Hidden Levels #5: Press B to Touch Grass

From blocky biomes to breathtaking open worlds, video games are teaching us new ways to see, build, and even save nature.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 0:45Roman Mars?

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• 1:52Speaker 01

  Roman Mars.

• 1:53Roman Mars?

  Ben Brock Johnson.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  So you are a father of twins. I am a father of twins. I would like to introduce you to one of my twins. This is my son, who got the name "I always wanted," Brock Johnson.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Hello, Roman Mars.

• 2:10Roman Mars?

  Oh, you're fired. This kid's coming for you.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  He'll have my resignation on his desk on Monday morning, for sure.

• 2:17Roman Mars?

  That's right.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Brock is doing what a lot of eight-year-olds do these days. He is designing a very ridiculous treehouse that I do not have the ability or the resources to construct. He is riding his bike as fast as possible. And he is starting to play, just starting to play, video games, which offer him this whole universe of different worlds to inhabit. He likes smashing things just as much as the next eight-year-old or 45-year-old in my case. But, you know, when I asked him about what he really loves about playing video games, he's not just about smashing things, he's about game environments.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  I play a lot of the tundra biome and sometimes forest biome.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Forest biome?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  What do you like about the forest in video games?

• 3:10Speaker 02

  You can really transform the forest into a nice home. And there's really cool bushes. Sometimes I really like the bushes. I can always be like, hmm, is there something tangled up in this bush? And it's really fun to imagine what could happen. And sometimes it does happen.

• 3:33Roman Mars?

  You know, I've never heard an eight-year-old use the word biome so much. Like, he's just really, like, ensorcelled by the outside world inside of his, you know, indoor kid's game.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  I know, he really is. And the first time he said it, it was a sort of a record scratch for me. But, but I can see why. You know, the games that you and I played when we were growing up, right? They're really simplistic in the way that they depict or capture natural environments. But games now are getting really good at rendering things like bushes that might have something tangled up in them, and trees. It is way more realistic and immersive than it used to be. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

• 4:17Roman Mars?

  This is Hidden Levels, how the world of video games is changing the world beyond video games.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Endless Threads' senior producer, Dean Russell, takes it from here.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Cassie Anne was raised to be what you might call outdoorsy. A wild child of the mid aughts, dirt under fingernails, grass on the knees. Cassie was a rain or shine kid.

• 4:43Speaker 04

  I was outside all of the time, at least when I could be, because we do have very harsh winters here sometimes, though that never stopped me. Sometimes I would just go out in the snow and be completely soaked.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Cassie and their family lived in rural Vermont, a beautiful spot east of Lake Champlain in a valley of pine and birch and oak and maple, some of Cassie's favorite things.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  Giant trees, big into trees.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Nature was everything, a place they could explore. It was a place to hang with friends, a place to build forts and fairy villages, a place to be. In those early years of life, nature felt limitless. It felt good, until one day, it didn't.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  I was like 10 or 12, like somewhere in that early second decade. And I was out playing with my friends. I had a lot of friends who had like farms growing up and we loved to play in the hay bales.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  On that day, when Cassie tired themselves out and came inside, they noticed something. Cassie's skin was red, puffy, itchy. Honestly, it was a little scary.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  I never had that reaction before and I don't know where it came from. And so like their mom was like giving me Benadryl and you know, the creams and stuff like that, but it was so bad I had to go home in the middle of the sleepover. And I was like, I was just so embarrassed.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  This reaction was new. It felt invasive and confusing. It went away, but they didn't know what it was. On another day, Cassie went to the beach. Suddenly, they felt awful, feverish even. These episodes became more frequent. Pretty soon, rashes and fevers developed. It felt like almost every time they went outside. They saw doctors who couldn't give a clear, singular diagnosis. What they did come to know is that they are allergic to hay, allergic to grass, immunocompromised, extremely sensitive to the heat of the sun, or as some put it, allergic to the sun. It was like their body had decided, enough with the outdoors.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  I mean, I just kind of became a little bit of a shut-in, I guess, which is sort of expected. I just kind of retreated into my room, very much so. And, you know, I'd have the window open if I could, but I definitely stopped spending time outside.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  Doctors didn't know what caused Cassie's body to turn on them, or if they'd ever get better. They still don't know. What is clear is that Cassie, someone who loved the outdoors, who thrived with their hands in the dirt, had to become a lot more indoorsy. But they couldn't give up nature. They had to find another way to get it. And for a kid in the 2000s, there was one obvious place to turn. What's your favorite game?

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Oh, Minecraft. Sorry. I'm really excited there.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Cassie frickin' loves Minecraft.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Minecraft is, by the numbers, the most popular video game in the world. Over 350 million copies have been sold since it launched in 2009. The spin-off Jack Black movie, which you've probably heard of, grossed nearly a billion dollars this year.

• 8:20Speaker 05

  Anything you can dream about here, you can make. Zero limits. You know what I'm talking about.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  The game is a Lego-like world of 16 pixel by 16 pixel by 16 pixel blocks. The trees are blocks, the animals, the rocks, all blocks. Minecraft has no points, no prescribed goal, really. You mine with pickaxes and punch trees for lumber. Yeah, punch trees.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  Then you can build, or not.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  One of the things Cassie enjoyed most in the game was walking. Walking around in the game and exploring. Because Minecraft is a virtually endless world of forests, farmlands, deserts, oceans, caves, you name it. It became Cassie's portal to the outdoors.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  I started playing it like pretty much every day. I had my little server with my friends. And whenever my friends would kind of burn out from it and play something else, I would just go in my single player world and build. It kind of never mattered to me that like the Minecraft environments were like 16 by 16 pixels.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  Or whatever, because in my head, I was like, I was so familiar with that feeling of like walking through the woods and being outside that it kind of just translated into my experiences in game.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  This is like Minecraft generated terrain. This is a monitor barn that's specifically for livestock.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you got like a butterfly garden and...

• 9:55Speaker 04

  There's some tadpoles in here.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  Oh, now we're underwater.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Cassie is now 22, and they are better known by their Minecraft handle Snifferish. Snifferish is a Minecraft influencer. They are internet famous. Between TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube, they have some 3 million followers. People who watch hours long videos of Snifferish building some of the most elaborate landscapes.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  One of my first videos, it was like a farm video, and I built a fire pond. And everyone was like, what is a fire pond? And I was like, I got so excited.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  Some of these builds will take months to make.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  I built this very classic white farmhouse. And then this is a monitor barn, which is a barn that's specifically for livestock.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Snifferish has even been commissioned by the makers of Minecraft to design mini worlds. Oh my gosh.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Now we've got giant mountains in the background. All because snifferish, Cassie, has a unique understanding of the game's virtual nature. A nature that, for Cassie and many others, feels quite real.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  I know for a fact that video games make people interested in nature because they're seeing nature that they've never experienced before, and it's making them almost want to go experience it. And then in turn, you know, you have people who are already interested in nature and therefore get into video games because of that.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Video games are arguably the antithesis of nature: highly constructed worlds, synthetic, inorganic. If you grew up gaming, you may recall grownups telling you to shut down the console, go outside and touch some grass. These days, though, touching grass isn't something you have to do outside. As gaming has grown into a $200 billion industry, the boundary between screen and soil has muddied. New technologies and types of play are getting gamers ever closer to the experience of real nature. And yet, in a kind of weird feedback loop, those same technologies and types of play

• 12:14Speaker 03

  meant to simulate nature are now changing the real thing in ways that could outlast us all.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  Since the start of gaming history, virtual nature has played many roles, served many purposes, and been represented in many ways. Space War, a 1962 game on a circular screen computer, was maybe the first with "nature." Space, aka white dots on a black backdrop. When games advanced, virtual nature also evolved.

• 13:03Speaker 06

  As always with the industry, it's usually a push toward more verisimilitude and toward more accuracy.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Alenda Chang is a professor at UC Santa Barbara and a gamer. Alenda studies video game ecology, wrote a book on it. Why would an academic study ecology in games?

• 13:24Speaker 06

  For a lot of people, that is their daily dosage, or whatever their weekly dosage of encounter with the natural environment, right? Or at least the representation of a natural environment.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I haven't been hiking this week, but I have been to the mountains of Hyrule. So, you know, there's that.

• 13:41Speaker 06

  Oh, excellent.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Hyrule Kingdom, Zelda, she gets it. The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo's long-running franchise with dozens of games, is actually a good example of how nature has evolved throughout gaming history.

• 14:01Speaker 06

  There is something about Nintendo and also the Zelda franchise itself that has always been at the forefront of natural representation in games.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  You can think of video game nature's evolution in three big eras, three big Zeldas. Let's start with Era 1. The first Zelda game comes out in 1986. It's two-dimensional, 8-bit. You play as Link, a pointy-eared warrior saving Princess Zelda from a pantsless evil hog monster in the magical world of Hyrule. Link is a flat, pixelated figure moving over flat, pixelated approximations of lakes and caves.

• 14:43Speaker 07

  Did you see the latest Nintendo newsletter? Whoa, nice graphics. I'd like to get my hands on that game.

• 14:49Speaker 06

  Everything down to the character itself occupies a very discreet square or rectangle, you know? So if it's a forest, all the trees are the same and they're sort of replicated in a grid, right? Or rocks and things. And so you get the sense that it was like all very carefully placed and scenic in the sense of like scenery.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  As with most games then, nature is little more than background, a placemat.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  So, era two. Skip ahead a decade to gaming's 3D period, when games, including Zelda, start centering nature in their gameplay.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  It's 1998, Zelda's 3D Ocarina of Time. Pixels are replaced by large, brightly colored polygons, triangles typically, that snap together to create an origami-like forest world. In Ocarina of Time, you're still in Hyrule, still fighting monsters. Yet this time, nature is not just background. Nature is a key part of the game. To accomplish your goals and progress, you need to interact with it. Link swims, he lifts rocks, he chats up the talking tree, all to prevent the bad guy from plunging green Hyrule into ruin.

• 16:13Speaker 06

  If you go back and look at footage from playthroughs of Ocarina of Time, you see the sort of vision of being able to traverse the world in a very embodied and three-dimensional way.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  Ocarina of Time fit into a breed of 3D games: Final Fantasy VII, Spyro the Dragon, which gave nature a more evolved role. But, that was nothing compared to what came next: a new type of game, one that would truly blur the lines between virtual and real nature. Era three: An era that dominates modern gaming: open world.

• 16:57Speaker 06

  Open world is this moniker that gets attached to games, meaning you as a player can traverse these virtual spaces without the impression of having limits.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  In open world games, nature is neither just a place setting nor a means to an end. They are immersive with seemingly boundless landscapes, and their gameplay is often nonlinear, where experiencing nature can be a goal in its own right.

• 17:26Speaker 06

  Thinking about ecology and games, I think it's a huge, it's a huge development because you can now tell stories where you can, by all appearances, wander around a fully-realized immersive game environment.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Truly giant open world games started popping up in the 90s and early aughts. EverQuest and World of Warcraft. And by 2017, you guessed it, Zelda. Zelda: Breath of the Wild is wild. Link is no longer a composite of large polygons, but a hyper-detailed teenager with flaxen hair that whips in the wind. He/you are dropped into an enormous world where you can run for hours without hitting a wall. And if you hit a wall, you can climb it.

• 18:23Speaker 06

  I was completely blown away by not only the beauty of the game environments, but also in terms of liveliness and agency of the non-human environment. So, you know, the fact that in Breath of the Wild, when it rains, you have more trouble climbing things was amazing. I was thrilled.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  The high-rule environments, deserts, tundras, plains, they are practically ecosystems. Their components interact with you and each other. You can tame a wild horse, or collect mushrooms, or do nothing, and the world keeps turning. Rivers flow, rain slicks rocks, bears hunt deer, trees burn and fall, all on their own.

• 19:03Speaker 06

  Breath of the Wild is one of those games where you can put the controller down and you can walk away and things will continue to happen. And you can also stay, like you're saying, and just really enjoy a scenic overlook, or a storm coming in, or, you know, like a herd of wild horses coming by, right? So I think that increases... The sense of realism and also the sense of stakes for players, because you are more vulnerable in some way. You're part of that environment in a way that didn't happen with earlier games.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Breath of the Wild is one example, but today we're living in a golden age of open world games. Red Dead Redemption 2, Skyrim, Assassin's Creed, The Hunter, Call of the Wild, No Man's Sky, Ghost of Tsushima. People play these games differently. Some focus on the main objective, some bounce around taking screenshots of butterflies. Really? Because today's games are closer than ever to a true nature experience. Of course, true nature experience means different things to different people.

• 20:14Speaker 04

  I don't know, it was just, it was so fun to walk around. I love walking around a game. I love just like taking a little stroll.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  Cassie, snifferish, loves Minecraft not because it looks realistic. I mean, it's all blocks. The sun radiates at right angles. But Minecraft's nature, despite its blockiness, does feel real. Part of Minecraft's realism is its diversity. The game has over 60 different environments, or biomes, each with their own plants, animals, and landscapes. Players can access a kind of nature that is not right out their front door.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  Growing up in like the classic temperate forest, having access to those other biomes that I definitely don't have access to, like beaches even. I'm in a landlocked state. I don't see beaches. Like, it's interesting. And also, it kind of lets me, I can build my house on a beach. I can build my house in a rainforest, you know? I can't do that in real life.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  The realism in Minecraft is also in its scale. If Zelda feels endless, Minecraft is endless. You can wake up every day, walk east, and never stop if you want. Some guy actually did that. He made it 58 days before he chose to stop the game because the game wasn't going to stop him. These features of open worlds, their diversity and scale, the way you can walk forever and never see the same scene twice, that experience is possible because of something called procedural generation.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  Procedural generation is a technique that creates nature algorithmically, not manually. You don't place every tree in the game. You give the computer rules and the computer populates the scene for you. This is something Agnes Larson told me. She's game director at Mojang, maker of Minecraft.

• 22:09Speaker 07

  It's not possible to design each part of an endless world by hand. Procedural generation is the reason to why we can create this world with different biomes, different kind of building blocks. There are oceans, we create continents.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Procedural generation came out of the late 70s as a way of creating rudimentary but semi-randomized, grid-like environments. Nowadays, Minecraft developers tell the game's software the rules of the world, like where mangrove trees grow, or which creatures live in which climates. And the software executes.

• 22:48Speaker 07

  Each thing is simple by design, and the visuals are simple, and the mechanics are simple. And that means that it can kind of be combined in an endless amount of complex ways.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  The procedural rules in Minecraft's game design are akin to the laws of nature. Just as with nature, the magic is in the unexpected combinations. Even as a Minecraft developer, Agnes has been genuinely surprised by some landscapes, because she didn't invent them. Not exactly.

• 23:22Speaker 07

  I remember walking into this location that it was a big mountain, and then there was a huge waterfall, because a lake had generated on top of the mountain. And then we also happened to generate a lush cave biome. So the waterfall went into these vines that came down from like the sides of the caves. And it was just very dramatic, because there was so much contrast.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  As gamers and developers told me, it is the pursuit of nature that inspired technologies like procedural generation. It also fueled a new wave of graphics. Graphics that, if you haven't seen a brand-new video game in a while, go look, because it's crazy.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  The Last of Us 2, a lot of it is borderline photorealism with a dash of style.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Jeremy Huxley is an environmental artist. He's worked on games heralded for their looks, including Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us Part 2, the game-turned HBO series, where fungi cause the zombie apocalypse.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  I'm not infected. I'm immune. Yeah, I was lucky enough to get to work on the fungus team. And I was focused on materials, so I would do a lot of the snow and rocks and stuff like that.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  The Last of Us 2 and Uncharted 4 are linear games, technically not open world. But they are large worlds, and they look unbelievably believable because of people like Jeremy. His job is to study nature and blend art and tech to mimic it.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Actually, when we were developing the tech for Uncharted 4, we didn't fully understand, for example, like how translucency worked on leaves. So we literally went out, gathered a bunch, and then we took a light box that you would use for like animating, cast light through them to kind of see how it reacted. And we took a lot of notes there, and then we were able to sort of simulate that.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  When you're designing a game environment, you use a library of assets, trees, rocks. You can design them from scratch, a process called sculpting, which is Jeremy's forte. But you can also fill that library with real trees and real rocks, scanned from life into the virtual world.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  The fidelity level is extremely high. You can literally just create realism now because you can go out and scan nature these days.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Scanning is what it sounds like, but on a meticulous level. Professionals go into the wild with handheld light or laser scanners, or they use intense camera equipment to take thousands of photos of a single object from every conceivable angle. That data is then uploaded to a game engine, software used to make games. This means that some tree you bump into in the game may actually be the digital ghost of a living tree. Game engines then make the tree come to life to blow in the breeze and shimmer in the sun.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  What I'm using currently is Unreal Engine 5. We have insane amounts of processing power. You can use tons of geometry materials, react naturally to light, like you were saying. Even Minecraft is doing a similar thing. This sort of stuff is really difficult to do, but it's really powerful that we have this sort of thing.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  So procedural generation creates a game world that feels dynamic and infinite. Scans make the world beautiful in a way that real nature is beautiful. And then game engines animate it into being. Together, they make the nature in video games feel very close to the real thing. But that dynamic also works in reverse. Because today, some of the technologies born from gaming are now being used to manipulate the real living world and are placing it. More on that in a minute.

• 27:40Roman Mars?

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• 30:25Speaker 03

  In a lot of ways, it makes sense that nature has inspired the games industry. Games are commercial art, and art has been emulating nature since someone drew a pig on a cave wall. But what's maybe less expected is the way the gaming industry has, on a real tangible level, shaped the living world. How much have video games influenced nature?

• 30:49Speaker 04

  In my field of work, heavily.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  Taisha Fabritius works in Zurich for a company called Ezri. Ezri uses video game technologies, like procedural generation and game engines, to map the real world. Or even recreate it.

• 31:08Speaker 04

  How much do you know about digital twins? If I say digital twins, does that mean anything to you?

• 31:15Speaker 03

  Digital twins are functioning, animated simulations of a real place. Think Google Street View meets Grand Theft Auto. Zurich has one, New York has one, Corpus Christi, Texas, has one.

• 31:30Speaker 04

  The more immersive you can experience your world digitally, the better you'll be able to make decisions, right?

• 31:40Speaker 03

  Digital twins are used primarily in city planning. They're not exact replicas, but living models of a place. And the reason they are possible is because of technologies pioneered by the games industry. Game engines for one, procedural generation for another. Procedural generation, the game tech that creates worlds algorithmically, can invent a place, like in Minecraft. It can also use rules and real-world data to digitally approximate a place that already exists, easily. So instead of some person painstakingly sculpting each building and tree, or even scanning them, you can give the computer a map and information about the landscape, how many

• 32:24Speaker 03

  stories each building is, or how many trees on each block. And the program uses procedural generation to invent the rest, or fill in the blanks.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  Then, Esri brings the digital twin to life with game engines. Game engines animate a place so that traffic moves and rain falls. The result is an immersive map that doesn't just look like its real-life twin, it also acts like it.

• 32:52Speaker 07

  When you're bringing in real data into game engines, and you can create these believable, very visual, very immersive experiences that obviously, quote-unquote, changes the game when it comes to actually making real decisions in the real world.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  What Esri does with game engines has been particularly helpful in the age of climate change. As nature itself changes, we need to imagine what will come and how to prepare for the worst. Kauai County, Hawaii, used Esri tech to animate sea level rise and see how it would affect the area. The county then adopted new construction ordinances. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration used it to visualize heat islands in DC. LA used Esri for response and recovery efforts during the wildfires earlier this year. Taishu says Esri can recreate those fires, allow you to revisit them again and again to understand what went wrong and how to plan for next time.

• 33:50Speaker 07

  You can be there and see it. And because the data's there and the 3D model's there, everything, everything looks real. And so you can see it and you're fully immersed in it. And it helps you to plan for ways that you can mitigate this then.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  And this is not just for cities. Esri partnered with the Nature Conservancy to create a digital twin of point conception in California, a place where chaperone and oak woodlands meets coastal scrub and kelp forests. There, invasive ice plants are displacing the local flora. Researchers are using the digital twin of point conception to test out ways to eliminate the plants before going IRL, in real life. In theory, you could predict which ideas will fight off invasives and which won't. It is a digital proving ground, like a game. Try, fail, respawn, try again.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  While this endless pursuit of a truer virtual nature has made its way into tools for predicting sea level rise and preparing for wildfires, it also comes at a cost, one that is arguably raising the level of the sea and sparking the flames.

• 35:10Speaker 04

  The number one thing for me is the almost staggering amount of carbon emissions that come from playing games, from making games and from all the other peripheral activities around the games industry.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  You just broke a lot of gamers' hearts out there. I just have to point that out.

• 35:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  Ben Abraham researches digital games and climate change. And no, he doesn't hate gaming. Destiny is his favorite game. But also, his favorite Earth is, well, Earth. So Ben works for the Sustainable Games Alliance, a nonprofit trying to clean up the industry for the planet. A difficult task because game companies do not have to disclose their emissions.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  The best number that I've been able to come up with, and it's just a ballpark figure, really, is around about 50 million tonnes of CO2 per annum. And most people will just be like, OK, that sounds like a lot because it's a million. But what is that? Well, it's bigger than Hollywood. It's probably around about the same sort of emissions as a medium-sized European country, like Sweden or Greece.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Graphics, game engines, it all bleeds energy. Without more solar and wind, that means burning fossil fuels for the sake of play. And despite some smart industry moves to make games more energy efficient, the fuels keep burning and emissions...

• 36:38Speaker 04

  They are absolutely going up. I mean, there's almost no question, yeah. And I think we need to reckon... With that fact, and you know, figure out what is a sustainable path for the games industry. I don't think that we've got a vision of one yet.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  Part of what's fueling emissions is ironically, the push to create more realistic environments. Think of the CPU slash energy needed for scanning. You take thousands of photos of one tree and upload them into software, which renders that tree as a 3D model with multiple layers of detail and especially calibrates it to say authentically reflect light. And then that model is fed into an AI-supported engine where it's downloaded and perhaps used to procedurally fill in the virtual world. All in the name of getting us to admire the fake tree instead of going outside where the real drought-ridden trees are no longer any more alive than the one in the game. Anyway, some people see it differently. Game ecology professor Alenda Chang thinks it's more of a mixed bag.

• 37:37Speaker 06

  I have to acknowledge the the sort of environmental impact of the powerful computers and graphical processing units on the world, right? But I think also, games do have a really profound influence on people's understandings or perceptions or attitudes toward the natural world, or at least they can.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  Games are media. Media have a huge effect on people psychologically. And people have a huge effect on nature. Fill the earth and subdue it. Said a book once, people took that to heart. But the messaging in games can be quite different than the Old Testament. Take Minecraft. Punch down a tree and you'll need to plant another one to replace it. Punch down all the trees and you're out. Resources are finite, just like in nature. Maybe that sounds small, but again, Minecraft, a game created by Mojang, a small studio in Sweden, Minecraft is the most popular game in the world. 20% of its players are kids. They

• 38:44Speaker 03

  pick stuff up. One small study found kids who played Minecraft learned more about sustainability than kids who didn't. And there's anecdotal. Evidence.

• 38:55Speaker 06

  It's pretty wild and magical to me, the power that Mojang has in some ways. You know, just the decision to include axolotls, right?

• 39:03Speaker 03

  Yes, axolotls, the critically endangered salamanders with pointy punk rock head gills. After Minecraft added them to the game in 2021, Google searches spiked. An axolotl sanctuary told NPR at the time that nearly every kid who visited came because of Minecraft.

• 39:20Speaker 06

  Games are, you know, these really incredible storytelling machines and they can just leave us with a feeling or they can leave us with a sensation and that might be enough. That might be enough to propel somebody to think differently or to care about something that isn't just them.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  Is your wardrobe a specific choice against the sun?

• 39:48Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah, I'm like always wearing pants in summer.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  Over the years, Minecraft-loving, allergic-to-the-sun Cassie has found ways to be more outdoorsy again. With the right season, the right weather, the right clothing, and sometimes a really annoying journalist who won't shut up about nature, Cassie still sees green. So a while back, we went for a hike in the foothills of western Vermont. Do you ever just like look out and see the world in blocks?

• 40:19Speaker 04

  No, actually. Yeah, I feel like I'm more focused on translating our world into Minecraft than Minecraft into our world, if that makes sense.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  So you're not punching trees?

• 40:31Speaker 04

  No, definitely not.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  Cassie, their partner, and I went on our way through white birches and red maples and across a field of tall grass. There was a breeze, birds, nature was moving.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  Oh, look, there's a little snake. Oh, there it goes. Okay.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  We followed trail signs and a dirt path, reminders that even in reality, few places are truly natural. Like players in Minecraft, we've sculpted this world. But even under the heaviest footprint, there is something there, something beyond ourselves and our ambitions, that something is and will always be irreplicable because we didn't make it.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  And that is quite a thing. Should we go to the end?

• 41:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  All right. To the parking lot.

• 41:22Speaker 04

  To the parking lot, yay. So we can get in our cars.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  Go play video games.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  So, Roman Mars.

• 41:51Roman Mars?

  Ben Brock Johnson.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Do you know what I love about those huge open world games like Ghosts of Tsushima? The game where you play samurai defending his Japanese island from the first Mongol invasion?

• 42:03Roman Mars?

  I don't know everything you love about them, but what do you love?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  I love me a side quest, you know?

• 42:08Roman Mars?

  Side quest, of course.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Side quest, the little mission you can do that's not necessarily part of the big mission. In Ghosts of Tsushima, they have so many of these. You can practice your sword skills on these bamboo things. You can follow foxes to shrines where you pray. You can write haikus. There's lots of side quests you can do.

• 42:27Roman Mars?

  And we have one more side quest for our hidden levels listeners on the endless thread feed, right?

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And this one comes to us from producer Grace Tatter.

• 42:37Speaker 07

  Hi, Ben. Hi, Roman.

• 42:38Roman Mars?

  Hey.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Hey, Grace, tell us a little bit more about this journey you are taking us on with your side quest. What's the story?

• 42:45Speaker 07

  Okay, so this is a story about a renowned surgeon. He's a pioneer in his field and he has a theory that playing video games could help other doctors be better surgeons.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Does this surprise you as an idea? Like gamers could be better surgeons, Roman?

• 43:03Roman Mars?

  Oh, my God, no, it does not surprise me as an idea because, you know, we've talked about this, like the dexterity, the tools, the reaction, all that sort of stuff is built into video games. And I imagine it's like a cornerstone to what makes a good surgeon a good surgeon.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Would it surprise you to learn that non gamer surgeons might be skeptical of this idea?

• 43:22Roman Mars?

  I mean, the funny thing about doctors in general is that doctors have some fealty to tradition.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:31Roman Mars?

  That makes these types of developments, you know, sometimes hard for some of them to accept.

• 43:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's.

• 43:37Speaker 04

  Exactly right. The doctor in this story, it was quite the quest for him to prove this theory in the 90s and the 2000s. Because a lot of people really did not believe that video games had any place in medicine.

• 43:50Speaker 07

  Dr. Rosser is considered one of the best at this in the world. And it's all because he figured out something no one else had thought of.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  That was a big breakthrough. You know, it's like, oh, mom, you know, look, I play in Donkey Kong and it still can help me save lives. Roman, that story is ready for us to listen to right now in our feed, Endless Threat.

• 44:15Roman Mars?

  And coming up Friday on The Final Boss of Hidden Levels, we bring you a dispatch from the console wars.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  Sega was the challenger, right? Sega was never the king. Sega was just coming up to their king and asking for a fight.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by Dean Russell, edited by Kelly Prime. Mix, sound design and music composition by Paul Vikes. Additional mixing by Martine Gonzalez. Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vikes. The super cool music by Swan and Paul for Hidden Levels is being released as an album. You can listen everywhere you stream music. Fact checking by Graham Hesha. Special thanks to Samuel Aberg, Alex Beecham, Tracy Fullerton, Will Matia, Kelsey Myers and Mike Rojo. The managing producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Berube. Hidden Levels was created by me, Ben Brock Johnson, while dancing in a Fortnite game lobby with power ups and cheat codes.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Thanks to Team 99% Invisible and Team Endless Threat.

• 45:17Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible's executive producer is Kathy Too. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Jason DeLion, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Laish Madon, Jacob Medina Gleason, Joe Rosenberg and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for Hidden Levels was created by Aaron Nester. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Endless Threat is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR. The rest of our team tackling unsolved mysteries, untold histories and other wild stories from the internet includes my illustrious co-host, Anne-Marie Severson, managing producer Sumit Tajoshi, editor Meg Kramer, producers Grace Tatter, Franny Monahan, and sound designer Emily Jankowski. See you on Friday, everybody.

• 46:17Speaker 05

  Hey, everyone. It's Stavros Halakis, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast, Stavvy's World. Each week, we're joined by great guests like Josh Safdie, Eric Andre, Caleb Heron, and more. It's sort of an interview show, but really, we're just messing around, making each other laugh, and hopefully making you laugh while you're washing the dishes or grocery shopping or on a long drive. Plus, I take listener calls where we have honest conversations about dating, life, and everything in between. Imagine if your therapist was a vulgar degenerate whose office was in a Greek diner. No scripts, no polish, and absolutely no holding back. Listen to Stavvy's World wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:55Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. When you use Angie for your home projects, you know all your jobs will be done well. Roof repair? Done well. Kitchen sink install? Done well. Deck upgrades? Done well. Electrical upgrades? Done well. Angie's been connecting homeowners with skilled pros for nearly 30 years, so we know the difference between done and done well. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at angie.com.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  Talk about regrets. We all know someone who's been in a car accident and said, "I don't need to call a lawyer," only to regret it after their pain and damages were worse than expected. When someone hurts you, you deserve to be compensated fairly. Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm, fighting for the people for over 35 years. Injured? Visit forthepeople.com/podcast. That's forthepeople.com/podcast. Their fee is free unless they win.