This Game Comes With the Worst Prizes
A self-playing videogame reconstruction of Bayan Obo, the world's largest rare earth mine, synchronized with the mine's day-night cycle. No player agency. No victory condition.
About
The project looks at the Bayan Obo site in the Mongolian desert, a crucial source of rare earths whose dirt transubstantiates into the ether that sustains planetary computation, green dreams, and interplanetary fantasies. The extraction site exists like a perpetually open scar on the face of a capitalocenic earth as it looks back at us: powerful as land art yet irreversible, irresistible as catastrophe.
Our so-called IRL existences are shaped by decisions made online, and that realm in turn shapes everyday life outside it. The atoms of dirt in Bayan Obo are transmuted into bits that power cryptocurrency mining, stock trading, video games, and warfare. The rare earth elements mined here are refined into the magnets, phosphors, and catalysts that make planetary computation possible, and satellite imaging, spectral scanning, and machine vision generate the datasets used to guide exploration, logistics, and further extraction. Extraction and perception are not separate processes but part of the same technical system.
Contemporary mines operate like videogames: operators in centralized control rooms navigate gamified 3D renderings of extraction sites, interfacing with real-time sensor data that renders geological complexity into actionable terrain. If reality is gamified, and extraction becomes a game, then this game refuses those dynamics.
Geological data, satellite imagery, and topographic information are assembled into a navigable environment alongside algorithmic techniques for real-time atmospheric simulation, but there is nothing here to act on. For instance, dirt extracted at Bayan Obo is refined into rare earth oxides, processed into the magnets and phosphors that provide the substrate for planetary computation. Some technobros get rich AF with magic internet money so they can drive Teslas by the Bay, while people in the Mongolian desert are left with radioactive wastelands for millennia.
Aesthetic Dissonance
The state of mental discomfort or psychological stress experienced when holding contradictory beliefs, values, or ideas as aesthetic experiences at the same time. The earth's destruction renders literally in-credible, spectacular landscapes.
At Bayan Obo, the geometric precision and arresting color palette of the terraced extraction sites render planetary-scale violence into something visually compelling, even beautiful, and this is not accidental. The same visual regimes that organize extraction, satellite imaging, remote sensing, operational dashboards, also produce the spectacle through which that extraction becomes bearable to witness from a distance. Jason Moore's concept of the Capitalocene locates this condition within a world-ecology of power, production, and reproduction that binds class rule, patriarchy, and white supremacy to projects of endless accumulation, a system that depends on rendering its own violence as scenery, on training perception to find beauty where it should find accountability. The gaze folds into the circuits of accumulation it surveys, and aesthetic experience becomes the medium through which that folding goes unnoticed.
Zines
Made alongside the research. Where these ideas first moved before they became argument.
![[dis]possessed](https://differential.space/thisGame/img/06-1small.png)
A reflection on ownership, possession, and acquisition. Of images, of land, of living beings. Mines as hyperobjects. Risograph print, Verge Contemporary, Sacramento CA.
Foreshadows from the expanded field. Turning land into crypto. The internet as a frontier to at once create and colonize; an extractive neocolonial endeavor, despite what you have been made to believe.
Watch