Hidden Levels Ep. 5: Press B to Touch Grass

Video games are arguably the antithesis of nature; highly constructed worlds, synthetic, inorganic. If you grew up gaming, you may recall grown-ups 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 dollar 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 meant to simulate nature are now changing the real thing in ways that could outlast us all. Credits: This episode was produced by Dean Russell. Edited by Kelly Prime. Mix, sound design, and music composition by Paul Vaitkus. Additional mixing by Martín Gonzalez. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Special thanks to Samuel Åberg, Alex Beachum, Tracy Fullerton, Will Matthee, Kelsey Myers, and Mike Rougeau.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 1:06Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 1:22Speaker 04

  Hello, Roman Mars.

• 1:25Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 1:29Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 2:12Speaker 04

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

• 2:20Speaker 05

  Forest biome?

• 2:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:22Speaker 05

  What do you like about the forest in video games?

• 2:25Speaker 04

  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.

• 2:47Speaker 05

  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.

• 2:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 3:31Speaker 05

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

• 3:37Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 3:45Speaker 06

  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.

• 3:57Speaker 07

  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.

• 4:10Speaker 06

  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.

• 4:21Speaker 07

  Giant trees. Big, big into trees.

• 4:25Speaker 06

  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 beat. In those early years of life, nature felt limitless. It felt good. Until one day, it didn't.

• 4:45Speaker 07

  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 farms growing up and we loved to play in the hay bales.

• 4:59Speaker 06

  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.

• 5:12Speaker 07

  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.

• 5:33Speaker 06

  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 some put it allergic to the sun. It was like their body had decided, enough with the outdoors.

• 6:16Speaker 07

  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.

• 6:36Speaker 06

  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?

• 7:09Speaker 07

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

• 7:13Speaker 06

  Cassie frickin' loves Minecraft.

• 7:18Speaker 06

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

• 8:02Speaker 06

  Then you can build, or not.

• 8:06Speaker 06

  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.

• 8:27Speaker 07

  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.

• 8:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:47Speaker 07

  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.

• 9:01Speaker 07

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

• 9:07Speaker 06

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

• 9:09Speaker 07

  There's some tadpoles in here, you can see them.

• 9:11Speaker 06

  Oh, now we're underwater.

• 9:18Speaker 06

  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.

• 9:41Speaker 07

  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.

• 9:48Speaker 06

  Some of these builds will take months to make.

• 9:51Speaker 07

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

• 9:59Speaker 06

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

• 10:24Speaker 07

  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.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  Video games are arguably the antithesis of nature: highly-constructed worlds, synthetic, inorganic. If you grew up gaming, you may recall grown-ups 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

• 11:29Speaker 06

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

• 11:52Speaker 06

  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.

• 12:17Speaker 08

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

• 12:25Speaker 06

  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?

• 12:39Speaker 08

  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.

• 12:51Speaker 06

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

• 12:57Speaker 08

  Oh.

• 13:00Speaker 08

  Excellent.

• 13:01Speaker 06

  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.

• 13:16Speaker 08

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

• 13:26Speaker 06

  You can think of video game nature's evolution in three big eras, three big Zeldas. Let's start with

• 13:35Speaker 06

  Era One. 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.

• 13:58Speaker 09

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

• 14:03Speaker 08

  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.

• 14:30Speaker 06

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

• 14:38Speaker 06

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

• 14:51Speaker 06

  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 a talking tree, all to prevent the bad guy from plunging Green Hyrule into ruin.

• 15:27Speaker 08

  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.

• 15:38Speaker 06

  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 III, an era that dominates modern gaming: open world.

• 16:11Speaker 08

  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.

• 16:25Speaker 06

  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.

• 16:40Speaker 08

  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.

• 17:02Speaker 06

  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.

• 17:37Speaker 08

  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.

• 17:55Speaker 06

  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.

• 18:18Speaker 08

  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.

• 18:59Speaker 06

  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.

• 19:28Speaker 07

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

• 19:35Speaker 06

  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.

• 20:06Speaker 07

  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 could build my house on a beach. I can build my house in a rainforest, you know? I can't do that in real life.

• 20:29Speaker 06

  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.

• 21:04Speaker 06

  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.

• 21:23Speaker 10

  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.

• 21:41Speaker 06

  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.

• 22:02Speaker 10

  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.

• 22:18Speaker 06

  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.

• 22:37Speaker 10

  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.

• 23:11Speaker 06

  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.

• 23:28Speaker 11

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

• 23:34Speaker 06

  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.

• 23:49Speaker 04

  I'm not infected. I'm immune.

• 23:52Speaker 11

  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.

• 24:00Speaker 06

  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.

• 24:17Speaker 11

  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.

• 24:36Speaker 06

  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.

• 24:55Speaker 11

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

• 25:03Speaker 06

  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.

• 25:37Speaker 11

  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.

• 26:02Speaker 06

  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 placed in it. More on that in a minute.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 27:10Speaker 12

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 28:06Speaker 13

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• 28:36Speaker 06

  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?

• 29:00Speaker 14

  In my field of work, heavily.

• 29:05Speaker 06

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

• 29:19Speaker 14

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

• 29:26Speaker 06

  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.

• 29:40Speaker 14

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

• 29:51Speaker 06

  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,

• 30:35Speaker 06

  how many 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. 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.

• 31:03Speaker 14

  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.

• 31:19Speaker 06

  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.

• 31:52Speaker 06

  Taisha 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.

• 32:01Speaker 14

  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.

• 32:13Speaker 06

  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.

• 32:54Speaker 06

  Try, fail, respawn, try again. 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.

• 33:21Speaker 15

  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.

• 33:36Speaker 06

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

• 33:41Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 06

  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.

• 34:05Speaker 15

  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.

• 34:31Speaker 06

  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.

• 34:49Speaker 15

  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.

• 35:04Speaker 06

  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 specially 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.

• 35:48Speaker 08

  I have to acknowledge 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.

• 36:13Speaker 06

  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 pick stuff up.

• 36:56Speaker 06

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

• 37:06Speaker 08

  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?

• 37:14Speaker 06

  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.

• 37:30Speaker 08

  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.

• 37:55Speaker 06

  Is your wardrobe a specific choice against the sun?

• 38:00Speaker 07

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

• 38:03Speaker 06

  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?

• 38:30Speaker 07

  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.

• 38:41Speaker 06

  So you're not punching trees?

• 38:42Speaker 07

  No. Definitely not.

• 38:46Speaker 06

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

• 38:57Speaker 07

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

• 39:01Speaker 06

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

• 39:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, sure.

• 39:30Speaker 06

  All right. To the parking lot.

• 39:32Speaker 07

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

• 39:37Speaker 06

  Go play video games.

• 39:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 40:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  So, Roman Mars. Ben Brock Johnson. Do you know what I love about those huge open world games like Ghosts of Tsushima, the game where you play a samurai defending his Japanese island from the first Mongol invasion? I don't know everything you love about them, but what do you love? I love me a side quest, you know? Side quest, of course. Side quests. 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. And we have one more side quest for our hidden levels listeners on the Endless Thread feed, right? Yeah, that's right.

• 40:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  And this one comes to us from producer Grace Tatter.

• 40:48Speaker 16

  Hi, Ben. Hi, Roman.

• 40:50Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 40:56Speaker 16

  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.

• 41:09Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 41:14Speaker 05

  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.

• 41:26Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 41:33Speaker 05

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

• 41:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 41:42Speaker 05

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

• 41:47Speaker 16

  Yeah, that's 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.

• 42:01Speaker 17

  Dr. Ross 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.

• 42:10Speaker 18

  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.

• 42:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Roman, that story is ready for us to listen to right now in our feed, Endless Threat.

• 42:26Speaker 05

  And coming up Friday on the final boss of Hidden Levels, we bring you a dispatch from the console wars.

• 42:34Speaker 19

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

• 42:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  This episode was produced by Dean Russell, edited by Kelly Prime. Mix, sound design and music composition by Paul Vikes, additional mixing by Martín González. 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 Haysham. Special thanks to Samuel Auber, Alex Beachum, 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

• 43:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  with power-ups and cheat codes, thanks to Team 99% Invisible and Team Endless Threat.

• 43:28Speaker 05

  99% Invisible's executive producer is Kathy Tu. 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 Madan, 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 Nestor. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California.

• 44:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  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 Joshi, editor Meg Kramer, producers Grace Tatter, Franny Monahan, and sound designer Emily Jankowski. See you on Friday, everybody.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, executive director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 44:52Speaker 20

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 44:57Speaker 05

  And just to explain why you're excited about it.

• 44:59Speaker 20

  Oh, my gosh. Individualized support, right? Personalization, and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 46:17Speaker 21

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon Fall Drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's Fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.