This video is better on Nebula, both because
there are no ads and because you can follow it up with an exclusive recording of a live
talk I recently gave at my local library. Okay, shh, now the video’s starting for
real. Sometimes, huge feels bigger than infinite. Let me explain. No Man’s Sky is, more or less, infinite. A space game with 18 quintillion planets,
a number that– while not technically limitless– approaches the number of planets in our actual
universe, a figure so unfathomably large that it shoots right past meaninglessness. I can no more easily conceptualize one quintillion
planets than 18, or even a billion. It is so big that words fail. But allow me to present a counter-example,
a game that has stuck in my brain for years. The racing game FUEL. Developed by Asobo Studios in 2009, FUEL is
a fairly middling racing game with mediocre handling and weird opponent AI. And yet, FUEL has a serious claim to fame;
the game’s map is fourteen thousand, four hundred square kilometers, or five thousand
five hundred square miles. This is obscene. I have thought about Fuel for more than a
decade now simply because of this staggering number, 120 klicks long, 120 klicks wide,
thousands upon thousands of tracks to race upon in the middle. That’s 370 times larger than Skyrim, nearly
200 times as large as GTA5. It is so big that the entirety of a real-scale
Mount Rainier sits on the top of the map and hardly even dominates the space. It is as big as…Connecticut. Or Puerto Rico. And this number still, basically, rounds down
to zero in comparison to something like No Man’s Sky or Elite Dangerous, but it sure
doesn’t feel like zero when you can pick one direction and drive for literally hours. It doesn’t feel like zero when you watch
one biome gradually melt into another over the course of miles of road. You might have recognized the name Asobo Studios
from another game– they went on to develop Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, a game that
literally contains a 1:1 scale model of the Earth, one of the most staggering technical
achievements I’ve ever seen. In hindsight, Fuel seems like a test-run for
this, a huge game created using a mix of procedural generation and satellite imagery that can,
somehow, run on console. And, while I love Flight Simulator and have
written about it at length, I think this makes Fuel the stranger cultural object. Unlike Flight Simulator, or No Man’s Sky,
or Elite: Dangerous, you don’t have access to vehicles that can cross vast distances
near-instantly. You have a car, a grounded, limited, car,
to cover this landmass and because your perspective and options are so limited, Fuel still- to
me- manages to feel big in a truly radical way. In the decade after Fuel’s release, two
other racing games with similar missions came out, Ubisoft’s The Crew and The Crew 2. Unlike Fuel, which covers an undefined portion
of post-climate disaster America, The Crew makes its map explicit; it is the whole country,
from east coast to west, tip to tail. Kinda. The maps of The Crew games are large, but
not nearly as large as Fuel, let alone the United States. To adjust for this, the America of The Crew
looks a little like one of those “draw the country from memory maps.” You can map the roadtrip of your dreams in
this game, but charting a route from, for instance, LA to San Francisco will reveal
that one is about 10 miles away from the other. The graphics and detail are a significant
jump from Fuel, but in a way that only highlights the artifice. You can, hilariously, visit many landmarks
in The Crew, like Mount Rushmore, which appears to be in a Denny’s parking lot, or Mesa
Verde, maybe? Or my favorite, Niagra Falls, which has been
made so modest you can drive over the top of it. Cities demonstrate this same artifice in a
slightly different way– storefronts display what appear to be the average of all possible
commercial writing, like this one that boasts “50% off- buy one get second one- t-shirts
4 for $5- 15% off.” Or this bookstore with a large banner that
simply says “Store” and smaller text detailing that it is actually a secondhand and antiquarian
electric, or this gift shop that upon closer inspection is actually a grocery store, or
this pizza place that “has all flavors.” The Crew games, while easy to make fun of,
are almost certainly more mechanically satisfying than Fuel. The squashing of America down to a handful
of iconic cities and the roads in between is a genuinely interesting idea to explore. But I still come back to Fuel. Because while its cities are even less compelling
than The Crew and its driving kinda feels like butt, there’s this indefinable power
to just how big the game is. You can start driving through a dried up Grand
Canyon, and just keep going and going and going, the cliff walls stretching into the
horizon. Fuel refuses to make the landscape small in
order to increase density and visual diversity. Simultaneously, it doesn’t push its procedural
generation so far that it breaks human imagination, creating a quintillion planets consisting
of the same basic tropes. It pulls a trick far more stubborn and yet,
to me, far more compelling. It refuses to fake the space. If you are anything like me, you’ve probably
googled “biggest video game maps” at some point, and run into your own personal conflict. What counts as big? What’s a cheat? What’s a technicality? One of the biggest ever video game maps is
The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, released on MS-DOS in 1996. Daggerfall looks like this, its world map
like this, and is reportedly “about the size of Great Britain.” And I look at that and think…okay, sure
dude. Daggerfall has several large regions, and
the landscape within those regions is entirely procedurally generated; the exceptionally
patient youtuber “How Big is the Map” has a video walking across Daggerfall’s
landmass in real time, and the first of 15 videos in the playlist is 7 and a half hours
of trekking across identical gray mountains. Each generated world of Minecraft has the
potential to be many many times larger than Earth. But Minecraft is, of course, randomly and
procedurally generated. The fact that there’s essentially no authorship
in a Minecraft world or in the middle of the Daggerfall continent lessens their impact. This rationalization of what feels big and
what doesn’t is made up and inherently imperfect. Fuel uses plenty of procedural generation,
no human decided on the elevation of 14,000 km of terrain. But Fuel’s procgen works in conjunction
with satellite data, and the map is ironically small enough that it can still feel huge rather
than…meaningless. Essentially what I’m saying here is I’m
working more in the realm of what emotionally registers as big, rather than the raw numbers. And while I’ve talked about map size as
a whole thus far, I’ve actually more often found these moments, awe at the sheer size
of something, hidden in more traditional levels. A single instance of big-ness shattering the
imposed reality of the rest of the setting. Am I speaking complete gibberish right now? As I’m writing this, I genuinely can’t
tell. Anyway. A lot of game development is creating the
illusion of a holistic space and continuous progression out of several distinct pieces. I remember being mind-blown many years ago
watching one of the special features on God of War 2, in which they note that if a piece
of a level isn’t visible, it simply doesn’t exist. This makes sense for titles with a fixed camera
like God of War, but it’s not uncommon for any style of game to take what we might consider
“shortcuts,” building environments based on what the player will see rather than real-world
architecture. As digital explorers like the YouTube channel
Boundary Break often find, even seemingly straightforward environments, like the office
of The Stanley Parable, are not as they seem. They’re essentially games’ version of
matte paintings or false building facades; ways to communicate a grander space while
still staying within the constraints of budget and memory. Because games don’t have to abide by real-life
physics, they can have fun with this as well– the endless staircase in Mario 64 is an iconic
example. Near the top of the castle, the player finds
these stairs ascending into the dark and runs up them. The music continuously works its way higher
and higher, the paintings rush by, and if you’re 10-year-old me you might run up these
stairs for minutes before turning around and realizing…you haven’t moved at all. It’s a trick as simple as it is effective-
Mario is being invisibly teleported backwards almost continuously, creating an illusion
of infinite ascension with only a single flight. It’s fun to think that, even in the early
days of 3D games, developers were already having fun with tricks of perspective and
space. But there are counterexamples to this, a bigness
that’s not simply a mirage of clever programming. One of the best levels in Silent Hill 2–
which, by default, makes it one of the best levels of all time– is the Historical Society. A museum located off the main road, the first
few minutes in the historical society are almost normal, at least by Silent Hill standards. Photographs cover the walls of the entryway,
offering a bit of background on the town and of course your old pyramid headed friend. It is punishingly dark and a sort of foghorn
emanates from the walls but it’s not until you walk through this hole smashed in a wall
that the historical society tips its hand. Beyond the hole are stairs that go down, and
down, and down. It is minutes of walking into the black. The foghorn gets more frequent. James’ footfalls repeat endlessly. And then, suddenly, you reach the bottom. In typical fashion, there’s not even a big
reveal at the end, just another office room. Mario’s run up the stairs is accompanied
by what’s called a “Shepard scale,” a sort of musical illusion in which a series
of notes can be made to climb infinitely by overlapping them an octave apart. The effect is bizarre, to say the least. Click around on a ten minute loop of the track
and every bit sounds identical– but listen to it continuously and you’ll swear the
notes are working their way up. But the tone can descend as well. As Gareth Damian Martin notes in their seminal
piece, “The Basement’s Basement,” Silent Hill 2’s descent functions in much the same
way as this scale. “If you listen to a descending Shepard tone
for any length of time, the feeling of being slowly dragged down, almost compressed, is
unmistakable. It’s that downward movement, the slow decay
of a sound. How far can it continue? You ask yourself, how much deeper? But the tone is steady, its slow descent both
rapidly falling and yet going nowhere at all.” Following the staircase, James falls further
into the earth, continuously choosing to jump down pits with nothing but dark at the bottom. Silent Hill relishes in the impossibility. After falling miles into the ground, you eventually
emerge…on the shores of a lake. The spatial absurdity is the point, rapidly
falling and yet going nowhere at all. But each pit James jumps into is accompanied
by a cutscene and a loading screen, two embellishments that– while necessary– remove us just
slightly from the environment. In those jumps, a reminder of Silent Hill’s
gaminess returns, that the environment is constantly being built around us instead of
existing all at once. The staircase is different. There is no load, no movie, to separate us
from it. And, as you might have guessed from this video’s
topic, the stair doesn’t fake it. It’s all there. Every step rendered in real geometry, at the
same time. I worked with streamer Brossentia to capture
this footage, and his other out of bounds footage is more what you’d expect; half-built
architecture, streets that end in nothing, 2D planes to portray distance. But the staircase…is just there. “This thing is ridiculous,” he said, “Nothing
else is at all close to this.” And I can’t get this staircase out of my
head, perhaps because the out of bounds footage is just as nightmarish as the in-game perspective. There is no illusion, no Shepard scale. James, in this moment, is walking into the
bowels of the earth in as real a way as the game allows. Several iconic game moments center around
nothing more than this sort of transitory environment, the ~liminal space~ if you will,
of an exceptionally long journey up or down a single object. The ladder after The End in Metal Gear Solid
3, the ladder back to Iosefka’s clinic in Bloodborne, the climb up the stairs of the
Shinra building in Final Fantasy 7, the elevator down into the Siofra River Well in Elden Ring. Some of these are “all there” as with
Silent Hill 2, some are pieced together from multiple different chunks, all are cool and
memorable sequences. But when I think about enormous transitory
spaces, there’s only one that matches the energy of Silent Hill. Years ago, I talked about the indie game NaissanceE,
an impersonal and unsettling trek through an endless brutalist nowhere-scape. My first encounter with the game was in the
magazine Heterotopias (fittingly also penned by Gareth Damian Martin). The game’s developer said in that magazine
that there are no invisible walls in NaissanceE, and thus no security. This speaks to how I first experienced the
game– it is a challenging, frustrating experience– but on a recent revisit, I took this no-invisible-walls
statement as more of a challenge. Enabling flying in the console commands certainly
breaks the game progression, but it doesn’t break the world nearly as much as you might
think. It just keeps…going. This mechanical chasm in the architecture
is modeled well above and below what the player is ever able to normally see. In this endless row of identical blocks, you
can fly for what feels like miles. This dark, electrical canyon has details a
player would never find. But like Silent Hill 2, it’s the big staircase
that takes the cake. Towards the end of the game, you emerge from
a dense ventilation network and are met with these white stairs, going up instead of down
but similarly shrouded in dark. So you start going up. And keep going up, or at least that’s what
you assume because it’s so punishingly dark that you can barely see the step in front
of you, and you do this for minutes on end, even longer than the historical society, so
long it seems they may truly never end, and then you’re at the top. Like Silent Hill, the space defies all expectations;
After the endless ascension, you emerge not on top of the mechanical expanse but somehow
at the bottom of a desert, your forever-climb landing you in a place that feels lower than
you started. The stairs are nonsense, they’re impossible,
and yet they are, also, all really there. Enabling a wireframe outline allows us to
see through the dark, but even it can’t display the true scale because the stairs
simply fade from view. Like Silent Hill 2’s descent, there’s
nothing lost by going out of bounds here, in fact the construction is even more impressive
and preposterous. I’ve found this kind of thing more frequently
in indie titles– the more big and expensive a game, the more often it needs to be absolutely
optimized so it can squeeze every drop of hardware power into its intended visuals. In God of War 2, by making everything you
can’t see non-existent, everything you can see could receive that little extra oomph. But smaller independent titles, either because
they’re not as graphically taxing or because they’re not subject to the same terms of
optimization, have space for all this extra stuff. Sometimes, it feels like they’re nothing
but extra stuff. Sometimes that’s the whole point. The game Babbdi, released for free late last
year on Steam and Itchio, is a game about the extra stuff. The objectives of Babbdi are as straightforward
as they could be; get a ticket for the train, tickets are sold out so get one from your
neighbor, leave on a train. The appeal is instead the setting, this cold
concrete cityblock that is so much larger and more vertical than the stated goals of
the game require. Babbdi– the name of the city as well as
the game– is a brutalist playground, a place where every balcony can be clambered over
and if you wander the underground enough, you might find people having a trashfire-jukebox
dance party. Or you might not! One of the strangely appealing things about
Babbdi is that as often as there’s something to find, your curiosity can also take you
into places that end without fanfare– the massive reservoir the city sits on is completely
open, and although its corners hold no secrets, there’s nothing to keep you out of it either. Eventually I found a pickaxe that allowed
me to scale any wall, and my reward was just that, the intrinsic pleasure of finding that
yes, every building has a roof, yes, with enough work I can stand upon the tallest spire. Because Babbdi so effectively communicates
that every piece of it is real, every piece is there, I never even paused to wonder if
the game would get in the way of my exploration. Like its entire, run-down vibe, the environment
of the game feels more or less lawless, that there will be no artificial impediment to
wherever you want to go. It is not massive in the way many game cityscapes
are massive; it’s 1% of a GTA map. But Babbdi feels big because its utilitarian
art style implies that every building is truly there, nothing is a hollow facade, nothing
fancifully painted with the false textures of civilization. Maybe the best way I can put it is the objectives
of the game aren’t indicated by the design of the environment itself. This city doesn’t seem built for the player
to have an adventure in. It was built, existed, and then some time
later the player stumbled in. The language I’ve been using in this video
is inherently flawed. I know that. The verbiage of “real” or fake, “illusion”
or genuine, “trick” or legitimate, isn’t suited to video games. A computer is making me think there’s a
world inside this flat screen– the whole thing is an unbelievably complicated illusion,
a magic trick so impressive we don’t even think about it. There is no staircase, there is no Babbdi,
there is no 14,000 square kilometers of post-apocalyptic wilderness. For the purposes of this video, I’ve made
my scales of realness completely relative. The Historical Society’s stairs are real
only when compared to Mario 64. It goes back to what I said at the beginning–
this is about what feels real, what emotionally registers as big. And in using this language so loosely, I think
I’ve completely shot myself in the foot for the last game I want to talk about. Because the thing about Anor Londo, the shining
city atop the world of Dark Souls, is it’s all an illusion. In lore, in the game’s reality, what we
are looking at is fake. The dazzling sunlight vanishes when questioned,
the castle's polished halls fall into shadows. And it goes further, because under that illusion
is another, kept in a crypt far beneath the throne room. A massive statue blocks the way, only to fade
with the sun or in the presence of a special ring. When it disappears, it reveals– what else–
a staircase down. But the stairs aren’t the notable part here. Beyond the door at the bottom lies Dark Sun
Gwyndolin, one of my favorite souls bosses purely for visual splendor. It is a fight based on illusion; Gwyndolin
curses you for entering and then throws the back of the hallway into the infinite, the
statues on the wall repeating endlessly as they vanish into the horizon. The fight is one of the rare instances where
Dark Souls transcends into the environmentally surreal, and accordingly, one of its most
conceptual battles. Gwyndolin only has a few attacks, and no real
close-range ability. Instead, every time you get close, the boss
teleports away, giving you time to only get in a few strikes before running again down
the endless hallway. After Gwyndolin falls, the hall returns to
normal; the end and its ensuing rewards are revealed to be just a few dozen yards away. On first blush, I assumed this hall was more
or less like the Mario stairway. After all, that’s what the imagery basically
implies. You’re trapped in an endless illusion, run
all you want and you’ll never escape. But that’s not true. Going out of bounds during the cutscene reveals
the normal hallway swapped for this. It’s a combination of clever framing and
brute force of scale; the original hall is replaced with a wile coyote-style false ending,
which is then shot down the new MILE of architecture the game just spawned in. And this isn’t just for looks. You can, if you are both stubborn and focused
enough, take the boss fight all the way to the end of this passage. You can chase Gwyndolin until both of you
are backed up against this brick wall all the way at the end (at which point the boss
AI basically breaks). There is a canon ending to this fight in which
you push Gwyndolin’s endless hallway until it falls apart, and then you just stand swinging
limply at each other, incredibly far from where you started. This is what’s so fascinating about games,
and so challenging about this language of real vs fake I’ve tried to build around
it. Because we know it’s an illusion, in the
game it’s supposed to be a trick, and yet look at it! There it is, hundreds upon hundreds of statues
in perfectly orderly rows, as or more real as anything else in the game! Gwyndolin faked the space; Dark Souls did
not. The other day, I booted up Fuel, I told my
computer to open all the countless miles of road from 2009, and I just started driving. It is an inherently silly thing to do; burn
fake gasoline on the bluffs of a fake desert, without so much as a fake objective to give
me direction. But as false night passed into false day into
false night again, I thought about movie scenes with the “special effect” of hundreds
or thousands of real actors, the “illusion” of an entire world built temporarily for a
single scene, the “trick” of genuine acrobatics, falls, explosions, captured once to be replayed
again and again. As I drove through the artificial walls of
a canyon constructed out of digital triangles from actual satellite data, I reflected on
our ability to understand something as false and true at the same time, an artistic representation
that tirelessly reproduces the space it simultaneously abstracts. There is no aesthetic failing in illusion–
the success or failure of a project rests on its emotional communication, no matter
the strategies used to achieve it. But still; knowing that when I walk down those
stairs in Silent Hill 2, every step really exists before me sends a wonderful little
chill down my spine. Knowing that there are no hollow buildings
in Babbdi makes the whole tiny city more enthralling. Every game fakes its space, in one way or
another. But I will always love stepping outside the
bounds and marveling at how the trick might be that there’s simply no trick at all. Okay this wasn’t an intentional connection
for this essay, but I recently gave a talk in a real space! For the very first time! Last month I was lucky enough to speak to
a couple hundred people at the Durham Public Library in a talk I loosely titled “A Beginner’s
Guide to Game Analysis.” Am I bragging a little? Sure, but I am also excited to tell you that
the full recorded talk is now available on Nebula! Both the scripted part of it and the 40-plus
minutes of Q&A afterwards, featuring super thoughtful and interesting questions from
the audience. Nebula sponsored this video, and Nebula has
allowed me to do so much cool bonus content this year– from cooking videos to whole
additional essays to now, hosting my recording of this live talk. It’s a healthier, more sustainable streaming
ecosystem that I’m proud to be a part of. It’s also, here’s the thing you might
not know, cheap! Follow my link in the description to get a
solid eight HOURS of exclusive content from me, and countless hours of other creators
exclusive series, movies, classes, and more, for just over 2 bucks a month. Doing a talk at a local library was a very
specific dream of mine, BUT the fact that it was, you know, local, left a lot of people
out. Now you too can see me walk through how I’d
come up with an essay about Elden Ring, make jokes about Animorphs, and answer all sorts
of great questions from an audience that- you can’t see them in the video, but they’re
actually there I promise. I wasn’t just giving my talk in an empty
room. You’re gonna have to trust me on this one. Anyway, Nebula! Watch my talk, watch a whole heap of other
exclusive videos, support creators like me, for just over two bucks a month. And then go support your own local library!
