This is the eighth article in the Playing Inside: Board Games, Video Games, and the Indoors series, which explores the ways that board games, video games, and other types of indoor play impact and guide our understanding of the environment.
I’ve spent too much time playing Warcraft. There are three games in the series, but the first, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) was the popularizer of the Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre of computer games. As the name suggests, players choose to play as either humans or orcs, similar to choosing between the white and black pieces in chess. Regardless of which race you pick, the player experiences the game from a god’s-eye view, looking down on a castle-like structure and five interactive worker “units.” Human workers are called peasants, while the orc workers are called peons. RTS games are like a mix of chess and Risk but with many more variables to contend with.
Even though the point of the game is warfare, the first thing the player does as they look down on this world is command the worker units to start gathering gold and lumber and building different structures. When gathering lumber, you see your peon unit chopping one of the hundreds of trees that fill the game “map.” The peon then brings a bundle of lumber to the player’s castle, raising the total resources displayed on the screen by +10.
If you allow them, the peon will gather lumber the entire game if they aren’t killed by the opponent or haven’t chopped down all the trees. As the players deforest the map, the peons move further away from the base to collect lumber and accumulation slows. The player can spend resources to buy “upgrades” that are meant to represent improvements in lumbering technology as the game progresses. These upgrades increase how much lumber a worker unit carries each trip and the speed of work. After these upgrades, the peons no longer make mistakes, get tired, resist, or have individual incentives and choices. Each peon the player creates requires resources, but they aren’t compensated for their work. They are perfect automatons. Similarly, the forests are some imaginary ideal type of forest. The trees don’t vary in size, species, width, hardness, or health. It’s a scientific forester’s dream!
Lumbering is not the point of Warcraft. Few people have thought as much about the forests and workers in Warcraft as I have. The game, after all, is about war. Players gather resources to build cities and train armies, which they use to battle other players with their own bases and units. People like Warcraft, and other RTS games like the popular StarCraft, because, from the vantage point of a god, they have complete control of fantasy worlds. As gods, they wield political economy and natural resources like players in other games wield swords and guns. In fact, in RTS games, players don’t have guns or swords because they don’t need an avatar. You, the player, are simultaneously an invisible king, general, and central planner. You float above the action, commanding the most minute actions of dozens of peons and military units. With keyboard and mouse players orchestrate and animate imaginary civilizations.
Reflecting on the game I wonder how the god’s-eye view shaped, and helped to shape, people’s collective understanding of political economy and history. The popularity of RTS games suggests that many long for the control inherent in a god’s-eye view. They like to think about history and the economy from the same perspective. It makes a complex and nuanced world manageable, and, as the word manageable implies, this vantage point gives readers, writers, and researchers a feeling of control. The problem is that a god’s-eye view fails to see the nuances of political economy, social relations, and the relationship between humans and the more-than-human.
Seeing like a peon
What would it mean to alter our perspective and take the view of the peon? How might a ground eye-view give us a better understanding of agency in RTS games and in the environmental humanities? I am not the first to consider how perspective affects the conclusions that writers, researchers, politicians, and technocrats reach. In his famous book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott uses scientific forestry as a device to explain how high-modernist state planners disrupted traditional cultures because they failed to understand local traditions that mediated encounters between human and more-than-human nature”. Throughout the book, Scott uses the term “synoptic view,” and the metaphor of a god’s-eye view, to describe the oversimplified perspective of modernist planners and foresters.1
Forestry is an ancient craft, but it modernized and professionalized in the long nineteenth century in several countries, including the United States. Unlike modern foresters’ medieval and early modern precursors, who were primarily interested in preserving forests as game habitat, modern scientific foresters saw the forest as mathematical abstractions.2 They created idealized “forest types” based on average soil composition, topography, longitude, latitude, and other factors. They sometimes created maps denoting forest types. They dreamed of perfect ecologies with clone-like trees.
Early foresters might have never needed to deal with the material nuances of forest land because when it came to conducting improvements or logging timber, the forester simply wrote up a contract to give to a logger with new progressive logging rules specified within. Using maps, contracts, new laws and policies, local people became peons that foresters ordered, incentivized, and punished to accomplish their own objectives. Foresters sought the perspective and the control that Warcraft players have.
Right: This map of Urania Lumber Company’s land in central Louisiana was created in 1926 by Yale Forestry School students. Most maps, and most forestry plans take a God’s-eye-view of land, work, and people. Bragg, Don C. 2020. A century of Forest Service research and development in the southern United States: Historical documents and images. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive.
It is questionable to what degree early foresters knew how to conduct a logging operation. In 1918 German trained forester and University of Michigan professor Filbert Roth wrote in the Journal of Forestry “[t]he expert knowledge of the forest was generally not possessed by the man at the central office and by the [land] owners; the forest expert of the lumber industry was the foreman of the logging camp … and what little these men had of forestry knowledge they keep to themselves.”3 In other words, forestry knowledge preceded the birth of scientific forestry.
Despite foresters’ and video game players’ dreams of control, loggers have always had a ground-eye view of the forest.4 Referring to the intangible aspects of logging one of the US founding fathers of forestry Henry Graves declared in the Forestry Quarterly in 1912 “[l]umbering is unique only in that… [it has] not been systematized either in theory or practice.”5 This unsystematized set of skills and knowledge is what Scott called “metis.”6 In the United States and Canada it had various names: wood-skill, woods-lore, woods-wisdom, woods-usefulness, or even woods-philosophy. Those who mastered these skills were called woodsmen, woodsbosses, or lumberjacks.7 Forestry students and rangers spent years attempting to gain this knowledge during their training in ranger schools or universities.
The best foresters could hold both a synoptic and ground-eye view of forests at the same time, but it was not easy. The synoptic view was seen as more essential than the ground eye view. Modernist foresters assumed changes of real scale couldn’t happen without a god’s-eye view, nuanced be damned. For the father of American forestry, Gifford Pinchot, this meant influencing the president and creating a forestry bureaucracy in the federal government. Although, for many other American foresters, becoming government technocrats working for Pinchot’s Forest Service (1905) was a high enough perch. Not coincidentally, the god’s-eye view is the vantage point of power, control, and command. Something about the time that early foresters lived in, or the class perspective that they carried with them, made it difficult for them to envision woodsmen mobilizing progressive change from the ground up. Today many crave the synoptic view of the world and the power it bestows. When we play RTS games, we climb into these seats of power (without having to pay for four years of technical education!)
But Warcraft is not only fun because we command and control; the game allows us to ignore nuances. Nuance and unpredictability are at the heart of economics, as well as social and natural ecology. Nevertheless, in Warcraft, players wield perfect control of cities, forests, armies, and economies. The contest within the game is over who is a better controller. This complete control of people and land is more fantastical than any army of green-skinned orcs. While fantasy is great for games, we should not aspire for this type of view of the world or this type of control in real life
Victory!
In Warcraft, if the player successfully manages their political economy and defeats their enemies, a message pops up on the screen declaring “Victory!” The winner is the player, an invisible planner, general, and autocrat. Mindless peons—the actual laborers—get no credit. In computer games, forestry, and the humanities, the god’s-eye view misplaces agency. Nevertheless, too much history and too many histories of forestry and conservation are told from this vantage point. From this perspective every successful forestry plan, and the successes of the early twentieth century conservation movement, was the result of the management practices of foresters, politicians, and other technocrats.
Whether reading a book or playing a game, a god’s-eye view can trick us into thinking that gaining power over people and land is the best way to complete objectives, yet this is never the case. If fantasy is escapism, then Warcraft demonstrates our long for perfect control over people and things. True change comes from the collective action of people imperfectly working towards goals. From the ground-eye view, it is clear that loggers, rangers, ranchers, the turpentine collectors, Civilian Conservation Corps recruits, and other workers actually conserved forests. Real workers were not automatons like peons in Warcraft. Workers failed at tasks, they resisted orders, they invented new ways of doing things. Workers solved an endless series of physical and mental micro problems in the moment. This was conservation. Workers’ metis was necessary to get anything done in an ever-changing natural world. What emerges from this perspective—from the perspective of the peon—is a working-class history of conservation. And when conservation was successful, workers were the winners. Victory!
[1] James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, (Yale University Press, 1998)
[2] Henry E. Lowood, “The Calculating Forester: Quantification, Cameral Science, and the Emergence of Scientific Forestry Management in Germany,” in Tore Frangsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider, eds. The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 315-342.
[3] Filbert Roth, “The School-Trained Forester,” Journal of Forestry, 16, no. 8 (1918): 856.
[4] Richard White, “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996).
[5] Herman Chapman, “The Forest Service and Its Men,” Journal of Forestry 16, no. 6 (1918): 653. Also see R.T. Fisher “Methods of Instruction in The Forest School,” Forest Quarterly, Volume VIII, (Cambridge MA 1910)
[6] Scott, Seeing Like a State, 313
[7] Jason L. Newton, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest (West Virginia University Press, 2024) 28, 162-163; Craig William Kinnear, “Cruising for Pinelands: Knowledge Work in the Wisconsin Lumber Industry, 1870–1900.” Environmental History 21, no. 1 (2016): 76–99.
Jason Newton
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- Seeing like a Peon: Warcraft and Perspective in Forest History - December 3, 2025