Week 5: Wandering the Constructed World
“Like traditional landscapes, video game landscapes incorporate the moral ideologies of their producers and therefore limit or direct the kinds of lessons about the real world that players might learn. Video game landscapes my therefore reinforce the dominant ideologies that govern the production of real world landscapes as much as they challenge them” Michael W Longan. “Playing with landscape: social process and spatial form in video games” Aether Vol. 2 (2008)
NOTE: Please include a screenshot of your character in the landscape you are discussing.
Please consider your experience with a specific in-game landscape and discuss how your experience might relate to the “Playing with Landscape” quotation above:
Some things you might consider:
- conflict over specific territory and idealities of invasion, defense, occupation
- visual signifiers that a specific region is ‘hostile’ or ‘friendly’
- utopian vs. dystopian landscapes—do you help or hinder the inhabitants?
- Ideas of order and control in an environment
- What message is a world that is effectively indestructible/unchanging /self replenishing conveying explicitly or implicitly?
- In your experience does the landscape of the gameworld reinforce or disrupt the contemporary cultural moment?