A Thousand Ways of Seeing a Forest

Summary by Krater

This video explores how different video games depict forests and translates the varied virtual environments using Wang Wei's ancient poem Wang Wei as a lens, drawing comparisons between titles like The Legend of Zelda, Proteus, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Marginalia, Firewatch, The Last of Us Part II, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Ghost of Tsushima.

From the video

Answers: How do video games represent and translate the experience of being in a forest?

• virtual forest design in video games
• translating poetic experience into game environments
• comparison of forest depictions across different gaming eras
• the role of nature and wilderness in open world games

What it concludes

• Translating poetry is a reimagining rather than a direct leap from dictionary to dictionary, meaning every reading is an act of translation.
• Different video games translate the feeling of a forest through wildly different design choices, from primitive grid representations to hyper-realistic procedurally generated environments.
• While modern games achieve unprecedented visual fidelity in rendering woods, they still rely on human interpretation and subjective translation just like ancient poetry.