Occasionally in a game I’ll look up and I’ll notice the clouds. I’ll be shooting someone, or collecting something, or just walking over the crest of a hill as I follow a waypoint marker, and my gaze will drift upwards, entirely unmotivated, and-
-And suddenly I’ll see the huge bowl of the sky overhead. Maybe there will be thunderheads, those towering stormclouds that turn to anvils at their summits, lurking on the horizon. Maybe there will be a lacy veil of high atmosphere clouds dithering away to an iridescent nothing. Whatever’s there, it’s always a moment to stop and to marvel. It’s an intrinsic pleasure, pure unnatural natural beauty, suspended above a landscape that sometimes foregrounds extrinsic pleasures: map icons, quest-givers, the kind of loot that comes in treasure chests.
Then what? Then I’ll move on, caught up once more in the map, the quest, the endless hunt for treasure, and I’ll forget what I saw in the sky.
And I do something like this everyday. A lot of us do. Testify: “If a glorious sunset of Altocumulus clouds were to spread across the heavens only once in a generation, it would surely be amongst the principle legends of our time.” That’s Gavin Pretor-Pinney, the founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, writing in his book, The Cloudspotter’s Guide. Altocumulus, despite the solid, bunched-up name, are those high clouds that form in scattering wheat fields across the mid-level of the sky, a perfect vehicle for absorbing the stains of woozy evening sunlight. “Yet most people,” Pretor-Pinney continues, “barely seem to notice the clouds…” So much drama up there, and somehow we see it and move on, head down, stumbling towards Tesco for a meal deal. Floating canyons, roving scouts made of nothing more than moisture. A whole world of beauty, and it irises out in our peripheral vision.
Anyway. A few months ago I re-read The Cloudspotter’s Guide, which was originally published in 2006, and I decided to become more attentive to the clouds. I went for long, meaningful walks and imagined myself tiny under the sky. I would break off mid-sentence, often while talking about where to go to lunch, to set my cold eyes on the horizon line where I would watch the slow, noble passage of Stratocumulus as if I was watching old friends go off to war. This annoyed almost everyone, but I didn’t mind. I was hooked, hooked on clouds, hooked on the cloud word horde, which is rich and deep: Cirrus, Nimbostratus, Cumulonimbus. And since I play a lot of games, I started to look up more from those virtual playgrounds to see what someone had laid out in the sky above me.
Clouds in games seemed particularly interesting, in fact. Here was nature entirely manufactured and yet entirely convincing. Here was beauty and drama that someone had created in the awareness, surely, that, while it needed to be there, it would largely go unnoticed. Video game clouds seemed to sum up something that’s crucial to our experience of clouds in the wider world in this regard. If the clouds weren’t there, we’d feel their gaping absence. But when they are there, we struggle to see them. I wanted to know more about all this stuff. I wanted to know about clouds, and why they should bewitch us. And I wanted to know if all the skies I’d been looking at in games made sense. So, following the impulse of every good cloudspotter, I went straight to the top.