Making an Agential World in the Gaia’s Riddle Modpack
An important part of our thinking about ecogaming with Gaia’s Riddle (GR) is the world generation in relation to our story about anthropogenic climate change on the one hand, and the fickle dynamics of Montreal sunshine powering our server on the other. Using the mods at our disposal for Forge 1.20.1 we wanted to create a world that feels not only lively but also agential; a world with a mind of its own as befits the titular Gaia in our story. Whether our gameworld is interpretable as a Lovelockian Gaia, let alone our own Earth is an open question, but we are not concerned with simulation. We don’t want to make a simulation of our climate situation; we want to make a world that allegorizes our climate situation.
To help with this I mashed up some well known worldgen mods, Terralith and Oh the Biomes We’ve Gone (BWG), along with Biome Makeover, Enhanced Nature, Blooming Nature and a few others. This is a fairly common mix which results in dramatic vanilla-esque terrain generation. BWG is exceptional for producing otherworldly biomes more reminiscent of Dr. Seuss than any realistic location on Earth but the landscape feels forceful and present. This is not a world built for player habitation… there are few large flat plains, river deltas and other perfect “base” locations. If the players are going to homestead in this world they will have to adapt or terraform. I prefer this kind of worldgen where the terrain becomes a kind a puzzle for building as players try to balance the availability of easily usable land, striking views, and access to resources and loot.
So the world looks like it has its own geological agency with its epic mountains and rivers, forests and gullies. It’s a kind of otherworldly national geographic experience and the intention is to generate in the player a sense of appreciation and pleasure of the landscape which in turn becomes a part of the unfolding story. The player should feel like they are intruding to some extent; that they are out of place… that the world is not just theirs for the taking.
This is also augmented with flora and fauna mods – most notably Natural Décor and Alex’s Mobs which otherwise populate and give life to Minecraft worlds which for their size are fairly lifeless (especially when you consider the most common mob is probably the zombie). While these mods can become the focus of gameplay for zoological exploration and landscape design they are mostly meant as ambient life – an aspect of Gaia – which again proceeds independently of the player. Or at least that is the perception.
Interestingly nothing in a Minecraft world happens independently of the player because the game only loads parts of the world near where the players are located. Minecraft is truly humanistic if not solipsistic in that sense. The world only exists for the player and moreover it is given to the player (by the computer) as a literal standing reserve for the players use and enjoyment. SunBlock attempts to turn this on its head by showing how making the world available to the player requires power to keep the computer on and idling. Now, we can see how these solipsistic fantasies in fact depend on the environment and infrastructure… there is no escape from Gaia.
A final aspect the gameworld’s agentiality is to explore “natural” cycles and rhythms with mods. Vanilla Minecraft’s only cycle is night and day but with Serene Seasons and Legendary Survival Overhaul, I added seasons to the game along with temperature effects by season and biome. The final and most important mod in this respect is Weather2 which becomes the main actor in Gaia’s Riddle… an endless series of storms and tornados that give us the riddle at the heart of the story.
All of this is fairly intentional modpack design (or modpack choreography as I like to call it). Taken together the modpack makes a world that conveys a feeling or an idea that players can take hold of, or not. And of course, each mod sparks thoughts of new configurations and new combinations… as well as ideas for entirely new mods that could enhance the design intention.
Yet all of this representational intimation of the world’s agency is only the entry point. It is important to remember that Minecraft worldgen is not natural it is procedural. The natural world is a fiction of computation, and the real agency of the world is the agency of computation. This is why we prefer to work with Minecraft as a platform – one cannot mistake computer generated nature for real nature no matter how photorealistic the textures and shaders might be. I love modded Minecraft for this reason… especially for worldgen. It’s sublime and imperfect at the same time.
Good agential terrain generation should have those Minecraft flaws… bits of land irrationally floating in the sky, chunks cut in weird non-natural ways, strange water behaviors, sink holes beneath structures, etc… that whole series of uncanny disjunctions and glitches that remind the player that they are playing with a machine and not a representation of nature… and certainly not a simulation. Each glitch reminds the player to look outside the game for meaning; to look to the conditions of possibility for playing the game itself – to think about the agency of system they are engaging with – that is the actual goal of our gamer.
Gaia is SunBlock, SunBlock is Gaia.