Designers are increasingly able to render weather conditions as not just evocative visual effects but phenomena that physically affect the player. The

Extreme Weather Gives Video Games a Powerful Adversary

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2024-10-08 22:00:11

Designers are increasingly able to render weather conditions as not just evocative visual effects but phenomena that physically affect the player.

The storms start off small in the vehicular survival game Pacific Drive. Raindrops fall on the windshield, as lightning cracks ominously in the distance. In a few minutes, the pristine Olympic Peninsula will shake with nature’s full terrible force.

Hollywood has long portrayed extreme weather, and 4-D screenings of the summer hit “Twisters” bludgeoned viewers with wind and water in gyroscopic seats. Yet video games have the power to truly envelop an audience in severe meteorological conditions. Players traverse a virtual environment thrashed by the elements, and are made to feel at the center of an awesome might.

Video games that feature extreme weather — including The Long Dark (2014), The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) and Death Stranding (2019) — owe a debt not just to movies but to George R. Stewart’s landmark 1941 book “Storm,” regarded by some as the first ecological novel. He begins his story with a cosmic view of Earth and a gestating storm before cataloging its on-the-ground devastation. He gives the turbulent weather front a personality and even anatomy, writing about the “long arms of rain” that “ran miles ahead.”