In partial fulfillment of my designated emphasis in New Media, I’m taking a class this semester with Ozge Samanci, the author/cartoonist of ordinary things, a web comic. I am really busy with dissertation and whatnot, but I always enjoy taking classes in the New Media department as they are truly interdisciplinary–I’ve met fascinating grad students from the School of Information, Rhetoric, and Religious Studies and they give me unique perspectives on the work I do.
So one of the students in the class is writing his thesis on Narratology and classic Japanese video games, the kind that I played years ago, like Final Fantasy VII, Suikoden, and Final Fantasy Tactics. I also played Civilization II, which is where the above image came from–it’s one of the only examples I could find!
Anyway, during the course of discussion regarding Seymour Chatman’s structuralist literary theory I realized that I visualize exploring space in a way very closely relating to those early video games. When I go to a new city or go out on survey, I think of myself as clearing a path through darkness, “mapping” the features of the landscape, illuminating them in my mind. I always have the urge to clear out all of the dark space, to explore every centimeter until it is all visible, in relief, in my mental map of the space. This is probably not deeply unique, but I find it pretty funny that these early video games gave me such a rigid mental metaphor for experiencing place. As Sybille Lammes says in her excellent Cultural Functions of Spatial Practices in Video Games, “in Latourian terms, one could state that the game space consists of landscapes as hybrids of objective and subjective spatial (re)presentations.” I’ve blogged about augmented reality before, without realizing that I already experience space in a oddly cyborgian way.
Lammes also describes the ludological term, “the magic circle,” a “membrane that encloses virtual worlds,” which Lammes states is “more about games as space than about space in games” but that it still has “major consequences for the way spatiality can be understood in games.” I’ve somehow permeated the magic circle and brought a visualization metaphor out into the real life to overlay my experience of the world.
Hmph. Maybe I should carry a sword.
Colleen Morgan 
I recently finished “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter”. It’s a populist–as opposed to academic–book, but it’s a terrific read for anybody interested in what I’d clumsily call the literary theory of video games.
Thanks for the recommendation, Darren! I’ll check it out.
The purity of your archaeology makes me happy… even in this virtual world you’re digging, examining, and spiffing it all up for the rest of us. I I might add that this is SO true… the fact that it is “virtual” space does not negate the fact that it IS space. To some degree, it is the “extra” world which helps us access more than a micron of our brain………..
Keep on Rockin It! <3