In the sleepy suburb of Sydenham, south-east of London, the statues of the Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park stand watch over nothing in particular. By today’s standards they look hilariously inaccurate: the Iguanodon is little more than a fat alligator, while the Megalosaurus looks like one of No Man’s Sky’s misshapen dog-like quadrupeds. They were constructed in the early 1850s to accompany the Crystal Palace after it moved from Hyde Park—where it had been the centerpiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851—to a permanent location outside the city. Hand-built from brick, cement, and iron by the great paleo-artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, these architectural constructions were the first dinosaur models ever put on public display, only a few years after the term ‘dinosaur’ itself was coined, in 1842, by Hawkins’ scientific overseer, the anatomist Richard Owen. Unlike the mastodon skeletons that had already appeared in American museums, these were not “reconstructions” but “restorations”—attempts to recapture the living form of the original beast. If the Crystal Palace was supposed to be Victorian Epcot, a kind of permanent World’s Fair, the Dinosaur Park was its Animal Kingdom.
They stand not as representations, but symbols, both creatures and artefacts all at once
Today, Victorian Epcot has fallen. In the nearby Crystal Palace Museum, signs written in Comic Sans—not out of irreverence or neglect but the sheer opposite: volunteerist enthusiasm—describe the Palace’s struggles with unprofitability; its degeneration into disrepute, and the fire that eventually destroyed it in 1936. Another sign describes the status of a heroic plan, bankrolled by Chinese businessmen, to rebuild the Palace on-site—or at least something “in the same spirit.” Negotiations, the signs tell us, have reached an “interesting point.” You can still see the building’s colossal footprint, once a vast machined construction of metal and glass, now a void, flanked by stairways with Sphinx statues that recall the grave of Oscar Wilde. A single white iron archway stands at the corner of the land, silently reminding visitors of the history of this place while the tinny drone of administrative announcements echo from a nearby sports complex. The archway is a kind of fossil, a tooth of the arcade, ready to be collected by latter-day Walter Benjamins. It feels ironic, maybe, that the nearby dinosaurs stand unchanged in their completeness, containing not a single fossil at all.
Horizon Zero Dawn is anchored by its own ruins of a “Metal World.” They are a source of wonder in a game that otherwise reaches conservatively for the familiar rhythms of other open-world games. They punctuate its postcard-pretty environments: on the other side of a snowy hill you might find the skeleton of a skyscraper, bent and twisted toward the sky. They reveal an ancient world that resembles our own, bearing all the touchstones of 21st century metropolitan life. Even containing some of the detritus of game development: throughout the game, you spelunk through caves that end up being cubicles, finding priceless “ancient vessels” that were once cheapo mugs.
This leaves the Metal World feeling wondrous but ultimately mundane, marked by its recognisable traces of the routines of contemporary life. The other remnants of the Metal World, the robot dinosaurs that populate Horizon Zero Dawn’s landscape, are equally mundane—because you kill so many of them—but are also equally wondrous.
They are both wild and profoundly domesticated, both ‘animal’ and seductively, reassuringly artificial
The game’s map is littered with these creatures, simply called “Machines.” At the beginning of the game, you mostly encounter Watchers, humble cyclopean raptors that crane their long necks to track you with inscrutable headlight eyes. But as you progress, you move further up the food chain, and the megafauna get more and more charismatic. Some are benign, so long as you leave them alone: moose-like Grazers that flee in packs when you approach; ram-like Broadheads and bull-like Tramplers that shake the earth with their steel hooves. The really big ones, however, are profoundly aggressive and outfitted like aircraft carriers. The Tyrannosaur-like Thunderjaw sports energy cannons on its mandibles, a laser cannon in its mouth, two metal disc launchers on each hip, and an array of sensors that allow it to find you even when you’re hiding. Every encounter with one is an intense, protracted boss fight.
The story of Horizon Zero Dawn revolves entirely around the predictable premise that these creatures, once built to serve human purposes, have revolted and destroyed the human world. Yet the core gameplay loop of Horizon Zero Dawn relies on the fact that they yield to human purposes much more pliantly than the animals they resemble. Because they are machines, they are also structures with discrete component parts that lend themselves to specific interactions. Even the most elaborate encounters with the most fearsome beasts are basically games of Bop-It. Killing a Watcher is easy: you just sink an arrow into its eye. Killing a Thunderjaw is hard: an elaborate process of armor-stripping and weak-spot hitting. Yet a Thunderjaw fight is the same thing as a Watcher fight, just at a different scale. Both unfold as fortuitous meetings between puzzle-box animals and the key-holding player; the Thunderjaw just requires more keys, more actions, and more time to subdue. Each element of each animal’s form is shaped carefully to correspond to a gameplay function. The whole game subsists on this logic: intelligent design as gameplay design.
With this in mind, is it fair, or just, or even appropriate to call them animals? They are nothing like real animals; nor are they like the best animals in games, which leverage the interactivity of the medium—games are always, on some level, encounters between the human and the inhuman—to sustain an illusion of independence and alterity. Nor are they animals according to Horizon Zero Dawn, which wants to separate them from the organic wildlife that populate its landscape. Horizon takes place in a world that transitions suddenly, jarringly, between geographic extremes: arid deserts, lush jungles, snowy mountains. Despite that, you find the same ‘real’ animals in every climate: boars, turkeys, foxes, raccoons, rabbits, and trout. All of them give you the same three types of meat, which can be used, as in Far Cry, to craft upgrades for ammo pouches. Their profound generic nature as a limitless commodity—they’re basically grist for the rudimentary crafting system—is only brought into starker relief by the diversity and ferocity of the Machines. And the opposite is even more true: their status as meaningless biomass makes the Machines seem all the more alive, all the more independent, all the more animal.
They could avoid the messiness of change, the ambiguities of organic life
At the same time, in game design terms, the Machines represent the highest possible evolution of generic open-world fauna. They are both wild and profoundly domesticated, both ‘animal’ and seductively, reassuringly artificial. Like tigers and rhinos in Far Cry, they lend unpredictability to the landscape, which wants to feel organic. But they also conform to player-centric design in ways that tigers and rhinos can’t. They do an end-run around every single problem that plagues animal representation in games, precisely by embracing artifice rather than trying to mask it. You can ride Striders and Broadheads at top speed forever, unlike the stamina-limited horses in Zelda and Red Dead Redemption. You can scan the ‘track’ of every Machine and know that it’ll patrol the same circle, over and over again, waiting patiently to be killed or mounted. You can tame them without worrying about the affective complexities of domestication; like the similarly pliant made-up animals in Avatar, they come with USB ports. You can kill them endlessly without even the slightest moral qualm.
They are the pliant automata we have always met in digital wildlands. The only difference is that their wires and gears, both aesthetically and mechanically, are exposed. And so, like Crystal Palace’s “architectural” dinosaurs they stand, amongst metal ruins of another time, not as representations, but symbols, both creatures and artefacts all at once.
Victorians were astonished by the dinosaurs at the Crystal Palace. They had to be: dinosaurs gave an age to the Earth that wasn’t the 5,000 years of Biblical creation; they revealed the possibility of a prehuman past and a posthuman future. They were massive monsters; even worse, they were gone. Yet the statues at the Dinosaur Park were not agitprop. As James A. Secord points out, they served an almost “utopian” combination of the interests of capitalism, science, public education, and art; what allowed them to serve anything at all was their artifice, which brought with it the implication that even the remote beasts of deep time could be exposed, recreated, and conquered by human ingenuity.
Richard Owen, the anatomist who oversaw Hawkins’ artworks, later became the most famous and pugnacious opponent of Darwin, clinging bitterly to the idea that all species appeared fully formed at the beginning of creation rather than evolving over time. As W.J.T. Mitchell notes, Owen “designed the dinosaur explicitly as a refutation of progressive evolution, treating the terrible lizards as evidence of an ‘archetypal’ theory of creation.” The structure of Hawkins’ models supported his view. Because they were architectural, they could be archetypal—they could avoid the messiness of change, the ambiguities of organic life, and the profound uncertainty that always shrouds the creatures of the past. Just as Horizon Zero Dawn‘s human-made Machines take the form of organic life but the function of machinery, so too do the Crystal Palace’s dinosaurs hide, beneath their organic forms, the ideologies and fantasies of their time. It’s more than a little ironic that the statues themselves now look like vestigial forms, waiting to evolve into the more accurate creatures of Jurassic Park. Or the more artificial creatures of Horizon Zero Dawn.
On New Year’s Eve, 1853, Owen, Hawkins, and other scientific luminaries had dinner in the belly of the Iguanodon statue, celebrating a unique and fruitful partnership between palaeontology and the plastic arts. The beast received them without objection. Today it stands there still, a remnant of the Metal World.
In the sleepy suburb of Sydenham, south-east of London, the statues of the Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park stand watch over nothing in particular. By today’s standards they look hilariously inaccurate: the Iguanodon is little more than a fat alligator, while the Megalosaurus looks like one of No Man’s Sky’s misshapen dog-like quadrupeds. They were constructed in the early 1850s to accompany the Crystal Palace after it moved from Hyde Park—where it had been the centerpiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851—to a permanent location outside the city. Hand-built from brick, cement, and iron by the great paleo-artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, these architectural constructions were the first dinosaur models ever put on public display, only a few years after the term ‘dinosaur’ itself was coined, in 1842, by Hawkins’ scientific overseer, the anatomist Richard Owen. Unlike the mastodon skeletons that had already appeared in American museums, these were not “reconstructions” but “restorations”—attempts to recapture the living form of the original beast. If the Crystal Palace was supposed to be Victorian Epcot, a kind of permanent World’s Fair, the Dinosaur Park was its Animal Kingdom.
Today, Victorian Epcot has fallen. In the nearby Crystal Palace Museum, signs written in Comic Sans—not out of irreverence or neglect but the sheer opposite: volunteerist enthusiasm—describe the Palace’s struggles with unprofitability; its degeneration into disrepute, and the fire that eventually destroyed it in 1936. Another sign describes the status of a heroic plan, bankrolled by Chinese businessmen, to rebuild the Palace on-site—or at least something “in the same spirit.” Negotiations, the signs tell us, have reached an “interesting point.” You can still see the building’s colossal footprint, once a vast machined construction of metal and glass, now a void, flanked by stairways with Sphinx statues that recall the grave of Oscar Wilde. A single white iron archway stands at the corner of the land, silently reminding visitors of the history of this place while the tinny drone of administrative announcements echo from a nearby sports complex. The archway is a kind of fossil, a tooth of the arcade, ready to be collected by latter-day Walter Benjamins. It feels ironic, maybe, that the nearby dinosaurs stand unchanged in their completeness, containing not a single fossil at all.
Horizon Zero Dawn is anchored by its own ruins of a “Metal World.” They are a source of wonder in a game that otherwise reaches conservatively for the familiar rhythms of other open-world games. They punctuate its postcard-pretty environments: on the other side of a snowy hill you might find the skeleton of a skyscraper, bent and twisted toward the sky. They reveal an ancient world that resembles our own, bearing all the touchstones of 21st century metropolitan life. Even containing some of the detritus of game development: throughout the game, you spelunk through caves that end up being cubicles, finding priceless “ancient vessels” that were once cheapo mugs.
This leaves the Metal World feeling wondrous but ultimately mundane, marked by its recognisable traces of the routines of contemporary life. The other remnants of the Metal World, the robot dinosaurs that populate Horizon Zero Dawn’s landscape, are equally mundane—because you kill so many of them—but are also equally wondrous.
The game’s map is littered with these creatures, simply called “Machines.” At the beginning of the game, you mostly encounter Watchers, humble cyclopean raptors that crane their long necks to track you with inscrutable headlight eyes. But as you progress, you move further up the food chain, and the megafauna get more and more charismatic. Some are benign, so long as you leave them alone: moose-like Grazers that flee in packs when you approach; ram-like Broadheads and bull-like Tramplers that shake the earth with their steel hooves. The really big ones, however, are profoundly aggressive and outfitted like aircraft carriers. The Tyrannosaur-like Thunderjaw sports energy cannons on its mandibles, a laser cannon in its mouth, two metal disc launchers on each hip, and an array of sensors that allow it to find you even when you’re hiding. Every encounter with one is an intense, protracted boss fight.
The story of Horizon Zero Dawn revolves entirely around the predictable premise that these creatures, once built to serve human purposes, have revolted and destroyed the human world. Yet the core gameplay loop of Horizon Zero Dawn relies on the fact that they yield to human purposes much more pliantly than the animals they resemble. Because they are machines, they are also structures with discrete component parts that lend themselves to specific interactions. Even the most elaborate encounters with the most fearsome beasts are basically games of Bop-It. Killing a Watcher is easy: you just sink an arrow into its eye. Killing a Thunderjaw is hard: an elaborate process of armor-stripping and weak-spot hitting. Yet a Thunderjaw fight is the same thing as a Watcher fight, just at a different scale. Both unfold as fortuitous meetings between puzzle-box animals and the key-holding player; the Thunderjaw just requires more keys, more actions, and more time to subdue. Each element of each animal’s form is shaped carefully to correspond to a gameplay function. The whole game subsists on this logic: intelligent design as gameplay design.
With this in mind, is it fair, or just, or even appropriate to call them animals? They are nothing like real animals; nor are they like the best animals in games, which leverage the interactivity of the medium—games are always, on some level, encounters between the human and the inhuman—to sustain an illusion of independence and alterity. Nor are they animals according to Horizon Zero Dawn, which wants to separate them from the organic wildlife that populate its landscape. Horizon takes place in a world that transitions suddenly, jarringly, between geographic extremes: arid deserts, lush jungles, snowy mountains. Despite that, you find the same ‘real’ animals in every climate: boars, turkeys, foxes, raccoons, rabbits, and trout. All of them give you the same three types of meat, which can be used, as in Far Cry, to craft upgrades for ammo pouches. Their profound generic nature as a limitless commodity—they’re basically grist for the rudimentary crafting system—is only brought into starker relief by the diversity and ferocity of the Machines. And the opposite is even more true: their status as meaningless biomass makes the Machines seem all the more alive, all the more independent, all the more animal.
At the same time, in game design terms, the Machines represent the highest possible evolution of generic open-world fauna. They are both wild and profoundly domesticated, both ‘animal’ and seductively, reassuringly artificial. Like tigers and rhinos in Far Cry, they lend unpredictability to the landscape, which wants to feel organic. But they also conform to player-centric design in ways that tigers and rhinos can’t. They do an end-run around every single problem that plagues animal representation in games, precisely by embracing artifice rather than trying to mask it. You can ride Striders and Broadheads at top speed forever, unlike the stamina-limited horses in Zelda and Red Dead Redemption. You can scan the ‘track’ of every Machine and know that it’ll patrol the same circle, over and over again, waiting patiently to be killed or mounted. You can tame them without worrying about the affective complexities of domestication; like the similarly pliant made-up animals in Avatar, they come with USB ports. You can kill them endlessly without even the slightest moral qualm.
They are the pliant automata we have always met in digital wildlands. The only difference is that their wires and gears, both aesthetically and mechanically, are exposed. And so, like Crystal Palace’s “architectural” dinosaurs they stand, amongst metal ruins of another time, not as representations, but symbols, both creatures and artefacts all at once.
Victorians were astonished by the dinosaurs at the Crystal Palace. They had to be: dinosaurs gave an age to the Earth that wasn’t the 5,000 years of Biblical creation; they revealed the possibility of a prehuman past and a posthuman future. They were massive monsters; even worse, they were gone. Yet the statues at the Dinosaur Park were not agitprop. As James A. Secord points out, they served an almost “utopian” combination of the interests of capitalism, science, public education, and art; what allowed them to serve anything at all was their artifice, which brought with it the implication that even the remote beasts of deep time could be exposed, recreated, and conquered by human ingenuity.
Richard Owen, the anatomist who oversaw Hawkins’ artworks, later became the most famous and pugnacious opponent of Darwin, clinging bitterly to the idea that all species appeared fully formed at the beginning of creation rather than evolving over time. As W.J.T. Mitchell notes, Owen “designed the dinosaur explicitly as a refutation of progressive evolution, treating the terrible lizards as evidence of an ‘archetypal’ theory of creation.” The structure of Hawkins’ models supported his view. Because they were architectural, they could be archetypal—they could avoid the messiness of change, the ambiguities of organic life, and the profound uncertainty that always shrouds the creatures of the past. Just as Horizon Zero Dawn‘s human-made Machines take the form of organic life but the function of machinery, so too do the Crystal Palace’s dinosaurs hide, beneath their organic forms, the ideologies and fantasies of their time. It’s more than a little ironic that the statues themselves now look like vestigial forms, waiting to evolve into the more accurate creatures of Jurassic Park. Or the more artificial creatures of Horizon Zero Dawn.
On New Year’s Eve, 1853, Owen, Hawkins, and other scientific luminaries had dinner in the belly of the Iguanodon statue, celebrating a unique and fruitful partnership between palaeontology and the plastic arts. The beast received them without objection. Today it stands there still, a remnant of the Metal World.
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