Video Games & Natural Beauty
Living on Hakatajima has given me a new perspective on the beauty of the natural world. The Charleston / Mt. Pleasant area of South Carolina is still an amazing place to live – but I am incredibly biased towards it, having grown up there. Breaking away from sandy beaches, silently powerful marshland, barrier islands, local forested areas, and the not-so-intrusive low profile of the buildings around town (which were not even close to being skyscrapers), and coming to live in this place has been profound in some ways. Now I walk on coarse and pebbly sand, deal with foothills and mountains galore, choose scenic vistas on either side of my apartment, ride my bicycle everywhere, and I cannot get over the color of the water here.
The water of the Atlantic is a dark green with a lot of brown and hints of a weathered Prussian blue. It’s very much suited to oil paintings, to nor’easters and hurricanes, to creating foam and driftwood, and for spectacular sunsets. The water of the Japanese Seto Inland Sea is, in my opinion, not dissimilar from the waters around Venice, Italy. The Adriatic Sea. I’ll never forget seeing that water and thinking to myself in wonder that the way the local minigolf shop dyes their water isn’t actually all that outlandish. There are waters on this planet of intense and vivid colors. Islanders here like to remind me that the inland sea is often referred to as the Aegean of the East. I think perhaps Adriatic of the East is better, but I’ve never been to the Aegean Sea, so I can’t really be sure. (I suppose I should go…you know, for research.) My point is that the water here is full of gradients. It is nearly clear, evoking images of tropical getaways on sunny days close in on the beaches. Moving out into the water, however, the color deepens dramatically into an restless, roiling turquoise. It carries emerald hues, sudden tears of teal and glints of aquamarine, but these are appreciable only in person. Cameras fail at capturing their essence, and satellites overgeneralize to a monumental degree. The Seto Inland Sea is the home of humid rain showers, watercolor paintings, shells, and islands dipping their craggy feet in the water like trees in a mangrove – keeping their lush greens above the reach of the tide. Of course, the sunsets are spectacular here too. I suspect that I’d enjoy sunsets just about anywhere, though.
I am taken in by this beauty around me and often find myself daydreaming, my mind floating about outside the window. (This is a common problem for me anyway, but when you give me such a gorgeous location in which to play, it is compounded exponentially.) Something that recently struck me is how video games are starting to attempt to bring natural beauty to market in the form of eye candy. One such instance might be the introduction of High Dynamic Range lighting by VALVe in their first add-on to Half-Life 2. It was called the Lost Coast. The point of the game was to let a player have fun shooting the bad guys in a breathtaking locale. (In fact, I remember thinking “Wow, I live in a Japanese lost coast” once upon a time.) There is another game that comes to mind. Oblivion – it sounds like a game full of scary places, but is basically an open-ended non-linear RPG that is set in a make believe land of rolling hills, vibrant gardens, and realistic weather. (In fact, I remember thinking “Wow, Oblivion is almost as nice as Hakata” at times. No kidding.) Other games, like the upcoming Crysis, which I believe is the next iteration in the Far Cry series, also take place in exotic, hyper-stylized worlds. I think it’s really interesting that the thing some companies want to emulate the most is environment. I don’t think that they will ever top the natural world, but I am all for incorporating as much of the stunning real-world inspiration as they can.
I know this is kind of random, but it’s what I was thinking about today. Any thoughts? 
