A Sense of Place
Art can depict a place— and even provide us with a very powerful sense of that place. Videogames can do the same. But they can also let you play in that place. The place(s) can be simple disconnected levels or something more worth calling a world—a vast, rich, interconnected, textured place. At times it can feel like you are in the place and, after long hours, even like you have lived there. Games let you inhabit a place in a way that many other media do not. At the limit, this fact makes the place a part of you in a way that no other artform does. You know where you are. You know the shape of the world you’re in—what lies past that cliff, which roads lead out of the town , how to get to the other side of the kingdom. Many of the details that make up a place and even a fairly thorough geography of a world can be represented in other artforms—in novels, in films, in paintings— but, as you experience those artworks, you don’t make the place somewhere you really dwell. And that’s true even with some aids or outside help. You can study the maps that might come printed in a book series like Lord of The Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire. You might know that Winterfell is north of King’s Landing and that King’s Landing lies to the east of Casterly Rock. The novels tell you this explicitly and the tv adapation shows a map at the beginning of each episode displaying that fact.
But there’s no living map in your mind that could really guide your way around the world and the places in it. There’s no intuitive sense of what lies next to what at any fine-grained or practical level. I’ve read Sentimental Education several times and I still don’t intuitively know what monument Frederic is about to pass by as he walks down a certain street in Paris. But when you play a game— one that really makes traversal and exploration thematic—these are exactly the sorts of things you come to know. If you play Dark Souls for long enough—a game set in an entirely fictional world of Lordran— you will come to know the landmarks, the direct paths, the scenic routes, and the surprising hidden shortcuts. Things like: if you go up through that aqueduct you’ll be right back home at Firelink Shrine, or if you take that lift in Darkroot Garden you can run past a bunch of dragons (most living, one undead) to find the back way into Blighttown. You come to know all those terrible tragicomic places the merchants like to set up shop—usually somewhere out of the way, maybe hidden by some crates, or precariously positioned on a ledge surrounded by fatal falls, and there’s even one right in the middle of the death trap that is Sen’s Fortress. But you learn where they are at and how to get back there as quickly and as alive possible. Enough Dark Souls talk-for now… All that was just to illustrate how playing a game can make you into something like a local.
So yes games allow us to know a place in ways that other non-interactive (non-inhabitable?) media don’t. And this has some interesting consequences. Beyond just knowing a map and a world and the particular places and landmarks it contains and how to get around it— this rich practical understanding opens up what I call ‘place-based emotions’ or feels or moods. If you’ve ever left your hometown for awhile and eventually returned to visit—you probably felt a certain way. That sort of phenomenon is one example. Games can explore these feeling much more deeply than other media. They can evoke that feeling of homecoming, or the familiar, and also the feeling of being somewhere new, uncharted, unknown, and even the feeling of being utterly and completely lost. These place based emotions can only be conveyed to us in a second-hand way in other media. When we watch a film we can see a character feeling joy upon returning home. We can see someone else feeling excited or uneasy that they have entered a strange and unfamiliar land. But our feelings are parasitic on the character’s feelings and/or the situations portrayed. We can see the characters getting lost in a dark forest, but we do not feel lost ourselves. We do not feel any of these things for ourselves in other media. But in games it seems like we do.
The fact that games are agentive artworks makes this possible for a simple reason. You are the one who has to find your own way through the world. You have to get yourself from point A to point B and go through all the points in between. That’s something that cannot be imitated in non-interactive forms of art. The experience of traversal itself, the rich practical knowledge of particular places, and the place-based emotions are all inaccessible to us as spectators. They only show up through our agency, through being in and making our way around a world.
I think these things can be valuable and artistically significant in their own right. I’d like to continue to reflect on how different design choices surrounding traversal can emphasize different aspects of the relation between the player and the places they exist in.
[For more on this topic, see the post On Slow Travel]