Shallow Depths

(Enslaved: Odyssey to the West's fish tank scene occurs at the end of Chapter Two, but in some ways it's worth discovering for yourself, so consider yourself warned if sensitive to spoilers.)

The scene: Monkey and Trip come across something beautiful and incredible.  A large fish tank is still thriving after approximately two hundred years in the ruins of New York.  Trip explains that it's working as a perfect closed system.  The sunlight feeds the plants, the small fish eat the plants, and the big fish eat the small fish.

I'm not going to attack that scenario, even if it does seem pretty unlikely.  Enslaved is hyper-real in general, with its oversaturated greenery and picturesque ruins.  I'll hand wave a little for the sake of fantasy, or perhaps assume they had some pretty amazing fish tanks before the apocalypse hit, to deal with ongoing oxygenation, decomposition, and so on.   Nothing in Enslaved is grimy, and the fish tank is effectively a miracle – survival against the odds.

Two hundred years is an interesting figure to me, because it's also around the time since European settlement of Australia.  And a couple of hundred years is really short in this context.  Changes might seem dramatic but, like Australian cities, Enslaved's landscape is still new and changing.

On that short time scale many things do persist.  There's a simple graph to estimate how many species are likely to occur per area of habitat.  New cities like those in Australia are likely to have more species than you would predict for the area of habitat available.  Many things are still just hanging on, like long-lived trees or small populations surviving in scattered reserves.

That is how I think of Enslaved's fish tank, and Monkey seems to agree with me.  Trip explains that her own colony functions in a similar way – a self-sustaining community cut off from the rest of the world.  Monkey says it's only a matter of time before the slavers attack again, while I doubt their ability to persist for other reasons, including the risk of disease outbreak or long-term inbreeding.  Small, isolated populations are vulnerable for a whole bunch of reasons.

You can probably guess what happens next.  The boss fight, followed by Trip crying over fish flopping uselessly on the ground.  And can't you just smell the forshadowing?  All the subtlety of a brick.

Ecology is perhaps an awkward thing to depict in media.  On a simple level many people already understand it.  It's basic ideas like plants capturing sunlight and animals eating each other.  It's watching a pair of birds hatch and raise their young.

It's a deceptive simplicity, which hides the countless variables and interactions complicating natural systems.  The happy medium between simple observations of nature and the complex reality is hard enough to get my head around while working with it regularly.  I don't exactly expect to see it in a more informal setting.

Still, somehow I can't help but feel there's room for just a touch more complexity and subtlety.  I'm also looking at you, Miyazaki.

Earlier this month I was linked to this article on Flower. As an ecologist who works in urban spaces it was fascinating to me, and described something close to my own experience playing Flower. I really wish I'd written something like it, particularly the parts about breaking down the separation between humans and nature. On another level, the article suffers from what I have been known to call 'Matrix ecology' -- a poor choice of terminology, since matrix usually means something else in landscape ecology. I should possibly call it something more like 'popular culture ecology'.

(Tangent: computers and ecology seem to have a few awkward terminology overlaps. We've also started talking about 'landscape defragmentation'.)

Most people probably remember this rant from Agent Smith in The Matrix:

I'd like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species, and I realised that humans are not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. Instead you multiply, and multiply, until every resource is consumed. The only way for you to survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern... a virus.

Kyle MacGregor's Flower article follows a similar idea:

The earth once was a healthy functioning ecosystem. In many ways ecosystems function like individual organisms. If the earth were a single organism, than all life on earth would be in symbiosis with that ecosystem. Most terrestrial life has either a commensalistic or mutualistic relationship with the planet. However, in recent history the human race has become a parasite.

These views come back to the idea of the Balance of Nature, which suggests that in the absence of disturbances (such as humans messing with things), natural mechanisms will maintain a stable equilibrium. There is also more than a hint here of the form of Gaia theory that considers the earth like a single organism, with all parts working together in harmony.

That's sweet and all, but to me this is a mix of outdated theory and pseudoscience. There is nothing fundamentally different about the animal and human approach to resources, it's more a difference of scale. Yes, humans are having massive impacts on ecosystems, and I'd like to see us take more responsibility for that. But it's not because we are particularly different to other animals.

Ecosystems do not function like individual organisms, and do not tend to exist in a stable balance. Disturbance is a normal part of the world. People seem very attached to the idea of nature as stable rather than chaotic, though. Something about this balance idea has wormed its way into popular mindsets. Humans are attracted to balance and stability, while nature itself has no such preference.

Druids in Dungeons & Dragons must have a neutral element to their alignment and are concerned with maintaining the natural balance. These D&D druids will get into trouble with their society (and deity) if they set fire to vegetation, or fail to protect nature from that 'destruction' to the best of their ability. In reality, fire can be very important to vegetation, and many plants require it for reproduction (there are numerous examples of this here in Australia). The best caretakers of the land know how to manage disturbances like fire, not just suppress them. Well-meaning conservationists did a lot of damage before they worked that out.

Science has at least partly moved on, but the idea hasn't died away yet. Druid land management based on balance and preventing disturbance is probably found somewhere in just about every fantasy roleplaying game ever produced. There are a heap of quests in World of Warcraft that act as fairly recent examples.

Fantasy often presents nature as a kind of mystic entity, which is fine, but it's a benign, fair kind of nature that a lot of fantasy focuses on.  I didn't think people really believed that, but that may well be because I'm too close to the topic.  These ideas do seem to keep coming up in places where I don't expect them.

I don't know much about Kyle MacGregor, but his profile says he's working on a B.A. in Environmental Studies, so that's good reason to be interested in these ideas.  The Arts approach to Environmentalism is likely to be rather different to my Science approach.  I don't know what those courses involve, but here's hoping it sets some things straight.  I don't really mean to pick on him specifically, since it's a very common view.  But I'd like to see people learning and changing these ideas.


Further reading: How nature really works - new ecology (Their comparison to Galileo is poor though, he lacked good evidence for his theories and pushed them anyway, which really is arrogance.)

I spent the weekend at Freeplay Independent Games Festival here in Melbourne. I wasn't at my most interactive that's for sure, but did sit quietly and listen to a lot of great speakers. I'm still turning it all over in my head.

Others will probably write about more specific ideas from the various sessions. As usual, I'm going to write about a more individual experience.

I wasn't too sure what I might get out of Freeplay, given that I enjoy playing and writing about games, but have never been interested in making them myself. I expected some new ideas to think about, possibly also a bit more insight into the development process.

I didn't quite expect the level of passion and inspiration. I also didn't expect to start making connections in my mind to my day job, and where there might one day be great synergies. I keep different aspects of my life fairly fragmented, so crossovers come as a surprise.

I work in ecology. Urban ecology, to be more specific. As the people who give a damn about biodiversity in urban areas we spend a lot of time trying to work with competing land uses and perceptions of value.

The theme of Freeplay this year was "Play is Everywhere" and there was quite a bit of discussion of Augmented Reality. A lot of it's fairly conceptual, there are still tech limitations, and no one knows the likely future applications. But when people start talking about how play can be used to alter how people use and perceive spaces around them I can't help but get really excited.

People are usually very concerned with the here and now. I am interested in how to overcome that, and be constantly showing things outside the temporal and spatial boundaries of our perceptions. A lot of information is available, but people are not connecting with it. It almost makes me want to run away and join the AR-circus.

Working in conservation feels like being permanently on the edge of giving up on the world (for me, at least). So, to be faced with so much enthusiasm about the future... yeah, I'm a little bit jealous. It's the first time I've been tempted to be part of all that creative energy.