Looking Down Not Up

Virtual Environments and Colonial Spatial Practices The history of artificial and virtual environments, particularly those found in digital games, is rife with destructive colonial ideologies. Themes of conquest, domination, and Othering permeate many kinds of game design, for instance, including board games where mechanics such as seizing large tracts of ‘uninhabited’ land, stripping it of resources, and dominating those that live there are considered part and parcel even today (Flanagan and Jakobsson 9). In Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games, Dyer-Witheford and de Pauter draw from Hardt and Negri’s Empire to articulate how digital games are fundamentally linked to the ongoing effects of colonialism. For instance, they trace how games feed into issues like energy consumption and exploitive labour practices in their production and dissemination: a result of unequal distribution of power and capital after imperialism (xviii). They also point to how games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) have the player reassert and act out the processes and structures of imperialism, in which their relationship to the virtual landscape is to “occupy it, activate it, and network it into a setting for optimal capital accumulation” (162). Other scholars have pointed to how strategy and adventure games have players perpetuate colonial practices such as military manoeuvring, map-making, and resource extraction, and encourage them to lay claim to supposedly empty spaces through violence and exploration (Lammes 1; Mukherjee 35). As such, many of these destructive colonial practices and ideologies manifest in the player’s movement through the virtual spaces that they occupy, which are often framed as territory to be constantly expanded and acquired. While particularly visible in contemporary works such as No Man’s Sky (2016), this movement pattern has dominated the design of videogame environments for some time. Games such as Super Mario Bros. (1985) recycle the myths and movements of sixteenth and seventeenth-century colonisers, for instance, using the seemingly harmless “appetite for encountering a succession of new spaces” to fuel the consumption and mastering of artificial land (Fuller and Jenkins 62). This endless pursuit of new and exciting spaces produces a particular, goal-oriented, point-to-point movement pattern, in which arrival is always deferred to another destination, just over the horizon (63). This movement pattern is particularly endemic to contemporary open-world game designs, where the player moves directly and efficiently between any resource that will give them an advantage: items, power-ups, quests, and so on (Keogh par. 2). While open-world games will often claim to grant total freedom of movement, players are thus instead funnelled into “a constrictive topology of nodes and [the] connections between them” (Aarseth 161). Even in the open, non-linear Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020), for instance, where the player can theoretically wander in any direction they choose, objective markers embedded in the game’s user interface constantly push them towards the next item or place of value, just over the horizon. Importantly, this goal-oriented, colonial movement structure affects not only how players traverse a virtual environment, but also how they look at and value that environment. For instance, Magnet outlines how the totalising, distanced perspective of strategy games like Tropico (2001) encourages the player to ignore the impact of their actions on the artificial landscape and non-player characters below them (149). Similarly, in a virtual environment viewed and explored from an embedded, first-person perspective, a point-to-point movement pattern flattens the player’s view of that environment, reducing it to a series of potential resources to be acquired in an expanse of unimportant negative space. The landscape itself is seen by the player as simple set-dressing, merely there to fill out the areas in between where they really want to be. Their attention is directed outwards, to the next objective, the next landmark, or the next resource to be commodified: the environment itself is seen as incidental, and thus ripe for exploitation and plunder. This matters, because how players view, move through, and interact with artificial environments shapes and affects how they view, move through, and interact with actual environments. As cultural artefacts, videogames and virtual environments are formed within and perpetuate the dynamics of societal power, and so do not “simply transcend ‘old-media’ problems of ideology and political control” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter xxvii). Indeed, as performed, interactive experiences they actively train players in certain behaviours, viewpoints, and modes of engaging with the world (Flanagan and Jakobsson 19). In the era of climate crisis and ecological destruction, virtual environment designers should therefore seek to design and engender alternative, more caring ways of seeing and interacting with virtual and actual environments. Rather than encouraging players to devalue, accumulate, and plunder virtual landscapes, we should encourage them to value, care for, and maintain those landscapes, informed by the practices and principles of those who have been caring for and maintaining the environment for thousands of years: Indigenous Australians (Pascoe). As scholars such as Pumpa have noted, these principles and practices have been cultivated and developed in actual, dynamic environments as lived, collaborative, and dynamic knowledge, and thus might at first seem incompatible with the fixed, unchanging structure of a digital virtual environment (51). However, he also points out that it is possible to design virtual environments that negotiate this tension by embracing a fluid and collaborative design process where the environment continues to evolve, as in the Virtual Songlines (2003-present) project (Pumpa 53). Others have pushed further, stating that the form itself is a particularly useful vessel for the sharing of cultural heritage and practices. This is due to the way that first-person virtual environments foreground direct participation and performance in response to spatial events and features, similar to many Indigenous systems of environmentally-embedded knowledge storage and access (Barrett 77). Projects like Torres Strait Virtual Reality (2018), for example, leverage the direct perspective and navigation of virtual reality to immerse the player in Indigenous stories, practices, and language. These projects represent one way of encouraging care for environments: by virtually collecting and sharing the specific stories and knowledges that make a particular place unique and valuable. Other projects offer other ways of cultivating care for land: by encouraging players to pay closer attention to it. In discussing the design of their site-specific AR app Hidden Rippon Lea (2024), Briggs et al. highlight the importance of attuning oneself to an environment when building a relationship of care and maintenance with it. Before we can care for an environment, we must first orient ourselves and our senses towards it, as “understanding comes through our own awareness of Country — our capacity to listen and observe” (5). An important part of this process of listening and observing, they note, is physically slowing down, and moving through the environment at a gentle pace. “Slowing down can be a deliberate act of respect and a pathway to careful interactions with others”, as it affords the cognitive space necessary for contemplation and reflection, and guides our attention towards our current surroundings, in the present moment, rather than what’s ahead (11). A similar project, Epiphyte (2017), offers a particular way of encouraging this close attention, by using AR markers to lead players on a bushwalk through the Sherbrooke Forest in Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges. Each of these markers, placed temporarily amongst the natural landscape, allows the player to collect a virtual seed that contributes to an “artificial ecology on their mobile device” (Riley et al. 240). Epiphyte thus aims to “encourage an affinity” between the player and their surroundings by engaging them in an attentive, non-linear wandering of the space, rather than leading them through it along a pre-determined trail (240). In order to discover the various markers distributed throughout the space, the player has to slow down, explore, and pay careful attention to their environment (243). In discussing what she calls wandering games, Kagen explicitly positions this kind of intuitive meandering as “a mode of movement much opposed to purpose-driven conquest” (7). When we wander an environment, we embrace ambiguity, indeterminacy, and inefficiency, because we are allowing our own intuition to guide us, rather than a pre-determined spatial goal or pathway. Solnit similarly notes that the “indeterminacy of the ramble” allows and encourages us to attune ourselves to an environment, to understand its layout and features, and to gain a stronger sense of place (10). Wandering, in other words, requires and encourages close and sustained attention, and close and sustained attention affords and encourages care, as we are not extracting resources from the environment for our own use, but engaging with and appreciating the environment on its own terms in order to move forward. In projects like Hidden Rippon Lea and Epiphyte, players are not exploiting or consuming the environment, but paying attention to and conversing with it (Briggs et al. 1). How might these kinds of environmental practices be encouraged in a wholly virtual environment, rather than an augmented reality overlying an actual environment? And how can designers use the unique affordances of that form to further encourage a more collaborative relationship between player and environment, in the interests of fostering a more caring design para

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