What do Blizzard games teach us about political ecology?

In high school and college, I spent a good bit of time playing real time strategy games, especially Starcraft. At some point, I will have to write a post about what these games teach us about technology and social progress, but for now I am interested in the models of ecology and economy that they build. In particular, my recent readings on pollution, weeds and disease have brought the Zerg creep to mind. The creep
(at right) is supposed to be some sort of organic substance that is necessary to support the Zerg buildings, but is impossible for the other races to build on. There have been some rather interesting meditations on the internet on the scientific reasoning behind the creep, as well as some less interesting uses of it as a metaphor for the invasive nature of progressive political thought. But I think at root, the zerg creep represents a particular political ecology of the Zerg civilization. In fact, from a game-play perspective the creep seems to have been a rather significant innovation of the Blizzard team, which they have subsequently employed in their other real time strategy games, including Warcraft 3, where the Undead have a virtually identical ecological creep, in this case called the "blight" (left).

In both cases, the understanding is that these civilizations both depend on and promote a particular ecological formation. Note that this logic is not unique to the Zerg/Undead; for example the Protos are only able to build within a certain radius of their power-generating pylons. In any case, these formulations promote a very visual, somewhat simplified understanding of the miasmatic, wake-type environmental effects of civilizations. For example, in Ecological Imperialism, Alfred Crosby makes the case that the particular ecology that developed around the European farming complex expanded with European settlers. This "creep" included not only the intentional promotion of plants and animals beneficial under the European wheat-and-livestock based political ecology (and economy), but also "side-effect" weeds and nuisance species, like crabgrass and rats. Like the Zerg creep, this had the dual effects of making the landscape more suitable for this political ecology and less suitable for others.

These "creep"-like phenomena can be seen in a lot of historical processes, ranging from the disease front accompanying (and preceding) colonization and warfare detailed by Diamond and McNeil, to the crops and weeds explored by Crosby, to the cycles of pollution and depletion promoted by/promoting artificial fertilizer/pesticide/herbicide use in modern industrial agriculture (not to speak of the debt cycles implicated therein).

So what do these games have to teach about political ecologies? I think they help foreground the inherently spacial/topological nature of these phenomena. In studying political economy, it is easy to be tempted to abstract relational processes to network maps, and differential phenomena to categories. This is patently true of much epidemiology and sociology since the advent of regression economics and germ theory. Most diseases are analyzed by some combination of their proximate vectors of transmission and social categories of risk. For example, we tend to think of AIDS as transmitted from person to person (primarily by sexual contact), with certain categorical risk factors like race and sexual orientation. We "know" that malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes and cholera by bad water, and that cancer is based on your genes (which you get from your parents) and your behavior.

In fact, the miasmatic, ecological understanding of these diseases is also, in a sense, "correct." More importantly, it is useful. Malaria's proximate vector is the mosquito, but it is spatially associated with swamps; AIDS (in a previous era), with bathhouses; cancer with toxic waste dumps.

Likewise, other social phenomena must be understood to have a miasmatic nature. Agriculture is not just about the chains of production and consumption, it is not just about understandings of nature, it is very much situated in physical space and has a transformative effect on that space. This type of understanding is easily lost in a lot of environmental histories (ironically enough), as they become obsessed with conceptions of nature, or energy flows. Disease, pollution, weeds, "creep" have the advantage or reminding us of the importance of space. This is very much Linda Nash's argument in Inescapable Ecologies, but this understanding is equally visible, if not more so, in the Zerg creep shown above.