Game Engine as Frame: Presence Without Play
In 2022, I made a music video for Locrian's "The Glare Is Everywhere and Nowhere Our Shadow," from their album New Catastrophism (Profound Lore). Calling it a music video is accurate but inadequate. It was built in a game engine—not to showcase interaction but to hollow it out. These tools, designed for agency and response, became instead a platform for stillness, not for play, but for presence.
The structure mimics the familiar choreography of a first-person shooter game: the camera moves forward, scans side to side, traces terrain. But there's nothing to trigger. No enemies, no objectives. Just traversal through a world that doesn't care you're there. It doesn't react. It doesn't need you.
Locrian's track shaped this approach. The piece is dense and enveloping—equal parts pressure and drift. It doesn't escalate in the traditional sense. It expands. Flares. Dissolves. The music gave me a tempo that wasn't rhythmic but tectonic. Instead of editing to its pulse, I built an environment that moves at its pace. A terrain that unfolds like a breath held too long.
The world is wrecked. There are charred vehicles. Collapsed buildings. Crumbling infrastructure half-swallowed by dust and time. But nothing about the ruin feels recent. The catastrophe has already passed. What remains is sediment—evidence without narrative. No single event has shaped this place. It is the residue of compounding systems left to decay.
While building it, I kept returning to an image from my past: a trip to Istanbul in the 1990s, where I stumbled across a work crew digging into a street. Looking down into the hole, I saw layers of history—centuries of stone, brick, pavement, and dust compressed into six feet of earth. Coming from the U.S., where age is often measured in decades, it felt geological. The city was not built atop ruins—it was the ruins pressed into a vertical memory.
That image became foundational. The world I built behaves the same way: time compacted into architecture. Everything visible is partial, layered, and collapses in on itself. The terrain doesn't tell a story. It tells time.
There is beauty here, but it's not comforting. It arrives through light filtered across the wreckage, the flicker of glitch in dust, the slow shift of shadow across a broken world. It's a beauty that doesn't resolve—it emerges. Briefly, then recedes. The visual field carries both gravity and fragility. Things hold, but barely.
This is not a game, but it was created using game development tools. That tension is the point. Unity and Unreal aren't just engines of interaction. They are instruments of scale, capable of rendering space that dwarfs the viewer and destabilizes the narrative. That makes them ideal for evoking what Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects: systems so vast and distributed in time and space that they exceed complete comprehension. Climate collapse. Extinction. History. You don't observe them—you're immersed in them. You move through their atmosphere.
The camera in this piece moves the same way. It does not seek. It drifts. It carries the viewer across a terrain that cannot be known, only felt. There's no catharsis. No progress. Just movement inside a condition that remains unchanged.
And yet, that refusal—the absence of reward, climax, or revelation—becomes its own form of attention. The longer you stay, the more the static starts to shimmer. Not with meaning but with density. With duration. With presence.
This was a music video, yes. But it was also a spatial essay. A slowed encounter with landscape as memory, with sound as architecture, and with ruin as a kind of impossible continuity. Built from a game. Scored by a band. But shaped by what happens when the system no longer serves the player—and starts to speak on its own.
#Locrian #NewCatastrophism #GameEnginesAsArt #Unity #Unreal #DigitalRuin #Hyperobjects #EcoAnxiety #AmbientGames #StillnessAsResistance #AnselmKiefer #BanksViolette #StudioNR