Ocean view
The Never Alone team on partnering with the BBC to chart the future of our seas
Beyond Blue and the BBC partner up to chart the future of our seas
Created in partnership with Alaskan tribes, 2015’s Never Alone was a powerful attempt to preserve and celebrate indigenous culture through the mechanics of a platform game. Following its release, publisher E-Line Media received a call from an unexpected quarter. The BBC had enjoyed Never Alone’s handling of documentary materials, and wondered if the company might do something similar for the forthcoming second series of Blue Planet. “They invited us to sort of shadow the production,” E-Line’s CEO Michael Angst says. “To look at the huge library of footage they’d put together, speak to the scientists and see if we could mine that for an original story, but sort of continue from where the last episode talks about the future of the ocean.”
The result is Beyond Blue, a narrative-driven exploration simulation starring Mirai, the leader of a team of researchers in the South China Sea around ten years from now. Mixing thirdperson swimming as the game’s protagonist with firstperson exploration through remote drones, it sees you monitoring the habits of various animals as you place WiFi buoys to map the environment. Interspersed with unscreened Blue Planet footage and commentary from scientists, the game is designed to celebrate the region’s complexity while also investigating how humans have altered it, forcing species such as sperm whales to seek out new habitats and develop new behaviours in response. It also playfully blurs the lines between its human characters and the species under observation. Technologies such as ultraviolet lamps allow you to perceive bioluminescent patterns and so “see as sharks do”, while getting coated in octopus ink might cause predators to identify you as prey. Tagging species, meanwhile, unlocks the ability to experience the world from their vantage point via real-time feeds. Beyond Blue is not the product of day-to-day collaboration with the BBC, but it does represent something of a back-andforth. “[The start of the project] happened to be while they were still making Blue Planet II,” Angst recalls. “So we invested significant time upfront watching the early footage, which allowed us to work in parallel exploring the same themes. We also decided to use some of the same scientists as key advisors. So we did some independent creative work, then met back and explained what we wanted to focus on, and they then helped us find the richest areas where they had explored that.”
The game is as much a portrait of the scientific community as it is of the aquatic world. The fates of different animal species aside, it examines the sadly controversial status of ecological research in the context of ideological conflicts about the effects of global warming, and delves into the ageold clash between idealism and selfinterest. Much of this unfolds at your submarine, in conversation with other researchers and via online interactions with other parties on the surface. Each character has a different agenda, and key decisions will bring their values into conflict – the writing builds, here, on existing tensions between corporations, governments, activists and scientists in the South China Sea.
“We have folks who have a commercial interest in the ocean’s resource potential for minerals for our cellphones,” Angst says. “We have people looking at innovation for sustainable energy. We have folks who are naturalists who just want to forward our knowledge of the ocean.” Beyond Blue also takes heed of how discoveries metastasise online, swept along by the currents of social media, and how scientists may become public figures with or without their consent. “We have insight from our scientists not just on nature but on what it means to be a scientist in this globally connected, rapidly changing, media-saturated world,” Angst says. As its creators acknowledge, Beyond
Blue is a profoundly conflicted work. It valorises the quest for knowledge, but also acknowledges that the legacy of much research on the Earth’s flora and fauna has been brutal exploitation. “Not all scientific methods are benign, and not all opportunities to intervene positively might end well,” Angst says. This awareness resonates uneasily with the choice of mechanics, such as creature scanning and the gradual exposing of missions on a map, that may be familiar to players of open world games – a genre that makes a virtue of conquest. Whether it succeeds or fails, Beyond
Blue is notable for being one of the few videogame stories to entertain a degree of optimism about life on Earth. “We’re a hopeful company, and one of the reasons we have a number of games that are exploring the near-future, is we want to paint an aspirational future,” Angst says. “We’re not going to hide from the challenges, the sorrow and the stakes, but we believe that humans care about our planet, we care about each other, and ultimately, though it’s bumpy along the way, good things will happen.”
As its creators acknowledge, Beyond Blue is a profoundly conflicted work