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EARTH ENGINEINTERACTIVE VIDEO GAME,2026
MADE IN COLLABORATION WITH ALICE BUCKNELL
Earth Engine is a video game exploring planetary play. Taking place across nine life-size landscapes that are generated from 3D geospatial models of the Earth and real-time climate data, the game's principle mechanic is a refusal of the Player-vs-Environment (PvE) and Player-vs-Player (PvP) power hierarchies typical of gaming. In Earth Engine, the planet is more like the main player, and the human player is more like an NPC.
The Earth Engine appears sprite-like in the game's UI, its 8-bit design recalling the blocky flatness of early arcade games. The Earth Engine's mood is influenced by real-time climate data gleaned from the player’s location, long-range global climate forecasts, and the player’s in-game behavior patterns. Move too quickly, and entire swaths of the virtual landscape will dissolve in front of the player, gone forever; move too slowly, and gameplay is ruptured by flash floods, sandstorms, avalanches. Like an adolescent, the Earth Engine’s emotional state is chimerical but powerful: it is highly responsive to player actions, and in turn it controls the weather, player ability, and the very viability of the game world itself.
Something between an ecological tamagotchi and a divination tool, Earth Engine rejects the modular fantasy of a wholly quantifiable world. Inspired by the legacy of walking simulators, a type of video game where the agency of the player comes second to the world that they inhabit, the game rewards players that slow down, notice, and build a kind of nonlinguistic communication system with the Earth Engine. Ultimately, the game offers players an affective encounter with digital Earth twins co-created by planetary intelligence systems and human agents. The game utilizes the technologies of predictive climate modeling in order to move beyond them, instead opening up an expansive ecological playspace for forecasting without controlling, exploring without extracting, sensing without capture.
The project is supported principally by Creative Capital with additional support from the Art Explora x Cite des Arts international residency in Paris and is co-commissioned by the MUNCH Oslo Triennial, "Almost Unreal".