BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Roman Mars.
ROMAN MARS: Ben Brock Johnson.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: So, you’re 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
BROCK JOHNSON: Hello, Roman Mars.
ROMAN MARS: Oh, you’re fired. This kid’s coming for you.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: He’ll have my resignation on his desk on Monday morning, for sure. Brock is doing what a lot of eight-year-olds do these days. He is designing a very ridiculous tree house 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 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.
BROCK JOHNSON: I play a lot of the tundra biome and sometimes the forest biome.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Forest biome?
BROCK JOHNSON: Yeah.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: What do you like about the forest in video games?
BROCK JOHNSON: 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.
ROMAN MARS: I’ve never heard an eight-year-old use the word “biome” so much. He’s just really ensorcelled by the outside world inside of his indoor kids game.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: I know, he really is. And the first time he said it, it was sort of a record scratch for me. But I can see why. The games that you and I played when we were growing up–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 gonna talk about today.
ROMAN MARS: This is Hidden Levels, how the world of video games is changing the world beyond video games.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Endless Thread’s senior producer, Dean Russell, takes it from here.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
CASSIE ANNE: I was outside all 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: Cassie and her 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…
CASSIE ANNE: Giant trees. [LAUGHS] Big into trees.
DEAN RUSSELL: Nature was everything–a place they could explore. It was a place to hang with friends, a place to build forts and fairy villages, and a place to be. In those early years of life, nature felt limitless. It felt good. Until one day, it didn’t.
CASSIE ANNE: I was, like, 10 or 12–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.
DEAN RUSSELL: On that day, when Cassie tired themselves out and came inside, they noticed something. Cassie’s skin was red, puffy, and itchy. Honestly, it was a little scary.
CASSIE ANNE: I never had that reaction before, and I don’t know where it came from. And so, like, their mom was 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 just so embarrassed.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.”
CASSIE ANNE: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: What’s your favorite game–video game?
CASSIE ANNE: Oh, Minecraft! [LAUGHING] Sorry. I got really excited there.
DEAN RUSSELL: Cassie fricking loves Minecraft.
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 probably heard of, grossed nearly a billion dollars this year.
STEVE: Anything you can dream about here, you can make. Zero limits! You know what I’m talking about…
DEAN RUSSELL: 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. Then you can build–or not. One of the things Cassie enjoyed most in the game was walking–walking around in the games 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.
CASSIE ANNE: I started playing it pretty much every day. I had my little server with my friends. And whenever my friends would burn out from it and play something else, I would just go in my single-player world and build. It never mattered to me that the Minecraft environments were, like, 16 by 16 pixels or whatever because, in my head, I was so familiar with that feeling of walking through the woods and being outside that it kind of just translated into my experiences in-game. This is, like, Minecraft generated terrain. This is a monitor barn that’s specifically for livestock.
DEAN RUSSELL: Yeah, and you got, like, a butterfly garden and…
CASSIE ANNE: There’s some tadpoles in here. You can see them.
DEAN RUSSELL: Oh, now we’re underwater.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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 hourslong videos of Snifferish building some of the most elaborate landscapes.
CASSIE ANNE: And one of my first videos–it was, like, a farm video. And I built a fire pond, and everyone was like, “What is a firepond?”
DEAN RUSSELL: Some of these builds will take months to make.
CASSIE ANNE: I built this very classic white farmhouse. And then this is a monitor barn, which is a barn that’s specifically for livestock.
DEAN RUSSELL: Snifferish has even been commissioned by the makers of Minecraft to design mini worlds.
DEAN RUSSELL: Oh my gosh! Now we’ve got giant mountains in the background.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
CASSIE ANNE: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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 plays meant to simulate nature are now changing the real thing in ways that could outlast us all.
Since the start of gaming history, virtual nature has played many roles, served many purposes, and been represented in many ways. Spacewar!–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.
ALENDA CHANG: As always with the industry, it’s usually a push toward more verisimilitude and toward more accuracy.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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?
ALENDA CHANG: 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–
DEAN RUSSELL: Yeah, I haven’t been hiking this week, but I have been to the mountains of Hyrule. So, you know, there’s that.
ALENDA CHANG: [LAUGHING] Oh, excellent.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
ALENDA CHANG: There is something about Nintendo and also the Zelda franchise itself that has always been at the forefront of natural representation in games.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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–eight 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.
KID #1 (ZELDA AD): Did you see the latest Nintendo newsletter?
KID #2 (ZELDA AD): Whoa! Nice graphics! I’d like to get my hands on that game…
ALENDA CHANG: Everything down to the character itself occupies a very discreet square or rectangle. 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 all very carefully placed and scenic in the sense of scenery.
DEAN RUSSELL: As with most games then, nature is little more than background–a placemat. Skip ahead a decade to gaming’s 3D period when games, including Zelda, start centering nature in their gameplay. 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. At 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 them. Link swims, he lifts rocks, he chats up a talking tree–all to prevent the bad guy from plunging green Hyrule into ruin.
ALENDA CHANG: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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 3–an era that dominates modern gaming–open world.
ALENDA CHANG: “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.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
ALENDA CHANG: Thinking about ecology and games, I think 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
ALENDA CHANG: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: The Hyrule environments–deserts, tundras, and planes–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.
ALENDA CHANG: 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–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.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
CASSIE ANNE: I don’t know. It was so fun to walk around. I love walking around in-game. I love just, like, taking a little stroll.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
CASSIE ANNE: 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. 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
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 Larsson told me. She’s a game director at Mojang, maker of Minecraft.
AGNES LARSSON: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
AGNES LARSSON: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: The procedural rules in Minecraft’s game design are kin 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.
AGNES LARSSON: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
JEREMY HUXLEY: The Last of Us II–a lot of it is borderline photorealism with a dash of style.
DEAN RUSSELL: Jeremy Huxley is an environmental artist. He’s worked on games heralded for their looks, including Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us Part II, the game-turned-HBO-series where fungi cause the zombie apocalypse.
ELLIE WILLIAMS: I’m not infected! I’m immune!
JEREMY HUXLEY: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
JEREMY HUXLEY: Actually, when we were developing the tech for Uncharted 4, we didn’t fully understand, for example, 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 were able to sort of simulate that.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
JEREMY HUXLEY: The fidelity level is extremely high. And you can literally just create realism now because you can go out and scan nature these days.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
JEREMY HUXLEY: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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 our place in it. More on that in a minute…
[AD BREAK]
DEAN RUSSELL: 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?
TAISHA FABRICIUS: In my field of work? Heavily.
DEAN RUSSELL: Taisha Fabricius 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.
TAISHA FABRICIUS: How much do you know about digital twins? If I say “digital twins,” does that mean anything to you?
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
TAISHA FABRICIUS: The more immersive you can experience your world digitally, the better you’ll be able to make decisions, right?
DEAN RUSSELL: 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 in 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 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.
TAISHA FABRICIUS: When you’re bringing in real data into game engines and you can create these believable, very visual, very immersive experiences, that obviously “changes the game” when it comes to actually making real decisions in the real world.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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 D.C. LA used Esri for response and recovery efforts during the wildfires earlier this year. 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.
TAISHA FABRICIUS: You can be there and see it. And because the data’s there and the 3D models, 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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 chaparral and oak woodlands meet 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, respond, 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 flames.
BEN ABRAHAM: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: You just broke a lot of gamers’ hearts out there. I just have to point that out.
BEN ABRAHAM: [CHUCKLES] Yeah.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
BEN ABRAHAM: 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 tons of CO2 per annum. And most people will just be like, “Okay, 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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?
BEN ABRAHAM: They are absolutely going up. I mean, there’s almost no question, yeah. And I think we need to reckon with that fact and figure out what is a sustainable path for the games industry. I don’t think that we’ve got a vision of one yet.
DEAN RUSSELL: Part of what’s fueling emissions is, ironically, the push to create more realistic environments. Think of the CPU/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.
ALENDA CHANG: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: Games are media. Media have a huge effect on people psychologically, and people have a big 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–is the most popular game in the world. 20% of its players are kids. They 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.
ALENDA CHANG: It’s pretty wild and magical to me–the power that Mojang has in some ways. Just the decision to include axolotls, right?
DEAN RUSSELL: Yes! Axolotls, the critically endangered salamanders with pointy punk rock headgills. 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.
ALENDA CHANG: Games are these really incredible storytelling machines, and they can just leave us with a feeling or they can leave us 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: Is your wardrobe a specific choice against the sun?
CASSIE ANNE: Yes, yeah, I’m, like, always wearing pants in summer.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: Do you ever just, like, look out and see the world in blocks?
CASSIE ANNE: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: So you’re not punching trees?
CASSIE ANNE: No. [CHUCKLES] Definitely not.
DEAN RUSSELL: Cassie, her partner, and I wended our way through white birches and red maples and across a field of tall grass. There was a breeze, birds… Nature was moving.
CASSIE ANNE: Oh, look, there’s a little snake! Oh, there it goes. Okay.
DEAN RUSSELL: 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.
DEAN RUSSELL: Should we go to the end?
CASSIE ANNE: Yeah, sure.
DEAN RUSSELL: Alright. To the parking lot.
CASSIE ANNE: Get to the parking lot. Yay! So we can get in our cars.
DEAN RUSSELL: Go play video games. [LAUGHS]
CASSIE ANNE: [LAUGHING] Yeah.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: So, Roman Mars.
ROMAN MARS: Ben Brock Johnson.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Do you know what I love about those huge open-world games like Ghost of Tsushima, the game where you play a samurai defending his Japanese island from the first Mongol invasion?
ROMAN MARS: I don’t know everything you love about them, but what do you love?
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: I love me a side quest.
ROMAN MARS: Side quest! Of course!
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Side quest–the little mission you can do that’s not necessarily part of the big mission. In Ghost 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.
ROMAN MARS: And we have one more side quest for our hidden levels listeners on the Endless Thread feed, right?
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Yeah, that’s right. And this one comes to us from producer Grace Tatter.
GRACE TATTER: Hi, Ben. Hi, Roman.
ROMAN MARS: Hey.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Hey! Grace, tell us a little bit more about this journey you are taking us on with your side quest. What’s the story?
GRACE TATTER: 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.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Does this surprise you as an idea–gamers could be better surgeons–Roman?
ROMAN MARS: Oh my God. No. It does not surprise me as an idea because– 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 a cornerstone to what makes a good surgeon a good surgeon.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Would it surprise you to learn that non-gamer surgeons might be skeptical of this idea?
ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHS] I mean, the funny thing about doctors in general is that doctors have some fealty to tradition that makes these types of developments sometimes hard for some of them to accept.
GRACE TATTER: 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.
NEWS CLIP: 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.
ROSSER: That was a big breakthrough. You know, it’s like, “Oh, mom. Look! I’m playing Donkey Kong, and it still can help me save lives!”
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Roman, that story is ready for us to listen to right now in our feed, Endless Thread.
ROMAN MARS: And coming up Friday on the final boss of Hidden Levels, we bring you a dispatch from the console wars.
TEZ OKANO: Sega was the challenger, right? Sega was never the king. Sega was just coming up to the king and asking for a fight…
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: 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. Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus. 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 Hacia. Special thanks to Samuel Åberg, Alex Beachum, Tracy Fullerton, Will Matthee, Kelsey Myers, and Mike Rougeau.
The managing producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Berube.
Hidden Level was created by me, Ben Brock Johnson, while dancing in a Fortnite game lobby with power-ups and cheat codes thanks to Team 99% Invisible and Team Endless Thread.
ROMAN MARS: 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 Jayson DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca 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 Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Endless Thread 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 cohost Amory Sivertson, Managing Producer Samata Joshi, editor Meg Cramer, Producers Grace Tatter, Frannie Monahan, and Sound Designer Emily Jankowski. See you on Friday, everybody.
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