------------------------------
Below is the written version of the paper I presented in the first 'Geographies of digital games' session at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference on 30th August 2017. The superscript numbers indicate the number of the corresponding slide in the embedded Powerpoint above (you can view the slides separately as a PDF here). I'd like to thank Nick Rush-Cooper for organising two excellent sessions on video games at the conference, and Regan Koch for his helpful comments on drafts of this presentation, and continued support throughout this project on the environments of walking simulators.
------------------------------
What1 does it mean to experience ‘a sense of
place’? It’s2 a term often used when we feel an environment
(physical or fictional) has strong character or personality – it’s the quality
that makes an environment distinctive. Art such as literature or photography is
said to exhibit a strong sense of place when it vividly captures what it’s like
to be in a particular location and time, even though you’re not physically
there.
Today3, I want to make the contention that a
sense of place can be experienced in virtual
worlds too, and use this to make a claim for a new conception of what ‘sense of
place’ means. To make this argument, I’m going to discuss my research into an
emerging genre of video games known as ‘walking simulators’. Walking simulators
are video games in which the gameplay is based on purposefully exploring the
environments represented onscreen to experience their affective power, rather
than the landscapes being backdrops4 to the gameplay. Instead of
winning, losing, or completing objectives, these games reward the exploration
of virtual worlds as an end in itself – to discover their stories and feel present in them.
As a geographer5, I became interested in how
these game worlds could feel believable as places,
when they are, fundamentally, constructed from computer code. What is it about
how walking sims are designed and played that can make this digital
architecture feel ‘real’ and meaningful?
To investigate6 how practices of both design and play lead to this effect, I
interviewed 11 developers involved in making walking simulators, and used
autoethnography to apprehend the player’s experience, playing 12 walking sims
myself and recording my responses using audio recording and a research diary.
Drawing these perspectives together, I attempted to render how a sense of place
can be produced through both the designed software, and the player’s own
experiences as they navigated the game worlds.
One7 of the key arguments I’m making through this
research is that a ‘sense of place’ is a mental
model of a location that is constantly
undergoing construction. In video games, the constituent parts are the
developers and their design techniques, the players’ decisions and
interpretations, and the mediating technological apparatus, all of which
interact contingently at the moment of play. To
explain how this process generates experiences of place in walking sims
specifically, I’m going to delve into three8 of their attributes: agency – the power relationships between
developers and players; aesthetics –
how the virtual location is sculpted for a particular fictional context; and performance – how these different
elements are enacted and experienced during play. Together, these sections will
outline how video games can produce a
hybrid sense of place in their virtual worlds, which I’ll then use to point
towards a new understanding of ‘place’ as a concept.
Agency9
is the degree to which you’re able to influence a world as a player. This is
largely determined by the game’s developers10, who program the
different actions a player can perform with their avatar. James Ash observed
that game designers aim to give players a distinct set of “positively
affective” possibilities in the world – a degree of control that is satisfying
in some way. But what does agency mean in walking simulators, where the
gameplay is based on letting the player explore a place to discover its stories
and emotional power?
Intriguingly, it means less11 mechanical interaction. In most walking
simulators, the small number of actions you can perform with the controller are
usually based on just walking around and looking at things. But by limiting the
range of mechanical controls, the developers I spoke to said that they intended
to create more room for interpretative interaction.
Without having to think about precise button control or fulfilling objectives,
players can concentrate more on the story and characters; interpreting what
they see and hear in the world.
The developers’ role isn’t just about removing obstacles to
thought, however. They still aim to subtly shape the flow of the experience in
walking sims using three main tools. The first12 is gating, where access to spaces is
restricted until certain conditions are met. The most common example is the
locked door, which needs a key to open. The second13 tool is
signposting, where developers highlight important objects in the environment
using lighting and sound. The final14 method is pacing, which
dictates how information is spread throughout the world.
What do these techniques achieve? Well15, they
give developers some control over how their story is told, ensuring that key
information is found by the player, and in an order and rhythm that preserves
the mood and dramatic tension of the narrative. But most importantly, none of
these tactics explicitly tell the player what they should be doing. This means
that players can still navigate the world and interpret what they discover
according to their own inclinations and frameworks of meaning.
The end result16 is a mental model that is
coherent and engaging, but also deeply personal, because it’s constructed both
by the player’s imagination and emotional dialogue with the world, and the
developers’ carefully crafted narrative architecture. Walking simulators stage
a conversation between the player and
the world, rather than simply providing a playground for players to physically
interact with. It’s a more post-structural
framework of interaction that closer reflects the personal associations we
cultivate within real-world places.
Now17, onto aesthetics.
The aesthetics of the game world determine how these core mechanics – these
building blocks of the world – are dressed to serve the story and emotional
experience the developers want to convey. As the player’s prerogative is simply
to explore, developers have to ensure that players care about the world enough
to want to investigate it.
The way18 walking simulators achieve this is
through what Henry Jenkins calls environmental
storytelling – creating worlds that have been transformed by narrative
events. In the same way psychogeographical perspectives on place contend, we
can feel the emotional resonance of such events from the traces they leave
behind in the environment. In the game SOMA19, as I explore the
alien environment of a shipwreck encrusted with sea life, I’m still able to
make out faces in photographs from the private quarters. Hearing20
about the deadly fate of the crew in sombre audio logs, I begin to feel like an
intruder as I rifle through their belongings, their bones still lying there
amongst posters and coffee cups.
Indeed21, alongside visual information, sound is a particularly effective method
of conveying the sentiment behind a narrative environment, due to its ability
to juxtapose your environment with a distinct mood or atmosphere. In Dear
Esther, as you traverse the bleak landscape of a Scottish island, a solemn
narrator contemplates his wife’s death, while the ambient sounds of wind, sea
and melancholic music reinforce the feeling of solitude.
However22, the narrative significance of the
world is not just put on a plate for the player. If this were the case, the
game wouldn’t encourage exploration, and wouldn’t effectively capture the
subtleties that define real places. Instead, by designing depth and ambiguity into
the world through symbolism and carefully hidden details23,
developers encourage an attention to detail; the psychogeographic aim of being
open to “noticing everything”. Players feel more emotionally in tune with the
world when they are asked to invest something into the world themselves, such
as their imagination24 and effort.
Of course, there is a balance to be struck here by
developers. Too much ambiguity and the world becomes ungraspable, but too much
deliberate exposure and it begins to feel fake, or like a movie. Steve Gaynor,
the lead developer of Gone Home25, has talked about how he managed
to capture the essence of a teenager’s bedroom by using just a small number of
iconic objects. All developers need to do is provide enough evocative prompts, and players will fill in the gaps,
forming their own coherent mental model of the world based on the information
available. However, believability is fragile and subjective, and can require
extensive testing by game developers to ensure that most players will find the
environment convincing as a place,
not just as a game level.
What26 we can begin to see from these examples is
how cultivating a sense of place is contingent on very finely-tuned elements of
a game’s design, but also how that design is apprehended by the player. The
final attribute I’m going to talk about today is performance – how the game’s design, the player, and the technology
come together at the moment of play to determine how a game world is
experienced.
Understanding27 how these different elements
intersect in practice is crucial,
because games are evental media. Up
until the point when the player provides input into the program, games are just
a static architecture of computer code. As Alexander Galloway puts it, games only
“exist when enacted”, even in walking simulators where mechanical interaction
is limited mostly to walking and observing.
But in fact28, it’s this combination of walking
and thinking that defines the
gameplay of walking sims, as players must draw associations between information
spread widely throughout the environment to make sense of the fictional world.
Navigating game environments becomes a performative
act29 of making connections between places and events. It’s an act
of cognitive mapping as the game is
played that determines how the narrative world is experienced.
This practice of mental mapping relies on a coherence between the mechanics and
aesthetics of the world – how the physical movement and actions of the avatar
bring the narrative information to life. However, due to the limitations of the
technology and the subjectivity of the player, any degree of attunement is
fragile. Inconsistencies30 in mental models arise when there is a mismatch between the mechanics and
aesthetics as the game is played. For example, technical glitches such as
incorrectly rendered textures like this one in Firewatch interrupt your
relationship with the game as a believable world. Elsewhere31,
the aesthetics can cause the
mismatch. In some games I would question how narrative information such as
diary entries were perfectly positioned to continue a linear story32,
which would be an unrealistic scenario in a physical place.
Clearly, attempting to create a coherent, believable virtual
world involves unique sets of human and non-human agents that are prone to
inconsistency33. As I alluded to earlier, some of this inconsistency
can be managed by testing, and even after the game’s release through updates,
bug fixes, and player feedback. Yet during play, the extent to which a sense of
place is experienced by players – and what form this takes – is dependent on
the player’s own subjective decisions, interpretations, and
more-than-representational experiences as they navigate the world, drawing
together its different mechanical and aesthetic components as they play.
Experiencing a sense of place in virtual worlds is prone both to moments of
what James Ash calls ‘attunement’, and also disconnection.
This34 account of how a sense of place is
experienced is quite unlike the traditional conception of place in geography,
born out of phenomenology, which contends that forming emotional bonds35
with environments is a given condition of being conscious, and that such
attachments are relatively settled throughout our lives. If anything,
experiencing a sense of place in video games is a fragile achievement, assembled throughout the constituent practices
of design and play.
So video games36 don’t simply deconstruct or
reproduce our relationships with the corporeal world. Instead they create new
and meaningful experiences of ‘virtual places’37, delicately
reorganising relations of human and non-human agents through the interactivity
of the video game medium.
In light of these findings, I don’t think that we as
scholars should dwell on the distinctions between our relationships with
virtual worlds and geography’s traditional conceptions of place. Instead38,
I contend that the ‘sense of place’ concept itself has to evolve and diversify to
remain useful. I want to posit the notion of a ‘post-phenomenological’ sense of
place. Post-phenomenology maintains phenomenology’s focus on experience, which after all is what a
sense of place is – it’s a kind of experience. However, it conceives
experiences as intersubjective and relational; coming into being through the
array of material and human agents which we interact with in our lives. In the
case of video games, this approach recognises how the experience of place
developed during play is an emergent
effect, which cannot be reduced to an ontological relationship between thinking
subject and environment. Rather, it’s dependent on individual events and acts
undertaken by designers and players at the times they occur, as well as the
varied and inconsistent technological systems through which these experiences
are performed into being.
In addition39 to providing a framework for
thinking about video game worlds, this approach can open up research into the
relationships we form with other virtual environments, such as those we
encounter on the internet and in smartphone applications, and how these technologies
in turn affect how we interact with physical places. It could also be applied
in reverse to non-digital artforms, to help us understand how the combination
of a work’s creators, audience, and medium influences the sense of place that
is felt as a result.
Digital technology40 is hybridising the ways in
which we interact with environments around us. And41 if there’s one
aim I want to achieve with this research, it’s to encourage academics with an
interest in place to consider42
how it can be experienced and investigated through these virtual realities too,
not just purely physical ones.43
No comments:
Post a Comment