I’ve walked through a tropical rainforest before. The trees shoot up to the sky and fan out, forming a canopy, rays of light peeking through the thick cloud of leaves. When the wind blows, shadows shake and jitter over the forest floor. The ground is covered with so many leaves that my every step makes a loud crunch. Every inch of the place has something sprouting out of it. When I think of nature, I think of my walk through the rainforest.
But it’s not a real forest. It’s all in a video game. Virtual. Simulated. I think it’s fascinating, amazing, and sad that its only after taking a tour on a computer did I come to appreciate real nature.
I admire the craftsmanship that goes into rendering these virtual trees. I can recognize the hard work behind it because I like to draw. Making sure people can recognize what I’m trying to draw is a real challenge. I used to draw my trees with two vertical curves with a cloud plopped on top, and become ecstatic when people saw a tree and not a stick of cotton candy, now, I’m obsessed with the details. As I gallivant through these virtual environments, I ask myself: Is that really how it is?
I scrutinize every little detail of the graphics in a video game. I walk up to trees until my face (or the camera) is colliding against the bark. I crouch up and down, twist and turn, all in order to inspect objects from different angles. I closely examine the textures, I watch how the light bounces off, and I observe how the shadows glide across the surface. In my final experiment, I shoot it with my gun and inspect the bullet holes.
I don’t shoot trees in real life. The greatest act of violence I ever committed against a tree was taking a hammer and pounding it against a branch as a child. That was in my old neighborhood. I came back to visit a decade after the fact and saw that the scars persist to this day.
The odd thing about a video game is that everything catches my attention, how realistic everything looks and how accurately they resemble their real-life counterparts. After spending so much time poking and prodding these worlds, it’s only natural that I continue to poke and prod outside of it. That’s when it hit me. The world’s greatest graphics are real. I often find myself walking along campus and staring at the trees. When most people think of trees, they think of a general all-encompassing tree. There are at least twenty different types of trees on campus with obviously distinct features. In Aldrich Park, it’s too easy to blur out nature and only see the roads and places we have to go. If you actually stop to look sometimes, you see things you didn’t notice before—like the flowerbeds. Even a quick glance lets me see details I never knew were there.
I went hiking with my friend the other day and we sat on a bench overlooking a lake. Hills rolled in every direction. They weren’t rocky, but they weren’t green either. It was probably the season. They were yellow, and they sprawled all around us and in the distance. It was a scene straight out of a movie—or maybe it was the opposite—a scene movies rip straight out of nature. I thought, “So these places really do exist.”
When we look through travel catalogues and photo albums, we see exotic locales that seem far away. California is a unique place that has exotic locales right in our backyards. A twenty minute drive is all it takes to get out of suburbia and into the wilderness. The city feels closed in, noisy, and relentless in its assault on all senses. I think of Blade Runner and its smog-choked constantly-rained Los Angeles. By the movie’s end, Harrison Ford and his replicant girlfriend ride off on a mountain road lined with trees.
One of the appeals of a virtual reality is a chance to explore exotic environments without the inconveniences that follow in real life. Scaling mountains and trekking across treacherous terrain is a lot harder than holding down a key. Exploring exotic locales in video games is certainly a cheaper way to experience “nature” than actually traveling there, but is it really a substitute? It isn’t.
I appreciate nature’s design. Details don’t disappear the closer you look, rather, more details are revealed. There are entire worlds on a microscopic level that exist on and underneath the surface of trees. The smallest unit of graphical representation in a video game is a pixel. They are geometrically based. In order to create the semblance of a curve, you need thousands upon thousands of polygons. Computers favor sharp clean lines. The varied forms of nature are a nightmare to render. The sprawl of branches, the thousands of leaves, the roundness and twisted contorted shape of everything stumps even the most powerful computer. Reality doesn’t have that problem though. There is no approximation of curves, no polygons or vertices parading as rounded objects. It’s real and infinite in its design.
There is something about nature that is inherently pure. Our attempts to capture its essence always falls short, no matter how much it resembles the real thing. It’s not just about appealing to all of our senses: the sight of hills, the sound of water, the smell of earth, or the feel of the wind, it’s about knowledge. There’s more to nature than its beauty. There are things that we can’t immediately observe—the food chain, how the ecosystem functions as a coherent whole. We take on look at a forest and we see a forest, not an entire world chock full of self-sustaining processes. Nature isn’t static, it is constantly changing. Nature’s very essence is change, and that’s something no reproduction can truly recreate.
