Video games present us with a unique experience unlike that of any other form of media.  Video games combine elements of film, music and art to create a profound, interactive experience for the gamer.  While video games have been a fairly recent development compared to that of film and music, the genre is quickly gaining prominence in the entertainment world, earning billions of dollars in sales annually.  What makes the experience of video games truly unique is the relationship between the player and the simulated geography within a game.  Not only do video games facilitate this relationship, but each game approaches it differently, leading to hundreds of ways of experiencing the concept of simulated space.  For the purpose of this paper I will be discussing some of the geographic concepts learned in class and in the readings, as well as relating them to some video games of my own choosing.

The definitions of place and space are interesting when chosen to be applied to video games.  Cresswell’s definitions of place and space are geographical in nature while Nitsche’s are more conducive to the nature of video games (though drawn from Lefebvre) .  Cresswell defines place as material and having historical as well as personal significance.  A place is fixed in space, which is the abstract concept of moving through a place.  Space is everything that place is not.  Cresswell states that particularly  successful media conveys a profound sense of place, as if “we have been there before.”  Lefebvre’s definitions of “absolute space” and “social space” are essentially Cresswell’s definitions of space and place, respectively.  Nitsche uses the concepts of absolute and social space to put forth ideas about place and space in gaming.  Nitsche states that “video games are social spaces understood as ‘narrative landscapes.’”  What Nitsche is trying to say here is that gamers create their own sense of place through their interactions with virtual space.  These interactions create a narrative unique to that player.   

Maps are important when trying to navigate any place, virtual or otherwise.  The player’s mental map can be extremely different from an in-game map, however both are used to orient the player.  An interesting example of a video game map can be seen in SSX: On Tour.  On Tour is a 2005 snowboarding and skiing game released by EA.  The virtual mountain has no limits until you reach the bottom, and an average ride down the whole mountain takes at least 20 minutes.  There is no in-game map, however the player does select events to participate in from a map of the slopes.  What is interesting is that this map somehow effectively represents a 3-dimensional mountain on a 2-dimensional plane.  Navigation in-game doesn’t rely on maps, but the player recognizes landmarks in relation to the event map, despite it looking nothing like the mountain.

Works Cited
1.     Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. Print.

2.     Nitsche, Michael. Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Game Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008. Print.

Actraiser

Throughout the course, I've found that I'm more drawn to certain geographic principals over others and have naturally chosen games that reflect those themes. Actraiser plays with a couple of my favorites. Firstly, it is playful with its shifting perspectives. In the game, your view changes from an overhead god like figure that impacts the landscape in order to manipulate the fortunes of tiny villagers to a close in, Castlevania like exploration of the individual areas that make up the panoply. This plays with two geographic concepts we covered.

First, the idea of landscape versus place or space (discussed in the first lecture). If a space is just a location and people make it a place, then a landscape is simply a zoomed out view of an area, untouched by the viewer. There can be people within it but you, the beholder, is not. The game shifts between these two perspectives freely.

Second, the idea of Nitsche's “Forms of Presence” is invoked, though not fully explored. In both senses, the world and people within it react to you, and you feel a part of it, but in very difference ways. You slide along the spectrum from impacting things directly on a large scale (terraforming) to a small scale (smacking a monster with a sword). In both instances you invoke all three elements of presence but in godmode, you have the illusion of being less in the world.

Gone Home

One of the most important things we've covered, or at least interesting from my perspective, is the idea of a sense of place. A lot of things can contribute to that but one thing that stuck with me was when, in lecture, you mentioned that it has to do with how easily one could imagine being in the place in question. To my mind, Gone Home accomplishes that with aplomb.

When exploring the empty home in this game, great pains are taken to make it feel like the player is experiencing the same thing as the character: coming home to an empty house after a long absence. Though the gameplay is focused on finding out what happened to your family in the interim, the house itself feels as lived in as any game environment I've ever experienced. The father's office is littered with an appropriate number of failed drafts and discarded stories (he's a writer). The younger sister has just been exposed to riot girl music and has decorated her room to match. The master bedroom features his and her bedside lamps, signaling a couple that spends more time reading in bed separately than enjoying one another's company. The entire experience feels like walking into a strangers home, not house, which is a large part of the appeal.

Dark Souls

Dark Souls immediately came to mind when we started talking about concepts in mapping.  Not only is it my favorite game of all time, it's also a wonderful example of how 3d games resist accurate 2d representation, the same way real places do. Similar to how almost every globe is inaccurate by necessity, I feel like most 3d games, especially those that take advantage of their Y axis, make poor candidates for maps. The world of Dark Souls is vertical and interconnected. There is a very clear highest point in the game and a very clear lowest and you can often see one side of the world from the other. Between these extremes are a web of stortcuts, switchbacks, elevators and sidepaths. The entire thing reads perfectly and logically in play but falls down as a representation.

Another thing Dark Souls does extraordinarily well is express narrative through geography. We're never told that Anor Londo was once inhabited by both giants and men but we do see a staircase that features two sizes of steps. We're never told that the knight Iron Tarkus fell to his death traversing the precarious temple rafters but we find evidence of his breaking the window to get in and his armor set strewn on the ground below. The placement of detail in the world explains the world to you without ever actually expressing it directly. There isn't a game that combines narrative and geography better, to my mind.

Jet Grind Radio

When I found out that we'd be discussing sound in games, my first thought was to talk about Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a consummate spooky game that uses sound to build atmosphere. But then I started thinking of how sound could contribute to a more specific sense of place than just a vague sense of foreboding.

Jet Grind Radio is a triumph of unified aesthetic. Every part of it recalls a specific slice of Japanese youth culture, that of Shibuya Kei music fused with American punk. The bands featured on the uniformly excellent soundtrack typify the styles of the area and time. This wouldn't be noteworthy on its own but it's nice that they didn't ignore the audio element when every other element is working so damn hard. The graphics are blocky, timeless and hip and the anti police sentiment is punk as hell and resonant now. It would have been easy to include a simple driving soundtrack rather than such authentic weirdness.

-​Gary Butterfield

Geographic Discussion of an Element of a Game

The game chosen for this assignment was Fallout: New Vegas. Set 200 years in the future in an alternate universe where the Cold War was prolonged for decades more and ended with an all-out nuclear exchange, the game sees the player character wander the post-apocalyptic desert wasteland of the Mojave desert and related locales. While the game does have a story (and one with myriad branches), it naturally has a strong emphasis on exploration and wandering the desert. Throughout the desert the player can find the ruined remains of retrofuturist gas stations and other such buildings, the rotting skeletons of the old world that evoke a bygone era. The world presented is both familiar and foreign; the style of the 1950s still lives on in many buildings in America, but seeing it permeate a world of post-apocalyptic ruin creates an interesting sense of dissonance. The presence of real-world sights (or their copyright-free analogues) in the form of places like Las Vegas proper, the Hoover Dam, Interstate 15, and other such locations also accomplishes a similar goal. They invite the player to both examine and recoil from the landmarks provided as they become unsettled by the alteration or destruction of something familiar, and allow the player to potentially attach meaning to a place because of that unsettling nature.

A Game with an Interesting or Powerful Sense of Place

Here we examine a game with a sense of “place” that is strongly grounded in the real world. The 2012 game Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat, based on a Source engine mod of the same name from years prior, is set in the middle of the US-Iraq War of 2003-20011. The game takes place in various locales that strongly resemble the war torn urban and rural landscapes of Iraq and Afghanistan during the US occupation, and pits two teams consisting of “security forces” (clearly meant to represent US armed forces) and “insurgents” (consisting of player characters who look and sound vaguely Middle Eastern) against each other. The game offers two modes (multiplayer player-vs.-player and cooperative player-vs.-environment) with various game types that revolve around scenarios that could, with varying degrees of plausibility, occur in an actual warzone. The equipment seen in the game also has a degree of historical and realistic accuracy, speaking relatively for a first-person shooter; the game only features weapons that would have been seen in actual use by the depicted factions in the time frame portrayed. The game’s mechanics also place emphasis on teamwork, patience, and strategy; guns are almost as lethal as they are in reality and a player can usually only take one or two hits from the enemy before they are killed, forcing them to wait a significant amount of time before they respawn in the form of “reinforcements”.

The game is very obviously a simulation of the highly-publicized and televised Iraq War. Everything about the setting places the player into an imagined – though very imperfect – replication of the stereotypical environments from that conflict. There is little if any mistaking the game for anything but an Iraq War game; the player models, weapons, environments, team names, team-specific announcers, diegetic voice lines, even the game’s “cover art” (though it was digitally distributed) and title are all evocative of the conflict, and flawed though they may be when examined with a strict eye for realism, they work together extraordinarily well to create the idea in the player’s mind that they are watching or taking part in a simulation of military operations in the Iraq War. It is a theme park-like game, but it is one that easily makes you forget that you’re in a theme park.

Maps in Video Games

One interesting example of maps in video games is the in-game map in Fallout 3, set in the ruins of Washington DC and its surrounding areas. Like its previously-described successor Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 3 places great emphasis on wandering and exploration. To this end, an in-game map is absolutely vital, but in the game, the map is not only in-game – it is a part of the character and setting. Each player character wears a device on their wrist that is effectively a personal computer, granting the character (and its player) access to things like inventory management, statistics tracking, the ability to tune in to the radio stations present in the game space, and among other things, a map that keeps track of the locations the player character has visited. The wasteland is extensive – in Fallout 3 there are over a hundred locations to visit, many named but some unnamed and unmarked. Each of them is unique and tells a story, or suggests one to the player who then is able to construct one in their own imagination. Players will frequently regale each other on sites such as forums and image boards with stories of their encounters in the game world, such as how they felt upon discovering a fallout shelter full of skeletons, or how they took several playthroughs to find an out-of-the-way or outright hidden location, or even how the same location was experienced in vastly different ways in different playthroughs.

The game map aids in two things: the maintenance of presence in the game and the creation of story maps. Because the map is presented as an object in-game and the player is never fully removed from the game environment, their immersion is not affected like it would be in another game. The map also provides a kind of visual framework for the player to understand and contextualize their experiences in the game world; without a map, they would be left to construct relationships between locations and narratives on their own.

Sound in Game Spaces

While there exist many excellent examples of sound in game spaces, the game I want to discuss here is Portal 2. The game, set in the remains of a scientific testing facility, involves using a “portal gun” to open interconnected portals on flat surfaces, allowing the player to abuse physics to solve puzzles and escape from the facility.  Throughout the facility there are various tools and environmental objects that form parts of the puzzle or its solution, and each of these things has a musical cue associated with it. These musical cues, which sound off when the player is near to or engages with that object or part of the environment, are woven in to the game’s music but also help to serve as functional indications of the space the player is operating in. The soundtrack of the game itself is procedurally generated and reacts to the player’s progress through a level. Each additional interaction with a new object as well as its successful utilization in the puzzle adds successive components to the soundtrack, culminating with a “finished” piece when the player has solved a puzzle.

Ultimately, Portal 2’s soundtrack blurs the line between the functionality of sound effects and the mediation of music. Not only does the music itself become a sound effect, but the functionality of sound effects become a part of the emotional mediation provided by the soundtrack. The game ties together mechanics and music in a way very much unlike that of the numerous games which have done so before it, such as DDR or Guitar Hero.

-​Fisher Shattuck

Example 1: Sid Meier’s Civilization V

Civilization V (Abbreviated as Civ V) is an excellent example of geography that plays a very important role in how the player interacts with the game. Civ V is a game about building your empire, gathering resources, settling cities, and developing your nation. The game starts off in 3000 BCE, and you begin with only one basic technology; agriculture. From there, you research mining, trapping, archery, and animal husbandry. As the game goes on, your borders expand, you settle new cities, meet other civilizations, and befriend city-states. The game will progress scientifically into the future, where you can eventually build death robots and nuclear missiles to wage war on your opponents.

As you can imagine, geography plays a very important part of this game not only because of the military tactical aspect, but also the resource gathering aspect. If you are in the early 1900’s and you just researched flight, you’re going to need oil to be able to build your planes. Unfortunately, oil only becomes visible on the map once you research a certain tech. So it’s possible to find out you have no oil until it’s already too late. In this scenario, you have several options for how you can acquire the resource you need. You can either ask a neighboring civ to trade you the resource for something they need, you can settle a city somewhere where the resource is, or you can raise an army and do a hostile takeover of any civ with that resource. So geography is very important in the placement of your cities, as well as the arrangements of your troops, farms, mines, universities, navy, plantations, roads, ect. Where you settle and how you expand your empire early in the game can greatly affect your production and resource pool late in the game. 

Example 2: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 

The week that I submitted this screenshot, we were discussing the concept of space versus place. One of the first games that came to mind to submit was Majora’s Mask. In MM, at the center of the world is Clock Town, a small area where the majority of the population of the land of Termina resides. In Clock town, there is a bomb shop, a general goods store, a bank, a curiosity shop, several minigame shops, an inn, a post office, and a few residential buildings. You spend most of your time in Clock Town running from building to building gathering supplies, completing quests, looking for heart pieces, or just passing through on your way to another area. You pass through Clock Town quite frequently over the course of your adventure, so you grow to remember the people and layout of the town. But what makes Clock Town truly a place rather than a space is the NPCs who inhabit it. 

The NPCs in Clock Town aren’t just static models who stand in one spot and give you one or two speech options. No, every NPC in Clock Town has a name or title, a schedule, a backstory, and have a quest attached to them. Now, the unique aspect of Majora’s Mask is that the moon is falling, and you only have three days to stop it. If you run out of time, you are forced to use the Ocarina of Time to go back in time three days and try again. Because of this, you see each NPCs schedule played out many times over the course of each playthrough. You eventually learn that the Stockpot Inn opens at 10am every day, that the Postman delivers the mail at noon every day, and that at exactly 10pm on the second day, the Bomb Salesman’s wife makes her delivery of Big Bomb Bags. In this way, every time you pass through Clock Town, you see the citizens going about their daily business, and you begin to remember their schedules, and if you need to interact with them for a quest, you have to look at your clock, and try to remember where that NPC would be and what they would be doing at that time. You develop a certain fondness for all the people and places around Clock Town, and it becomes a familiar second home. Especially since it’s one of the four places in the entire game where no monsters will attack you. Because of all these aspects, Clock Town becomes the most important place in all of Majora’s Mask, and because of that, even today I could tell you exactly when Kafei checks his mail, or when the Milk Bar opens, or when the Curiosity Shop gets the Nighttime mask in stock. Clock Town will always be a Place for me, filled with the NPCs I watched live their lives as I tried to save their town. 

Example 3: Fez 

For week four we were required to submit a map from a game that we found interesting. I submitted the map from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, but since I already wrote about a Zelda game, I decided to write about Fez, which has a much more interesting map, in my opinion. I hope that’s okay.

Fez is a sidescrolling puzzle game where the object of the game is to explore the whole map and collect various cubes until you collect all 32 light cubes, all 32 dark cubes, and all 4 artifacts. Sounds simple, right? Not quite. Fez is unique because of one game mechanic, the ability to rotate the map 90 degrees on the y-plane. This makes every level a three dimensional map that you can only see 25% of at any given time. You use this ability to access hidden platforms, find secrets, and do all sorts of creative puzzle solving. Fun fact: the game has been out for a little over two years, and there is still one room that nobody has been able to solve. The game has its own language of symbols, and in this room, there is a singular monolith covered in these symbols. When you input various directions on the keyboard, certain symbols light up. The symbol alphabet has been translated time and time again, but so far nobody has been able to figure out how to unlock the secret of the monolith room.

Since the game is played in a three dimensional space, the map is three dimensional as well. The rooms are arranged in cubes, connected by lines to show which rooms lead to one another. You also have the ability to rotate the map, same as you would the screen when you’re in the game itself. It has a legend as well, so you can see the nearest warp gates, cubes, and puzzles that you have yet to solve. When you find everything there is to find in a room, the tile changes to a gold tint, to tell you that you have no reason to go back there. Overall the map in Fez is extremely interactive and useful in navigating the otherwise confusing maze of worlds with secret after secret waiting to be discovered. 

Example 4: Crypt of the Necrodancer 

Our most recent screenshot submission was required to be a game that uses sound or music to enhance the player’s experience. That was timed perfectly, because I had just recently purchased Crypt of the Necrodancer on Steam. This game started out in early development as your average turn based top-down roguelike procedurally generated dungeon crawler, but when the developer was playing through it one day while listening to Michael Jackson’s Beat It, he found himself playing to the beat. This sparked his imagination, and he decided that in order to play the game, you had to move to the beat. This spawned the name Necrodancer, and the game practically developed itself from there. Every push of an arrow key moves your avatar one space, or attacks one time. But in order to keep moving, you have to keep up with the tempo of whatever song is playing, which makes the faster songs even harder. 

In Necrodancer, every enemy has their own movement patter. For example, the green slimes just bounce in place, while the blue slimes move up and down. Skeletons raise their arms when they are about to jump, and the Red Dragons’ movement pattern is stop, move, charge fire, breathe fire. You have a window of two beats to hit the dragon, then move out of the way of its fire blast. Because of this, fighting some of these monsters takes lots of practice and knowledge of their movement patterns. This makes the game fun and challenging at the same time. Necrodancer utilizes music perfectly to create a game mechanic never seen before in that genre of gaming.

​-Aaron Secrist

Dark souls 

The game Dark souls is a dungeon crawler with a map that challenges players to not only traverse but connect each place by means of passageways. The story is non linear and the player only knows, once they gain access to Firelink Shrine (the central hub of the game, where NPC’s are most present), that in this world, there are two bells that need to be rung. It is up to the player to find the two bells and ring them. The player is not told what will happen when the two bells are rung, only that they need to be rung. The player is first informed of the bells and their vague location through an interaction with the NPC Crestfallen Warrior. In Dark Souls the NPC’s assist the character by informing them of areas, again vaguely, and then give the player their personal opinions. The NPC’s range from happy to melancholy and every where in­-between. 

The NPC Crestfallen Warrior tells the player character “I used to be an adventurer like you. But, then I gave up.” This NPC sets the tone for the entire game and informs the player character that there are indeed other adventures like himself. Some NPCs will reveal they are upset with their own actions, such as getting themselves locked in a house while adventuring or express, to the player character, the duty they have and its personal importance. The player begins to understand why the NPCs feel so strongly because the game is a grueling process of trial and error, the player character will die and repeat most scenarios several times over before reaching the next bon fire (a loose version of a checkpoint). There are no save points and every action the player makes is permanent (no save slots to write over if you get curious and want to test actions that might lead to other scenarios). That being said the game demands a lot from the player and the players struggle and joy is reflected by NPCs. 

The NPCs create a rich world for the player. What would otherwise be another RPG in which there is a clear defined protagonist (the player) and an ultimately evil antagonist (the final boss) Dark Souls moves away from this cliche by giving the player character opportunities to piece together a story which is undefined. the player character comes across many NPCs which aid in telling fragments of the story which the player is currently playing. The absence of narrative creates an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue. because the game is so difficult it makes the player ask themselves “Why am I doing this?”. From here the player becomes involved in their own created story. "I left the bonfire and eventually walked down a mountain pass. The pass led to a massive decaying dragon holding on to a mountain’s side. I killed the dragon, who aside from regurgitating poison could not move. I picked up the items (Sword of Astora, Dragon Crest Shield and a Soul of a Proud Knight) that were once in front of the dragon. I read the items descriptions which led me to believe sometime ago a great knight and this dragon fought. The fight ended in the demise of the knight and left the dragon crippled and grasping to the side of the mountain pass." That story was not created by the developer but by the player. Though that story leads to no consequence the player has still experienced it. In a game world which has no clear narrative and the players actions seem painfully futile, the created side stories shape the story for each player separately leading to unique interpretations of each players experience

Darkest Dungeon 

The game Darkest Dungeon assumes no protagonist. There is also no antagonist. True there is a goal “ To reclaim the lands from the infesting evil.”­Narrator. But there is no story to follow aside from the narrator who enlists volunteers to help him close the otherworldly portal he opened in his once great families’ Mansion. From the perspective of the player there are two locations in the game. One being the seemingly never ending amounts of dungeons (all geographically similar side scrolling) and the other is the town, a god like first person perspective. The town is interesting from a geography point of view because all of the places the character could go to are presented in one place in time. There is no traveling like there would be in a third person perspective game. In this way the game is observational, the world is described right in front of the character and continues without the players input. 

Dungeon crawl 

In this game there is no music and there are no state of the art graphics. The game is made of 8 bit graphics and the player moves one square at a time. The game is presented from a top down angle but the player is not disconnected from the world like in The Darkest Dungeon. The player is not god. What is interesting about this game is the player has no goal other than to reach the Orb of Zod and escape the dungeon with it. The thing is there are many dungeons and many more floors of the dungeon the player needs to traverse and it is all incredibly difficult. 

The environment reacts to the player. Through the floors of the dungeons the player comes across potions, weapons and armors and other items to aid in their quest. Occasionally the items will be cursed. The curse will likely leave a negative attribute assigned to the player. Such as finding a plate armor and putting it on. The armor, if cursed, cannot be removed unless the character has a remove curse potion. Yet potions too are unidentifiable unless the character has a scroll of identify. But even so the player does not know if the scroll is a scroll of identify until the player uses the scroll. Because of this the character is highly vulnerable in the early stages of the game. Often the character will end up with many permanent negative traits if the character survives to later areas of the game. 

At one point in the game my character was turned into a tree after reading a scroll. My character could not move or use weapons, I assumed it was a game over. But, as an experiment I acted on using the “skip turn” option and eventually was no longer a tree. The game asks that the player be cautious of the environment and when necessary take risks. This aspect of the game involves the player more deeply into completing the game. The goal ultimately is to take the Orb of Zod from an unidentified location and bring it back to the entrance of the dungeon. Likely the player will never reach the Orb but instead will find out how to play the game and through trial and error (this being a rogue like game) be able to meta game in order to get further into the dungeon.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter 

In The Vanishing of Ethan Carter the Player takes the role of a detective. the lens through which the layer ays the game is first person perspective. the player however does not shoot guns like is most common for first person games, instead the player uses the first person perspective to better see the surrounding. the space of the game is open and there is no clear direction to take in the game. All the player knows is the bits of information the detective that they play as will give at appropriate times. 

The space of the game is presented as an open world. The player is encouraged to investigate the area they are in. in the areas they are in they will encounter objects and traps. The objects serve as clues the player takes mental notes of, for example the leg portion of a humanoid body on train tracks which are next to cut rope and a train cart. (this draws the player in by making them wonder “what was this?” and “how does this serve the story”.) There are also traps made of primitive means such as sharpened sticks attached by rope to a heavy rock that is itself roped to a tree branch, when triggered the rock wrapped in sharp sticks will swing like a pendulum which may possibly result in the player being impaled. However, once the player dodges the trap the player is directed by the game to ‘investigate’ the trap. In the investigation the character’s vision becomes torn between two planes of existence, one where the trap is real and one where the trap is not. the game gives the player subtle clues in direction. within the first moments of the game the character comes upon a rickety train cart bridge. What was once a complete bridge is now a series of wood planks atop rusted iron. The player must navigate the character across to avoid certain death. The bridge gives the player audible warnings of where to and where not to step. Such as in possible points of danger the planks will creak and in more severe areas of danger the rusted iron will groan. Regardless of the situation the character is in the player must make use of visual and audio clues to safely cross the terrain and navigate the map to solve the story.

-Brian Dodson

The Talos Principle is a puzzle solving game that is very “Portal-esc.” The landscapes are made up of ruins from ancient civilizations. There is regular glitching in the surroundings that never lets you forget the artificial nature of the world. There are 3 main building structures and a forbidden tower. Each building contains a different landscape with 8 doors and each door leads to an outdoor area containing 4 to 6 gated puzzle areas. The first building looks similar to ancient roman type ruins. The second building contains Egyptian style buildings and figures. The third is very “renaissance” looking, with castles and great oaks.  I haven’t gotten to the forbidden tower yet. 

I found the landscapes of this game amazing. The puzzle area’s geography is very important and things are placed in such a way to make the puzzles more challenging.  Some hidden easter eggs in this game rely heavily on paying attention to the geography and on one occasion pixel hunting over the moon.  I found this game to be very similar to portal, if portal was an open world puzzle solving game, not only in the fact that it’s a “puzzle game” but also in its sarcastic and brooding nature. 

The video game with a sense of place that I chose was “GRAND THEFT AUTO 5.” The definition of a sense of place according to Google is: “a combination of characteristics that makes a place special and unique. Sense of place involves the human experience in a landscape, the local knowledge and folklore. Sense of place also grows from identifying oneself in relation to a particular piece of land on the surface of planet Earth.” In class, we learned that a sense of place is “a feeling that we know what it is like to be there.” GTA 5 fits these definitions perfectly.

The game is based on Los Angeles, but they call it “Los Santos.”  Since I am from the Los Angeles area, I can attest that the accuracy of the mapping is remarkable.  The list of buildings and streets that look exactly like they do in real life is extensive. There are several videos online comparing Los Santos to Los Angeles that are easily over 2 hours in length.

I often find myself getting homesick. I have no family in Portland. I haven’t been home in about 3 years. The sense of place in this game is so strong to me, I habitually find myself roaming the streets of Los Santos to ease the pain. Incredibly, it seems to work like a charm.  When I play GTA 5 with my friends up here, they will laugh at me when I see a landmark that I know all too well. I’ll begin jumping up and down and relaying old memories and stories that have happened “there.” 

The map I chose this week is from Fallout 3. I chose this map, not only because I have it memorized like it’s a real place, but also the way it is used. In many games if you want to look at the map, it is either in a corner of your screen (CoD games), or in the start menu (Skyrim). I loved the mapping in Fallout 3. They used a tool that’s on the main character’s wrist called a pipboy3000. The fact that your character looks down at their arm for the map rather than backing out into a start menu made the game so much more immersive. It made it easier to forget you weren’t actually a bad ass in the wastelands.  I really felt that this brought a sense of personal presence to the game.

Another cool feature of this map is that locations didn’t appear until you had either gone to them or the location had been assigned by a person of interest in a mission.  There was however, a perk your character could gain that would open up every location, but this was not required to explore.  In many other games all of the locations are either already visible, or if you go to one location, others open up around it, despite not yet exploring the area (Skyrim).

Orientation came easy while playing this game. A marker always tells you where you are and you can place other markers to guide you to your destinations. It became difficult at times for way finding. I only had problems when I was in a building or tunnel that consisted of many levels. The pipboy3000 only shows either an entire world map, or a map of the level you are on. Following an arrow when it is on another level right underneath you can make you slip up and question your surroundings. Once you got used to it though, it was easy to navigate where you were.  

Without even hearing the dreaded music that comes with this picture, we all know it. Every kid in the 90’s with a Sega Genesis can feel their heart pump harder with just the first measure of the feared drowning music from the Sonic the Hedgehog series.  The arrangement was simple, a small two-note jingle that gets faster and louder as your character gets closer to death.  You rush back and forth across the screen looking for an air bubble to make the countdown stop. As a kid playing this game, I often found myself holding my breath as well.  Even as an adult watching my own children play the sonic games, I feel the same sense of dread as the music starts up from the other room. I wonder if Yukifumi Makino, the composer of the drowning sequence, realizes the terror he’s implanted in the 30-something year old adults walking around today.

Nitsche discusses the use of sound and music in video games. He states “…games allow users to change the timing of events, demanding an immediate reconstruction of the musical score.” The example of Sonic drowning is a perfect model of this. Your character is underwater, you know you have to hurry to either get up out of it or to find an air bubble. Right when your character is running out of air, the soundtrack changes to that horrible score. The second you find an air bubble, the score will go back to the regular level music, and the search for a new air bubble begins again. 

-Alicia Raines

Geography as a Game-Play Element 
Game: Etrian Odyssey IV 

It is important to know that this game is for the Nintendo 3DS, which has two screen displays: one shows you the game worlds in three dimensions, and the other shows you two-dimensional images on a touch screen. 


The land of the game is a maze seen in 3D first-person; you, the player, must make your own overhead map to navigate. (You can judge distance with the 3D screen and draw your map on the touch screen.) Your success at the game depends in part on your ability to read both screens’ descriptions of the landscape as a cohesive whole. 


There are strong monsters you can see on mapped portions and avoid by observing their movements. These monsters are often too strong to fight when first encountered.


There are weaker monsters you can’t see on your map that wear on your resources as you travel, making route choice important. 


If your party perishes, you can choose to still have your mapwork survive. You may restart from your last saved point with all the work you penned in your doomed expedition intact. The game recognizes the worth (and invested effort) of the map.

Sense of Place Game: Journey 

Outside locations throughout Journey are partially defined by their spacial relationship to the mountain seen in the opening and title screen. It is this mountain to which you, the player, must strive, for progressing in the game demands nearing it. Much like Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (a series of ukiyo-e prints depicting 36 landscapes in which Mount Fuji is always seen from one angle or another), your view of this nameless yet iconic mountain changes with the stage (in the linked video, 2:25, 17:49, 19:20, 22:30). Like the views of Mount Fuji, again, eventually Journey’s mountain is no longer recognizable in the view you are given, for it is no longer a background landscape, but a physical space surrounding the viewer: you, the player, stand upon its very slopes!


The soundscape of Journey is concerned with the details of crunching sand, the wind, the flap of heavy cloth, and music that sweeps into hearing for emotional scenes, then fades into the background to let the sound effects again take precedence. We are treated to two landscapes of our eponymous journey through sound: the physical (sounds) and the emotional (the music), but indeed emotion can be fed by sounds, sight, and interaction, as discussed below.


Throughout the game, the revealed visual histories endow the places, or spaces, the player travels with historical meaning (see 21:16 in the video for one such instance). The journey is not only a pilgrimage to the mountain, but a tour through the past. Thus, there is a peripatetic approach to history and place in Journey.


There are dark and light peripatetic journeys: sun-bathed, open areas can give way to narrow, dark areas haunted by foes and the dire, historical significance of a place shown you before entering.


These dark peripatetic can offer areas for others to pour light into them: other players can randomly appear in each other’s games online, and you can bolster each other's scarf (flight ability) by pressing the "voice" button nearby. There is a place in the game where the weather saps your strength, and you trudge uphill (too weak to fly) through snow a long way into the wind, and the strength to keep moving comes from the other player as you walk together, huddled close, pressing that button to ward off the cold.

These three different maps of the in-game world, Eorzea, illustrate the varied roles, or uses, maps may take in video games, and how some uses can be abstracted away while others are emphasized.

The continent map does show vaguely where to navigate in-game, but physical layout is not the only information on it. Also included are the cultural relics of that world: writing (which is actually a code that can be read), national banners (used in-game to show the alignment of outposts and settlements), and creatures and ships (most encounterable in-game). The depiction of detailed space is subservient to the evocative depiction of the spirit of the game’s world.

Sound and Music Game: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 
Clip of "the Royal Family Tomb" area at 4:45

Whenever these walking-dead-like enemies, the Redead, are found in a room, you hear the unique sound of their murmuring; it’s their signature sound, and only they make it. You almost always hear them before you see them. The sound only stops if all Redead in the room are defeated. The sound is thus a direct indication of their presence. It serves as a warning of their presence, but also a warning of their nature: The ReDead murmuring resembles the human voice close enough to accomplish an uncanny resemblance; one cannot actually make out any comprehensible speech in its white noise, and the pitch of the voices are synthetically deep. Though their unearthly sound is designed to haunt the player, it can also haunt them through connotation, for this enemy, the ReDead, inspires dread in the player of the game with these five points, observable in the clip: (1) they're immune to any projectiles owned when you first meet them; (2) if you venture too close, they audially punish you with an alarming shriek and completely freeze you for several seconds, disabling your ability to fight or flee as they inch slowly toward you; (3) they suck a lot out of you if they reach you in that time; (4) they take 8 hits to defeat (more than some bosses); (5) they normally do not drop power-ups, and; (6) they don’t even "die" normally: in a game where most enemies quickly explode and vanish when defeated, ReDead crumple to the floor like a corpse and stay there for a relatively long period of time, after which they simply fade away. One can observe one player's reactions, which confirm these points (https://youtu.be/2Gx14Wr4olI?t=4m40s): He knows "zombies" are in the room before he sees them, he is creeped out by the sound, and he is dismayed at both his weapon’s inability to fight them as well as their lack of "loot". Audial connotation plays an important role too when a similar synthesized voice is used in the location music of later places in the game containing ReDead and worse, namely the Bottom of the Well and the Shadow Dungeon (https://youtu.be/sZwolhdsukk). The sound’s inclusion in the music helps to cast a pall of eerie anxiety over the entire dungeon.

-Joseph Willis

This game is a lot different than what I’ve talked about in previous entries. Limbo is a black and white puzzle game that might not seem like much at first, and no character speaks a word, but the ambiguity of it all pulls you in. With the shadowing and lighting, this game creates an atmosphere that makes you very cautious and uneasy. Every move you make can result in death, and some you won’t even see coming. The element that puts this game on the map is sound. Often, you’ll hear creepy, distorted sounds that sometimes sound downright disgusting. Paired with the darkness and feeling of helplessness, this game’s sound effects tie it in perfectly and gives you a unique feeling unlike any other game does.

In the video paired with this entry, there’s a secret level in the newly released version of Limbo. After you’ve gathered each collectible in the game, you can try the bonus level. This level is almost completely in the dark, so you have to rely on sound alone to succeed. This is no easy task- you must precisely jump to avoid sawblades, bottomless pits, and mind controlling slugs. Again, all in complete darkness for the majority. While it’s not a AAA title, Limbo gives you a completely fresh experience and tests your senses; whether that’s a good thing or not is up to you.

-Emily Wood

For this project I picked the four games which seem to tweak the nose of traditional boundaries in games the best, whether that means they have novel place-making or merely a very unusual take on cartography is irrelevant. Here are four games that touch the spirit of what it means to make an interesting space and experience it in an interesting way.

#2
Banished

Launched last year by the one man run Shining Rock Studios Banished is a city management game more focused on survival and the management of scarce and difficult to gather resources than about building up the city of your dreams. This is not a game you are expected to do well at quickly, getting up to a relatively large city of a few hundred people will take the average player considerable amount of trial and error.

This is mostly down to management of citizen labor, a mechanic that defines a lot of the gameplay, if managed poorly villages can quickly start to run low on building resources, food, firewood, tools and clothes. Trade in the game is done without money and to get livestock and seeds which are essentials as you grow past a hundred residents. The play experience then is a mixture of managing where resources are stored and trying to prevent growth from interfering with efficiency, it’s a bit like studying an ant farm and then making strategic decisions about where to build the next connecting passages/chambers.

#3
Faster Than Light

A good example of a historical place gaining meaning as play progresses, Faster Than Light is a roguelike starship captain simulator based around a rock hard difficulty curve and a desire to be captain of the USS Enterprise. The game space is very linear but the customizability of your ship gives it a very good sense of place. Story and character are built up through player actions, you can name your characters and presume things about their small pixelated lives. Most spots you will warp to have some quest dialogue or interaction with another ship.

#4
League of Legends

League, and other multiplayer online battle arenas, revolves around one very specific map with places which accrue history with each playthrough. The map in league (and the original Dota) is split into two sides with three lanes connecting the team bases in each corner of the map.

For those who have not played it the sense of these places can be so strong it can be disconcerting: bot lane, mid, top lane, the jungle, Baron Nashor. Each of these places has a specific meaning and gameplay you would expect to see around it. The game is also highly team based so knowing where things are and then being able to communicate effectively about them with teammates is essential to a good understanding of the places and systems.

-​Adrian Livermore

Graphics, Sound, and Moore’s Law

 In the year 1975, Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel, published his revised prediction that the number of transistor components in integrated circuitry would double every two years. Not only has has this prediction held true for move four decades, but it has also been further revised to only eighteen months per doubling. The prediction has been so successful, that it has been coined as Moore’s Law by many in the tech industry. As videogames were born and lived through their infancy in this very same span of years, they too have been affected by Moore’s Law. Each new generation of videogaming technology offers feats of graphic, sound, and other effects that dwarf their earlier counterparts.

I remember clearly the very first time I stepped out of the Kokiri Woods in The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and saw what I then considered to be vast lands of the Hyrule Field. I took my time exploring these fields (and repeatedly dying to enemies that I was not yet geared to face) and looked in awe at how real the trees looked then, having only experienced cartoony pixel trees in prior videogames on simpler systems. The Ocarina of Time was released for Nintendo’s very first 3D game system, the Nintendo 64. The trees were rendering using a very simple player-facing texture mapping system, which gave the trees the illusion of being full of leaves, no matter which angle they were viewed from. For the technology of that era, the sight was breathtaking.