Over the course of a human life, most of us will have experienced moments when we yearned to just flee our current problems and predicaments. Such a desire for escape often coincides with an inclination towards seclusion in a more natural environment. To leave our city, town, or hamlet for the open country and find the peace and quiet we are missing in nature, so to say.¹ Both the attraction of such a flight and its ultimate futility have perhaps never been portrayed more authentically and bittersweet than in the narrative video game Firewatch.

Why am I suddenly talking about video games, you may wonder. Did I take my interest in the field of the digital humanities, which we discussed last week, too literally or too far? Well, the reason has indeed to do with the humanities, but not the digital variety perse!² Back in March we learned that the environmental humanities may concern the study of the past in addition to more recent subjects of interest, such as (early) modern literature. And today we will find out that those very same concerns and methodologies can also be applied to games with a big role for the environment.³ Because of its themes and environmental angle, the narrative video game Firewatch fits that profile well. It is for this reason that getting to know more about Firewatch is also commendable for those who normally shy away from this kind of pastime.

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The Story of Firewatch

Developed by Campo Santo and published by Panic in 2016, Firewatch tells the story of Henry, a middle-aged man who postpones dealing with his problems by becoming a – you guessed it – fire lookout in a fictionalized version of the Shoshone National Forest in North America in the summer of 1989.⁴ In the intro we learn that, however you slice it, Henry has ditched his wife Julia, who struggles with early onset Alzheimer’s and whose care he left to the responsibility of others.⁵ And even the beautiful environments of the Shoshone, which we already encounter in one of the first visual scenes of the game and continue to explore throughout our adventures, may not entirely obscure that fact. As a fire lookout, you reside in a large wooden tower overlooking the forests, meadows, and mountains, while trying to stop wildfires whenever you spot them.⁶ During the day, the player pilots Henry while he chases away campers lighting fireworks, picks up the long lost backpack of the son of another fire lookout from a few years back, and tries to construct a safe way down at a slope that he fittingly calls the “Shitty Boss Is Going To Get Me Killed Hill.”

Though it would be a lonely existence without that shitty boss. Her name is Delilah and she has already gathered a few more years of experience with being a fire lookout while putting one’s own demons on ice. During the game you can talk to her over a walkie-talkie and develop something of a bond through sarcastic back-and-forths, shit-talking the job, and – of course – reminiscing about how great it is to swap your daily predicament for a relatively carefree life in nature.⁷ But over time your conversations become less light-hearted, as the Shoshone may not be as peaceful as it had appeared to Henry and Delilah on first sight.

Throughout the game Henry perceives more and more signals that something is wrong. That perhaps his walkie-talkie is bugged, that his stint as a fire lookout may be part of a largescale social experiment, or even that all of this happens merely in his head. This veritable mystery offers him the chance to spring into action and find out what is actually the matter.⁸ But as you might have already guessed, this is yet another excuse to further run from the responsibilities that haunt him. Many of the strange occurrences have perfectly pedestrian explanations. And those that don’t, turn out to be the result of the actions of one Ned Goodwin, the father of the boy whose backpack you found earlier in the game. During their summer in the Shoshone this boy, whose name was Brian, perished during a dangerous climbing exercise mandated by his father. Unable to face the unfathomable price paid by his son because of an accident that stemmed directly from the way he treated him, Ned left Brian’s body where it fell down and hid himself in the wild for the intervening years. This summer he feared that Henry and Delilah’s shared curiosity would imperil his continued flight from the grim reality of his life and actions, so he did his best to stir paranoia in them.⁹

At the end of the game, whereby players may or may not have found out the entire truth about Henry’s summertime adventures, we have one last conversation with Delilah. And depending on the choices the player made, Henry realizes that he cannot keep fleeing in odd jobs, the distant wilderness, or made-up mysteries. It is time to return to Julia and his own life – for better or for worse. And for Delilah it is perhaps likewise time to face what she was running from all these years. Consequently, as the flames of a symbolically fitting forest fire rage throughout the places that we as players just explored for the last few hours, Henry is whisked away by a helicopter to an uncertain future.¹⁰

Care vs. Heroics

Even those of us who do not often linger in the dopamine-filled abode of computational entertainment, have a certain impression of your average mass-marketed video game. One might imagine playing as a soldier who murders their way through a small country’s worth of victims, as a warrior from bygone eras who fights fantastical beasts with sword and bow, or as a CEO of a theme park or factory who dominates all competition.¹¹ Firewatch, as you may have already gleaned from my summary above and which is also noted by scholar Melissa Kagen, “successfully problematizes […] traditional videogame hypermasculinity.”¹² Henry may be presenting a gruff demeanor, but in the end his story primarily concerns the very tender subject of care.¹³ More specifically: the lack of care he provided to Julia, the stinging responsibility for which he cannot leave behind – no matter how far he runs.¹⁴ And this theme of responsibility is, I think, emphasized by the way the game employs its environment. Because the beautifully rendered trees, grasses, and bodies of water, in addition to the wide skies, pleasant hills, and foreboding mountains are more than just a backdrop for the story. They arguably constitute an important character in and of themselves.¹⁵

The Shoshone that we explore in Firewatch is modelled on a real landscape, though it is not an precise representation.¹⁶ And like many actual biomes, this natural environment falls victim to human ignorance and malice. As the characters not only mistreat each other – most notably with Ned Goodwin’s conduct towards Brian, as well as towards Henry and Delilah – but also do harm to the flora and fauna. Thus Henry’s very personal guilt towards Julia is embedded within a broader and more omnipresent sense of guilt towards the world in which we live with all that other human and non-human life. And we learn that both these challenges – the personal and the worldly – cannot be solved by heroics; quite the contrary. Instead of trying to find the proverbial bad guys who may have concocted a mysterious plot – that mostly existed in our own head anyway – real-life conundrums prove to be better served with reflection, grace, and empathy.¹⁷ And such a way of approaching our problems and responsibilities may be significantly harder to pull off than your bog-standard heroics.¹⁸

That the latter deliberation between heroics and consideration is very much a continuing choice, is illustrated by the way the player may treat the environment in the game. Headstrong action, such as inadvisably throwing a vintage radio at the littering campers – which unsurprisingly ends up in a lake – is a possibility.¹⁹ But we could also bring the radio back to our lookout tower, clean up the litter strewn around the forest, and save a very cute turtle while we’re at it! You can, in a very real sense, learn to care again during your self-imposed exile. And the player may begin to apply that same care, through the various conversations with Delilah, to our relationship hurdles back home. As such, Henry’s flight to a more natural environment may not have helped him escape his problems, but his newfound self-awareness and caring attitude – if the player is so inclined, that is – can help him solve them in the long run. We might not be able to flee from our troubles into the wilderness, as we always take ourselves with us, but we can reflect and return from our self-imposed exile as a more rounded person.²⁰

Conclusion: Self-Knowledge in Firewatch

Even an elaborate simulated environment, such as we find in Firewatch, has its limits. If one strays to much from the expected path, you encounter invisible walls that convey a terrible truth: much of the beautiful vistas are just that – pictures in the distance.²¹ To my mind, these confinement serve the game’s themes: there really is nowhere we can run if we want to leave our problems behind, as our limits are at least partly inside of us. The aforementioned Melissa Kagen wryly notes: “There’s a reason it’s called Firewatch and not Firefight.”²² And our sense of responsibility for what we could or would not handle back home, does not disappear when smelling the pinecones. We need to face our troubles without any guarantee that we may overcome them, but confronting them we have to. Else we might end up like Henry’s terrifying mirror image: Ned Goodwin. The man who also tried to hide from a self-made tragedy, a tragedy which had cost his son their life, and proceeded to haunt the Shoshone for years and years.²³

I hope that the previous few paragraphs made it clear why a narrative video game like Firewatch has a place here at Bildungblocks. And not only because there is so much fascinating literature on games and the environmental humanities in general, and on Firewatch in particular. While we are on this tangent, for those who want to know more about these topics, I can wholeheartedly recommend the book Playing Nature by Alenda Chang, Melissa Kagen’s article Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch, and the book chapter Light My (Camp-)Fire by René Schallegger.²⁴ But besides an excuse to read more cool scholarship, there is a less prosaic reason. Namely that, just as with the other topics that I have hitherto explored with you on Bildungblocks – from the deep past and scientific integrity to music and literature – narrative video games also constitute a medium with which we may know ourselves, our fellow humans, and the world in which we live a little bit better.²⁵

Coda: Ron and Dave

As a coda, one fascinating subplot within Firewatch, which I sadly could not properly cover here but will perhaps revisit in the future, pertains to two rangers who once traversed the Shoshone.²⁶ They are called Ron and Dave respectively, and you can follow the unfolding of their relationship because of the notes they left behind throughout the forest. Ron has a rather stormy love life and Dave tries to help him with it, despite he himself harboring unrequited feelings for the man. Ron does not understand Dave’s affection and eventually finds a girlfriend with whom he moves to Alaska, while Dave simply disappears from our purview.

At the end of the game, we find out that Ron did leave a song for Dave, which he dubbed Ol’ Shoshone. It is about the joy of leaving one’s stifling and disappointing daily routine for nature. Writing this blog and listening to that song again inspired me to compile a list of songs that are likewise all about escaping to nature. So you can soon look forward to that blog!

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References

1. Terry Hartig et al, “Health Benefits of Nature Experience: Psychological, Social and Cultural Processes”, in: Kjell Nilsson et al, Forest, Trees, and Human Health (New York: Springer, 2011) p. 127-168.
2. Though research on today’s topic has been published in journals like Digital Humanities Quarterly, see: Alenda Y. Chang, “Games as Environmental Texts”, Qui Parle 2011, 19 (2), p. 68.
3. Alenda Y. Chang, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), p. 10-11.
4. René Reinhold Schallegger, “Light My (Camp-)Fire: Affect and Incitement in Firewatch”, Lindsey Joyce & Víctor Navarro-Remesal (eds.), Culture at Play: How Video Games Influence and Replicate Our World (Leiden: Brill, 2021), p. 81. The Shoshone National Forest is located in the state of Wyoming in the United States of America, see: Melissa Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”, Game studies 2018, 18 (2) (2018), p. 1.
5. Finn Arne Jørgensen, “Walking and Worlding: Trails as Storylines in Video Games”, in: Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman & Sverker Sörlin (eds.), Pathways: Exploring the Routes of a Movement Heritage (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2022), p. 192; Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”, 5-6; Chang, Playing Nature, p. 44-45.
6. Jørgensen, “Walking and Worlding”, p. 192-194.
7. Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”, p. 6-7; Schallegger, “Light My (Camp-)Fire”, p. 83.
8. Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”,  p. 6-8; Jørgensen, “Walking and Worlding”, p. 192.
9. Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”, p. 8; Schallegger, “Light My (Camp-)Fire”, p. 84.
10. Jørgensen, “Walking and Worlding”, p. 193; Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”, p. 12. That is, if you so choose to do so! You can stay behind, see: Schallegger, “Light My (Camp-)Fire”, p. 82.
11. Cf. games like the Call of Duty series, the Diablo series, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and Factorio.
12. Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”, p. 1.
13. Schallegger, “Light My (Camp-)Fire”, p. 83; Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”, p. 2.
14. Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”, p. 83.
15. Chang, Playing Nature, p. 31-33.
16. Jørgensen, “Walking and Worlding”, p. 192-193; Chang, Playing Nature, p. 45.
17. Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”, p. 5, 8. See more in general: Alenda Y. Chang, Jesús Costantino & Braxton Soderman, “The Multiple Lives of Permadeath: An Introduction”, Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 2017, 9 (2), p. 112; Schallegger, “Light My (Camp-)Fire”, p. 82-84.
18. Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”, p. 10; Schallegger, “Light My (Camp-)Fire”, p. 82.
19. Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”, p. 7.
20. Jørgensen, “Walking and Worlding”, p. 194.
21. Velvet Spors, Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk & Juho Hamari, “Ecological In/congruence: Becoming Sensitised to Nature in Video Games through Humanistic First-Person Research”, Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems May 2024, Article No. 522, p. 8; Jørgensen, “Walking and Worlding”, p. 193.
22. Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”, p. 2.
23. Schallegger, “Light My (Camp-)Fire”, p. 84; Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”, p. 9.
24. Chang, Playing Nature; Kagen, “Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch”; Schallegger, “Light My (Camp-)Fire”.
25. Alexandra Ferland-Beauchemin, Dave Hawey & Jocelyn Benoit, “From Walking Simulator to Reflective Simulator: A Practice-Based Perspective”, Press Start 2019, 5 (2), p. 12-16; Daniel Muriel & Garry Crawford, “Video Games and Agency in Contemporary Society”, Games and Culture 2020, 15 (2), p. 138-157. For specifically the narrative mechanics in Firewatch, see: Alfonso Cuadrado Alvarado, “Narrativa y Gameplay en Abyme en Firewatch”, Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association 2022, 6 (1), p. 123-146.
26. For these and other themes conveyed through the story of Ron and Dave, see: Schallegger, “Light My (Camp-)Fire”, p. 84.