One of the earliest lessons in any good environmental humanities classroom is that how we understand and interact with the non-human world is mediated through culture. Television, films, music and literature all shape how we understand and connect with soil, plants and animals in the real world. And those cultural representations often have a long and complex history that is constantly being remade and reconstructed in new forms of culture, including video games.
This past February 21, the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory hosted two researchers from Lund University, Fannie Frederikke Baden and Björn Fritz, to discuss and explore how we experience environments through video games. We first encountered Fannie’s work during a seminar presentation at the Division of History last year. She is completing a dissertation on visual displays of atomic cultures, which includes research on the video game Chernobylite. We decided to invite Fannie and Björn back to the EHL to lead an interactive workshop.
Björn, a teacher at Lund who is also completing his doctorate on video games and visual culture, explained how the visual style of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild owed a significant debt to the classic landscape painting, especially the work of Claude Lorrain. The images and style that Lorrain and others pioneered in the early modern period set visual standards for how environments are portrayed in many aspects of visual culture, including video games. Then Fannie discussed how Chernobylite was the product of conscious efforts by the Ukrainian government to reclaim the narrative of the Chernobyl disaster by allowing researchers, tourists and cultural producers increased access to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the roughly 2,600 square kilometer area around the nuclear plant site that has the highest levels of contamination. The game’s developers were able to do a complete photo-realistic rendering of the zone, so game play is very realistic.
After this discussion, the twenty-five students in attendance had a chance to play each game. Coached by Björn and Fannie, they learned how the narrative and game play mediated how we understood each environment. For Zelda, it was the wonder of green mountains, waterfalls and other experiences of the ecological sublime. In contrast, Chernobylite is a zombie horror game, where the main protagonist, a physicist, is navigating the exclusion zone to find his fiancée. These were great contrasting games that helped us understand how historical and contemporary visual cultures shape gaming worlds, and our environmental experience.
