I dive from a floating island, a hunk of granite suspended in the sky, drenched in golden sunlight, green and gold leaves to match. As I dive, the first thing I see are clouds drifting below me. As I fall, I begin to make out towers and towns, shrines and ponds. I don’t have a parachute or a glider, so I aim for a pond, splashing into it with a satisfying kerplunk. Drops of water rain down as I emerge from the water to stand on terra firma.

Soon enough—as I continue to play Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK)—I’ll discover different ways to return to the sky: launching myself out of towers, using a glider to reach one floating island or another. I’ll find caves to spelunk, mountains to climb, deserts to sweat across. I’ll learn the history of the mysterious Zonai, technologically advanced humanoids whose mechanical creations ceaselessly pursue their programmed tasks. I’ll also discover that, below the land of Hyrule, there lies the Depths: expansive caverns polluted with a life-sapping gloom and filled with hideouts, strange creatures, and abandoned mines. Playing TotK, I won’t just map the details of a digital space. I’ll discover a planet.

TotK is an Anthropocene game. It’s a game that channels the vertical imagination of deep time, the sense of the Earth not as a premade object but as a complex system that’s fluctuated in form over billions of years. It implies a mutable planet. It gestures toward the remaking of planetary conditions by human hands. TotK doesn’t just transform the digital world of the game into layered terrain, it makes the environment geological and it makes the player’s relationship to the land extractive: a matter of manipulating digital versions of natural resources.

TotK is a playable version of the “planetary turn”: a recent shift in the humanities and social sciences toward addressing human culture and politics on a geological scale. It’s a project driven by the sense that the climate crisis isn’t merely global but planetary, that it requires us to confront our imbrication in the systems that make the Earth run. Two recent examples of this newfound attention to the planet are Karen Pinkus’s Subsurface and Patrick Whitmarsh’s Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science. Pinkus’s Subsurface examines the literary and scientific narratives through which human beings make the Earth legible. It reads 19th-century fiction, especially work by Jules Verne, with an attention to tropes and rhetorical techniques that tame the planet’s subsurface by making it into a mirror world: the subsurface reflects the surface back; it turns what lies below into a repository for human wishes and waste. Whitmarsh’s Writing Our Extinction argues that human extinction, or its anticipation, is an invaluable and unavoidable perspective on human culture. It looks at post-1960s Anthropocene fiction, a genre in which what’s at stake isn’t so much climate change but a broader ecology operating at planetary scale. Whitmarsh doesn’t avoid climate change, but he reframes our understanding of it through verticality, or “vertical perspectives on the planet” that inspire “new ways of thinking about humankind’s entanglement with the earth.”

In Pinkus and Whitmarsh, the planet rises up as an archive in its own right—a record written in paper and stone, worked on by literary criticism and stratigraphy, and likely to outlast human civilization. These planetary critics offer tools to dig through cultural objects like Tears of the Kingdom, excavating their geological unconscious, the earthly and earthy presuppositions on which their artistic, formal narrative and stylistic pretensions rely. Zelda, Subsurface, and Writing Our Extinction teach us how to think and interpret on a planetary scale.

The “planetary turn” names the critical imperative to think about culture, society, politics, and history in terms of the planetary systems (for example, the carbon cycle or the water cycle) that make life on Earth possible. It’s a scholarly response to ecological crisis, especially climate change: What happens when social problems are inextricable from ecological problems? How do we conceptualize the interplay of political and natural processes? How does cultural production emerge from and respond to natural environments? The planetary turn is, in many respects, the humanities version of Earth system science (ESS). It conceptualizes culture as a set of processes and practices, as well as aesthetic and formal strategies, embedded within the totality of the Earth’s ecosystems.

The planetary turn is also a reckoning with the epochal geological transition into the Anthropocene, the postulated (if not officially ratified) periodization of the present as a geologically novel time characterized by the effects of human civilization on the planet. Elizabeth Povinelli, for example, suggests that the dominant version of power in the present is “geontopower,” a kind of governance that operates not so much on life and death as on “the difference between the lively and the inert.” It’s not enough to take nonhuman life into account when we’re talking politics, we need to consider how power cleaves the animate from the inanimate. Kathryn Yusoff contends that anti-Black racism is central to this planetary politics: “Blackness as a historically constituted and intentionally enacted deformation in the formation of subjectivity, a deformation that presses an inhuman categorization and the inhuman earth into intimacy.” What, Yusoff asks, would it mean to tell the story of the Anthropocene as so much violence against Black life? Meanwhile, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller and Dana Luciano trace the present pivot toward geology back to the 19th century, the moment when geology came into its own as a scholarly discipline. Miller reads British literature from the 1830s through the 1930s in terms of “literary-environmental exchange,” explaining that climate anxiety finds precedent in the 19th-century worry over the exhaustion of natural resources and, by implication, the future. From this perspective, the planetary turn might just be the geological turn 2.0, the belated recognition, as Luciano proposes, that culture and politics are inseparable from geological fantasy—“stories that bring the planet and the human back together somehow.”

The most well-known proposal for why the humanities must turn toward the planet was written by Dipesh Chakrabarty in “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Chakrabarty marks the difference between global history and planetary history and suggests that this difference has methodological implications. He argues that there’s a fundamental discrepancy in scale between the historical timelines of social systems like capitalism and colonialism, on the one hand, and the deep time of the planet, on the other. It might make sense to talk about the politics of settler colonialism, for example, but can one really speak of the politics of tectonic plates that shift over hundreds of thousands of years? What appears in Chakrabarty is a chasm between a universal history of the human species—a history of the species operating on a geological scale—and a merely global, yet intensely political, history of societies.

However, another approach to the Anthropocene tasks critics with mediating between human history and deep time. Such a task is described by Jeremy Davies, in The Birth of the Anthropocene, as follows: “The Anthropocene does not, after all, require a turn away from the critique of sociopolitical power relations (globalization, capitalism, imperialism, and so on) toward a universal history of the human species. Instead, to understand the Anthropocene means widening the focus of sociopolitical critique and working toward an analysis of the power relations between geophysical actors, both human and nonhuman.” In other words, we can find the geological history of the human species in the history of social and cultural formations. The latter are not on the other side of a chasm but instead rely on, elaborate, and respond to the long durations of planetary life (“geophysical actors, both human and nonhuman”).

If the Anthropocene names a transition during which human civilization has become a geological power, then the humanities can make a justifiable claim to a special role: capturing all of those imaginative efforts to represent the interaction between human life and geology. In other words, it’s to the humanities that the task of reckoning with geological fantasy, the blur between human desire and earthbound conditions, falls. Pinkus’s and Whitmarsh’s books of literary criticism are sharp guides to such imaginative efforts and Nintendo’s Tears of the Kingdom is an obvious example of them.

But what I want to suggest in this essay is that we need not draw a stark line between the critical and the imaginative when it comes to the planetary. Indeed, what we need is criticism and theory as world-building on a planetary scale. Let’s not just represent the planet we have, let’s imagine what the planet may yet become—though not without acknowledging the material limits of Earth’s systems.

To enter the interplay of the human and nonhuman is one of the great gifts of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. TotK is the 2023 sequel to Nintendo’s 2017 Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW), which introduced open-world design to the long-running Zelda franchise. For years prior, Zelda had privileged tightly controlled puzzle spaces (especially “dungeons,” enclosed spaces composed of rooms gated by enemies and puzzles). But then BotW turned the landscape itself into a puzzle, eschewing linear narrative in favor of open-ended exploration. Traversal became the point. The journey between one space and another could be an adventure because of snow or rain, a high cliff or a wide river. A stamina meter made it so that Link (the character as which you play) had physical limits; you could only climb so high, run so far, swim for so long.

The game’s story was unremarkable: a post-apocalyptic tale wrapped in a mythic struggle between the forces of light and darkness. Narrative conflict has never been the series’ strong suit. At its best, in games like Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past, the series turns plot into an alibi for exploration, an excuse for game designers to invent fascinating spaces. The 2017 BotW realized this potential in a brilliant manner, so that playing it often feels more like hiking the titular wilds than fighting against some banal evil.

So, what does Tears of the Kingdom do to differentiate itself from the wild success of its predecessor? It brings depth to the lands of Hyrule. I don’t mean existential depth or spiritual meaning, but, rather, the more literal depth of a virtual geology. The game takes place in the same setting, using the same initial map or geography. But it expands the explorable world to include the sky (floating islands), even more of the land (cave systems on the surface), and even the world below (the subterranean expanses of the Depths). TotK also thickens the history of Hyrule, introducing story-driven changes to the locations in the previous game, as well as a time travel plot-line that suggests the world as we live it could have been very different. Traversing the land in TotK can’t help but involve a kind of historical double vision, a vision of the differences between its version of Hyrule and the one found in BotW.

TotK supplements this geographic, geological, and historical depth with new mechanical complexity, including abilities to rewind time (or, more precisely, to rewind the motion of objects in the game world); ascend through surfaces (another nod to the game’s emphasis on vertical space); fuse objects (attach an “ice fruit” to an arrow, loose the arrow, and watch an enemy freeze in place); and build mechanical contraptions with Link’s “ultrahand” (Link can create bridges, battery-powered vehicles, and more). TotK turns the physics engine of BotW—the game’s complex system for handling the motion and collision of objects, the spread of fire, the flow of water, and so on—into a platform for player invention.

This player invention operates along the lines of that modern imperative to subdue the natural world for the sake of civilization. It’s a kinder version of capitalist and colonial logic, a vision of mastery that wants to rescue the thrill of invention from histories of violent conquest and exploitation. It’s not that violence disappears, but that it’s displaced onto enemy creatures reminiscent of J. R. R. Tolkien’s orcs. Expel the darkness, spread the light, make the world good again. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that such game design is ideological in the strictest sense: a programming and playing out of resource extraction that reproduces the status quo. Scholars such as Nick Dyer-Witheford, Claus Pias, and McKenzie Wark have described the origins of video games in the military-industrial complex, the degree to which action games in particular derive gameplay from, for example, weapons research (targeting enemies) and logistics (optimizing paths from point A to point B). Why should Zelda be any different?

If world-building is planetary alchemy, it’s because these imaginative and representational practices testify to the fact that we’ve already remade the planet and to the hope that we might still transfigure it for the better.

Video games are, by definition, abstractions. They not only abstract from the real world but they also operate in a perfect realm of numbers. It’s perhaps inevitable, then, that Tears of the Kingdom fails to reckon with the historical violences wrought against the planet and its inhabitants. On the other hand, there are examples of games, like Death Stranding, Final Fantasy VII, and Terra Nil that deal directly with environmental crisis. They let you wander through the ruins of civilization or fight back against corporate polluters or restore the biosphere. Even in these cases, abstraction reduces the planet to manageable variables. But is this abstractness necessarily a problem? In Playing Nature, Alenda Y. Chang argues that games “leverage unique affordances that enable often abstract information and otherwise distant threats of ecological calamity to take very real and even operable form.” They are “a place where the natural and the digital collide and prompt careful reexamination of our assumptions about nature, realism, and the virtual.”

Realism isn’t the first word that springs to mind when playing TotK, but the game has its own version of realism as a way of representing planetary matters. It’s not a referential realism; it doesn’t entail direct correspondence between real-world ecological crisis and digital playgrounds. Instead, TotK lets you glide, dive, spelunk, and hike a virtual planet. It lets you play through the planetary archive. In so doing, it suggests the pleasures of thinking at planetary scale.

Literary criticism might have something significant to say about our planetary predicaments, according to Pinkus’s Subsurface, because of its attention to form. Pinkus writes: “My own focus here is rather on structure and form as they might offer us glimpses into the subterranean that are shaped (distorted?) by our own desires to see and not see, to confront geology or justify our own positions.” It doesn’t take climate fiction, or direct depictions of the future of society in a warming world, to reckon with planetary crisis. We can also consider how the very manner in which we tell stories contributes to extractive violence. How might the pleasure we take in popular adventure tales of recovering buried treasure or discovering hidden kingdoms speak to a more general passion to treat the Earth as a storehouse of human delights? And how do such delights betray our will to mastery, our desire to subdue the planet?

But the focus on form and structure is not only a matter of ideology critique, of blindness and insight, for it also opens something like an excluded middle—the realm of ambiguity—in our planetary musings. Pinkus writes,

Literary readings, then, may open the subsurface beyond the binary of simple mastery (we can control it) or renunciation (we cannot do anything there), beyond the extremes of exploitation (what we do down there had no effect up here, so all activities are fair game) and conservation (leave it alone). Narratives and language move between the subsurface and surface, sometimes revealing unexpected cracks, drifts, and openings. Geognosy is tied to certainties (and sometimes undone by uncertainties.)

Digging into the Earth—coming to know the Earth (“geognosy”)—doesn’t mean escaping language. Instead, it requires the kind of reading one does with literature or as a literary critic: reading as a reflexive process, in which the meaning of the text is the very process of producing meaning, in which language appears as an agent in its own right.

Pinkus reads in a complicated, even involuted, manner. She doesn’t survey literary and geological terrain so much as delve into the complexities and ambiguities too easily missed in the haste to address planetary crisis. For example, it’s easy enough to condemn drilling for oil as violence against the Earth, but what about carbon capture and storage technologies? Does this artificial form of carbon sequestration feed into the geological fantasy of planetary mastery? Does it inadvertently exacerbate the climate crisis by reinforcing the dream that the solution to our woes will be more investment in corporate power over the planet? Pinkus reads the complicities between seemingly opposed positions and practices, showing how they share ideological narratives and tropes, fending off true transformation by repeating centuries-old stories of penetrating the Earth.

So much recent criticism has found itself locked in a battle between form and content, aestheticism and materialism, appreciation and critique; the dialectic or dialogue between form and content gets lost in this polemical haze. It’s this dialectic to which Pinkus attends, in a manner that recalls Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight or Allegories of Reading. Pinkus’s analyses and arguments land on uncertainty; she reads for the fissures and cracks, which are always also openings, glimpsed possibilities. It’s not unlike those moments in Tears of the Kingdom when you reemerge from the Depths, climbing out of the murky red gloom to see the sun infusing the clouds with golden light—except that Subsurface forces our attention to the fictional quality of above and below, to the artifice and fantasy involved in imagining the clean passage between surface and depths.

Pinkus’s master trope is alchemy. “Inasmuch as extraction is a story about knowledge that helps the hero/author transform base matter into noble through a difficult process, alchemy remains a significant referent.” Alchemy establishes a conduit between, on the one hand, premodern practices that blur scientific experimentation and ritual magic and, on the other, modernity, with its vision of endless technological progress. Alchemy simultaneously mystifies extractive violence and betrays it, revealing that the dream of getting something for nothing, of energy without serious cost, is just that—fantasy, fable, hocus pocus. Pinkus’s approach to extraction is measured. She eschews a strictly oppositional version of critique without ignoring the violence of capitalism laying waste to the environment. In alchemy, she finds “a third way between technophilic extractivism and the facile conservationism of those who call for (simply) leaving resources in the ground.”

Pinkus gravitates toward ambiguity, excluded middles, third ways, and betweens of all sorts. This tendency lends Subsurface an elliptical quality; the book moves in off-kilter circles, drawing out the structural elements of the narratives through which we process Earth only to undo them in the next moment. This undoing has a point, however. It upsets “a way of reading as deferral,” the kinds of storytelling and interpretation that foster “the desire to keep the subsurface as a terrain to be explored while also exploiting it for everything it is worth.” I doubt this approach will satisfy readers looking for a straight line between scholarship and activism. Like the characters in Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Pinkus’s readers won’t ever reach the core of things. Instead, they will be spat out of this earthy archive, their fantasies of planetary control firmly chastened.

Subsurface is a welcome antidote to Tears of the Kingdom’s adventures in virtual geology. Nintendo’s game trains players to look under every rock, explore every cave, map the depths, but it rests on stasis: Link can break through rock walls to discover new underground expanses, but the transformation ceases there. It’s as if all of Hyrule’s tunnels, caverns, and fissures were arranged for Link’s consumption. Because, of course, they were. They’re designed, crafted with the precise attention to level structure that Nintendo’s prided itself on since the original Super Mario Bros. (1985). No surprise, then, the spatial symmetry—cosmological in scale—that sees the 120 shrines (reward-filled puzzle boxes) on Hyrule’s surface reflected below by 120 lightroots (treelike structures that illuminate portions of the Depths when Link activates them).

There’s a simple point to make about the way in which digital games obscure the material and environmental conditions that make them possible. Consider the electronic waste accumulating in landfills, forming their own layers of earth. But there’s also an ideological dimension at play, here, a dream of planetary sovereignty that open-world games are particularly well suited to fuel. The game loop of TotK involves mapping every inch of soil, collecting resources, putting those resources to work against enemies and obstacles, and strengthening the player-character—all toward the ultimate end of vanquishing an ancient evil. It is as if the game believes that exploration and environmental manipulation could finally remove the last resistance of a planet to its overreaching inhabitants.

Writing Our Extinction insists on the physical universe’s resistance to human desire. Whitmarsh introduces human extinction not only as the terminal point of civilization but also as a perspective from which to reevaluate contemporary politics and culture.

This perspective isn’t simply a product of the climate crisis. It emerges as the shadow of every human effort to master, rework, or dig up the Earth. It’s the necessary corollary of thinking on a planetary scale. And that’s because, at that scale, thinking means reckoning with the fact that humans haven’t always been around and that there’s a good chance they won’t be around a million years from now.

For Whitmarsh, the extinction perspective isn’t all gloom. It doesn’t succumb to ecopessimism or get mired in climate anxiety, for “it also implies the possibility of reimagining human existence. It allows writers and readers to postulate futures beyond the confines of capitalist realism by intuiting alternative realities of hopefulness and resilience embedded in the here and now.” Whitmarsh stokes the possibilities of extinction through a twin perspective, whose poles are the “overview” and the “underview,” or to put it simply, the Earth seen from above (from satellites and space shuttles) and the Earth seen from below (from mines, landfills, and trenches). He follows in the tracks of what he terms “vertical science,” which is really a collection of sciences like geology and atmospheric chemistry that belong to the interdisciplinary field of Earth System Science (ESS). ESS advances and relies on orbital satellites and drilling to survey the planet from above and to reveal the secrets it conceals below; it’s a holistic attempt to consider the planet as a system.

Anthropocene fiction, the central object of Whitmarsh’s study, indexes the growing awareness since the 1960s of “planetwide metamorphosis set in motion by human industry.” If this designation covers a long stretch for academics in the humanities, it’s not even a blip on a geological timeline. Indeed, it doesn’t make much sense to claim a difference in kind between the late 20th century and the preceding decades on the basis of growing planetary awareness. Dana Luciano and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller have pointed out that already in the 19th century, scientists (especially geologists) and literary writers were attuned to the planetary changes being unloosed by human civilization.

That said, what distinguishes Anthropocene fiction and Whitmarsh’s analyses of it is the significance of media and technology. Writing Our Extinction is a book about the feedback loop between planetary systems and the technology (not only satellites and drilling but also information and communication technologies) that penetrates and reveals the Earth. One could say about Whitmarsh’s writing what he says about Don DeLillo’s Underworld, that it “achieves a kind of planetary realism. The text negotiates the representational ravine between narrative prose and unrelenting geology by reimagining geology as an archive.” The planet as archive: a thing you can read, a literary object. Indeed, it’s this circuit between the tangible and the cognitive, between sign and concept, or affect and idea, that Zelda, Pinkus, and Whitmarsh share in common. They’re all establishing so many scale-jumping geological corridors from the immediacy of a figure or a person in terrain to the planet in orbit, and back again.

The reading of Underworld is one of the places Whitmarsh best negotiates the dialectic between form and content. It’s an instance in which he shows how the form of the novel doesn’t just reflect planetary predicaments but offers the special insight of literature. The content of Underworld is important—its earthworks and landfills and nuclear blasts—but it’s the reworking of realism as a literary mode that makes it worth discussing: Underworld doesn’t just scale up realism’s investigation of modernity, it makes it speculative by folding the possibility of human extinction into the everyday life of the present. It’s a narrative experiment whose ultimate consequence is that “readers encounter themselves as agents of both human and natural history—as a species of global change, and a species absent from the scene, virtually extinct.”

Three quarters of Writing Our Extinction tends toward this tragic note. Analyses of fiction by Reza Negarestani, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Karen Tei Yamashita, among others, read the planet as a record of human extinction, a vertical slice of time that speaks to the fragility of life. The tragic is not pointless, however. As a storytelling mode, it memorializes what’s been lost and what will be lost: “Fictions of speculative geology underscore the immanence of extinction within narratives of historical progress—extinction becomes in fact a condition of narrative possibility. Such fictions engage, in one way or another, the readability of humanity’s presence on the planet, whether through evidence of existence or anticipations of extinction.”

Whitmarsh doesn’t end Writing Our Extinction on a tragic note. In a striking reversal, he shifts his gaze to Black speculative fiction that “salvages race as part of geological and genealogical strata” and, in doing so, cultivates social and political hope. Writers, including Colson Whitehead, Jesmyn Ward, and Octavia Butler, not only bear witness to the “powerful connections between Black experience and that of the exploited planet,” they also testify to the inventiveness involved in survival: the endurance of racialized violence, as well as the struggle against it, has entailed the development of new forms of communal life.

Recalling Whitmarsh’s emphasis on verticality, one might say that if Black life was crushed into the earth, if it was buried again and again by white supremacism, it never stopped building underground sites of resistance, terrains of struggle, escape, and liberation. This is what Whitmarsh calls the “underview”: not the view from on high but the on-the-ground, or underground, perspective of struggle. I wonder what Tears of the Kingdom would be like if the enemy creatures—the Bokoblins, the Moblins, the Octoroks—weren’t monsters to clear from the planet’s surface but the upwelling of oppressed cultures, the revolutionary return of the repressed.

Here’s another kind of alchemy—not the ideological erasure of extractive violence and resource exploitation but the transformation of suffering into freedom. And it all gets written down in the planetary archive.

The planet as archive and planetary thinking as a kind of alchemy: what if we took these propositions in the most literal manner possible? Such an approach wouldn’t exclude the figurative, wouldn’t abolish the rhetorical and narrative flights of literary and cultural production. Instead, it would excavate their earthy premises; it would dig up the geological fantasies that imbue our imaginations with planetary scale.

Earth system science may mobilize the technical capacities of satellites orbiting the Earth to take the measure of planetary crisis. But the humanities have at their disposal centuries, indeed, millennia, of stories, dreams, images, and, yes, games that carry planetary imaginaries: sketches of what our planet is, ciphers of what it holds in store for us, what it promises us, but also fables of what the planet may yet become, what futures its tectonic tremors and melting seas herald. Not just the sedimented accumulation of history, then, but also the seeds of the future—that’s the planet as archive.

And alchemy? That’s criticism and theory as world-building on a planetary scale, it being understood, however, that works like Tears of the Kingdom aren’t merely raw material but practice criticism and theory in their own ways. In this context, world-building refers to the imagination of coherent and systematic environments in which stories can play out, exemplified by game design and by the writing of speculative fiction. But it also refers to the history of the Earth, to the geological processes through which the planet came to be and continues to change, as well as to our capacity to represent that history. Finally, if world-building is planetary alchemy, it’s because these imaginative and representational practices testify to the fact that we’ve already remade the planet and to the hope that we might still transfigure it for the better.

At the risk of repeating myself, let’s not just represent the planet we have. Instead, let’s imagine what the planet may yet become—though not without acknowledging the material limits of our earthbound condition. 

Featured image: A still from Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. All images are from the TotK press kit and © Nintendo, via IGDB.