Hidden Levels Ep. 5: Press B to Touch Grass

Endless Thread

WBUR

Reddit, Technology

4.1 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Video games are arguably the antithesis of nature; highly constructed worlds, synthetic, inorganic. If you grew up gaming, you may recall grown-ups telling you to shut down the console, go outside, and touch some grass.

These days, though, touching grass isn’t something you have to do outside. As gaming has grown into a 200 billion dollar industry, the boundary between screen and soil has muddied. New technologies and types of play are getting gamers ever-closer to the experience of real nature. And yet, in a kind of weird feedback loop, those same technologies and types of play meant to simulate nature are now changing the real thing in ways that could outlast us all.

Credits:

This episode was produced by Dean Russell. Edited by Kelly Prime. Mix, sound design, and music composition by Paul Vaitkus. Additional mixing by Martín Gonzalez. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia.

Special thanks to Samuel Åberg, Alex Beachum, Tracy Fullerton, Will Matthee, Kelsey Myers, and Mike Rougeau.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Roman Mars.
0:05.7	Ben, Brock Johnson.
0:07.0	So you were a father of twins.
0:09.2	I am a father of twins.
0:11.6	I would like to introduce you to one of my twins.
0:15.0	This is my son, who got the name I always wanted, Brock Johnson.
0:20.8	Hello, Roman Mawes. Oh, you're fired. This kid's comment. got the name I always wanted, Brock Johnson.
0:22.4	Hello, Roman Mauds.
0:25.4	Oh, you're fired. This kid's coming for you.
0:30.4	He'll have my resignation on his desk on Monday morning, for sure.
0:30.9	That's right.
0:36.1	Brock is doing what a lot of eight-year-olds do these days. He is designing a very ridiculous tree house that I do not have the ability or the
0:39.6	resources to construct. He is riding his bike as fast as possible. And he is starting to play,
0:47.0	just starting to play video games, which offer him this whole universe of different worlds to inhabit. He likes smashing things just as
0:57.0	much as the next eight-year-old or 45-year-old in my case. But, you know, when I asked him about
1:01.3	what he really loves about playing video games, he's not just about smashing things. He's
1:07.7	about game environments. I play a lot of the tundra biome and sometimes the forest
1:17.4	bio. Forest bio? Yeah. What do you like about the forest in video games? You can really
1:24.3	transform the forest into a nice home.
1:27.8	And there's really cool bushes.
1:29.7	Sometimes I really like the bushes.
1:31.9	I can always be like, hmm, is there something tangled up at this bush?
	...

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