The Universe Peoples

Environmental historian William Cronon believes “storytelling is inherently a moral activity” that can disrupt the “paradox of modernity”, our unprecedented interconnectedness at present coupled with a widespread inability to see it, by inculcating a richer understanding of the world (Reardon & Cronon, 2017, 25:35, 32:45). Part of the difficulty in addressing environmental issues such as climate change is the challenge in inculcating an ecologically realistic perspective outside of our learned reductive anthropocentric lens. This might explain why storytelling through conventional climate communications has largely been ineffective (As, 2022, p. 16). Technological fixes that do not account for the entangled ways in which the world relates with itself end up reproducing the same metabolic rifts and slow violence that characterizes our current milieu. At the same time, entertainment media, inclusive of film, television, and more recently games, have quickly become one of the predominant forms of storytelling (Gitnux 2023), and present novel means of communicating such entanglement. Alenda Chang argues all forms of mass media “encapsulate tacit ecological lessons that partially shape our sense of environmental self-efficacy”, but games and their interactivity in particular can transform “abstract information and otherwise distant threats of ecological calamity” into “operable form” (2019, 15). David OReilly’s Everything, a simulative game, intensifies this, allowing players to traverse a procedurally generated universe through the perspectives of literally everything that exists in the game. This includes thousands of things, from an oxygen atom, to a cigarette butt, to a mountain lion, to a galaxy. In my paper, I carry out an ecocritical analysis of Everything, focusing on its narrative, mechanical, and visual rhetoric, to evaluate how it might confer a sense of who we are as an entangled ecological entity. I employ methods from literary criticism and game studies to interrogate how the game evokes and navigates the dualities of simulation & realism, anthropocentrism & agency, and anthropomorphism & ecopedagogy. Some highlights of my analysis include how: [1] Everything charts a different course towards realism from other games, eschewing graphical fidelity, destructibility, and permadeath mechanics, in favor of facilitating rich and varied perspective-taking and communication; [2] Everything radically disrupts the game design trope of the environment as a passive backdrop, as everything that the player sees can be ‘played’, and decenters the player’s agency through constructing an infinite game while avoiding a narrow presentation of nature as simply pristine wilderness. [3] the anthropomorphic qualities of things in Everything serve as a form of nature study which adds to an interspecies communicative ethic by highlighting their agency and influence. Huizinga’s notion of a “magic circle” that contains and separates gameplay from the ‘real’ world has been thoroughly challenged by game studies scholars (Chang 2019, 15; Columbus 2021, 61). Everything adds to this discourse, pointing the way not to a symptomatic entanglement that can dismantle the myths underlying our climate crisis, but to the myriad of narrative, mechanical, and visual rhetorical approaches that interactive media can use to such communicate such posthumanist worldviews.

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