Nature in Pixels: Exploring World Generation, Player Action, and the Construction of Nature in Video Games (2026)
Featured below are extracts from my final year dissertation, Nature in Pixels: Exploring World Generation, Player Action, and the Construction of Nature in Video Games. At its heart, this work questions what it means to experience nature through a screen, through codes, and through the logics that simulate growth, boundaries, and labour. Drawing on the work of Ian Bogost, Alexander Galloway, and Alenda Y. Chang, it asks what emerges when we look past the visual surfaces of a game environment, past its visual fidelity to the real and attend instead to what becomes possible in the exchange between player and machine. Taking Stardew Valley (2016) and Minecraft (2009) as its focus, it situates video games as a critical site for rethinking how we relate to and imagine the natural world.
The extracts are overlaid onto photographs made in collaboration with Noah Melman, whose images of the figures dissolving into natural landscapes inhabit the same blurred ground the dissertation keeps returning to.