The Observatory You Wait Inside

Most of the places on this site turn up in games as scenery you sprint past. The Newark Earthworks got the opposite treatment: one small, free, entirely serious game that exists for no other reason than to put you inside the Octagon and make you look up. Meet the Earthworks Builders was built in 2012 by a team at Ohio State — Michelle Aubrecht, Tyler Ayres, Peter Gerstmann and Filament Games’ Dan Norton, with Christine Ballengee-Morris as principal investigator — on a Digital Humanities start-up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The ground you walk on isn’t invented: it’s an accurate 3D model of the earthworks supplied by John Hancock and CERHAS, the University of Cincinnati center that has spent years digitally reconstructing Ohio’s Hopewell sites.

You move the way you moved in Myst — clicking between fixed panoramic viewpoints, turning in place — across a landscape with nobody in it. That emptiness is deliberate. Rather than risk a stereotyped rendering of the people who built the place, the designers stripped out human figures entirely, and stripped out words too, on the reasoning that language carries culture with it. What’s left is grass, embankment walls, a tree line, and a very large sky.

The sky is the game. The interface tracks the day, the month and the year, and the moon drags a glowing trail behind it that lingers for several rotations before fading — a visual record of where it has been rising, so you can start to guess where it will rise next. Winning means standing on the observatory mound, facing the right way, in the right year of the moon’s 18.6-year standstill cycle, and watching the northernmost moonrise land exactly where the walls say it should. Get it right and the world quietly rewards you: brighter stars, the Milky Way, constellations drawing themselves in, birdsong and wind and water arriving in a place that started out silent. It is, as far as we can tell, the only game whose victory condition is an alignment that comes around roughly twice a generation.

It never grew past a prototype. Releases stop in late 2012, a follow-up grant application went in, and the whole thing was built in Flash — which means the game about a monument that outlived its own civilization is now itself a ruin, sitting on a public GitHub page in a format almost no browser will run. There’s a joke in there somewhere about durable media. The Hopewell encoded an 18.6-year cycle into seventy thousand tons of earth and it still works; we encoded it into a .swf and lost it in eight years.