The relationship between a society and its natural environments is a theme in many games.  In Dawn of War 2, this element can be seen in the terrain of the three primary worlds on which the game takes place.  Meridian is nearly completely covered by a single hive city.  Calderis is a desert world populated by small settlements attempting to live within the world’s harsh ecosystem.  On Typhon, the third world, nature and the wilderness had taken control and overrun the limited footholds that civilization had made.

Within the story of the game, Meridian sits as the main hub of the sector of space.  Most of the planet is covered with the primary hive city, a large urban complex housing billion.  The natural wilderness on Meridian no longer exists.  In this example, mankind has taken its concept of dominion over nature to its fullest extent.

Typhon, another planet within the sector, is called a “death world”.  The narrative explains that this name does not come from an absence of life, but rather that the planet is overrun with life that is excessively dangerous and hostile to human life.  The entire planet is a jungle that has completely overrun the few attempts at settlement humanity had attempted.

The final planet is Calderis.  This world is a desert planet.  The human settlements attempt to survive in the harsh environment alongside the few natural inhabitants of its ecosystem.  In this case, unlike the previous two, humanity is attempting to find its place within the natural world rather than attempting to outright conquer the wilderness.  The settlements which exist are built from natural stones and mud work.  Some are even carved directly into existing rock faces.

These three worlds are examples which illustrate both the classical view of the conflict between nature and civilization, as well as the romantic view of harmony between them.

In the PS2 game, Persona 3 the main character is a 17 year old teenager who enters a new school after transferring from his old one. The game premise is the fact that once the clock hits 12 midnight, a special hour emerges where the human populice turns into coffins, while only a selected few are able to move around. The creatures that take over the special hour are these shadow beings that feed on the people who are able to move around. The part that I enjoyed fromt his game was the way that the environment would change once it crossed the other hour. Buildings grow in length and draw shadows across the ground. The use of light and darkness is portrayed by the specific safe zones that the played can move around in. The environment plays an essential role, because it provide the character with specific challenges that he has to navigate through.

In one of the first boss battles for Prince of Persia 3 you are fighting a giant demon who has possessed some rocks and is formed into a rock monster similar to some of the beasts in Shadow of the Colossus. He is fairly easy to defeat once you figure out what you need to do ( i won’t spoil anything for those who have not played). He lives in a secret garden where he is protected by invisible warriors who are only seen while fighting.  Even though the game’s various landscapes are set up as nation building built straight into nature (almost building in a way so as to integrate but only almost) this first battle suggests a more classical stance rather than the romanticized and glorification of wilderness.  The rock monster is extremely disgusting looking, frightening, and dumb. The persona given to the rock beast goes so far as to suggest that nature (in this case the beast represents nature) is a wild, dumb, and powerful thing that needs to be defeated and made better; put out of its misery so to speak. You must use the monster’s actual body in order to defeat him which again is akin to modernization. For example how we cut down trees to make the wood into houses and paper. This connotes that we prefer the tree in the form we think we need most and that as just a tree it never reached its full potential without the help of human kind. That nature’s only use is to be reshaped because we can’t figure our what to do with it otherwise. Once you defeat the rock demon the sacred forest is at peace. All of the fear and unknown is removed and everything goes back to ‘normal’ but this is only possible by help from man.

The environment created by a game drastically effects the player environment and the culture that surrounds it. While it’s easy to look at how nature within a game helps feed the cultural environment of a game world, but the fact remains that no matter how much analyses you put into this, it was all created by a group of designers sitting around a table (speaking from first hand experience). What isn’t easily predictable is what kind of community will spring up around a game. If you compare two games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Team Fortress 2, both games are very similar in actual gameplay mechanics and setup. What differs greatly between the two games is the environment they have created artistically.

The developers of Team Fortress 2 intentionally chose to make their environments cartoony characterizations, with cactus straight out of road runner and building out of 1950s cartoons. The violence is over the top and silly, with gore that goes much further than it’s more serious cousin in Modern Warfare 2. Modern Warfare 2 strives to create almost a Unreal clone with a modern military feel. A simple glance at the behavior of the average players of the games should show the difference. Both are widely played by literally millions of people, but people who play Modern Warfare 2 tend to take the game more seriously, throwing around childish insults and getting incredibly upset when their win/loss ratio is messed up.

In contrast to this, players in Team Fortress tend to have a greater appreciation for silly hijinks. A brief glance at the communities for both games will show that while both games do have their fair share of players who take it too seriously, MW2s community is much more hostile. For the most part, seriousness in art direction tends to correlate with the kind of community that is perceived in a game, with more cartoony games lending themselves to more lighthearted communities.

Maple Story is a fairly popular MMORPG which allows a player to perform different quests in order to level up.  Each player can choose up to three different characters for each of the worlds that they wish to play in.  There are three separate classes of avatars: Explorers, Aran, and Cygnus Knights.

The Explorers or Adventurers are the majority of players.  This class starts out on Maple Island as beginners and learns how to navigate the game during the time spent there.  Once they have earned 150 mesos, Maple World’s currency, or have obtained a letter of recommendation detailing their merit they can leave the island and go on more complex quests.  After spending some time in one of the other three continents, Victoria Island, Ossyria, and Masteria, the explorer will be able to choose from five different jobs as they reach levels 8 to 10.  Each of the jobs allow the character to have a specific skill set accordingly.  Magician, warrior, bowman, thief, and pirate are the five jobs.

The Aran are a group made up of players who each share a storyline.  Aran is a character that was imprisoned in a block of ice when the evil Black Mage terrorized Maple World.  Now he has come back to life in order to save the world from the Black Mage for good.  Players who want to start with a powerful character should choose the Aran, because all Aran begin with a level 200.  This is how players are able to be taught the Aran’s complicated combo system.  Although the game’s storyline emphasizes that there is only one Aran, many players are able to choose to be forms of that character.

The last category is called the Cygnus Knights.  Their story is that long ago during the times of the Black Mage’s reign of terror, Empress Cygnus called upon her five most strong heroes to defend the world.  The five heroes each held a different job and used their skills to attempt to defeat the Black Mage.  Unfortunately, they failed.  Their next step was to form and train an entire army of Cygnus Knights who would be able to weaken the Black Mage’s power together.

Interactions among the players’ characters are encouraged, such as chatting and making friends.  However, sometimes that simple trust is broken.  Hacking and scamming is prevalent enough in Maple World that the game starts up with its own hacker shield.  Players are warned to never give out personal information that could compromise their accounts.

The correlation between the natural and cultural worlds is often the center of many a heated debate, particularly when placed within the context of a virtual environment primarily because it is commonplace for the design of such games to exploit and emphasis the relationship between the two to an exaggerated degree. This pattern is particularly apparent within the genre of real time strategies such as command and conquer and starcraft/warcraft due to the integration of cultural struggles often being directly associated with natural resources in one way or another.

Nearly all real time strategies are focused primarily on resources gathering, which is to say that the cultures within the game, regardless of role or connection with each other, must control  the environment around them in order to ultimately come out on top. The resources collected from the environment are used to produce or improve forces which then allow for safe expansion of territory ultimately feeding into the cycle of domination of the natural world. Furthermore, the natural world itself is represented as harmless in most if not all r.t.s. games, resulting in conflicts focusing on map control verses opponents.

Culturally speaking, r.t.s. games often take any number of alternative cultures, and pitch them against each other within the context of the virtual world in order to create diversity of selection for the player. This common design implementation, however, also creates an in game scenario where multiple, widely differing cultures clash for dominance over the natural resources of a play field, with the ultimate goal of each to destroy the others in order to presumably dominate the field and gather its resources unopposed.

These aspects of the real time strategy genre tend to reflect a more classical perspective on the relationship between nature and culture in which cultures must strive to dominate and harvest their surroundings before moving on to repeat the cycle. The games also tend to dismiss the natural world as a threat and instead focus on opposing cultures as the primary threat to their dominance of their surroundings.

This report focus on aspects of wilderness present within an online game called Maplestory. Maplestory is a massive multi-player online RPG that incorporates online social elements with vast single player experience such as questing, and hunting. Through this vast online virtual world, many aspects of the game coincide with the concepts of wilderness which have discussed during the lecture. In particular, the analysis will focus on the comparison between the classicists’ stance and the romantists’ stance within this game. Having an understanding of the meaning and definition of wilderness and by harnessing the examples provided by the game, these knowledge and examples will paint an image which reflecting the relationship and interaction between human beings and their environment.

Starting by examining the underlying game mechanics, game play elements and background stories which are essential for understanding the analysis presented in the rest of this report. Maple Story is a massive multiplayer RPG game that allows many people to play the game concurrently and interactively online. The game has 2D artistic design with the player controlling an avatar with different selection of skills available based upon the class selected at the beginning of the game. The player will travel from town to town and from map to map in order to complete quests, or kill monsters along the way and through the completion of quest, or killing the monsters the players will gain experience point and the accumulation of these point will eventually lead to advancement of the avatar granting access to more skills and powers. However, even though advancement of the character constitutes a large portion of the game, the various levels of maps, environments and fields of the game are often ignored by the players. Therefore it is the main aspect of focus for this writing to discuss some of the important concepts of nature, specifically the classicists and the romantist views of wilderness and how these concepts are incorporated into this game.

There are various classicists’ ideas within Maplestory such as the notion of wilderness as something to be feared. Within the Maplestory universe, players are often requested by in game NPC to eliminate certain group of monsters that are terrorizing the town or city. Furthermore, in order to travel between certain towns, players must have means, such as higher level skills, to defend themselves. As a result, the game portrays the nature and wilderness of the virtual world as a threat to the players. Another classists’ point-of-view mentioned during the lecture is the perception of human conquering nature as a symbol or progress and advancement and self fulfillment. As a main part of the game, the player defeats monsters, earning experiment point which will in term strengthen his/her character giving access to more skills or powers. For certain classes within the game, it is a part of the story for the character to eliminate the monsters. In this context, defeating the monsters is like taming nature while doing so results in the progression of self and overall human development. However, one conflict to be noted is that the idea of self progression and improvement is similar in nature to romantists idea of spiritual regeneration which is often associated with the uncovering hidden talents and is parallel to the idea of gaining a new skill within the game.

Following this train of thought, let’s examines the Romanists’ beliefs present within the game. Romantists believes in the idea of a past ‘Golden Age’ in which the natural world was untouched by human beings. Such a place exists within the virtual world of Maplestory; the town of Ellinia located within a giant-like forest inhabited by Fairies is the town of the Magicians where virtually all of the houses are tree houses which blends in as a part of the environment. Even though there are still human presences in the area, there are scarce amount of impact made by human cultural and social influence. Therefore, Ellinia can be considered as an example of the Golden Age sought after by Romantists who admires the beauty of wilderness for the entire town is composed of all natural parts. Furthermore, the fairies, which live peacefully with nature, are great examples of the term ‘Noble Savage’ coined by short in his book ‘Imagined Country’. Lastly, the Romanists hold the view that modern town and cities is a fall from the graceful Golden Age as a result of human corruption. There are also locations within the game which the shows the extensive human interaction with and modification of the natural environment such as the industrialized town of Kerning City.

Overall the game presented the players with examples from both the Classical and Romanist stances of wilderness. Through analyzing the game, one can easy gain a visual example of the concepts of each of the views, classical or romantists. Therefore, one will be able to use the information provided by the analysis of the game to further characterize the interaction between human beings and nature.

I have always held a belief that nature and culture are two interelated subjects that exist in the world at large. Truthfuly, i would define nature as the collective amount of ‘forces’ in an area that belong to various (living and non-living) organisms which inhabit a certain environment. The type of environments that I’m referring to can range anywhere from a drop of water to a large ecosystem of plants and animals. By using the term ‘forces’ I intend to suggest that all living things, and some non-living things, exert a certain influence or type of feedback on their respective environments. So one can rightfully suggest that there are millions of various kinds of influences that can exist in just one area. Furthermore, I contend that culture is a word which means to define the way in which a ‘thing’ is able to control and maintian those forces of influence or feedback; its own behavior, so-to-speak. These explanations can likewise be applied to just about any organization of organisms and envrionments on the planet, including us clever Humans’. Lastly, the general idea of nature comprising a wilderness of untamed objects and organisms, in my opinion, might be a little harsh and underthought. On the other hand, we might be able to think of nature as a place that is not understood by humans’ as thoroughly as we’d like it to be, and therefore invent the words, culture, norm, value, behavior, order, rule, etc., (All things which exist in nature, to some degree) in order to make sense of that special place that we know little about. In this sense, I conclude that nature and culture, if not thought about like this already, are one and the same idea holding relatively similar meanings.

I have recently been enjoying the outdoors for the first time in my life starting last Fall semester. Before, growing up with a single mom from a different country and living in the city never afforded me the opportunity to venture out. In my adventures, I first visited Lost Maples where I did very light backpacking. I then went out to West Texas to go caving. I was so hooked to how being outdoors made me feel that I immediately signed up for a week long trip back packing through rought desert terrain at Big Bend State Park in west Texas.

During these trips I had no distinction between those who were “outdoorsy”–I didn’t even have a personal perception of nature in either the classical or romantic sense. However, after learning about these different views and reflecting back on my experiences I found myself enthralled by nature similarly to that of the romantic’s relationship with nature.

I was captivated by the essense of its natural beauty untouched by man. So often in the city, I was bombarded with no understanding of the world without man, but these trips soon reorganized my molecules, so to speak. Like the romantic, I contrasted my experiences with the profanity of the city with that of the purity of nature. There was a universal sense of the origin of all of mankind, that we weren’t so divided as society would have us to believe.

At times, when it was completely dark, I thought I would be scared of the wilderness. My first time leaving the campsite in the middle of the night to do my business was an exhilarating experience. I was initially scared, staring into the depths of the night, but as I ventured out, surprisingly, I felt overwhelmingly safe. I was relieved of the anxieties that the city had cast on me. Though there was the reasonable fear of dangerous wildlife, I felt I could hear anything and everything, and that the complete isolation was the safest place on earth.

Through this experience I found the “individual salvation” that exposed the repressed elements of my mind.

The end.

My idea for a game is to take a suburban family along with their entire home and put it in the an area which would be considered the ‘wilderness,’ anywhere that is far removed from their society.  In this game they will have everything they are used to in their homes, but not everything will work as it once did.  There is no plumbing in the middle of a forest yet they will still have their sinks, faucets, and toilets, yet they will provide little use in their new environment.  Upon the first day of their new lives they will probably hold the classic view of the wilderness, but as time goes on they may gain a new understanding and view of their environment.