With the development of technology, photography has become our daily life. We make abundant direct, clear, and non-emotional images. Does photography allow us to understand life better? Digitalization turns photography into pixel units that can be shifted, transformed, and copied. We create a flood of images at no cost but miss the meaning of the contents. We are becoming less and less trusting of images, keeping them further away from real life. I try to probe another extreme situation. What if we are in a world completely out of reality, can we still find a trace of humanity in ourselves?

In the contemporary situation, how can we enter an unreal world? Gaming is clearly the way to go. Unlike films, games construct a complete worldview rather than a single narrative. However, not many people explore its artistry. I'm curious about how 3D game worlds are formed - from graphic design, 3D modeling, material mapping, motion design, to program computing. In the end, merge a huge number of such mods. Basically, it is created as a 'system', a so-called virtual world, from a point of view of physicality, not sensibility. This is a "non-human" perspective, such as the inability of humans to see the full depth of field clearly, the ability to travel in a time or space, etc., which seems to help us get in touch with reality beyond human experience.

However, what Takuma Nakahira pursues is to connect photography to the reality of life, which seems to be far from the virtual nature of the game world. How can we understand this virtual life? 'Open world' games are a unique category, built with reference to reality to a certain extent, in which players can explore freely without being bound by game stories, vision, time, and space. Therefore its system settings must be perfectly designed. Rather than experience gameplay as normal, I try to research the architecture in the game world. I am amazed that some games are so meticulously designed on biological ecology. Different species have their behaviours and even have specialised hunting systems. In gaming, the death of humans is often the keynote, such as in shooting and fighting games. On the contrary, the death of animals seems more precious. I stared at the corpses of animals, tried photographing the 'dead object' with 'a camera', and slowly adjusted various settings such as the viewing angle, position, exposure, focus, etc. During this process, I got a subtle strange feeling. It seems to be some kind of ceremony of respect for creatures, which is worth recording detailedly. Instead, the weight and beauty of life are represented in this virtual system, which is a rare experience in reality.

This is a different kind of creature reference book. In the game world, the fictional death makes the originally fictional life more precious, and connects me to the original appearance of life and human nature.