2012 was the year my life got off track, it’s the year videogames became real: a tangible thing with stakes, and an irritating way of putting myself into every situation I could.

Videogames were it, man, a way of passively relating myself to every human being around me. Murakami, renowned Japanese Author, has a book called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I could probably put just as many words into What I Talk About When I Talk About Videogames: square me as a square, or, someone who told a friend’s art teacher in College I didn’t have a favorite book, but have you tried God Hand? That’s the Era we’re working with. Time stands still. I was going to discover something about myself in them, looking into the painting, it staring back at me.

Sunny licked blades of grass swaying in the wind, dark nights burned into the light of a CRT television, a temporary escape into the time of day during times of sick and times of cold. Dragon’s Dogma is something I could catch myself looking through the window at, urging myself to go outside on such a nice day instead of enjoying nice ones on a television. It was a stark contrast to the strange, rolling and evergreen fields of western RPG’s and the small squat forests of the desert, the ones that spring up for a week and turn into broken cattails that embed themselves in socks and sneakers, tracked back inside tile floors.

It was a strange way of life: a growing sense I was not yet a person and wouldn’t be one for a long time. Buried heads in online roleplaying communities, Dragon’s Dogma was tabletop roleplaying campaigns not yet played. It was grass, sun, stars, companions. A lonely game.

Lonely like empty trails and the same slices of nature that have been explored and re-re-explored over and over again. Mountains that get stared at on days off and never ventured to, never trekked up. Cloudy days where it all rolls and snakes through canyons and trees, a name and a space of place in nature: so much time to walk, but nowhere to really go. No destinations in mind.

There are a dozen or so games that are about hiking, stretching a pantheon from indie darlings to triple aaa success stories. Billion dollar budget affairs that manage to trap players into a way of thinking about the world around them: but that’s the appeal. At the time I got stuck in place by the medusa stare of a videogame, I was living somewhere absolutely surrounded by nature in every way. Here’s the thing about nature, though – it costs money.

Hiking, mountaineering, cross country camping, travel, as much as there’s a romanticized image of the stalwart hiker and mountain man in the minds of Americans everywhere, this is largely a convenience that betrays itself as a part of American living standards embodied by the living standards of dentists, doctors, car wash franchise owners and hotel managers. Anything more than a discrete trip to a short trail or a quick hike from car to national park is a liability for anyone other than the most practiced and toured of our long term vacationers: American yuppies with something to prove and nothing inside.

There are the other hikers, too: backpackers that share trails with vagabonds, people who have to take stock and measure of the kinds of time they have and the stress they can put on their bodies. River rafting trips through places choked by RV’s and Branded Merchandise. All through the US, we count on the secondhand detritus of out of season hiker apparel that drifts down from the REI yard sale in the sky.

Our mountain towns are facing a fun labor crisis, too, eternal vacation destinations filled with slat-roofed mansions and mcmansions and emergency rooms covered in stucco that serve a mostly ailing, aging populace. They want margaritas and craft beer as long as the music never gets too loud, and they want the restaurants to have full time staffing as long as the people who work in them wont have to live next door to them and are willing to accept a take what we give attitude.

I’m not talking about anywhere specific: just a vibe, a vibe of the recent addition to the town of Sedona, Arizona, one of those short staffed mountain towns filled with Hippie-Yuppies and middle-class moms with running mascara and roping muscles provided by Snap Fitness at 110$ a month, or 310$ if you want to upgrade to the gym with a steam room. Sedona’s been facing a housing crisis for a dozen or so years, if not longer, and has recently made amendments towards stable housing for the employees the city needs: we built you a lovely place to park with an outdoor shower. Will you come to work now?

The average price for a pair of retail, entry level hikers that won’t wear out on the road starts at 110$. Restaurant shoe website shoes for crews has footwear priced around 30-40$ for shoes that’ll last three to six putting food on ther peoples tables, often with a bottle of wine worth more than the shoes and a towel over your arm. Is this vintage okay? and so the busking crust punks write “This Ritual Has Value” on guitars.

To be one of these workers often requires a distinct love and appreciation for nature more than most people in the states get to have, and a number of hard lifestyle changes that range from everything starting with vehicle selection to the types of recreational activities you can spend money on. Expect to see the kinds of watches on every wrist that count steps, heartbeats and caloric intake: health isn’t just a lifestyle brand, it’s a set of class signifiers and costumes that come with the kinds of activities somebody can be expected to perform while in nature. Scraggly buses and vans mingle with the aforementioned RV’s, and permits for rare spots in the USA like Havasupai Falls can require extensive waiting lists and number in the triple hundreds of dollars.

This is the affair I would leave the screen for the first time I played Dragon’s Dogma to tour in for almost a decade, meeting the people and sharing stories with the minds enthralled by nature, never really understanding why I couldn’t get my friends from nearby cities to come out and visit, and I was one of the lucky ones – I’d managed to score the kind of place you can hide from the rest of the world from on your days off by knowing a guy who knew a guy, as it is that working in America’s requisite mountain towns is enough to change the class of your social costume just by who you get to associate with.

So – Dragon’s Dogma is a videogame about hiking, but the deepest fantasy of it: being on the road with just the shoes you can make, the stuff you can fit in a pack and sometimes an oil lantern to guide you in the dark. The difference between the sunlit blades of grass in a videogame and the ones in real life are we are, often, without conscience, shaped by the very nature around us, a longing for green cities and national parks that steward the land out and don’t require it to be discovered, locked behind so many paywalls.

What is this nature we’re after? What is it about nature in videogames now that has me wandering pastorally. Depictions of rolling hills next to frightening monsters, fantasies that spill out from pages of books and into fully realized hillsides where all we can do but feel the wind on our skin. Nature has turned into an affair in and of itself, and here I am back in this little box out in the countryside. There are six elm trees above me, always, shedding their leaves in cycles I basically stopped keeping up with years ago.

The Hiker is something now, a person you can be or aspire to be: mountaintop coffee posted to instagram. A set of fashion ideals and newer, more composed health based signifiers. Watches that travel steps taken, rolling it all into one set of numbers I can look at back at the end of the day – and I will talk to my friends that own them, about how I would softly go crazy if I knew that much as a number. We recreate nature now, not on the trail, but back and deep somewhere in the heart of these resort towns.

Nature is not something to be explored, romanced, looked at or dwelled on: it can only be experienced by going out there and taking photos, knowing the numbers of steps taken, monitored heart rates because the only thing most horrible besides dying, is dying in the woods and never being found. What have I seen buried beneath the art galleries and look out points, lost in the all-but-forgotten national parks?

And then there’s Dragon’s Dogma, again: some of us might even say There’s Dragon’s Dogma 2, and there she goes: yes, there are the rolling hills and ancient forests and danger lurking in the shadows. Never do you take a step without a friend there walking with you, the ever chatty Pawn crafted in our own image. In Dragon’s Dogma, we are god and bring man into the forest with us, it is spiritual in a way fantasy trends towards, I cannot feel the breadth of the wind on my skin but the setting sun is so realistic, and likewise affordable: the initial investment of a console is far more accessible than the abrupt lifestyle changes required to be outdoorsy, where anything other than complete devotion to a Patagonia brand is seen as markings of a tourist, not someone who can respect nature.

Something is coaxing the trail hikers back out into the wilderness, but what do we call it? When its polyester and offroading vehicles tricked out with the kinds of gadgets necessary to wage a one man war on crime, our pen and paper fantasies become a thing that mingles with nature. Hikers and mountain towns almost sort of crave a reverse relationship, where the town justifies nature as a reason to exist: where there are no monsters or reasons to explore, there are only mountains to summit. Where I call home should have a Whole Foods, A Cinema, all of those things to distract myself with. “I like living in nature.” I overhear at the one bar that is open late from locals. Mountains of crushed granite and red-spray paint, to match the natural hue of the landscape, you know.

It’s enough to make me crave nature through the screen again, to long for laughter that is pre-recorded and canned but seems to ebb and flow so naturally. I am far lonelier, far more adrift from the world out there in the woods where it seems so easy to make sense of things. Cloaks and daggers and fantasy: a welcome reprieve from the near constant roleplaying we bring into the woods on a daily basis.

At least, in Gran Soren, curled up under a blanket I tell myself I know I am playing pretend.