Building virtual worlds: video games and autobiographical architecture

For those unaware, Worlds(.)com is an old virtual chat platform from 1995 that still exists today. I imagine it was a lot like VRChat back in the day in terms of its aesthetic and user experience, without the VR and with lower graphical fidelity. Its regulars today are, to put it lightly, very weird and sometimes unsettling people, but that's a topic for another time.

Worlds stands out in that many of its worlds are user-generated and still exist decades after they stopped being used. Exploring Worlds feels like you're exploring virtual ruins, where users made the kinds of worlds they would spend time on after work with fellow users.

You have virtual bars and clubs, virtual gardens, virtual BDSM dungeons, and even some secret areas. For example, there is a room only accessible by going behind a waterfall in another area, and it is a dark chamber with 2 floating roses in the middle, where Nights in White Satin plays. You get the sense someone made this for their partner. There is a "Hall of Fame" area with photos of the old users who spent time there, which prompted me to wonder how many of them were still alive.

The reason I was reminded of Worlds, outside of the obvious connection to the subject matter, is because of the article's idea of virtual space as a mechanism to experiment with identity. Worlds to me feels like a living, breathing, almost archaeological example of autobiographical virtual architecture.

The Shape of Infinity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm5Ogh_c0Ig

Games, Schools, and Worlds designed for Violence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usSfgHGEGxQ

Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mexs39y0Imw

Gaming's Harshest Architecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkv6rVcKKg8

The Architecture of Fumito Ueda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLphTtVZfvw

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[In Animal Crossing] They could also pay a visit to ‘Joe’s Train Town’, a basement room featuring an array of model railway sets. This touch was presumably meant to evoke Biden’s old-fashioned decency and pioneer spirit, while expressing a vaguely greenish, vaguely leftish regard for mass-transit infrastructure; I took it as confirmation that anyone who aspires to be Commander in Chief must have a Riordanesque streak.

What? Biden famously commuted on Amtrak to work for decades. That's what this was meant to evoke. That the author is so out of touch as to assert this nonsense above does not really instill in me any confidence in their ability to analyze pop culture and its relationship to the real world.

Is the rest of the article this off base?

I may be running afoul of Poe's law here, but I'm going to take this essay at face value. The premise of the essay, from what I can tell, is that games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons are played by men and women who are fantasizing about being a little dictator over their own island which they control completely, because deep down they feel powerless and they can take their feelings of impotence out on the inhabitants of a virtual world. Or at least that these ideas are inextricably linked to such games.

To me, this is like saying that people who make paintings of landscapes that don't exist are repressed miniature autocrats, because, unsatisfied with the world as it is, they have the neocolonialist compulsion to bend the world around them to their wills, and they express this in art. It's also akin to saying that people play first-person shooters like Counter Strike because they fantasize about joining the army and conquering foreign lands to take them as their own. I'm sure Minecraft is probably political to people like this as well, because apparently "there is no such thing as an apolitical video game".

Stripped to their essentials, games like Animal Crossing are fundamentally about building. Humans like to build. There's nothing wrong with building things per se. I wonder at the unwillingness of some people to contemplate creativity without seeing politics, neocolonialism and oppression everywhere, _especially_ in virtual spaces where these real-world externalities specifically do not exist. You can shape an island without murdering and evicting indigenous peoples! You can build machines without having to think about whether you're destroying the planet, because you're not! Shouldn't these be what we strive to enjoy, instead of demonizing as neocolonialist and regressive? To say that "because others have destroyed to build means that portraying building _without_ also portraying destroying is bad" is patronizing and infantilizing, and belies a view of our fellow humans as being incapable of handling even slight nuance and complexity.

To be clear, I can see the value in comparing and contrasting something like Animal Crossing to real life, where, for example, they really did commit genocide to build the "New World". But saying that a work of art is infected by all the evil that anyone has ever done, or that independent concepts, like the history of colonialism and building a house on an island, cannot be separated is a road that leads to madness in my opinion.

To be sure, there probably really are, as the article describes, Riordanesque people who play these games, but saying that these messages are baked in to the media themselves is Quixotic. There are no enemies here to fight.

The author pretending like they can peer into the mind of the Platonic ideal Animal Crossing gamer to reveal their neocolonialist tendencies is, to be kind, an unsupportable line of thinking. As a person who has played these games myself, what else can I say but "No"?