Games that Make You Part of the Ecosystem

Discover the virtual ecosystems that make you part of the food chain. A meditation on games with worlds designed to make you feel like a small player in a much wider environment.
---
It’s a unique experience when a game makes you feel truly unimportant — like you’re just a tiny part of a much larger environment. When a title successfully instills this feeling, it can be like witnessing a sort of magic trick. So what I’d like to do today is take you backstage and explore how different games succeed in making you part of their ecosystems…

0:00 Video Game Ecosystems
1:09 Part of the Food Chain
4:06 Changing Perspectives
6:07 The Power of Insignificance
8:47 Tears of the Kingdom
12:13 On Biomes
15:09 Endling
17:52 A Dark Future
20:02 Hope for Tomorrow

Media Shown: Planet of Lana, Webbed, Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Rain World, Minecraft, Endling, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Horizon: Forbidden West, Subnautica, Subnauitca: Below Zero, Skyrim, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Additional Footage from:

Copyright Disclaimer: Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. All video/image content is edited under fair use rights for reasons of commentary.

I do not own the images, music, or footage used in this video. All rights and credit goes to the original owners.

♫ Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio:
Mysterious Green Fluid, Sanity Unravels, Haddonfield Horror

Infinite, Beauty Flow, Majestic Hills, Second Coming – No Percussion, Bittersweet, Floating Cities
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

#CuriousArchive #Worldbuilding

[suntzu]

Plague inc evolved makes me feel like a part of the ecosystem

[casualbird]

Rain World is such a special one to me, especially with how it's designed to have a full ecosystem that functions with or without the player

[pathxtoxruin]

Kenshi is a perfect example of a game where you start off thinking it'll be a standard rpg game but you quickly realize you are not the main character. In fact if you die the game doesn't even end. You can sit there and watch the world go on around your corpse until you get bored. It's an awesome game but one that takes time to learn how to play well. Definitely worth checking out.

[rmguy]

Far Cry 2, Rain World, The Long Dark, Kenshi, and Darkwood are some of the games that make you wondering wether you're NPC or MC due to constant threat you're facing no matter how well equipped or experienced you are in the game

[spacecandygames]

As a dev, who has also supported planet of Lana during the whole development of their game it’s exciting to see them in your video. They inspired me to fix the visuals of my game. Thank you for giving them more exposure

[bluehairedemon]

i love rain world and the way it forces you to learn how different creatures interact with each other.
i have 300 hours on it and im still learning new things

[Spiney]

First time I played subnautica, I had thought that the bigger creatures had infinite HP. Playing it while thinking I had to avoid every leviathan made me feel small in a larger world. Great experience.

[MarquisDeSang]

All EA and Ubisoft games make me feel disrespected and unimportant.

[gurburgandr]

One game that makes you feel like an actual ant is shadow of the colossus, not only do the creatures dwarf you, the vast open expanses of grasslands, water, or titanic structures lost to time. The grey sky, lack of human life and large gap between boss fights paints this picture of emptiness. Its one of the reasons why I love it

[emeraldeyesinthesand]

I always love to hear your voice when I work out dude. Love seeing you explore new worlds and seeing new and weird creatures.

[ruthiewitter]

Man, I don’t know what exactly it is about these videos, but they bring me to tears. These games are such a gorgeous, powerful, inexpressible work of art and storytelling. It’s so moving.

[tristandaries]

The thing I love most about Minecraft is the sense of growth in power, a lot of games end with the main character either not changing at all or slightly growing, but in Minecraft, you go from taking a day or more to build a house to being a dimension hoping travel looking to slay a dragon

[robertgerman]

Now I really want to see you talk about the world of Pikmin.

[Train_lizard]

Believe it or not, a game I found *suprisingly on Roblox* called “prior extinction” really sets you into the ecosystem. Unlike other survival games of it’s genre, you will have to worry about your dinosaur’s energy, cleanliness, temperature, social, and nutrition stats, instead of the typical food, water, and occasionally sleep. In most situations you have to communicate through body language since chatting can make noise, attracting unwanted visitors, and you also have to have a powerful knowledge of how to find certain plants, navigation without any UI map, and finding out how to hide from larger predators properly.

There was a moment where I was playing as a Jianchangosarus and just barely managed to escape into a small log, where my attackers waited just outside for what seemed like forever. Something every player must remember is that every creature in the world around you has about as much intelligence as you. Instead of AI you will have to hunt and hide from other people, which also means your threats can be generally unpredictable.

[smookthecat]

There is a part in Abzû that is quite simular to 07:42 and it instantly reminded me of that scene. Not one to one but the way you described it just being you and the sun it is the same in this case with the fauna in that scene. The scene where you dive down, slowly next to a whole lot of whales. They start as small is humpbacks but keep getting bigger and bigger with the score underneeth until you are looking into the eye of a blue whale. An eye as big as your character. Ho ly s h i t do i get chills every time i play that. Just these absolute units living their life and oh THE MUSIC. Just wow. One of my fav games.

[MysticMylesZ]

12:02 that's an interesting perspective.
I've played it so long and known so much of it, even outside of the game, that I had the complete opposite view.

Nothing in Minecraft happens unless you do something, with the exception of it hitting night time, there are no pledges, natural disasters, if a catastrophic event happens like the wither, you caused it. You can even avoid night time monsters by lighting up the environment.

And you can shape the world around you by yourself, doing what would take whole civilizations years on your own in less time, all in survival mode. While you're still able to be harmed and still need food, you can do so much.

[VividFire]

Sky: Children of the Light does a great job of making you feel small in the Golden Wasteland. The walls tower over you, and the ruins of the Spirits’ civilization make you realize that you were never a part of this great thing that happened long ago, now crumbling into the sand. But the most effective part is the Krill. They are the first true danger you face in Sky, and they are a damn good one. The first one you see rips a manta out of the air with a deafening roar, and it instills in your brain that you are not welcome here. They’re so vast, rumbling menacingly as they hover past you, and they are honestly the most terrifying part of the game.
Other parts that make you feel small include the windy area in the Starlight Desert, the Coliseum in the Valley of Triumph, the final few floors of the Vault of Knowledge, and beyond the Point of No Return in Eden.

[Whydoiexisthere-]

I’ve been playing rain world for a while now, but never got tired of it. The satisfaction of successfully killing a vulture and taking its mask, immediately destroyed by the sudden rumble of the clouds. At that moment, I couldn’t think anything else other than “run.” Past the fake poles, through the hordes of panicking lizards, and one final leap… too late. The rain had caught up. I was forced down the pit, stunning my ability to walk. The rain only built up more and more, until it was strong enough to speed straight past my feeble slug body.
No matter how many times I’ve ragequit, this game is still etched into my heart.

[simbakissa]

A game that makes me feel like a part of an ecosystem is The Long Dark. If you don't know the game it's a quite open wirld survival game set in the Canadian winter. You need to gather resources and hunt animals to survive. Unlike other survival games it doesn't rely on base building but rather just staying alive. Definitely my favorite survival game.

[toubi]

Something I noticed about Planet of Lana was the fact that the local beings truly come in all shapes and sizes, from the tiny (and adorable) creature that hid under a rock, to the towering mechanical behemoths.