The Interactive Pasts Conference 2: George L. Vlachos
2Video presentation for the Interactive Pasts Conference 2, October 8-10 2018, Center for Sound and Vision.
George L. Vlachos (European University Institute, Florence, Italy)
To Fell a Digital Tree: Perceiving History and Environment in First-Person Survival Games
Since the release of Minecraft in 2011, the number of first-person survival or sandbox videogames making their way into our PCs or consoles has been on a sharp rise. In an attempt to trigger a debate regarding impressions of historical research in videogames, this essay will focus on three separate but intertwined subjects. Firstly, it will focus upon analyzing the gameplay feel of titles such as Stranded Deep, The Forest and Ark: Survival Evolved. Secondly, it will discuss about how the environment is scripted to be perceived in those games. Even more importantly, it will emphasize on how the environment is situated in these games in order to be utilized, manipulated, administered and managed by the player, the primary objective of whom is survive by exploiting the space around him. Such interaction, this essay will argue, forces the player to experience firsthand the economics of the environment, which subsequently pushes him to view nature not as a still landscape but as a dynamic system, or even better, as an ecosystem. The last subject in this endeavor –and closely related to the previous one- will be to correlate this digital interplay between the environment and the player with the spatial turn in history as well as the rise of environmental history as a distinct and, nowadays, popular field.
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