth. And I think we can see both and.

Speaker 2

Just real quick, you have about one minute left, Caleb. Okay, great.

Caleb Jones

So moving to the more transhumanous affirmation, it uses at the ontological layer it It starts with the assumption, the axiom, that we believe that scientific knowledge and technological power are among the means ordained of God to enable exaltation. And then at the normative layer, it says, we feel a duty to use science and technology according to wisdom and inspiration to identify and prepare for risks and responsibilities associated with future advances. And then at the strategic level, we could point at phrases like we seek the spiritual and the physical exaltation of individuals and their anatomies as well as communities and their environments according to their wills, desires and laws, to the extent they are not oppressive. So we see some of these grains in both the Transhumanist Declaration and the Transhumanist Affirmation.

Caleb Jones

So this is the last one, and I’ll end here. So what might a Mormon transhumanist physical frame look like? Well, scientific knowledge, technological power, or means ordained of God, we saw that in the affirmation. And we see it as our duty at the normative layer to use science technology to prepare for risks and responsibilities associated with future advances. And then ultimately, the strategy is spiritual and physical exaltation of individuals, their anatomies, communities, environments to the extent they are not progressive. So we get a lot of our frame from that affirmation. And I think we can see a lot of our ties to the environment in it, embedded within it.

Caleb Jones

And I guess I’ll just end here rhetorically as what frames can we create adapt and utilize in virtual spaces. I don’t know if the MTA is positioned to create a video game, but I think we could point to them as examples and see these. as part of our Oprah Wall Transhumanist and Mormon Transhumanist Park. And I guess I’ll end there. Thanks.