The relation between virtual and realistic environments — The Lanyu island and Game Utopia

Ying Design
3 min readJan 6, 2021

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Remote study / Photo by Chia Chu

Since I don’t want to miss any part of the courses in PreMDM when I travelled to Lanyu with my family, I tried my best to find somewhere allowing me to attend the remote classes on Zoom. Therefore, after the course or group discussion, I frequently rode my motorbike to meet my family and go sightseeing of different places around the island, differentiating places on that island. In those routes, I enjoyed my own time with myself and the surroundings delightfully.

The scene at Lanyu coast

Before I arrived at the specific sights, I didn’t search for the photos or related information, so I could not see what I could see. Hence, I explored this distinguishing outlying territory and discovered special materials with my curiosity and excitement. For instance, the Tao culture is unique compared with other aboriginal tribes in Taiwan, and the geologic structure is also different from mainland Taiwan. On top of that, while riding the motorcycle surrounding the land, I suddenly felt that I am in similar circumstances, which resembles a virtual environment in a game — Utopia.

Tracking the time to a few months ago, I was addicted to Utopia, which was a new and interesting game for me. I was so into it and tuned into the virtual world at that time because of its fantastic interfaces and its free exploration experience. This game's setting naturally encourages players to go on the road for adventures with no limitation and makes them desire to dig into creative experiences or tasks.

Source from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtAlK9MbTEg

As most of the games on the market were built their fictitious landscape with real scenes by 3D modelling and other technical methods, human beings sometimes would feel similarities between reality and the virtual world and the development of state-of-art technology. Even in some cases, especially teenagers, would get addicted to it. Thus, due to Lanyu preserving plenty of the traditions and primitive landform, when I saw the scenery near the coast, it drove me back to the paradise-look game, even though I haven’t logged in it a long time.

Since the game industry and virtual business creates a buzz in recent decades and has a huge possibility of remaining a trendy topic in the following years, the phenomenon which I mentioned above assuredly will become much more even. Is this an optimistic tendency or a terrible issue for humankind? We may be likely to leave this puzzle to the futuristic generation.

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Ying Design
Ying Design

Written by Ying Design

Senior UI/UX/Graphic Designer in Vancouver who loves to make sleek visuals and experience with research. Check out my web: https://ying-lai.webflow.io 🤡🦄

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