From Aesthetics to Asymmetry: Contradictions of Ecological Play in Cities: Skylines

Abstract

Anchored in the Anthropocene era's paradigm of human mastery over nature, Cities: Skylines grants its players extensive agency to shape untouched terrains into sprawling cities. We draw upon “ecological thought”—a mode of awareness that highlights the radical interconnectedness of all beings and their environments—to consider the ecological dynamics of city-building by the game's players. Analyzing player-generated paratexts from online game communities reveals that while many players aspire toward ecocentric city designs, they instead inadvertently restage the asymmetric planetary relationship emblematic of our current era. Our analysis uncovers the capital-driven assumptions that characterize human–environment relations in the game. Attempts at ecocentric aesthetics invariably subsumed by cybernetic interactions that privilege the Anthropocene's prevailing power dynamics. These expressions highlight the inherent contradictions of the Anthropocene era as encountered in Cities: Skylines and illustrate the permeability between the contemporary material world and digital play.

Introduction

Cities: Skylines (Colossal Order, 2015), a city-building and management simulation game available on all major personal computing and game console platforms, engages its players in the process of the transformation of untouched natural landscapes into bustling cities. Granted wide-ranging physical and legislative agency, players saturate the game's waiting virtual environments with the fingerprints of human habitation. Whether laying roads, building neighborhoods, planting trees, mapping out commercial supply chains, or modifying tax rates to attract different forms of industrial enterprise to the city, the player is empowered by the game to bring the assumptions of the Anthropocene era relating to human dominion over nature to bear on these fictional representations of Earth. As players manipulate the virtual landscapes of Cities: Skylines they not only immerse themselves in the practices of urbanization but also engage with the inherent ecological implications of their creations. While such player experiences are also characteristic of numerous sandbox-style games, Cities: Skylines stands out by comparison to other city-builders as a text with potent ecocritical potential, thanks in part to the familiarity to players of the representations of Earth it offers, to the sophistication and depth of its underlying simulations and systems, and to its considerable popularity and large user-base across almost all major gaming platforms.

In this article, we seek to reveal the richness of the ecological dynamics that emerge during play of Cities: Skylines, which at times appear to exceed the game's own limited systemic affordances and ludic incentives available to players in addressing their entanglements with the natural world. We analyze user-created paratexts shared in popular online communities associated with Cities: Skylines, using these textual artifacts as records of otherwise ephemeral play experiences and of the design and composition of cities built within the game. The term “paratext” is derived from the work of literary scholar Gerard Genette (1997) and, as Ellen McCracken explains, uses of the concept in digital cultural applications “move beyond Genette's precise formulations but continue to function in the spirit of his analysis” (2013, p. 106). In game studies, specifically, the concept has been adapted to refer to the “texts that surround the main text being analysed, which transform and condition how the audience interprets the main text” (Fernández-Vara, 2014, p. 25), extending the textual threshold of a videogame through artifacts (either published formally as part of the production or marketing of a game or created by players themselves) to include internet fora, chat rooms, player-to-player communications and game magazines (Apperley, 2018; Consalvo, 2007). Paratexts in gaming communities might take the form of text-posts, written stories, fan art, screenshots from gameplay sessions, videos, and other creative objects. Paratexts allow the “‘disappearing’ game narrative” of an emergent, ever-changing, and ephemeral gameplay experience to be recorded (Mukherjee, 2015, p. 103). Importantly, paratexts also blur the boundary between themselves, the player, and the videogame, offering players an opportunity to negotiate and contribute to collective and emergent textual meaning (Apperley, 2018; Carter, 2015; Consalvo, 2007; May, 2021b; Ruffino, 2022). User-created paratexts, our analysis will show, capture, and make visible (both to other users and to scholars) different ecological properties, dynamics, and experiences that emerge during play of a game such as Cities: Skylines.

Ecocriticism and Ecological Thought in the Anthropocene

Play of Cities: Skylines takes place against the contemporary backdrop of an era commonly described as the Anthropocene. This concept is founded on the conceit of “an entire species ascending to biospheric supremacy” (Malm, 2015, n.p.), with humankind having reached, as geologic agents, “the numbers and invented technologies that are on a scale large enough to have an impact on the planet itself” (Chakrabarty, 2009, pp. 206–207). Anthropocene, in the argument of the scientists who first proposed the label, names a present epoch where geological and morphological changes to Earth, which occur at a scale equivalent to earlier established geological epochs, can be directly connected to anthropogenic influence (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). The term Anthropocene has been the subject of sustained critique, most notably by those promoting an understanding of the “Capitalocene,” which shifts attention away from a generalized, undifferentiated “humanity” to more deliberately expose the role of industrial capital and the capitalist class (Haraway, 2016; Masco, 2018; Moore, 2016). It is, however, a powerful shorthand for explaining the way in which human activity (both underpinned and motivated by a political–economic regime dedicated to exploitation, extraction, and accumulation) has led to the present earthly context of climate crisis, extreme weather, and ecological collapse. The era also invites a paradigm shift wherein the artificial divide between nature and culture (or society) that we have inherited from the modernists is giving way to an understanding of our interconnectedness with and reliance upon our surrounding environments (Scherer, 2020). As such, the Anthropocene speaks to the material implications of the explosive development and globalization of humankind following the Industrial Revolution, whether by drawing attention to the centrality of energy (from the extraction of its fuels from ancient carbon stores, to the toxins produced through its generation, to the ecologically rapacious factories, industries and infrastructures it powers) (Parikka, 2015) or to the way the “cash nexus” and its attendant power relations constructs a view of nature as “cheapened” and available for exploitation (Moore, 2016). Anthropocene reminds us of the “accumulation of the stockpile of dead matter, carbon emissions, waste in all forms, species extinctions, acidification” (Kalaidjian, 2017, p. 32) that surrounds us and alerts us to the breaking points being reached and surpassed in Earth's biospheric stability and ongoing capacity to sustain life (Steffen et al., 2015).

In many ways, the gameplay of Cities: Skylines echoes the human activities that have characterized the Anthropocene, offering players the opportunity to master and reconfigure an earthly environment. In keeping with the conventions of the wider city-building genre, Cities: Skylines makes a vast array of urban construction options available to its players. The game's main interface bristles with buttons, menus, and overlays that reflect the areas of built environment the player has control over, including housing stock, commercial buildings, power generation, natural resource extraction, heavy industries, water and sewerage networks, public transit, education, healthcare, recreation, and emergency services. Beyond these physical interventions, the player is also able to shape the social, cultural, and economic aspects of their virtual community through a litany of local governmental ordinances and bylaws. Downloadable content and add-ons made available by developers Colossal Order in the years following the game's 2015 release have expanded the agency of the Cities: Skylines player to encompass countless further aspects of material impact upon the planet. The game, as with all city-builders, also requires players to shift from moment to moment between the registers of micro and macro scales, just as the Anthropocene invites reflection on the connections between individual decisions made in everyday life and the planetary disaster these decisions create in aggregate (Morton, 2016). For example, players might seamlessly shift their attention from carefully placing individual objects to shape the character of an individual suburban park, to configuring the flows of traffic that run across an entire city's highway network. Cities: Skylines similarly oscillates between temporal scales: watching moving vans flock to a new residential neighborhood over a matter of 5 min of gameplay is as natural an activity to the player as is perceiving the evolution of their city over weeks of interaction, which itself might account for decades of ingame time. Recalled in such play is the profoundly multi-scalar temporal phenomenon of experiencing a human-induced crisis unfurl inexorably over centuries, both fueled by and impacting the nature of lives lived in the immediate and short term (Masco, 2018).

As the assault of the Anthropocene and its compounding ecological and biospheric crises on Earth has worn on, the field of ecocritical analysis within game studies has expanded significantly. Given that games are fundamentally future-oriented, grounded as they are in “the forward-looking evaluation of innumerable choices that we make in the here and now” (Milburn, 2018, p. 222), and offer their players rich opportunities to experiment meaningfully with material, social and political futures within interactive systems (Fordyce, 2021; op de Beke, 2021), it is unsurprising that their entanglement with ecological realities is of growing interest. This speculative capacity of games has been embraced by a number of scholars including those analyzing the way that the Pokémon series of games might encourage a latent form of environmental awareness among its players (Bainbridge, 2014), how representations of renewable power generation in mainstream games works to normalize sustainable visions of the future (Abraham, 2018a), that ludic simulations of precarity contribute to preparations for futures (catalyzed by climate change) in which scarcity is the operating principle (Kelly & Nardi, 2014), and a growing tendency to represent the vast scale of planetarity within games that could improve consciousness of ecological systems for audiences and heighten an important sense of co-presence with Earth (op de Beke, 2020). Connecting more explicitly to the context of the Anthropocene, others have addressed the potential of games to catalyze reflection on human complicity in the current crisis (May, 2021a), the psychoanalytic connection between unconscious pleasure and an anthropocentric form of the condition Sigmund Freud termed the “death drive” (a repeated impulse or tendency toward experiences of failure, loss and self-destruction) (Nicoll, 2023), and the capacity of games to reflect and interrogate the devastating toll of industrial capitalism on earth's health (Abraham, 2018b; Clark, 2022; Felczak, 2020). Ecocritical game studies has also benefited from foundational models specific to this medium. Contributions include a typology developed by Benjamin Abraham and Darshana Jayemanne (2017) to explain environmental dynamics within games (environment as backdrop, antagonist, text, or resource) and a comprehensive account by Alenda Chang (2019) of the ways that virtual environments and our lived world overlap and bleed into one another through games. Frameworks such as these not only serve to illustrate the ecocritical qualities of plainly ecocentric games, and of games which explicitly foreground interrelationships between virtual and physical worlds such as the popular augmented reality games Pokémon Go (Niantic, 2016) or Ingress (Niantic, 2013), but can also help reveal conditions or traditions of ecological engagement in texts that are less explicitly engaged with ecological concerns.

In common with earlier ecocritical work by Benjamin Abraham (2018b) and Lawrence May (2021a), the discussion of ecologies in this article is specifically framed by Timothy Morton's (2010) expansive notion of “the ecological thought.” Morton emphasizes that ecological thought does not attend solely to nature but extends to encompass every aspect of our existence. This awareness of the interconnection and interdependence of all forms of life is captured by the metaphor of a “vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definitive edge or border” (Morton, 2010, p. 8). Morton's mode of ecological thinking offers a counterpoint to underlying ecological dynamics of the Anthropocene era, which has structured human–environmental relations around an apparent division between humankind and its surrounding nature. Taking root in medieval and early modern conceptions of the relationship between nature and the human, this dualism—entirely artificial and culturally situated—has configured Earth's environments as idealized and sublime, as standing separate to society, and as a standing reserve for human exploitation (Loftus, 2012). Morton's mesh, “vast yet intimate,” reminds us that nature is not a separate entity from humanity, but rather a complex web of relationships with no center or hierarchy (2010, p. 40). And once we engage more and more with such ecological thinking, “the more our world opens up” because it becomes “strangely or frighteningly easy to join the dots” and witness the endless entanglement of our lifeworlds (Morton, 2010, p. 1). This mode of ecological thinking demands a radical de-centering of the human agency so prized by the Anthropocene as well as seeing and thinking in assemblages. An ecological awareness must recognize that “our insides teem with aliens” because “our very cells harbour mitochondria with their own DNA,” just as birds and bees play such a central role to the flowering of plants that they are best understood as co-constitutive (Morton, 2013, p. 103). In short, considering ecology means appreciating that the “here is shot through with there” (Morton, 2010, p. 39), in a mesh that dissolves the boundaries between entities and actors, and collapses scales of time and distance together. This understanding leads to the recognition that “the world looks as it does because it has been shaped by life forms every bit as much as life forms have been shaped by their environmental conditions” (Clark, 2013, p. 103).

The privileged notion of the rational “individual”—discrete and agentic—crumbles in the face of the knowledge that our bodies are entangled with and comprised in unseen ways by elements including “hydrogen and oxygen, carbon based life forms reconfigured as ‘food,’ economies, ecosystems, cultures” (Snaza, 2018, p. 351). Our species’ “anthropocentric mania” is dramatically interrupted by our reconfiguration as “phenomenological beings” permeated and constituted by other ecological actors (Morton, 2016, p. 125), and with our agency recognized as arriving by virtue of our bodies’ functions as a “site of relay” for other inhuman powers surrounding us (Snaza, 2018, p. 351). This radical interconnectedness implies that our actions reverberate through the entire ecological system and that the ecological system reverberates back through us. This mode of ecological awareness also serves to draw our attention to the “dark ecology” that underpins the production of nature and the operation of our political and economic regimes: an ecology that is marked by “characteristics of tragic melancholy and negativity” and contains all the waste, toxicity and environmental brutality that humankind contribute to the mesh (Morton, 2016, p. 159). As such, the effect of the many minute decisions and actions taken in everyday life can be more clearly seen to add up to make each of us a complicit and active participant (or “tragic criminal” in Morton's words) in humankind's devastating aggregate impact as a “geophysical force on a planetary scale” (2016, p. 8). The scalar thinking required by ecological thought, in the form of this kind of “suprapersonal awareness of the impact and extent of one's actions” (Chang, 2019, p. 70), invokes loops and paradoxes of human self-awareness (Morton, 2016). Morton asks us to revel in such paradoxes, which include, for example, the recognition that “you are both individual and species, both part of the problem and not” (Gannon, 2017, p. 143) and the revelation that for all of our growing ecological awareness, as we join dots across the ecological mesh we invariably discover more and more that is unknowing and unknowable (Morton, 2016). Embracing ecological thought—and its consonant dark ecology—entails accepting that human activity is inherently intertwined with the environment, but also that this means that alien, strange and menacing interconnections subtend our own subjectivities.

Locating Ecologies in Cities: Skylines

Focused as it is on its core premises of building, sustaining, and growing a metropolis, Cities: Skylines does not privilege the detailed simulation of the ecological dynamics that underlie the virtual landscapes that provide a canvas for such acts of rethinking cities. While the interrelationship of actants and effects associated with ingame migration, education, healthcare, economic performance, industrial supply chains, and traffic flows are among some of systemic elements modeled in sophisticated detail by the game, ecologies are comparatively overlooked by the game's underlying simulation. Only limited ecological ingame feedback loops—connected to forms of air, ground, and water pollution and the finite availability of some natural resources (oil and ore)—are made immediately apparent to players. Indeed, these facts are not entirely surprising given the difficult balance that game developers need to make between the development of an enjoyable game and the fidelity, accuracy, and depth of their representation of our planet. For these reasons, Cities: Skylines might not appear to offer a fruitful case study of players’ engagement with ecological thought. The city, however, has long provided powerful markers of human–ecological relationships. Alex Loftus, for example, argues that the form taken by a city is “profoundly shaped by power,” and that its production “embodies and expresses, produces and reproduces, the very injustices” of its surrounding political milieu (2012, p. 3). Cities exist as “created ecosystems” (Harvey, 1993, pp. 27–28), that are not static and monolithic built environments, but are instead defined by dynamic processes that weave human society and its surrounding ecologies together. The processes and ecological relationships that form and sustain cities are, however, are ultimately shaped by the human power structures that circulate around and are stabilized through it (Loftus, 2012). In the context of the capitalist order, the socio-natural assemblages of urban environments act as “handmaidens” that allow their human inhabitants to “process and accept new environmental realities” and understand the power relations articulated through metropolitan form (Kalaidjian, 2017, p. 22).

We argue that in their virtual constructions, Cities: Skylines players engage with these deep-lying currents of power, exceeding those immediately evident ecocentric characteristics and affordances of the game. We seek to trace players’ expressions of what Abraham describes as an “ecological thought for games”—an application of Morton's concept that itself involves “thinking across the connections and assemblages involved in digital gaming as an activity or experience” (2018b, n.p.). In games, ecological thought is expressed through “the nature of relationships between player and world, player and objects, player and other things as foregrounded or backgrounded by design” (Abraham, 2018b, n.p.). To uncover those relationships between Cities: Skylines players, and the ecological characteristics of emergent experience of its play, we examine paratexts created and shared by users in online communities. Our turn to paratexts was influenced by the interrelated methods of “virtual ethnography” (an approach to ethnography of, in and through the communications and interactions mediated by the internet, and which embraces the adaptive, partial and dynamic characteristics of these research objects) (Hine, 2000), “netnography” (an adaptation of ethnographic methods originally designed for conducting marketing research within online communities, and emphasizing the ways that artifacts found within such communities can demonstrate user sentiments and attitudes) (Kozinets, 2010), “social media ethnography” (an methodology that emphasizes the significance of routines and everyday social practices—and the artifacts generated through these activities—among users of online fora and social networking sites) (Postill & Pink, 2012) and “online ethnography” (an approach that draws attention to the way that online platforms mediate identity, relationships, and social structures, and the ways these can be revealed and interpreted through ethnographic inquiry) (Markham, 2015). These digital cultural ethnographic approaches guide our efforts in locating, contextualizing, and appreciating the acts of meaning-making and creativity that shape user paratexts. Addressing paratexts as potent records of play and player discourse contributes to a shift in digital cultural scholarship that asserts the critical nature of investigations of user contributions, which have often been dismissed as mere ephemera in earlier work (Massanari, 2015). Indeed, user paratexts are potent research objects and, as the analysis shows, offer access to a “socio-cultural unconscious” that spans popular cultural texts and their audiences. Through paratexts, users can be seen “responding to the cultural trauma of the not-fully-admitted but unavoidable knowledge of impending climate change” and the ecological dynamics of the Anthropocene (Bulfin, 2017, p. 142).

Informed by the ethnographic approaches noted, and by specific methods outlined by May for gathering paratexts from online player communities (2021b), we systematically gathered, coded, and analyzed user-created paratexts from three research sites. These sites, all internet fora, were selected because they are the three largest English-language online forums (in terms of number of registered users, or total number of posts) associated with the game, and as such offered us the greatest possible volume of user-created paratextual material to draw upon, as well as the greatest possible diversity of user practices in relation to the creation and discussion of these paratexts. The three research sites were the Cities: Skylines subreddit ¹ (509,000 users); Cities: Skylines Paradox Forums ² (13,429 posts); and, the Cities: Skylines Simtropolis Forum ³ (44,122 posts). Using a combination of targeted keyword searches and the sorting, by popularity (in terms of replies or affirmative “up-votes”) of all posts within each forum, we located relevant artifacts to capture within a database. Artifacts were then analyzed using qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2000), in a process described in detail by García-Álvarez et al. in their netnographic study of players’ subjective experiences of the Facebook game Restaurant City (2017). In practical terms, this meant an initial thematic categorization was developed, using a combination of Abraham and Jayemanne's (2017) model for player–environment dynamics and key concepts from Morton's explanations of ecological thought (Morton, 2010, 2013, 2016), and then gathered artifacts were coded according to these themes. Once organized in these descriptive themes that connected to either Abraham and Jayemanne's model or Morton's definitions, we repeatedly analyzed and re-coded the artifacts to revise the coding and move toward interpretative (rather than descriptive) thematic labels (a procedure described in Mayring, 2000), and to make connections between themes which allowed smaller themes to be combined. Once we had exhausted this process of re-coding and could not generate new, interpretive themes (nor identify any further conceptually similar themes to consolidate together), we considered the coding complete. We considered the three themes that each accounted for the largest proportions of artifacts in the dataset as offering our key analytical findings, with each of these themes demonstrating a different form of the practices of ecological thinking demonstrated by players of Cities: Skylines. First (in a theme we have identified as the production of eco-aesthetics), we see that users frequently turn to aesthetics connected to ecological metaphors and concepts of environmental harmony in the design of their cities. In constructing in ways that appear, at the very least, ecocentric, users gesture toward hopeful visions of more sustainable human development on our ailing planet. Our second theme (the entanglement of ecological thought with aesthetics) reveals the ways in which these aesthetic determinations are often indelibly, and unwittingly, permeated by the conditions of industrial capitalism. Through user-created paratexts, we trace this contradiction between aesthetic intent and underlying anthropocentric reality to prompt our third key observation. This theme (the impetus to adopt cybernetic logics) identifies a broader cybernetic mode of interaction invoked by Cities: Skylines, where ecological thinking is subsumed by the asymmetrical relationship with Earth demanded by capital and accumulation. The fact that Cities: Skylines engenders these expressions of ecological thought in its players reflects the contradictions inherent in the destructive era of the Anthropocene and serves to reinforce that contemporary videogames are thoroughly imbricated in the material and political conditions of this epoch. As a final step in our method, artifacts within each of these three themes that were particularly noteworthy or exemplary were highlighted—183 in total. These exemplary artifacts form the basis of our following detailed discussion of each theme, and due to both the practical limitation of space available and ethical considerations, ⁴ we represent the data analyzed in an aggregate and de-identified form.

The Production of Eco-Aesthetics

The first theme illustrated by the paratextual data reveals the production of eco-aesthetics undertaken by users in the construction of cities within Cities: Skylines. In the context of civic construction and urban development (whether in the lived world or the virtual), aesthetic experiences can be understood as the “normative perceptual experiences” (Berleant, 2016, p. 124) or “pleasurable human responses” (Gobster et al., 2007, p. 961) associated with the appreciation of the art and of beauty found within environmental and architectural stimuli. The significance of aesthetics in the context of city-building is found in their potential to shape human behavior, whether by affirming or contesting political, social, or material conventions associated with aesthetic tendencies. As Louise Mozingo notes, despite popular suggestions that aesthetics are too “shallow” to connect meaningfully to ecological debates and dynamics, aesthetic principles and experiences can powerfully influence culture and cultural change (1997). The aesthetics of built environments and natural landscapes not only reflect the values of their human inhabitants (Steiner, 2019), but actively “embody and concretize power,” confirming the authority of the societal values and norms they represent (Mozingo, 1997, p. 57). The aesthetics embedded in environments designed and built by human hands contribute to a kind of “affective architecture,” which communicates a “global vision and a spatial imaginary” that is located in, and draws upon, specific geopolitical regimes of meaning (Yusoff, 2022, p. 16). Inasmuch as aesthetic experiences can reinforce existing currents of power and ideology, they also offer opportunities for alterity. Architectural aesthetics, re-oriented in ecocentric ways, might equally work to evoke human appreciation and sympathy toward ecological sensibilities (Haruna et al., 2018), and act as a “substrate” that could provoke us to “recalculate planetary dynamics and infuse them with new trajectories” (Axel et al., 2022, p. 10). Built environments and their aesthetics become, from this perspective, crucial spaces for negotiating (in potentially radical ways) the planetary relations that underpin the Anthropocene (Yusoff, 2022), and “an essential medium for both constructing and imagining the planet to come” (Axel et al., 2022, p. 10).

The data reveal a trend, within Cities: Skylines’ communities, for users to share ecocentric cities and neighborhoods they have built, which integrate nature and urban architecture. Across such artifacts, key aesthetic patterns emerge and repeat. One such pattern involves the saturation of built environments with trees (which players can either place individually or “paint” as forests onto a landscape at great scale and density). Described various as “eco-friendly,” “ecologically friendly,” or “eco-residential” districts, neighborhoods, or cities, screenshots shared by users reveal trees and shrubs planted in dense and orderly rows in order to line streets, fill in empty city blocks or visually section off less environmentally friendly elements of civic infrastructure (power plants or wastewater treatment facilities, for example). Asking whether their placement of trees “look[s] natural or is it excessive?” one user presents a suburb where grand oak trees have been placed into every free section of the landscape, creating a thick (and strikingly monocultural) suburban forest that appears to swamp the detached houses it surrounds. In addition to the way flora is planted across ingame environments, other paratexts illustrate a tendency to adopt physical materials that communicate their natural origins (as opposed to concrete, the game's default material for roading), including cobbled bluestone or sandstone streets and bridges. Other emergent trends include the way that cities are spatially oriented, with some user paratexts using screenshots and videos to demonstrate how their cities have been developed with vast parks at their center, making riverways their key focal point or surrounded by thick bands of pastoral farmland. These conscious efforts at integration of nature into users’ urban designs gesture to the way that nature itself has become co-opted as a “cultural artifact” (Bennett & Chaloupka, 1993, p. xi), which can be deployed (or, more literally, planted) to construct “pedigree” landscapes of carefully ordered and controlled ecology (Mozingo, 1997).

The use of nature as a culturally expressive tool to advance an ecocentric aesthetic continues in paratexts that exhibit nature reserves constructed by users. In these efforts at a virtualized form of landscape architecture, users contribute to an aesthetic approach that de-emphasizes the perception of green spaces as natural resources awaiting destruction, exploitation, and harvesting, and rather presents them as “self-sufficient bodies” that are “capable of being aesthetically admired” in ways that reinforce ecocentric sympathies (Haruna et al., 2018, p. 6). These ingame instances of large-scale landscaping vary in their specific detail and size, but exemplary paratexts include one that highlights an “ecological park” built at the outskirts of a virtual city, through several screenshot images. The user has painstakingly placed decorative assets—large boulders, rockfaces, and individual trees, shrubs, and patches of moss—as well as redirecting a waterway to create a chain of small waterfalls, in order to create a richly detailed and attractive parkland. In another forum post, a user writes about a mountainous nature reserve they have crafted, which spans nine of the game map's “tiles” (an equivalent of 33 km² of total space). This user's screenshots show, again, careful attention to detail, as vegetation, rivers, waterfalls, and geologic features have been crafted to create a stunning backdrop to the virtual city lying at the base of this enormous reserve. Another user shares a series of screenshots to demonstrate a large reserve cutting through the center of their metropolis. Explicitly reflecting on the potential for aesthetic experiences to provoke ecological thought and reflection, the user notes that their intent is to give their virtual citizens a space within which they might “take a step back and remember the nature that used to be” prior to urban development. In another artifact, a user who similarly explains that they hope to “show off” the pre-human history of their region to its imagined residents, shares a five-minute video in which the camera slowly pans across a bustling city and into a large nature reserve, with sculpted hiking trails and eye-catching landscape features, emphasizing the ease with which citizens could access this natural environment.

The physical form of buildings and collections of buildings also plays an important role in the eco-aesthetic efforts of Cities: Skylines players. Many tendencies evident in the broader eco-aesthetic conventions of architecture and urban design are repeated in user paratexts identified in the analysis of Cities: Skylines. These tendencies include the embrace of geometric shapes that communicate the contingency of natural processes (Spirn, 1984), rounded forms that imply natural unity and balance (Koh, 1988), the impulse to build structures that have “iconic significance,” and use striking aesthetic expressions to draw attention to ecologies and ecological dynamics (Mozingo, 1997, p. 46). One user describes an attempt to build according to an iconic aesthetic logic, sharing screenshots that show a virtual city inspired by the proposed Saudi Arabian city The Line. ⁵ Cutting through a dry desert, two perfectly straight skyscraper-height walls enclose the apartment blocks, office buildings, extensive tree and greenery planting, and various civic infrastructure of a narrow, linear city. Another user's iconic development—South Sea Pearl Eco-Island, built in the shape of a pearl and covered in dense residential and commercial construction—is inspired by the swooping circular shapes seen in the numerous artificial archipelagos built for inhabitation and leisure in the United Arab Emirates. ⁶ For other users, simpler details are showcased as sustaining eco-aesthetic expressions: for example, cedar wood cladding on the exterior of apartment buildings, “living wall” vertical gardens hanging from office blocks and grassed roofs on residential homes. In another example, in a video systematically outlining their approach to building their latest city, a user explains (in voiceover narration) that they seek to engage in “sustainable and ecological” practices in their city's construction, practices that reflect “more mindful” approaches to humankind's relationship with the planet. In the video, these practices are expressed through the excavation of grasslands to create large riverways through undeveloped areas of the ingame environment but also inflect the placement of buildings within the city. Structurally, the city's shape takes on a honeycomb pattern, with commercial, industrial and residential districts contained in hexagonal cells bordered by the city's major arterial roads. When the city is viewed at scale it appears in the shape of a metal, concrete, and flora beehive, with aggregate built architecture that attempts to speak to the user's desire for ecocentricity.

Whether through the careful integration of well-manicured natural elements within urban environments, the cultivation and construction of seemingly wild and thriving natural reserves, or the conscious appeal to the spectacle of the iconic in buildings, evidence shows that Cities: Skylines users engage in the production of an ecologically oriented aesthetics. Eco-aesthetic design choices, just as in the lived world, can coalesce to form environmental visions that draw attention to the nature of the relationship between human urban development and the planetary resources that sustain human life (Mozingo, 1997, p. 46). In the eco-aesthetics illustrated so far from the paratextual data, however, there appears a limit to their capacity to model or provoke ecological thought. The reshaping of natural landscapes to suit human settlement has resulted an ecocentric aesthetic doctrine that “may only imperfectly reflect the ecological functions it embodies” (Gobster et al., 2007, p. 961). In emphasizing the “visual enjoyment of natural-appearing scenery” and its integration into urban settings (Gobster et al., 2007, p. 961), landscape and built architecture has in fact encouraged the creation of highly artificial plant communities that can only be maintained with significant labor and expense (Spirn, 1984), the translocation of plants and animals to hostile and inappropriate environments (Mozingo, 1997) and ecological simplification that radically reduces biodiversity and threatens ecosystemic stability with devastating effect (Swanson et al., 2017). Ecologically healthy and valuable landscapes are often not particularly attractive (in terms of the aesthetic conventions established since the popularization of concepts and images of “nature” by the modernists)—and vice versa (Haruna et al., 2018). Expressions of eco-aesthetics, in short, unwittingly reflect and sustain anthropogenic relationships with the land.

Re-Entangling Ecologies and Aesthetics

Our survey of the eco-aesthetic practices that emerge in play of Cities: Skylines sheds light on Morton's claim that it is the very idea of nature itself, grounded as it is in anthropogenic ideological dynamics, that is “getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art” (2007, p. 1). Morton encourages a disavowal of the idealized forms of nature, and in the absence of the scenic and bucolic constructs of “nature” we might return to ecological thought and its revelations of relationality and interdependence. It is precisely this possibility that is illustrated by the second theme uncovered in the data: the entanglement of ecological thought with aesthetics. While we have so far used “eco-aesthetics” as a shorthand for aesthetic expressions and experiences that are characterized by their ecocentricity, the more specific concept of “ecological aesthetics” exists in scholarship to help locate ecological thought within the analysis of architectural and landscape designs. Jusuck Koh (1988) is often cited for his foundational work articulating three principles of truly ecological aesthetics and design: inclusive unity (the integration of form with purpose and context), dynamic balance (the maintenance of equilibrium between organic and inorganic forms) and complementarity (a rejection of prohibitive conceptual dualisms in favor of perspectives of indivisibility and entanglement). Ecological aesthetics seek to reconfigure aesthetic pleasure away from those visions of environment that are fundamentally anthropogenic and toward landscapes that “embody beneficial ecological functions” (Gobster et al., 2007, p. 962). This more specific aesthetic mode invokes “sensual connections” and growing awareness of the ecological interrelationships that surround built environments (Steiner, 2019, p. 33), revealing the place of human inhabitants within a whole greater than their own species’ contributions (Spirn, 1984). Just as Morton's ecological thought demands the unraveling and recognition of the endless connections between actors and entities in the meshes that comprise lifeworlds, ecological aesthetics seek to render the invisible dynamics of ecosystems and ecologies visible and tangible through built environments and landscapes.

In considering the paratextual data, examples of an aesthetic explicitly gesturing toward the complex webs of interactions that characterize ecologies are much less common in our studied communities than examples of the more superficial eco-aesthetics already discussed. This mode of aesthetic expression emerges through artifacts that record examples of unintended developments to ingame environments, conscious efforts by users to represent the de-centering of the human in their virtual cities, and observations of ironic juxtapositions between visions of ecology and destruction. In one such paratext—a screenshot of abandoned and decaying tower buildings looming over tsunami floodwaters surging through city streets—a user declares that “climate change has taken my city.” In another example, a user shares two images of an entire region covered by the dark blue waters of an ocean, with the tops of skyscrapers jutting above the surface of the water in patches, joking that “climate change seems to be having an adverse effect” on their city. Attempting to reshape a series of waterways on their virtual landscape, the user explains that they had lost control of the powerful flows of water and their city, now drowned, had fallen victim to their mistake. In both examples, an aesthetic is deployed (if unwittingly) that communicates the instability introduced to the interrelationships of ecological systems by human interference and the ruinous consequences of instances of consequent climatic and geologic collapse. The data reveal that other users deliberately cultivate such a destructive ecological aesthetic. In one example, presented as a screenshot, this is achieved by surrounding their city with large levies, allowing water to flood most of the remaining landscape (to simulate 30 m of sea level rise). In another series of screenshots, a different user highlights the effort they have made to create areas of their city characterized by urban decay and inexorable reclamation by nature. Having painstakingly placed decorative assets in order to create the appearance of vegetation swarming over abandoned and collapsing industrial facilities, these paratexts (as with the example illustrating sea level rise) signal the tension and violence that lies at the heart of the ecological relationships that enact human assumptions of mastery over natural environments.

Finally, there are instances captured by users where the game system occasionally—and strikingly—fosters irony by presenting contrasting ecological dynamics together. Some examples include heavy industrial facilities (which can randomly take one of a number of visual designs, with most being some variation of a gray structure with large chimneys venting thick black smoke) being automatically assigned the business name “Eco Friendly Company,” retail buildings dedicated to the sale of organic produce being dwarfed by their surrounding carpark facilities, and “eco-friendly” sewerage outflow pipes appearing to be regular discharge pipes—but painted green. As users note the wry humor of these juxtapositions (which could also be considered unwitting virtual example, perhaps, of the corporate phenomenon of “greenwashing”), generated through their efforts to build cities and landscapes in combination with unanticipated quirks of the underlying game system, we witness another manifestation of ecological thought. These instances potently embody the indivisibility of the various ecological actors and entities, as Morton's imagined “mesh” collapses time, space and phenomena into one another. These ironic coincidences contribute to an aesthetic experience that reminds us not just that “here is shot through with there” (Morton, 2010, p. 39), but that all those superficial efforts at environmental and ecological harmony that increasingly proliferate the late capitalist era are intimately, and inseparably, connected to human legacies of waste, pollution and consumption.

Between the more superficial expressions of eco-aesthetics already discussed and ecological aesthetics that manifest underlying ecological relationships, it seems we are continually led back to experiences and images that habitually repeat the hubris and damage of the Anthropocene era. Impulses toward eco-aesthetics, as we have seen, draw Cities: Skylines players into patterns of engagement with nature that are artificial, ecologically unhealthy, and driven by conventions of scenic beauty. Genuinely ecological aesthetics, meanwhile, appear to only emerge for users to account for destruction, decay, and toxicity in the age of the human. Ted Toadvine reminds us that all aesthetic experiences are defined by the subjective point of view—whether culturally, temporally, or spatially—of human perception and cognition (2010). Given that a desire for dominion over nature has been a persistent feature of modern human history (Berleant, 2016), naturalized by the turn to science, engineering, and technology to “tame” the planet, during the Western Enlightenment (Hird, 2017), it is unsurprising that Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that the “theory and practice of the conquest of nature has become integrated into Western aesthetics throughout the Anthropocene” (2014, p. 219). As Mirzoeff explains, visualizing is an inherently hierarchical act, intended to maintain the authority of the visualizer (2014, p. 216) and, in the case of aesthetic encounters with ecologies during the Anthropocene, equates to the well-honed power of “capitalist venture, planetary conquest, colonial authority, and limitless resource extraction” (Hird, 2017, p. 257). The utter pervasiveness of the underlying conditions of the Anthropocene, where nothing “escapes the potentiality of capital's perpetual reach,” fuels what Myra Hird describes as the “runaway quality” of Anthropocene aesthetics (2017, p. 265). We are surrounded by the disaster and destruction of industrial capital and it infects our modes of visuality, as it does countless other aspects of our interior lives. This infected visuality—or an “Anthropocene-aesthetic-capitalist complex”—is so “deeply embedded in our very sensorium and modern ways of seeing” (Mirzoeff, 2014, p. 213) that eco-aesthetics and ecological aesthetics are swept up and co-opted by it. As the Cities: Skylines data so far illustrates, this means that even such innocuous activities as the play of a city-builder game forms a node in the network of an anthropocentric power underwritten by industrial capitalism.

Cybernetic Abjection of Ecological Thought

The second theme to emerge in the analysis of Cities: Skylines user-created paratexts picks up the thread of capital's underlying influence on engagements with virtual environments, at the same time as drawing us away from aesthetics. In the data, we identify an impetus to adopt cybernetic logics in engagements with ecologies in play experiences. In using the term “cybernetic,” we refer to the closed systems of thinking and processing that address “massively complex, dynamic, and contingent circumstances” (Robles-Anderson & Liboiron, 2016, p. 249). These systems are characterized by the centrality of positive and negative feedback loops (Masco, 2018), and use findings from these operative feedback loops to work seamlessly as a “functioning whole, constantly adapting or discarding dysfunctional elements” in their quests for optimal action (Zwier & Blok, 2019, p. 624). Against the backdrop of the burgeoning dominance of algorithmic processing in contemporary culture (Parisi, 2017), cybernetic phenomena proliferate across many aspects of human life, encouraging in subjects (or in our case, players) a “‘technical mentality’ that enmeshes nature and technology, materiality and thought, individual and community” (Kalaidjian, 2017, p. 23). In critical accounts of the Anthropocene, connections to cybernetics have already been productively forged. This has been achieved through observations of the way that neoliberal governance has relied upon the cybernetic phenomena of “information, feedback, and non-equilibrium interconnection” to define and administer the lives of its subjects (Wakefield, 2022, pp. 197–198) and of an ontological symmetry between being and thinking on earth and processes of technological regulation (Zwier & Blok, 2019).

Numerous paratexts from the Cities: Skylines communities demonstrate the integration of cybernetic logics into users’ approaches to virtual ecologies and environments. The game's simulation is detailed and sophisticated, built to model the social, cultural, and economic activities of up to 1 million virtual citizens. This underlying model provides players with countless feedback loops and systemic inputs they must make to succeed in fostering thriving cities. To focus on just one limited aspect of the game's environmental simulation—water treatment—the data illustrate an array of ways users seek to optimize and adapt their behaviors to constantly improve systemic outputs within their gameplay. For example, across text-posts, screenshots, and videos, numerous users explain (or seek explanation for) optimal plans for the combination of different pieces of infrastructure to completely clean and recycle wastewater in order to make it portable. Users compare with one another the statistics and measurements associated with each type of facility, experiments with balancing cost efficiency against productivity of the treatment process and moments of learning from stories of failure or misjudged optimization that can lead to sewerage entering the drinking water supply, causing widespread illness among citizens. These expressions of a cybernetic desire by users to tweak and improve their engagement with the computational patterns of the game system (which is, of course, a key aspect of play across strategy and management game genres broadly) are illustrated in the gathered artifacts across every aspect of Cities: Skylines’ ludic options and feedback loops. Whether optimizing power generation and transmission, agricultural supply chains, the speed of natural resource extraction, the attractiveness and profitability of gated parks, or the efficiency of public transit networks (all instances for which the dataset contains multiple paratextual examples), users appear deeply enmeshed in a pattern of cybernetic decision-making and action in relation to virtual environments.

The cybernetic structure of the play of Cities: Skylines is further revealed in artifacts that capture users demanding richer affordances and opportunities for human agency within the game system's feedback loops. Paratexts demonstrating this tendency take a common form as text-posts, often written with considerable explanatory detail, either requesting new features for the game or a future sequel to the game, ⁷ or lamenting the absence of such features in the current title. In some cases, users are seen seeking greater granularity in the simulatory possibilities of their relationships with the virtual environments of Cities: Skylines. One user, for example, writes a complaint about the “strange lack” of conifer trees in the game—a remarkable omission, in their view, given their widespread appearance in the temperate climates of North America and Europe. Elsewhere, users hope for ingame sand dunes and wetlands that might be deployed to sustain local ecosystems, the ability to spawn wild animal populations within nature reserves, more options for energy capture and generation (including emerging “green technologies”), and new means to extract and harvest natural resources (including vast, open cast mines and more diverse crop options for agricultural cultivation). In other artifacts, users imagine adjustments to the game at a more systemic level. Examples include requests for the modeling of rising and falling levels of streams, rivers, and watersheds, following the onset of floods and droughts; simulation of dynamic climatic conditions, representation of levels of air pollution (and its harmful effects), relationships between carbon reduction goals and civic expenditure and the introduction of wild animal populations (whose proximity to human settlements would provoke considerations of citizen safety and species protection). A desire for more diverse encounters with natural disasters (a limited number of which already exist in the game, experienced either at random intervals or triggered deliberately by players themselves using an ingame menu) forms another large corpus within the data. User suggestions include the introduction of heatwaves, viral epidemics, disruptive mass rallies and protest actions, inexorably rising sea levels, and unpredictable extreme weather events borne of climate change. Taken together, these paratexts underscore a longing for deeper and more expansive cybernetic encounters with virtual environments expressed by users in these Cities: Skylines communities.

The impetus toward cybernetic modes of thinking and action within Cities: Skylines, we argue, represents an unlikely form of ecological thought. Inasmuch as ecological thought demands that close attention be paid to interconnection and the long chains of cause-and-effect that make up the ecologies of our lifeworlds, cybernetic phenomena similarly speak to the links, loops, inputs, and outputs of complex systems. This is an abjected form of ecological thought—one that works in service of the human–environmental relations both desired and propagated by the Anthropocene, rather than the more radical possibility (as suggested by Morton) of ecological thinking provoking revelations about the countless layers of entanglement and concomitance that make up everyday life. Our suggestion that players in games such as Cities: Skylines might be imbricated in such a perversion of ecological thought also brings us back to one of the basic tenets of the argument to centrally position the role of industrial capital and its exploitative environmental values in accounts of anthropogenic power. As Jason Moore argues, capitalism must be considered as a “situated and multispecies world-ecology of capital, power, and re/production” (2016, p. 94), with capital entirely subsuming the ecology we have tended to associate with nature in the process of colonizing the “creative, generative, and multilayered relation of life-making, of species and environments” (2016, p. 79). In appreciating that the ecologies that surround us, as well as the very concept of ecology, are permeated by the impulses of capitalism, then it is no great leap to conceive of ecological thought also being prone to a similar abjection.

Conclusion

When considering player relationships with ingame environments in Cities: Skylines, it becomes clear there is no easy escape from the assemblage of technics, governance and capital that has driven the Anthropocene. The paratexts reveal the deeply embedded, capital-inflected assumptions about human–environment relations that underlie the game and its play experiences. In seeking ecocentric aesthetics, or in seeking to cybernetically optimize the affordances offered by ingame environments, users articulate an anthropocentric desire for greater mastery. Not only has the vision of human dominion over nature underpinned environment relations in the centuries following the Enlightenment but, as Matthew Tiessen grimly identifies, the planetary devastation of the Anthropocene is the natural endpoint of this relentless quest for mastery. The Anthropocene, and its ruins, are the context in which it “becomes clear that our desires, our ambitions, our capacities for consumption exceed the capacities of our planet” (2018, p. 140). And yet, even in the face of the current epoch's compounding cataclysms, the human impulse to exercise anthropogenic agency is not dimmed. An increasingly popular eco-modernist movement (Zwier & Blok, 2019), for example, has determined that the solution to the planet's woes means humankind must “double down on their efforts to control the natural world” (Bergthaller, 2020, p. 38). Salvation, this line of thinking suggests, lies in mobilizing the radical solutions that are promised by nascent advances in science and technology.

Our analysis of paratexts suggests that Cities: Skylines players, through their play, simply continue an enduring human impulse to control and configure nature. The game, and the experiences of its players, help us to see that aesthetic experiences with ecologies—and, we now add, cybernetic interactions—are co-opted by a familiar ideology and underlying power structures. This ensures that attempts at ecocentric expression inevitably “circle back to the Anthropocene's inception” (Hird, 2017, p. 255). While building, growing, and sustaining human settlements in Cities: Skylines, seemingly ecocentric aesthetic and interactive patterns are in fact summoning “the processual material context of all the ruins that surround and anticipate” the Anthropocene, meaning that even virtualized building becomes an act contributing to the “process of ruination” that characterizes the current era (Yusoff, 2022, p. 23). We have shown that Cities: Skylines invites the discursive and ideological hierarchies, and violence, of an era of biospheric and ecological crisis (underwritten by industrial capitalism) into its gameplay. By attending to user-created paratexts from an ecocritical perspective, we uncover the porosity of both our lived material conditions and the digital game objects we play, with the game and its players repeatedly echoing the ecological dynamics that undergird contemporary life in the Anthropocene.