Games that Make You Part of the Ecosystem

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2023-08-04に共有
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.
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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:
Wolfire Games: youtube.com/@WolfireGames
D4rw1N: youtube.com/@D4rw1N

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

♫ Additional music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com):
Infinite, Beauty Flow, Majestic Hills, Second Coming – No Percussion, Bittersweet, Floating Cities
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

#CuriousArchive #Worldbuilding

コメント (21)
  • @suntzu3905
    Plague inc evolved makes me feel like a part of the ecosystem
  • 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
  • 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.
  • @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
  • @MarquisDeSang
    All EA and Ubisoft games make me feel disrespected and unimportant.
  • @rmguy1342
    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
  • @Spiney09
    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.
  • @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
  • @robert2german
    Now I really want to see you talk about the world of Pikmin.
  • @ruthiewitter569
    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.
  • @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.
  • I always love to hear your voice when I work out dude. Love seeing you explore new worlds and seeing new and weird creatures.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • @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.
  • @VividFire909
    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.
  • @Verminator4
    Stalker felt like a great ecosystem game. Sure, there’s the hideous mutant enemies and strange phenomena to contend, but the human factions feel like part of it too with the way everyone is fighting for the zone’s resources and stealing and scavenging from one another.
  • Holy shit I love this channel so much. I've stopped consuming youtube like I used to for the past 10 years, at times mindlessly and automatically staring at the screen for more than half the hours I'm awake. I'm subscribed to more than 2000 channels and have surely watched over 10 000 hours of content. Recently I've been putting in the effort and have found myself in a much healthier place, hardly watching a couple videos per week. I've debated if I should leave youtube behind completely or if I should just transform the way I approach it, and at the moment I only have the notifications on for about a dozen channels, the very best of the best - that I have handpicked for myself based on how much value it provides for me and how much the channels are aligned with the kind of person I'm slowly but surely am becoming. And yea, not having commented much on here I just wanted to say that I'm very happy with what I get from you every time I come here. This time is no different.
  • @simbakissa8659
    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.