GET REAL

How video-game engines became the invisible infrastructure of our world.

- ANNA WIENER

On a warm afternoon last fall, Steven Caron, a technical artist at the video game company Quixel, stood at the edge of a redwood grove in the Oakland Hills. “Cross your eyes, kind of blur your eyes, and get a sense for what’s here,” he instructed. There was a circle of trees, some logs, and a wooden fence; two tepee-like structures, made of sticks, slumped invitingly. Quixel creates and sells digital assets— the objects, textures, and landscapes that compose the scenery and sensuous elements of video games, movies, and TV shows. It has the immodest mission to “scan the world.” In the past few years, Caron and his co-workers have travelled widely, creating something like a digital archive of natural and built environments as they exist in the early twenty-first century: ice cliffs in Sweden; sandstone boulders from the shrublands of Pakistan; wooden temple doors in Japan; ceiling trim from the Bożków Palace, in Poland. That afternoon, he just wanted to scan a redwood tree. The ideal assets are iconic, but not distinctive: in theory, any one of them can be repeated, like a rubber stamp, such that a single redwood could compose an entire forest. “Think about more generic trees,” he said, looking around. We squinted the grove into lower resolution.