Ideological Maps and Colliders with Context: Remediations of Landscape in Computer Games

This paper positions computer games as a paradigm medium for landscape in the 21st century. The language we use to discuss landscape in computer games must be carefully considered and based on the unique properties of the medium. This paper combines methodologies from computer game and landscape studies to analyse the procedural function of landscape objects in game environments, and how they remediate histories of landscape.

Computer game studies outline a set of methodologies for discussing how games use fictional and procedural representations to make meaning. (Frasca 2001) (Aarseth 2007) (Juul 2007)(Bogost 2007) Hermeneutic studies of computer games describe a ‘remediating’ medium, to illustrate how the syntax of prior media such as painting, photography and film support the representational language used by computer games (Bolter and Grusin 2000). This interplay between games and historical media allows us to explore how historical narratives are similarly transferred into computer games. Jennifer Jane Marshall’s argument in favour of analysing landscape as a “subject-in-the-world” closely parallels the experience-based arguments of computer games as experienced procedural entities. This paper considers how computer games enact landscape qualities such as ‘emplacement’ and ‘region’ (Casey 2002) as well as how they remediate historical and cultural narratives embedded into the broader notion of the ‘landscape as world text’ (Cosgrove 1984).

Through a series of case studies, this paper poses specific questions of computer game landscapes: What knowledge from landscape is represented in a game simulation, and what knowledge is culled by its process of abstraction, and what is significance of this? As games remediate historical representations, what narratives of landscape are being reproduced without us noticing? This paper illustrates how we can combine the methodologies of game and landscape studies to synthesise revealing analyses of how computer games function as a paradigm medium for landscape representation in the 21st century.