The « Echoes of Forgotten Worlds » series, renewing its promise to immerse us in territories that have disappeared or will disappear, returns with Immuav. This game is the latest and most advanced in a series of digital replicas.
The « Echo of Forgotten Worlds » series, renewing its promise to immerse us in territories that have disappeared or will disappear, returns with Immuav. This game is the latest and most advanced in a series of digital replicas.
Immuav’s conceptual genesis is set in 2021, when the Tuvalu archipelago, a cluster of islands nestled in the Pacific, faced an existential threat from the rising seas, a catastrophic byproduct of global warming. As their physical reality crumbled under the encroaching waves, the Tuvaluans embarked on an ambitious project: to immortalize their homeland in the digital realm, the Metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg’s once visionary virtual world.
Over the years, this initiative has prompted many other cultures, whether their territories have been submerged by rising waters or their cultures erased by homogenizing globalization, to follow suit. These digital realms became sanctuaries for endangered cultures, preserving their architectures, customs, and ways of life in exquisite virtual detail. The fantasy of a fusion between GTA and Borges’ « On Exactitude in Science » as a promise finally fulfilled.
15 years after this first attempt, and with the release of this new opus, it’s time to take stock.
Today, of course, we’re a long way from the first attempt, Tuvalu, which was simply a crude attempt: a faithful, if superficial, recreation of an endangered archipelago. It was a direct transposition, a digital facsimile without the breath of life that characterizes these islands. Since then, technology has made significant advances in 3D immersion, made possible by the growing power of computers and the dazzling development of artificial intelligence, opening the door to deeper, more interactive video game experiences and the promise of a veritable ode made palpable to these territories and cultures erased from our collective history.
Immuav, standing on the shoulders of its predecessors, is a quantum leap in this ongoing project. Using cutting-edge virtual reality technology and AI, it offers an immersive experience unlike any before. The design of this new game is a masterful blend of hyperrealism and digital surrealism. More than a game, Immuav is a digital time capsule. It offers players the chance to wear traditional clothing, discover local crafts and even participate in virtual culinary experiences. The attention to detail is stunning, from the way light falls on the digitally recreated coral sands of a Pacific island to the intricate patterns of traditional weavings. Each virtual home is a meticulous reconstruction, an architectural elegy where every texture, every hue is imbued with the nostalgia of what has been lost.
Interactivity in this virtual realm transcends simple exploration. Players participate in re-enactments of daily rituals, festivals and ceremonies, vividly recreating the social fabric that once wove these communities. These activities are not mere entertainment; they are acts of memory, a challenge to cultural erasure.
The game’s interface is both intuitive and profound. You can wander the streets of these digital ghost towns, interacting with AI-driven inhabitants and participating in festivals and cultural rituals, vividly recreating the social fabric that once wove their communities. These intelligent inhabitants are not simply programmed entities; they are imbued with collective memories, stories and personalities drawn from interviews with real members of these lost cultures.
However, Immuav also embodies a philosophical conundrum and beneath this veneer of digital preservation lies a poignant question: While it stands as a testament to human ingenuity and the desire to preserve our cultural heritage, it also raises questions about the nature of memory and identity in a digitized world. These digital replicas, while stunning in their accuracy, are but echoes of realities that have been consumed by time and tide. They offer a semblance of preservation, but can they capture the soul of these lost cultures? Is the act of preservation itself transformed in this transition from the physical to the digital? Can a virtual facsimile really compensate for the loss of a living, material heritage? And above all, why do we feel this sense of sadness and sepulchral melancholy as we wander through this game? By playing this game, aren’t we paradoxically watching live the final death of the world we were promised to save by playing it?
The irony is stark and cutting. The very engines of progress, the technological marvels that promised utopia, have now become the architects of obliteration. These cultures, whose histories spanned millennia, crumbled not beneath the march of time, but under the weight of industrial hubris. As the seas rose, swallowing lands and legacies, the technological behemoths continued their relentless pursuit of advancement, oblivious to the erosion they catalyzed.
In this context, the digital resurrection of these drowned worlds is a tale of redemption laced with irony. The metaverse, a digital cosmos born from the same technological womb that fed global warming, now serves as a mausoleum for the victims of its own creation. This digital afterlife, while noble in intent, is imbued with the inherent ephemerality of technology. Just as the physical manifestations of these cultures were washed away by rising tides, their digital reincarnations are destined to fade into obsolescence.
In a sense, the attempt to immortalize these cultures in the digital domain is a mirror of the same technological arrogance that led to their demise. It is a cycle where technology both destroys and attempts to salvage, but in the process, fails to grasp the essence of what it seeks to save.
The ephemeral nature of technological progress, always on the lookout for the next innovation, ensures that these digital sanctuaries are only temporary havens, destined to be as lost as the lands they represent, and those cultures that withstood the test of centuries, before succumbing to the rapacious appetite of progress, are today facing a second, quieter form of extinction in the digital realm.
Who remembers Myst today? Who still wanders around the digital archipelago of Tuvalu? And who might still be an Immuav resident in 15 years’ time?
Historically, cultures have passed down their legacies, myths, and histories through the spoken and written word. Oral traditions, epic poems, and written histories have been the lifeblood of cultural memory, transcending generations and surviving centuries. The word, in its spoken or written form, carries a unique kind of immortality. It lives in the collective memory of people, is adaptable to the changing tides of time, and is not bound by the physical constraints of its medium. Moreover, the digitalization of culture, while preserving its outward manifestations, may lose the depth and richness inherent in the human elements of storytelling and oral history. The nuances of a storyteller’s voice, the communal experience of shared narratives, and the evolving nature of oral histories—shaped and reshaped by the collective consciousness of a people—are difficult, if not impossible, to encapsulate in digital code.
In this sense, we could say that the defeat of these territories lies not only in their physical loss due to environmental disasters or globalization, but also in the transition from an immortal form of preservation – the spoken and written word – to an ephemeral one: technology. If digital preservation is a bulwark against total cultural erasure, it comes at the price of sacrificing the immortal for the ephemeral.