Colliders with Context: Trees in First Person Shooter Computer Games

This paper analyses the tree as an object in first person shooter computer games to explore how the experience of a computer game environment can be an experience of landscape, and how a computer game relates to histories of landscape representation. I position computer games as a paradigm medium for representing landscape in the 21st century by demonstrating how the methodologies used to analyse computer games and landscapes can work together to form a productive and revealing language for understanding computer games as landscapes, and as continuations of deeper historical narratives. If this approach can be justified, we can then look within computer game landscapes to see how they reflect on broader concerns of landscape studies, such as contemporary relationships to the physical environment. Trees were selected to support this goal because they are a typical placeholder for the organic world, but are also highly mutable in their symbolic content. Within game environments, the qualities of trees have enough variation that a meta-discussion of landscape concepts between games might be facilitated by these qualities. My analysis is a close reading of three first person computer games. By choosing a small and related set of games, I compare and contrast the experiential and intertextual differences within a narrow and comparable possibility space. From the results of this initial analysis, I consider how these qualities can be located alongside the qualities of trees in the history of landscape theory. By connecting trees in computer games with trees in historical landscape representations, this paper questions how previous histories of landscape representation can influence our interpretation of computer games, as well as how the unique affordances of computer games can affect our understanding of the possible functions of landscape representation.