Abstract
Extending ecocritical game studies to the Sinophone (or Chinese-speaking) world, this article offers a close playing of three OPUS-themed science fiction videogames produced between 2016 and 2021 by Taiwanese indie developer SIGONO, exploring the games’ function as environmental texts and their relationship to Taiwanese literary and cultural studies. By asking the player to engage in shifts in scale and perspective from human to nonhuman, life to death, past to present, and enclosed to boundless space, the OPUS games serve as an effective way of understanding ecological intervention that promotes multiscalar awareness and asks what still can be done and what hope can be found when all has already been lost. In doing so, they demonstrate the ecocritical potential of science fiction videogames that feature an in-game environment many millions of light-years away from our current earth-bound realities.
Introduction
The OPUS videogames are a series of award-winning science fiction games produced by the Taiwanese indie developer SIGONO INC and available to play in traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, English, and Japanese versions on PC, Nintendo Switch, and mobile gaming platforms. In the first of the three games released so far, OPUS: The Day We Found Earth (OPUS diqiu jihua, 2016), you play an android named Emeth, tasked with operating a telescope on an otherwise unmanned spaceship tens of thousands of years in the future, with the single mission of locating planet Earth from among the countless stars and galaxies surrounding you in deep space. In the second, OPUS: Rocket of Whispers (OPUS: linghun zhi qiao, 2017), you control the characters of John Manson, the 36-year-old son of rocket engineers, and Fei Lin, a witch, who live on a postapocalyptic planet ravaged by plague. Your mission is to traverse the harsh, snowy landscape to salvage the materials needed to craft a rocket and launch the souls of the deceased into space, a ritual associated with the Church of Earthology (diqiu jiao). Finally, in OPUS: Echo of Starsong (OPUS: longmai changge, 2021), you control Jun Lee (known in Chinese as Li Mo), an elderly space adventurer who journeys back in his memory to relive a series of explorations and encounters in a planetary system called Thousand Peaks. As Jun, you command spaceships and search abandoned mines in search of rare plants, rocket components, and a precious resource called lumen (in Chinese, si), while at the same time reconnecting with your lost love, a witch named Eda.
In this article, I set out to explore two central questions about these three OPUS games and their relevance for both game studies and Sinophone cultural studies. 1 Firstly, informed by the growing field of ecocritical game studies, I examine the extent to which the OPUS games, despite the fact they do not portray life on Earth nor its immediate ecosystems or environmental challenges, can help players reflect on the broader ecological themes with which they are more familiar, such as systems collapse, resource scarcity, or biological disaster. My second question is more regionally focused: What, if anything, might be significant about the fact these games are produced in Taiwan, part of a wave of successful indie games to come out of local Taiwanese game studios and win over a global audience (Inwood, 2022)? To answer these questions, I adopt the kind of gaming-specific close reading that has been called “close playing” (E. Chang, 2010) or “storyplaying” (Domsch, 2013), aiming to acknowledge and describe the experiences that games offer through their blend of narrative and ludic elements, such as “imagination, emotion, kinesthetic engagement, narrative immersion, and ludic flow” (Bizzocchi & Tanenbaum, 2011).
Throughout this article I take particular inspiration from Alenda Y. Chang's assertion that play-based experiences of failure and loss can lead to a more hopeful form of engagement with the ecological crises before us through the production of a “collective, multispecies, and multiscalar awareness” (Chang, 2019). The multiscalar aspect of this claim is essential for understanding the effectiveness of the OPUS games, which represent a particularly effective and, as I will argue, affective simulation of the kinds of agency and awareness required to confront our current ecological challenges. The sections that follow employ a close playing of the three OPUS games to show how they manipulate various temporal and spatial scales, thereby mobilizing the player's emotional responses to in-game and beyond-game events and hinting at the benefits of trans-scalar thinking for comprehending life in the Anthropocene. The message these games convey not only has implications for the global crises facing our planet at this particular conjuncture, but has particular resonance with the experiences of Taiwan as a postcolonial island state that has long served as a hotspot for international ecocriticism (Chang & Slovic, 2016). The regional origin of these games thus serves as a cultural cypher through which the deeper ecological significance of the games’ preoccupation with scalar alterity and human/nonhuman relations can be further uncovered.
Ecologies of Scale
Ecocritical game studies is a rapidly growing discipline, part of the broader fields of environmental humanities and ecomedia studies that explore how media and culture can inspire new ways of thinking and acting in response to ecological challenges. Among the terms and approaches that have been developed within ecocritical games studies are the ideas of games as “environmental texts” (Chang, 2011), as a form of “ecocomposition” (Bohunicky, 2014), as “critical dystopia” (Farca & Ladevèze, 2016), as “consciousness-raisers” (Backe, 2014), or a means of producing “ludo-narrative dissonances which are highly inductive of critical engagement with the ecosphere” (Backe, 2020), as a tool for allowing players to feel their environmental impact (Lehner, 2017), and as a way of engaging with the structural violence of climate change in the Anthropocene (Price, 2019). Most recently, building upon the work of Alenda Y. Chang, Heijmen and Vervoort propose several strategies with which game designers can reconfigure the player-subject as a “pathway to ecological entanglement,” thus helping precipitate a shift away from normative game-based power fantasies marked by an unassailable and unhelpful divide between subject and object (Heijmen & Vervoort, 2024).
What games scholars disagree on is the extent to which games might do more than simply encourage reflection, perhaps even going so far as to inspire real-life action that might make a tangible difference to the world around us. In her 2011 book, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal asserts the optimistic view that games can and do have a positive impact upon us and the physical world in which we live. Games, she argues, are more than simply an escapist or passive “retreat from reality,” but instead offer a form of escape that can be purposeful, thoughtful, active, and helpful (McGonigal, 2012, p. 13). In an online review, Ian Bogost took exception to McGonigal's claim that reality is broken and that games offer a fix. Reality is alright, Bogost countered: it is “flawed and messy and delightful and repellent and stunning” and “we don’t get to fix it, ever.” Rather than solutions and the happiness that comes with “successful mastery of the world,” Bogost suggests that games provide “a more tranquil sense of the elusiveness of that mastery”: while we may not get to save the world through playing games, we can nevertheless benefit from strategies such as experimentation, a long view, and systems thinking (Bogost, 2011). This echoes scholarship in the environmental humanities, which aims to identify implicit narratives about the environment and humanity's place within it (as well as suggesting new ones) and to impart knowledge that is as affective or “emotionally potent” as it is effective in mobilizing social adaptation (Emmett & Nye, 2017).
Bogost's reference to systems thinking is addressed in research within both ecocriticism and game studies on the value of thinking and acting across differences in scale. Scalar thinking begins with the idea of the Anthropocene as epoch, situating humanity's impact on the environment on a timescale that goes back millions of years in geological time. Even more fundamentally, scalar thinking can be traced to the concept of the environment itself, the emergence of which marked a new way of understanding the scale of humanity's impact on a world characterized by complex systems of interconnection (Warde, 2021, p. 1). Scale has implications for the relative size of the things we pay attention to when thinking about the environment—scaling down to consider microscopic lifeforms or scaling up to observe connections between ecosystems—as well as for spatial (e.g., zooming in on local issues or zooming out on regional or global ones) and temporal framing (e.g., how human actions can have both immediate and long-term, often unforeseeable consequences).
Although researchers have divergent understandings of what scale actually means, its prominence within the environmental humanities suggests a growing consensus around the importance of what some call “scalar flexibility” in thinking about ecological challenges (Campos & Patoine, 2022). In The Cosmic Zoom: Scale, Knowledge, and Mediation, Zachary Horton suggests the need to engage in “scalar alterity,” requiring a “dismantling of the edifices of humanism itself,” or at least the kind of humanism that Horton terms “pan-scalar humanism” (Horton, 2021, p. 2), that is, the human tendency to make sense of scales we cannot understand by binding them to those we can. Within pan-scalar humanism, the human itself ends up serving as a tool for “assimilation and colonization” that works on all levels or scales of reality (Horton, 2021, p. 3).
Scale, as Horton and others have pointed out, has a number of connotations: it can be an “ontological determinant in that it dictates how certain physical states become other physical states”; an “ethical ground the binds individuals, groups, and territories into milieus of interdependence and responsibility”; and a “set of political tactics for aggregating and disaggregating assemblages” (Horton, 2021, p. 6). Much of our inability to respond appropriately to climate change and ecological breakdown results from “scalar deferrals,” referring to the practice of shifting things we don’t really want to think about onto “comfortingly distant points on the scalar spectrum” such as the nano realm or the far future (Horton, 2021, p. 6). Taken to its extreme, an overreliance on scale can, as Chris Tong suggests, be unhelpful, detracting from the objects themselves and advancing hierarchical, ideological preconceptions rather than inviting democratic examination of the interconnections between entities (Tong, 2014, p. 198).
Within Chinese and Sinophone environmental studies, scale is highlighted in the Chinese word huanjing (environment), understood as a verb–noun phrase meaning “to surround or to mark the territory” (Chang, 2020, p. 12). As Chia-ju Chang argues, huanjing as a “practice of environing” not only has a long and ethnocentric history in Han Chinese society, but also helps theorize what she calls an “environmental ethics of inclusion or care at the margins.” Such an ethics requires thinking across different scales of space and time, as well as in “different languages, modes of rhetoric, knowing, and nomenclature” (Chang, 2020, p. 13). A more inclusive huanjing or practice of environing, Chang notes, would involve dismantling all kinds of unhelpful centric thinking, including going beyond anthropocentrism to embrace the more-than-human (Chang, 2020, p. 14). Alenda Y. Chang also advocates a scalar approach to videogames, considering the environmental ethics that emerge in questions of game design, such as the size of the entities we control, the ways in which we move across game space, and the nature of the spatial horizons that “hem us in or invite us onward” (Chang, 2019). Games, Chang suggests, are perhaps uniquely positioned to help us develop a scalar environmental consciousness by bridging multiple scales and levels of domains. It is the differences in temporal and spatial scales in the OPUS games that are key to their status as environmental texts, or games that have something meaningful to say about practices of environing across both epic and intimate scales of space and time.
Trans-Scalar Encounters and the Cosmic Zoom in the OPUS Trilogy
One of the questions that is most frequently asked in online discussions of the OPUS games is to what extent the narratives and characters of the three games are related to each other and exist within the same fictional universe or storyworld. Despite sharing a broad genre (sci-fi adventure and exploration), esthetic style (mostly two-dimensional [2D] anime-style art), and using the same composer across the soundtracks of the three games (a Taiwanese musician known as Triodust), there are indeed key differences among them, especially when it comes to the structure and narrative of the games. After introducing the main stories and gameplay of the three games, in the analysis that follows I focus on the games’ manipulation of scale, using Horton's concept of “trans-scalar encounter” to consider how the OPUS games employ the cosmic zoom as a practice of environing or huanjing, at the same time as they each focus on differing scales and relations of scale to the human. It is the use of scale and trans-scalar encounters in the OPUS games, I argue, that confirms their status as environmental texts that can help us think through ecological questions that exceed typical spatial and temporal frames. The OPUS games imply that is the possibility of thinking and feeling beyond anthropocentric time and space that can help us understand the trans-scalar nature of humanity's ecological impact, even if they never entirely unsettle the centrality of the human.
In terms of both its gameplay and narrative, OPUS: The Day We Found Earth is extremely simple: controlling the android character of Emeth, you operate a space telescope, using four-directional keys to pan across galaxies in deep space, selecting solar systems to scan in the hope of finding a planet of a radius, temperature, mass, and water coverage approximate to those of Earth (Figure 1): this can be understood a literal manifestation of huanjing, in the sense of scoping out an environment, determining the relative size of the targeted planet, and creating a new set of cosmic boundaries in the process, with the margins occupying the far edges of scanned space as it appears on-screen.
Scanning the cosmos in OPUS: The Day We Found Earth.
In between Emeth's attempts at scouring deep space, you return to the interior spaces of your spaceship, OPUS, inspecting everyday items left behind by the ship's former human inhabitants to uncover clues to assist with the mission of locating Earth. Inside the ship, you interact with a hologram called Lisa, the human scientist who created Emeth. By now, Earth is little more than a myth and the last remaining hope for humanity, whose gene pool needs repairing after millennia of genetic engineering. There is no risk of death in the game, and the only human you meet exists as an articficial intelligence (AI) hologram. The game concludes on a triumphant and emotionally cathartic note when Emeth successfully finds Earth and sets the spaceship on a trajectory for the planet, which has been hiding behind the nearest star, also called LISA, all along (Figure 2).
Successfully locating earth in OPUS: The Day We Found Earth.
Of the three OPUS games, The Day We Found Earth presents the clearest example of the cosmic zoom, inviting you to scan vast expanses of open space to identify promising planetary systems to zoom in on in the hope of locating Earth. Emeth's spaceship, OPUS, is equipped with a hyper drive, allowing it to traverse tens of thousands of light-years with ease; the fact that Earth turns out to be “hiding” directly behind the nearest sun, LISA, makes the final journey even easier to complete. Upon successfully locating Earth, Emeth goes to find the hologram of his creator, Dr. Lisa, to share the good news. Despite being a preprogrammed version of a human presumably long dead, Lisa reacts with happy tears, while Emeth's own android eyes also well up with emotion in a close-up shot (Figure 3).
Emeth's eyes well up upon finding earth in OPUS: The Day We Found Earth.
Before activating OPUS's hyper drive, however, he hesitates, hovering by the spaceship's window to enjoy one final view of the nearest sun, LISA. “LISA is so pretty,” he tells Lisa, before clarifying that he is talking about the star rather than her. Lisa the hologram reassures Emeth that no matter how far away he is, he will always be able to look up to the stars and find her, whether that be LISA the sun or Lisa herself, his beloved creator.
Although you do not get to find out what happens next, you leave the game with the satisfaction that Emeth has fulfilled his one purpose, completing Lisa's mission of locating Earth and, by implication, saving whatever remains of humanity from further genetic deterioration. Time and space appear to have exceeded the limits of human survival. Millions of years in the future, Earth is a distant dream, and the final act of interstellar travel takes place in the absence of human presence or participation. All that remains of humanity is the motivational drive of affective attachments: to find ecological hope in distant planets in the service of love for and dedication to one's creator. The impact of this game thus lies in its collapse of the macro scales of space and time across millions of light-years with what Horton calls the “meso-scale individual”: in this case, the highly emotional relationship between android Emeth and hologram Lisa, the latter a digital simulation of what, for all you know, may have been the last human in existence.
The second of the OPUS games, OPUS: Rocket of Whispers, uses a mostly top-down, third person, 2D perspective to portray the main site of exploration, the snow-covered postapocalyptic landscape that is home to John Manson and Fei (Figure 4). As John, you need to find ways to move more efficiently across this landscape, interacting with the souls of those who have died from the Plague, uncovering the recent history of this desolate world, and gathering useful materials and objects.
The two-dimensional top-down perspective in OPUS: Rocket of Whispers.
In between scavenging sessions, you return to the rocket factory where you trigger simple choice-free dialogue with Fei and select the equipment you need to craft rocket parts. Then, as Fei, you add these parts to your rocket until it is sufficiently complete to attempt to launch a space burial (taikong zang) to send the lost souls up into the cosmos. This creates a gameplay loop between exploring and scavenging outside and crafting and assembling the rocket inside, interspersed with cut-scenes that reveal the characters’ memories and the connections between what we are seeing now and the events that led up to the postapocalyptic present. The credits roll after a final launch, the outcome of which is left ambiguous. After the credits, John and Fei return for one final cut-scene in which you see rocket no.19 being launched, this time successfully: the game ends with the two characters standing hand-in-hand, watching from a distance as the rocket blasts into space (Figure 5).
John and Fei holding hands in the final scene of OPUS: Rocket of Whispers.
If The Day We Found Earth allows a literal zooming in on the cosmos only to end in the most human of ways by highlighting the role of affect in confronting scalar alterities, Rocket of Whispers focuses on a much smaller, even microscale, occupying the player with the atomic processes of ritual and survival in a spatially limited environment. Although it does not feature the trope of cosmic zoom in the same way as The Day We Found Earth, its focus on the ground-level microprocesses of scavenging and crafting nevertheless implies a cosmic zoom-in from the macroperspective of deep space in the earlier game. John and Fei are permitted only small movements within the space of the game, tracing repeated loops around the abandoned industrial area that was once at the center of the space burial business and retreating inside the rocket factory each night. The game is set entirely in the Galactic Calendar year 15,320 after a plague has killed most of the planet's population. The witches who once performed the space burials have been placed in cryogenic sleep, awaiting a time when they might “return to rebuild their civilization and faith” and bring peace to those who perished from the Plague, in accordance with the Church of Earthology.
As the only witch to have emerged from cryogenesis, Fei Lin takes her mission seriously, hoping not just to hold a successful rocket launch but also to educate John about the history of her religion and of their postapocalyptic world. The gruff and grumpy John, for his part, possesses an unwelcome magnetism towards the lost souls that circulate in the air like the blobs of lumen in the follow-up game, OPUS: Echo of Starsong (Figure 6).
A blob-like ghost pestering John in OPUS: Rocket of Whispers.
Fei tells him that he's the only person these souls can follow if they wish to “go home” to the cosmos, placing a heavy responsibility upon his shoulders. Much like Jun and Eda in the follow-up Echo of Starsong, the two main characters are motivated by opposite desires: for the witch, Fei, it is to revive the past in the form of religious ritual practice, and for John, it is to rid himself of the souls of the dead who torment him from the past and encumber his ability to live peacefully in the present. As in The Day We Found Earth, you do not see the consequences, long-term or otherwise, of the characters’ actions. You might presume the outcome of the final rocket launch to be successful, but that marks the end of the game. You are left, instead, with a series of unanswered questions: What was the nature of the Plague that wiped out most of this planet's population? Where is this game set? Does Earth exist anymore? How does the Church of Earthology relate to planet Earth? Is this connected to the hunt for Earth in the previous game, The Day We Found Earth? And how is the year 15,320 calculated in relation to the Gregorian calendar?
Throughout the game, you are kept busy with the mundane tasks of trudging through the snow to search for objects, materials, and clues as to how to locate more objects, then using these to assemble a rocket, or fixing things to help the ghosts. This is slow and painstaking work and keeps your attention on John's immediate environment and the items littered around it. There is no option to zoom in or out or change the camera angle, no map view, and no telescope with which to scan across space as there is in the previous OPUS game, although the clarity of the 2D top-down perspective can be affected by the changing weather. The objects you discover are described as “waste,” “scraps,” and “remains”; they are variously “broken,” “worn,” “damaged,” “rusted,” “tattered,” “burned,” “smashed,” “rusty,” “bloodied,” “torn,” “warped,” “cracked,” and “cruddy.” 2 The damage reaped by the past on the present is thus represented primarily through the absence of data and by physical degradation to the material environment. Throughout the game, you are denied the insights that scale provides and remain fixed in the here and now, yet visibly and audibly haunted by the past.
The third game, Echo of Starsong, is the most complex in terms of gameplay and offers both the longest narrative arc and the richest worldbuilding. Also set in the distant future, the story begins by introducing you to an elderly version of the protagonist Jun Lee before traveling 66 standard years back in time to retrace his experiences as a youth. At the time, Jun was an exiled noble from the East Ocean planetary system trying to revive his family's fortunes by searching for lumen and other valuable resources in Thousand Peaks, an area of space that is still recovering from the recent Lumen War (longmai chongtu). At its core, the game is a visual novel, centering around a predetermined narrative with sections of dialogue and decision points in which you choose how Jun responds to the beings and situations he encounters; these decisions, however, have only a minimal effect on the overall plot and outcome of the game. The gameplay shifts between two main modes or perspectives. The first is a zoomed-out view of the cosmos in space navigation mode, in which you scan the area of space around you to decide where to steer your spaceship, Red Chamber (Honglou), to next (Figure 7).
Space-navigation mode in OPUS: Echo of Starsong.
Common locations include space stations, sentry posts, lumen caves, casinos, black holes, and comets, and exploring them requires the use of an Exploration Kit, which you must purchase using money earned from selling items you find during Jun's cave-running adventures. The second perspective is from within the interior spaces of these locations, where most of the exploration and resource management takes place. The most complex of these are lumen caves (longmai), which feature a 2.5D side-scrolling environment that Jun must examine to retrieve the various items mentioned earlier, such as lumen-derived materials and plants with healing powers (Figure 8).
Jun exploring a lumen cave in OPUS: Echo of Starsong.
It is also in these caves that Jun experiences the greatest danger, often in the form of pirates and assassins, and where you must complete simple puzzles to unlock gates and discover elements of the mythology that forms the background to the game. This usually requires performing a recording of a “starsong” (longming), a powerful soundwave emitted by asteroids that Eda can also copy with her voice (Figure 9), with the task of aligning the frequencies it creates with the design on the gate in a simple audiovisual puzzle.
Eda recording a performance of a starsong in OPUS: Echo of Starsong.
The main tension in Echo of Starsong arises from the conflicting motivations of Jun and Eda, a tension which ultimately and tragically drives these characters apart, despite their obvious affection for each other. Jun, his eye on the future and his mind on familial loyalties, wishes eventually to return to East Ocean to establish himself as the rightful leader of the Lee clan and lead it to greater glory. Eda, on the other hand, is fixated on the past, driven by the need to reunite with her former master, Red (Hong), who had always encouraged her to listen to the voice inside her and be true to herself. The decisive moment in their adventures occurs in chapter 4 of the game, when Jun agrees to accompany Eda to a comet named Banshee (in the Chinese version it is bailong, white dragon), the supposed resting place of the god Prime Terra (Houtu) and Eda's original home, where she hopes to find her master, Red, even if she is no longer alive. Unfortunately, the comet turns out to be a trap designed to kill grave robbers searching for Terra's tomb and is in fact dedicated to the god of the abyss, the black hole named Excidium. The actual comet is nearby, following the same orbit as Banshee; Eda calls it Phoenix (in the Chinese version, heilong, black dragon).
While attempting to travel there, Red Chamber gets pummeled by rocks and other space debris, causing catastrophic fires to break out on board. Jun leaves the ship's bridge to extinguish the fires and rescue their travel companion, another witch called Remi, but in the process is separated from Eda. With no way of saving the ship from imminent destruction, Eda detaches the cargo bay where Jun and Remi are taking shelter, transforming it into an escape pod, while setting Red Chamber on a course for Phoenix, still hoping to be reunited with her master. The chapter ends on a highly emotional note after Jun, trapped in the cargo bay, discovers the seeds for one of the flowers that Eda and Red used to collect when operating Red Chamber as a botanical trading vessel. The flower is called Fragrant White (fanghun bai), or Eda Lune, the “floriography” of which means “please forgive me”—this becomes the parting message that Eda conveys to Jun before they go their separate ways forever (Figure 10).
A description of the seeds Jun finds in the Red Chamber cargo bay.
Except, as the fifth and final chapter of the game reveals, Jun and Eda's fates are intertwined in ways that go beyond the boundaries of human life. In this chapter, you are reacquainted 66 standards years later with the elderly version of Jun after the comet Phoenix has finally re-entered Thousand Peaks, allowing him to travel there in search of Eda. You take control of a decrepit, white-haired Jun as he limps slowly across the comet's surface. As he moves, glowing blobs of lumen float fill the air around him, revealing memories of Jun and Eda's time together. In one, Eda explains to Jun, “Lumen has the ability to carry thoughts and emotions across time. If you really miss someone…as long as you follow the lumen…you will find them” (Figure 11).
A memory of Eda telling Jun about the power of lumen in OPUS: Echo of Starsong.
You then see a young Jun happily reunited with Eda on Phoenix, brought together by the powers of lumen. In the final scene, the virtual camera zooms out on an image of the elderly Jun surveying the wreckage of Red Chamber, now partially submerged in a landscape almost entirely covered with small white flowers: Fragrant White, or Eda Lune, the flower with which Eda shares her name (Figure 12).
The wreckage of Red Chamber in a sea of Fragrant White at the end of OPUS: Echo of Starsong.
Echo of Starsong is set in an area of space and at a time that is separate again from the previous two games. There are similarities—Earth as absence, for example, the role of witches, and the practice of space burials—but the use of scalar alterity as a source of meaning is, in this case, contained within the scope of the game itself. Here, you move repeatedly between the macroscale of deep space, scanning potential destinations vast distances apart, and the human-centered mesoscale of the interiors of the spaceship, Red Chamber, as well as the comets and other locations that Jun, Eda, and Remi visit in the course of the game. The game also shares with Rocket of Whispers an emphasis on the capitalist microtransactions of resource management, requiring Jun to collect materials and visit trading stations where he can sell them for cash with which to buy more fuel, exploration kits, and armor plates for their spaceship.
Binding together past, present, and future is the mysterious lumen, with its ability to transmit thoughts and emotions across time and space and beyond the limits of life and death. In the form of hybrid lumium (siqi), lumen can also serve as rocket fuel, and was the focus of the recent Lumen War that saw competing factions fighting to gain control of the lumen caves and the resources they contain. It is a refinable geological substance, much like our own carbon-based fossil fuels, found in rocks and available as solid lumenite shards and liquid lumenide pools, as well as molten lumenite. It is also organic, present in plants such as Lumen Jinseng and Lumen Fennel, contains spiritual powers, and is activated by music in the form of starsongs. Lumen, therefore, functions as a trans-scalar medium, articulating and conjoining new scales of space, time, and materiality: at once geological, biological, musical, and spiritual, deeply connected to the game's Myrian (Wandao) religion and its various gods, shrines, witches, and creation myths.
Like the fossil fuels that are at the center of so many of our own wars and the primary driver of climate change here on Earth, lumen also appears to be the root cause of slow or structural violence in the gameworld—not because of what it is, but because of what is done with it. This area of space has been devastated by competition for lumen and the accompanying prolonged warfare and resource depletion, with no inhabitable planets anywhere to be seen. According to a memory that can be acquired in chapter 2, there are only four observable planets in Thousand Peaks, and most of those are “mired in electromagnetic storms, making it difficult to harvest their resources.” Much like Taiwan in the late twentieth century, Jun's home region of East Ocean is revealed to have suffered from excessive industrialization, making even lumen plants hard to come by. Again, you leave the game with an awareness of the ecological disaster that must have unfolded prior to the game's diegesis, but also with a series of unanswered questions. What is the cause of this electromagnetic interference? What has happened to Earth at this point in the far future—is it lost, as in The Day We Found Earth? What terrible things must have happened on our own home planet? What other ecosystems might be out there in this area of space? What form of justice is achievable in the conflicts between organizations that vie to control the cosmos and increase their stash of lumen? And what lessons, if any, can you take away from the fictional experiences of this far-flung corner of space, its environmental challenges, and the trans-scalar encounters it depicts?
Back to Earth
While the answers to these questions may not be readily available, it is the interactive and highly emotional experience of playing these games that prompts players to ask them in the first place. All three OPUS games are structured around emotional high-points—Emeth finding Earth and sharing the news with the hologram of his beloved creator, Lisa; John and Fei bringing peace to the dead by launching a successful space burial and rediscovering their shared history before the plague struck; and Jun and Eda being forced apart in life only to be reunited 66 years later by the power of lumen in a blooming sea of Fragrant White. In online reviews, it is their emotional impact that is most often mentioned as the main draw of the games. 3 It is also emotion that drives the cosmic zoom, zooming in from outer space in the hope of discovering long-lost planets and sources of lumen, and zooming out from plot and gameplay mechanics to reveal, piece by piece and memory by memory, the larger mythology and religious worldview that form the backdrop to the games. As a trans-scalar medium, lumen takes on many forms and functions, but it is only its ability to carry thoughts and emotions across time that you end up caring about as it reunites Jun and Eda after the latter's death.
What might this tell us about the role of the human in the traversing or collapsing of scales that can be detected in the OPUS games? It is tempting to criticize the games for their implementation of the kind of pan-scalar humanism that Horton writes about, using the human as a means to assimilate and colonize the other and employing different scales to buttress the human subject (Horton, 2021, p. 3). Equally, however, one could argue that science fiction games such as these serve to critique our tendency towards pan-scalar humanism by depicting far-flung worlds and ecologies beyond the realm and scale of the human. Beings other-than and more-than-human populate space and the asteroids and sentry points within it; it is a lonely android who potentially saves humanity by rediscovering Earth; it is witches—said to have originated on a far-off planet called Earth—who hold the secrets of life and death in the cosmos. Rather than promoting a colonial mindset by encouraging endless resource extraction like so many games do, the OPUS trilogy, and Echo of Starsong in particular, shows the dangers of space colonization and resource competition and repeatedly highlights the precarity of hard-won intergalactic peace. As such, the OPUS games meet all the requirements of environmentally oriented works as set out by Lawrence Buell: they use nonhuman environments to show how human history is implicated in natural history; they legitimize nonhuman interests; their ethical orientation includes human accountability toward the environment; and the environment is presented as a process and not just a constant (Buell, 1996, pp. 7–8). And, as Chang adds, they also produce “involvement” (Chang, 2011, p. 73)—inevitably so, as interactive videogames, but especially so given their focus on emotion as part of the narrative drive.
What is unusual about my conceptualization of the OPUS games as environmental texts is that they are not primarily concerned with the ethical relationship between humans and the “natural” environment, or between ecologies on a local and global scale. Indeed, they might even be considered examples of what Timothy Morton, in his call for “deep ecology” and “deep green ideas,” terms “ecology without nature” (Morton, 2009, p. 204). Apparently ignoring the state of the environment or “nature” on our own planet, these games focus on the relationships between humans, nonhuman beings, and harsh deep-space environments devastated by events in the distant past. Other than the odd plant or seeds in Echo of Starsong, there is little “nature” of any sort to be found, and the scalar difference at play is that between the planetary and the intergalactic rather than the local and the global. Importantly, humanity's ecological impact is not projected onto a “comfortingly distant” point on the scalar spectrum as in Horton's scalar deferral (Horton, 6), but is experienced as the here and now. Earth itself, meanwhile, has been relegated to a distant point on the scalar spectrum that is decidedly discomforting. The worst-case scenario—be it genetic deterioration, plague, or intergalactic warfare—has already occurred, and what is needed now is a key to carrying on. Amidst such ecological precarity, hope derives from the comfort of affective attachments to others in the past (such as John's parents, Lisa, Red, and Eda) and the mission to retrieve and relive historical memories, which is often achieved by repairing broken technology. This kind of technologically enabled emotional closure, it turns out, is not only a healer of psychological wounds, but the only means of access to the future.
So what should the player do with this sense of closure, and—to turn to the second of my main questions in this article—how might the OPUS games relate to the planetary environment in which they were produced, most specifically that of Taiwan? The first possible response to this question is that the where and who of the games’ production simply does not matter: the fact that these games were made in one relatively small and geopolitically marginalized part of planet Earth should not preclude their relevance to the world—or cosmos—as a whole. As the environmental humanities are quick to point out, it is also the case that local situations always have global implications. If anything, forms of ecocriticism originating in Taiwan can provide a model for “locale-specific, vernacular thinking” about the environment that will likely have growing relevance to societies across the world as boundaries continue to blur between locations, cultures, and species (Chang and Slovic, xii). The games’ developers, Brian Lee and Scott Chen, have explained that their decision to set the OPUS games in deep space was motivated in part by a perceived lack of science fiction “coming out of Asia” (Elvie, 2022), thus highlighting both the regional origins and the global ambitions behind the genesis of the games.
For those who have played the OPUS games in their English-language localized versions, those regional origins may not be obvious. For the most part, the characters, locations, mythologies, objects, and so on have English names that bear no obvious connection to Taiwanese or Chinese language or culture; many of the Chinese names, in fact, are transliterations of English, and the Myrian religion portrayed in Echo of Starsong has mostly classical European overtones. For anyone with pre-existing knowledge of Chinese culture who experiences the simplified or traditional Chinese language versions, however, the game's cultural references are difficult to avoid. The lumen caves, or literally “dragon veins” (longmai) in the Chinese title of Echo of Starsong, refer to ley-lines, a geomantic concept used in fengshui to determine advantageous locations based on the topography of mountain ranges. Lumen itself is both fossil fuel and ancient energy that connects the cosmos, much like the energy (qi) that is central to fengshui. Eda's ship, Red Chamber, is a clear intertextual allusion to Cao Xueqin's epic Qing dynasty novel Dream of the Red Chamber (Hongloumeng), as is the name of her former master, Red, which also references the idea in Buddhist philosophy of the world as illusory “red dust” that must ultimately be left behind. The tragic separation of Jun and Eda after the latter sacrifices herself in search of her master, moreover, recalls the novel's star-crossed lovers, Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu, forced apart by Daiyu's premature death. Similarly to Daiyu, who is the earthly incarnation of the Crimson Pearl flower and has a strong spiritual connection with flowers of all kinds, Eda Lune shares her name with a flower, Fragrant White, and it is to flowers that she returns after passing away on the comet Phoenix.
These references, of which more can be found throughout the games, thus suggest a second response to the question above, namely that the cultural background to the games unlocks a deeper level of meaning that can help the player better understand the philosophies that lie beneath. In this case, these are an overriding emphasis on the importance of self-realization and the interconnectedness of humans and their environments—or perhaps the inability to separate “human” from “nature” in the first place, recalling Heijmen and Vervoort's concept of “ecological entanglement” and their call for ecocritical game studies to move further beyond the subject/object dichotomy (Heijmen & Vervoort, 2024). Like Jia Baoyu (the reincarnation of a stone) and Lin Daiyu (the reincarnation of a flower) in Dream of the Red Chamber, the characters in OPUS: Rocket of Whispers and OPUS: Echo of Starsong are connected to the world around and beyond them through the practice of space burials and by lumen, which joins material and spiritual energy in one. They are also entangled within much larger cycles of life and death and generational webs of interconnection that decentralize the individual human while highlighting the relative insignificance of any single lifespan on a broader cosmic scale. As an intertext, then, Dream of the Red Chamber serves as a cultural cipher through which to access a series of deeper meanings and messages contained within the games.
The final and, I would suggest, most compelling response to this question of regional specificity is that the fact these games were made by independent Taiwanese game developers is, in fact, highly relevant to their environmental messaging. Taiwan's experiences of repeated colonization in the hands of the Dutch (1624–1662), the Spanish (in certain northern parts of Taiwan from 1626 to 1642), the Manchus (1683–1895), the Japanese (1895–1945), and the mainland Chinese Nationalist Party or GMD (1945–1988), its longstanding geopolitical marginality, and the slow or structural violence of colonially linked environmental exploitation make the island uniquely positioned to serve as the cultural (if not literal) backdrop to a series of games that focus on the devastating trans-scalar impact of resource extraction and competition, ecological catastrophe, deep-space colonialism, and interplanetary warfare. As is also the case in recent Taiwanese science fiction writing (Li, 2023), the OPUS games, and Echo of Starsong in particular, hint at Taiwan's past and present political situation vis-à-vis its neighboring colonial powers, Japan and the People's Republic of China. The Lumen War between the United Mining Corporation, which continues to monopolize and exploit the resources of the Thousand Peaks region, and members of the Ring Liberation Front, who lost the war and eke out a living as lone mercenaries and antiauthoritarian pirates, has a particular resonance with Taiwan's historical experiences of colonization and its still precarious geopolitical status, particularly vis-à-vis its tense relationship with its largest and most powerful neighbor, the People's Republic of China.
Taking this one step further, then, it may be possible to read—or “play”—these games as a version of the “postnativist literature” (hou xiangtu wenxue) that has sprung up in Taiwan in the early twenty-first century, in which themes that appear at first to be wholly disconnected from the region in which the texts were produced reflect allegorically upon very local concerns, thus creating a “uniquely Taiwanese reflection of, and engagement with, the new cultural, political, and social realities of multiculturalism, environmentalism, and globalization” (Li, 2023, p. 96). Similarly, as Chialan Sharon Wang puts it in an analysis of the Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi, the sense of the regional or of the “native soil” (xiangtu) is connected with “ecocultural memory that envisions a symbiotic community beyond nationhood,” speaking a language of “resistance, reconciliation, and redemption” (Wang, 2022, p. 797).
In the OPUS games, this language of redemption is highly emotional, linking humans and nonhumans alike to loved ones they have lost and might yet reencounter in the future. The stories these games relate, while connected in more and less explicit ways to Taiwanese ecocultural and political experience, have the potential to resonate with all players, no matter where you are situated and in which localized version you play the games. By promoting the kind of trans-scalar thinking and feeling that I have explored in this article, science fiction videogames may never help you fix reality or save the world, as Bogost warns. They can, however, suggest one technological manifestation of the practice of huanjing as an “environmental ethics of inclusion or care at the margins” (Chang, 2020, p. 13), and a possible response to the perils of our Earth-bound ecological realities. By playing emotionally involving videogames such as these and experiencing first-hand the kinds of subjective and ecological entanglements they create, you are invited to look forward and backwards in search of the emotional connections that might just spur some form of response to the trans-scalar challenges of the Anthropocene.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
