"We Dwell in Possibility" (WeDIP) is a new queer gardening simulation game about planting bodies and ideas, and watching them grow into a kinetic landscape. You can currently play it in your browser on the Manchester International Festival’s (MIF’s) "Virtual Factory" website. The game should take about 5-10 minutes to play.
It was made over several months in collaboration with world-famous illustrator Eleanor Davis and Manchester-based rockstar musician aya as a commission for MIF. (Also shout-outs to illustrator Sophia Foster-Dimino and sound designer Andy Grier for their incredible work!)
Some people may be familiar with my past work: uncanny CG beefcake sex games that toy with hardcore gamer aesthetics, which only run on laptop / desktop computers. For the longest time, I’ve wanted to make a gay mobile game, but I was unsure how to get my queer politics past Apple and Google’s anti-sexuality censors. It’s impossible to get anything on a phone without their long withheld permission… unless… I made a browser game?
The history of browser games celebrates the open internet that exists beyond Silicon Valley’s sterilized closed garden. However, the photorealistic 3D graphics of my past games are too heavy and slow for a mobile browser, so I need to make a 2D game even though I’ve neglected my 2D visual skills. Fortunately, MIF’s support has made my creative collaborations not only possible, but enjoyable.
Does this game represent a shift or break from my existing work? Maybe. Eleanor’s cute and lush visual style is certainly more beautiful than any of my uncanny 3D hunks.
And in this simulation, the player sculpts an invisible landscape and paints flowers. Naked simulated AI people ("peeps") arrive and flow across the terrain. Peeps bring objects to plant in the garden, like trees, coffee shops, statues, colossal buttplugs, and other necessities. There are dozens of different possible plantings, which can make peeps happy, angry, horny, or even Tories. From this simple model of politics, sexuality, and landscape architecture, the player improvises a virtual heaven or hell, or more likely something both at once — a society.
This is a virtual artwork in a virtual exhibition in a Virtual Factory. The word "virtual" does a lot of work, so much that we rarely question what we even mean by "virtual."
- virtual as "digital": inspired by computer concepts like virtual memory.
- virtual as "potential": Aristotle argued an acorn has virtus (power) to become a tree.
- virtual as "fake": Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum, a false virtual double that replaces the real and becomes hyperreal, seeming more real than reality.
For artists, critics, and similar occupations prone to exaggeration, Baudrillard’s argument is particularly seductive. It warns of a deceptive Other that will replace Us. Reality is under attack! But Ryan is skeptical that her entire sense of reality depends on what this French guy says, and she emphasizes a different French guy’s ideas — Pierre Lévy’s theory of le virtuel:
- virtual as pluralistic: a virtual thing functions as many different things
- virtual as non-linear: a virtual thing is not anchored in one space or time
- virtual as inexhaustible: using a virtual thing does not lead to its depletion
The naked simulated people ("peeps") of We Dwell in Possibility embody le virtuel: they have 2^3 (= 8) different body configurations (thin or thick, breasts or no breasts, penis or vagina) and 6 different skin tones, resulting in 48 possible combinations of body traits. The peeps also wrap-around the screen edges in an infinite loop, they can run endlessly without tiring, and sometimes they can even fluidly change their chest or genitals at will. (Some of these features are common to video games, and some of them aren’t.)
But I think I disagree with Baudrillard and agree more with Ryan: the virtual does not replace reality. The pandemic has made this much clear.
Virtual schools, remote offices, and Zoom parties have not replaced physical schools, in-person offices, or actual parties — instead, these virtual doubles have just created more school, more work, and more people to confront. Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, famously retorted to lawyers: "We don’t like [saying IRL – In Real Life]. We say AFK – Away From Keyboard. We think that the internet is for real." If anything, virtual things generate far too much reality, and it’s all happening to you right now.
Ryan presents two strategies for this "virtual as deluge": goal-oriented utilitarians wade through the ocean of shit (aka the internet) to reach their destination, while flâneurs stroll the World Wide Web with minds open toward serendipity and surprise. But more often, we’re something in between: we’re players.
There are "sims" like SimCity, which seek to be taken semi-seriously as semi-scientific primers to urban planning for educational use in schools. Yet the original SimCity simulated crime primarily as "distance from a police station" and nudged its players into libertarian-style low taxation pro-sprawl strategies. These aren’t scientific models, these are political arguments. When designers streamline complex debates like "what makes a city" into a simplified sim, they inevitably embed their own politics, and the rhetoric of the sim launders these politics as a fact-based algorithmic truth. (see Paolo Pedercini’s essay "SimCities and SimCrises")
Then there are "simulators" like the infallible industrial-grade accuracy of flight simulators (and the game Flight Simulator) which we use to train actual real-life aircraft pilots. But in the last decade, gamers have imbued / tainted this word with a sarcastic tone. For example the modern simulator game Goat Simulator lets you live as a goat… who also possesses the chaotic power to destroy a small town and ruin countless lives with its 50 foot long elastic tongue.
My first prototype were sim-heavy, based on basic cellular automata, a technique popularized by Conway’s Game of Life (1970) where cells (or anything, really) live or die based on crowding, However this felt too fiddly, with small shapes that changed too quickly. I realized I wasn’t interested in a massive abstract population so much as people.
At a glance, this game is about simulating many people moving through a landscape. It mimics the crowd simulation systems used by real-world architects to test building and street circulation. But a building is more than just walls and floor, a building also has a program — a consideration of how it actually lives. Landscapes also have programs. We call this ecology.
In We Dwell in Possibility, the ecosystem has four parts:
- "Peeps" walk around and sometimes pickup nearby "Plants"
- "Plants" (e.g. large flowers, trees, furniture, statues, kiosks, etc.) can attract Peeps; some Plants modify Peeps by giving them "Hats"
- "Hats" temporarily change Peeps’ politics and behaviors; if a Peep dislikes a Plant, they may attempt to carry it off for deletion
- "Players" (i.e. you) can redirect Peeps and pickup Plants, but cannot affect Hats
An example of this ecology in action:
- a Churchill Statue "Plant" looks for nearby Peeps to influence
- a Peep is attracted to the statue, ponders it, and gains a Union Jack Hat
- the Union Jack Hat makes the now-Tory Peep dislike a nearby Buttplug Obelisk
- the Tory Peep pouts for a bit, and then picks up the obelisk to get rid of it
- if the Peep walks off-screen while carrying an object they dislike, they delete that object from the simulation
- … but you, the Player, can intervene and rescue the Buttplug Obelisk; and/or delete the Churchill Statue to prevent future Peeps from gaining Union Jack Hats
But my favorite part of this design are the political ramifications of my simple and flawed code architecture. I coded Peeps to wear only one Hat at a time, but then I also had to hack-in handheld objects (cupcakes, coffee, shopping bags) as "Hats" they wear on their hands. My hurried system design means Peeps must choose: they can either eat a cupcake, or they can be a Tory, they cannot do both. You can’t be both horny and working class. You can’t hold a sandwich while also being a Labour supporter. And so on. I’m sure there’s a very deep political truth in there somewhere, and I’ve left it as an exercise for the player.
As the player, you must indirectly negotiate all these decisions with the Peeps, who bring their own politics and desires into the garden too.
That’s not to suggest absurdity and nonsense are bad. One of the best parts of making a sexual-political simulation is interpreting the glitches that arise. During development, I wrote these cryptic phrases in my notebook:
Don’t let police ponder cupcakes.Shorten Churchill’s shadow.Dancing and kissing should be more common.Don’t let trees cum.Flowers shouldn’t cum at night.Those with hearts should not dance.
The title "We Dwell in Possibility" is from a poem that begins "I dwell in Possibility" (poem #F466A / #J657) by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), one of the greatest American poets who only became widely-read many years after her death. Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Dickinson’s poetry is her punctuation, an ambiguous mark that contemporary readers have interpreted as em dashes — as if she couldn’t stop this flood of feeling, interrupting every image and idea:
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –
Honestly it’s not Dickinson’s best poem, and perhaps it’s a little too straightforward, with not enough mystery. "A fairer House than Prose" refers to her obvious preference for poetry over prose, followed by some architectural / heavenly imagery. Poetry is a place where she can live with God.
But my favorite method is to imagine Dickinson at her most obscene. Imagine someone like Cardi B rapping that last stanza, and it comes off more like she’s bragging about how her virtual poetry hands can pleasure the hottest women ("spreading wide my narrow Hands"… "Visitors — the fairest"). Now that’s a Possibility we can all dwell in!
So often we think of politics and activism and belief as these terribly dry painful things that we’re better off avoiding. Everything is on fire and nothing can be helped, so maybe we should do as Voltaire’s Candide suggests at the end of the novel: cultivate your garden, keep your head down, mind your own business, and worry about your own shit.