Spatial regimes of the digital playground: cultural functions of spatial identification in post-colonial computer games.

Sybille Lammes (Phd)
Utrecht University
Institute for Media and Re/presentation
Kromme Nieuwegracht 29
3512 HD Utrecht
Sybille.Lammes@let.uu.nl

Abstract

In games like Empire III, Civilization IV, and Victoria, the player is encouraged to engage in a specific process of spatial identification: she is invited to become a historical ruler that colonises, explores and exploits landscapes in order to win the game.
Studying these games enhances our theoretical understanding of what spatiality means in games. Moreover, since such games are centred on the mastery, ruling and colonisation of space, they broaden our knowledge of how ideologies are part of spatial processes in games (Fuller & Jenkins 1995, Friedman 1999, Lammes 2003). This paper wishes to shed light on how a specific spatial game-genre asks for new theories of the cultural function of space.

Keywords: Spatiality, post-colonialism, games as culture, magic circle/node.

Start
Simulation games like SimCity and Civilization quickly spring to mind as prime examples when spatiality in games is being discussed. This comes as no surprise since the player of such games is both a traveller through the world of the game and strongly involved in actively manipulating this world. To a greater extent than in many other games she is explicitly invited to chart and master landscapes, and to moderate environments. Hence such games pose interesting theoretical questions about which functions spatial involvement may entail when space is “in the hands” of the player.

In this paper I would like investigate which cultural functions of space can be recognized in games that invite players to colonise, conquer, discover and map new territories. In these (what I will later call post-colonial) games the player undertakes a voyage that hinges on notions of a colonialist militaristic exploration, turning the gamer at once into a new world traveller, military force and explorer who surveys and masters unknown domains. I will examine how spatial identification in such games can be comprehended. My main concern will be to gain more insight into the cultural functions of spatiality: how can these games be understood as ritual expressions of contemporary spatial concerns?

In an attempt to give some answers to this complex theoretical question, this paper consists of two parts. I will start with a rendering of how game-spaces and their functions have been examined in general terms in game studies so far. My main concern will be how one could use these developed insights to gain more understanding in cultural functions of the “genre” that is under scrutiny. So I will look at game theories of spatiality with a specific enquiry in mind, that being how such theories are suitable or can be made suitable to come to a better understanding of game-spaces as culture. The second part of this paper will focus on cultural functions of the aforementioned games by examining which ideas exist so far about their cultural function, as well as considering which additional perspectives are needed to come to a better understanding of their cultural function.

Game-spaces
Space has already been considered as a central category in game research since the major onset of game studies in the late 1990s. Especially Espen Aarseth’s work has been influential in dealing with how space can be categorised, described, understood and analysed in games. As Aarseth already noted in 1997 space can be seen as a central trope of any game, since the most important activity of the player consists of moving, creating and sustaining environments, whether these are abstract or more recognizable (Aarseth, 1997). She is always involved in an effort to master a spatial game world. Hence on a very fundamental level an important function of any game is to involve the player in a spatial process and to encourage a strong identification with the spatial dimensions of the game.

Aarseth’s writing could be best described as formal  in that it concentrates on fundamental discussions about the inherent laws of games.  Space is considered an important category for understanding what games are intrinsically about. This is off course important groundwork for understanding games, but it has its limitations for a cultural analysis of them. The drawback is that it is a closed theory that does not easily open up to an understanding of games as social phenomena. It describes the formal laws of games and gives indications of cognitive functions of games, but tells us little about game-space as culture.

Another interesting concept put forward in game-studies that does entail a cultural dimension is the “magic circle” as first proposed by the cultural historian Huizinga (Huizinga, 1938, Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, Burmeister, 2006). Although the magic circle is more about games as space than about space in games it is still worth examining in this paper, since the use of this metaphor also has major consequences for the way spatiality can be understood in games. Following Huizinga’s mentioning of this term in his 1930s essay Homo Ludens, it is asserted that the experience of game-space can be best conceived as a semi-closed round space that is at the same time demarcated as separate from daily life whilst being also part of it. To put it in terms of function, the magic circle then enables the player to distance herself from daily life and be part of a ritual in which another identity can be established. Game-space is thus regarded as a ritual and intensified place of cultural expression (Huizinga, 1951: 2)

It is one thing to state that the magic circle allows the player to experience play, to form new identities and to create spatial meaning in a delineated and intensified space and time. It is yet another thing to theorise what the cultural functions of such processes precisely are, in other words to question what function the game world has as being part of the world at large. Huizinga tried to shed light on the specificity of its cultural function when claiming that the magic circle facilitated a place of order, whilst daily life could be described as disordered (Huizinga, 1951:10). Hence games offer according to Huizinga a safe haven to shelter from the chaos of daily life. When this function is translated to the function of space in games one could state that in contrast to daily space, game-space is ordered and therefore counters daily spatial confusion.

Playing with order
But is the presumption that game-space is of an ordered disposition well-founded? As Taylor points out in her article When Seams fall apart: Video Game Space and the Player, the predominant opinion that games, and in fact new media as a whole, are ruled by “the absolute authority of a rational scientific order” should be reconsidered. She shows that such a perspective doesn’t do justice to video games that are always more than “the sum of their code” and cannot be solely described through an ordered spatial linearity. She calls instead for a more experiential approach that includes the position of the player. Taylor explains that the player has to operate on different spatial levels at once, both within the game and when negotiating between game-space and her own physical space (Taylor, 2003:1). Hence one cannot call a game an ordered space at all, and the claim that games counter the disorder of everyday life doesn’t hold.

In a similar vein, although not writing specifically about space, Mia Consalvo, argues that it would be too simple to speak of games as a uniform and ordered experience since every player and every game allows for different meanings. Harking back to cultural studies academics Hall and Fiske, she asserts that games have a “polysemic content” instead: 
Games such as those in the Grand Theft Auto series perfectly illustrate the conditions and consequences created by polysemic content. Players are given the opportunity to follow the game designer’s storyline(s) involving mission completion, as well as chances to explore the space of the game world, which is almost completely interactive. More and less violent solutions to problems can often be found, and players can create their own “versions” of the game. Likewise, the PC game The Sims has no pre-set storyline, allowing players to explore all sorts of “what if” ideas they may imagine for their simulated people (Consalvo, 2005:2).

So, Consalvo asserts that it is highly problematic to speak of games as singular experiences.
For her, games are actually not about the experience of order, but about the pleasure of “playing with order and rules” (italics, S.L.). In particular looking into the players’ activity of so called “bad play” (e.g. cheating), she dons games the following cultural function:
For many players, playing games is, in some measure, a playing with rules and their boundaries. Games offer a bounded space (although some games are more bounded than others, depending on how many people are playing) for the exploration of actions and consequences as well as the ludic expression of activities deemed inappropriate (if not illegal) in regular life (Consalvo, 2005: 10).

When games are about playing with rules, Huizinga’s contention that “play is order” as opposed to the disorder that dominates daily existence becomes untenable, also on a spatial level. It seems then more accurate to maintain that games play with the spatial rules and limitations of everyday experience. Just think about racing through London in Grand Theft and what the police and judges will think about that. Or about cheating to another level of Ico. Such examples demonstrate Consalvo’s view that games are not simply taking place in spatial order that is detached from daily existence. Players are not in search of static spatial rules and order, but are playing with boundaries and rules in a manner that is deemed unsuitable in daily life.

Another experiential notion that in my view strengthens this contention has to do with the spatial confusion that is part of every game experience. Losing your direction in a game, or navigating through a space you cannot fathom fully yet, can be a highly thrilling experience. It shows that a game in itself may be partly determined by codes or rules, but that a player is always struggling to get to grips with these rules therefore experiencing a certain amount of uncertainty that can hardly be described as ordered. Intensified by the interactivity of playing she may enjoy the act of trying to create spatial order, but the pleasure lies more in the attempt than in the achievement itself.
 
Magic solutions
Recently, several authors have noted that the magic circle is not always as closed as Huizinga’s definition seems to imply. They have drawn attention to the porosity of the circle in pervasive games (Montola, 2005) or to the softness and fluidity of demarcations in Fantasy Role Playing games where play can take place in “between worlds” (Copier, 2005)

Still, on a more fundamental theoretical and above all methodological level, the concept of a circle with boundaries remains tricky, even when its contours are perceived as more or less blurred. A circle still implicates a simple one-to-one, one dimensional and pre-given relation between inner and outer world (inside and outside the circle). As a static and flat metaphor it triggers dichotomies such as inside/outside text/context, play/ non-play and simplifies what games are about. Acknowledging the semi-permeability of the circle, still keeps a modernist asymmetrical presumption intact in which a cultural product like a game is conceived as more or less separate and as in a simple relationship with the so called outer world.

Huizinga tells us that culture is play, but his circular metaphor denies games agency in producing and being “the world”. This problem is not solved by claiming that games can be twilight zones, neither by claiming that everyday life and play are of the same quality. The first solution is too modest, the second too relativistic. A more drastic measure is needed by a change of metaphor. I suggest turning to ANT (Actor-Network-Theory) for help.

Magic nodes
An important exponent of ANT is the French anthropologist Bruno Latour. Whilst other ANT scholars often exclusively focus on technoscience, Latour has also been concerned with questions about the texture of “the social” in a broader sense. Therefore his work can help us to get to grips with the function of games in our culture.  More specifically, his theories can clarify what place games have as being part of a social network and how games are related to other social domains.
When one follows Latour’s reasoning, asymmetrical relations as generated by the magic circle, such as inside and outside, fiction and fact, text and context, are paradoxes because one can only think in such oppositions by simultaneously presuming that the two sides of such dichotomies have something in common. Opposition thus entails translation. When such translations are not acknowledged, mediations become monsters. But when one takes such translations as a starting point, a different picture emerges and categories come into being via such mediations. The actor-network theory aims precisely at this by taking these hybrids, associations or translations as the central principle of its method. The social is perceived as an ever changing web or force field in which certain strongholds or nodes attract stronger associations. 
In line with this perspective, a game can be perceived as a knot in a network or as a magic node.  Some games are more concentrated as knots holding stronger associations. When a game is such a stronghold its associations are more durable and its extent wider. Others games may be conceived as weaker knots since they attract a smaller formation of associations.  What's more, some games have stronger boundaries than others, but boundaries are not a given and depend on the strength of the formation (its “inner logic”) and the way “representatives” are concerned with producing such boundaries. Additionally, the intensity of play depends very much on where the player is situated in this force field. At the centre of the knot intensity increases, whilst at places where the ties become more loose or weak, the player is less “lost in translation.”

The magic circle is a worthwhile concept in so far as it defines games as intensified experience. Furthermore it has been helpful in coming to terms with the cultural function of play by speaking of games as rituals. But as the above demonstrates, the application of the magic circle can result in what Consalvo calls  an unnecessary  “infantilization of the gamespace” when dichotomies such as orderly and disorderly space remain unchallenged (Consalvo, 2005:10).

That games take place in a more or less delineated (time and) space frame does not mean that they are secluded from daily life. It simply means that they are a node of expression in a web that is in constant movement and that consists of many shifting nodes of cultural power. In relation to spatiality an approach to games as magic nodes enables us to think of games as producing cultural meanings of space whilst at the same time being connected to a wide range of spatial conceptions that are also part of the social. It prevents us from envisaging games as isolated phenomena, whilst still paying attention to the specificity of their spatial formations.

Approaching games as magic nodes instead of magical circles can help us greatly in our conception of games as social-cultural events that tie in with many other domains. To borrow Bryce and Rutter’s words, it enables us to view games as a “node of (…) a wide range of cultural, technological, political, aesthetic and economic forces” (Bryce and Rutter 2006: xiiii).

Digital playgrounds
On a general level, games offer the player a ritual space to express and give meaning to the spatial confusion of everyday life as is mentioned by De Certeau. As Newman sums it up in his book Videogames, ”the problems of dislocation and fracture of community” are partly resolved when playing a computer game. (Newman, 2004: 110) Games counterbalance our daily spatial experience of a world that is overcrowded and offers less and less places to play outside. To refer to part of the title of this paper: they offer digital playgrounds instead.

Media-theorist Henry Jenkins makes the latter point when speaking of several media expressions in Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue, a published dialogue, co-written by literary historian Mary Fuller (Fuller & Jenkins, 1995). In Latourian vocabulary one could say that Fuller and Jenkins perceive a mediation between digital travelling and a nostalgic longing to become a new world traveller. Digital expression such as Nintendo games would offer us opportunities to experience ‘open’ space and thus compensate our experience of the world as a clogged up and unfathomable realm. Other authors have taken this observation a step further by applying it specifically to the aforementioned games:  the colonial desire to explore and master ‘virgin’ land can be found ‘back’ in these contemporary games. Due to their interactivity such games invite the player to give shape and meaning to a  past when the exploration and mastery of new lands and resources was intrinsic to western power politics (Newman 2004, Lammes 2003, Friedman, 1999).

One theoretical perspective put forward by Jenkins, and also taken on board by Friedman in his writing about Civilization, is especially worth mentioning here and that is the De Certeau’s notion of “spatial narrative”. Jenkins observes that games and other digital expressions can be best described as spatial narratives since the player primarily constructs a narrative by travelling through space.  Friedman takes this remark a step further by claiming that it is foremost a suitable concept for understanding simulation games in which the player re-enacts and gives shape to history through the mastery of landscape (Friedman,  1999)

Four concepts of are often used to specify what spatial narratives are about, namely the difference between the map and the tour and between space and place (Newman, 2004, Friedman, 1999). A map can then be described as a static representation of the world we live in. It objectifies spatial relations.  A tour, on the other hand, is a dynamic principle that is subjective since the point of view of the traveller is central. According to De Certeau these two conceptions of spatiality are both incongruous dimensions of  contemporary culture: we are confronted with static representation of the world we live in at the same time sensing our space in a dynamic and more personal way. The difference between space and place is closely related to this first paradox of daily life. Place is abstract, timeless and stable. Space on the other hand is seen as concrete, known and changeable (De Certeau, 1984).

It is precisely this tension between the abstract and concrete experience of spatiality which is an essential quality of the games that are central to this paper.  Static spatial representations such as maps and an overwhelming amount of statistics reflect and frame the activity of the player who is simultaneously engaged in touring through and exploring new territory in a highly personal endeavour. In her touring through the game unknown abstract place gives way to space that is identified by the changes she makes to the territory. Such games are the pinnacle of spatial narratives because the exploration of landscape is so closely and explicitly knit in with the player’s efforts to construct her own historical narrative. She tries to build a rich and long-lasting story of ruling by strategically mastering space.

Friedman extends this view further when he uses Jameson’s writing on De Certeau to stress that simulation games such as Civ should be conceived as being a late capitalist means of expression. Jameson maintains that the experience of spatial relations is central to late capitalism in which globalism accounts for a spatial texture that becomes more and more opaque. Maps, statistics and other abstract and frozen representations are our only way to know this complex, and vast world that we actually encounter in a dynamic fashion. Friedman states that games such as Civ  try to overcome this bewilderment by combining static spatial representations such as maps with narrative. They therefore fulfil an important cultural function in this late capitalist era (Friedman, 1999).

Post-colonialism
Elsewhere I have asserted that such games actually express a very specific dimension of late capitalism, namely a post-colonialist dimension. The player is invited to conquer and master environments and that endeavour is clearly defined in colonial terms. The voyage she undertakes hinges on notions of colonialist exploration, turning the gamer into a traveller who surveys and masters unknown domains and learns to control techno-scientific principles along the way.  At the same time such games rework this past, by handling time and space as changeable and anachronistic. They are therefore a contemporary and postcolonial means of expression that revisit and remould the past in order to make sense of a present (that Friedman defines as late capitalist) through spatial exploration (Lammes, 2003).

In the humanities post-colonialism is often used as a term to describe the repercussions and aftermath of a long western history of dominance and exploration of other lands and cultures. It refers to how the echoes and consequences of this colonial mentality are still palpable, be it in (diasporic) life stories, literature, films, or social geography. Or as social geographer Johnson defines post-colonialism:
A critical politico-intellectual formation that is centrally concerned with the impact of colonialism and its contestation on the cultures of both colonizing and colonized peoples in the past, and the reproduction and transformation of colonial relations, representations and practices in the present.” (Johnston, 2000:613)

It makes absolute sense to describe the games that are central to this paper as post-colonialist. Firstly, on a simple level, because they deal with colonial issues in a postcolonial era and through post-colonial means (that is digital games). Secondly, on a more profound level, because these games are not only dealing with the “reproduction” of colonialism in the present, but are also concerned with a “transformation” of colonial representations and practices of which Johnston speaks.

In my opinion, it is this last feature of transformation that is most interesting when thinking about digital games in relation to post-colonialism. Due to their interactive character, games offer players  many opportunities to remake and  reshape their colonial pasts through spatial exploration. They offer openings to make playful connections between spaces that may not be historically accurate (e.g. making winners out of colonial losers) but that are exactly about experiencing the consequences of being a colonizer. This can be related to what I have called elsewhere “a postcolonial and contemporary disorientation of belonging” in which “history cannot be easily retold in a singular way.” (Lammes, 2003:127) To come back to the cultural spatial functions such games may serve, they offer possibilities to reshape and make sense of ideologies of appropriation and colonial expansion whose consequences are still so much intertwined with our contemporary daily life.

Spatial regimes
So the games which cultural functions I am trying to define here, can be best called postcolonial. But how do they deal with space in an effort to make sense of the postcolonial world of which they are part and parcel? Which spatial strategies are available to the player to play with the rules and consequences of our colonial past?

I propose two spatial regimes that are in my view pivotal to the analysis of such post-colonial games, namely the military and techno-scientific. I call them spatial because they are both intrinsically tied up with the exploration of space: the military and technoscientific are important tools for exploring the game (e.g.  mapping and navigation) and winning the game (e.g. shifting borders through finding allies, gathering knowledge). I call them regimes because they are both part and parcel of a (post) colonial western ideology in which the occupation and mastering of foreign territory is interwoven with notions of military and techno-scientific progress (Restivo & Coughlin 2000).

The military and techno-scientific regime are of course intertwined, but they can serve as useful analytical categories. Whilst the first put its emphasis on spatial strategies of war and peace in order to secure and extend land mass (obviously using technologies for that purpose), the second regime is primarily concerned with gathering resources that increase the welfare and so called progress of a nation. In post-colonial games both are present, but may have a shifting balance. The latter category is for example much more important in games like Civ, whilst the Empire cycle depends more on a military spatial regime.

Travelling as a mind-set
I would like to end this paper with a short note on methodology. How these regimes are employed and which cultural functions they entail, can become clear when one sticks to an approach of games as magic nodes in a wider network as is proposed by ANT. Moreover, the interactive element of such games – one has to play them to study them - demands a method that also accounts for the involvement of the researcher with its research material.

An analytical approach which is a suitable addition to serve this last purpose is reflexive ethnography as has been more often used in ANT (Latour 1988, Woolgar 1988, Davies 1999, Atkinson 2001). Ethnography can be summarized as an anthropological approach that collects data about human practices through fieldwork; this is a practice that results most often in descriptive analyses. Reflexivity has become such an important principle in research, because an involvement between the researcher and the material is always unavoidable. It is impossible to be an objective observer and to separate ones position from the way in which the material is visited and mapped. Reflexive ethnography employs the theory that the researcher should be aware of this position and should consider and show how much he or she is part of what is researched. It thus implicates simultaneously proximity and distance.

Let me once more turn to Latour for a specification of how such a perspective can be applied to the games that I wish to study. Latour tells his readers in his last book Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory  that it could be best comprehended as a travel guide. As he states:
If earnest scholars do not find it dignifying to compare an introduction of a science to a travel guide, be they kindly reminded that 'where to travel' and 'what is worth seeing there' is nothing but a way of saying in plain English what is usually said under the pompous Greek name of 'method' or, even worse, 'methodology' (Latour, 2005: 17).

He chooses for such an approach because a guide is a “how-to book” and it “offers suggestions rather than imposing itself on the reader” (Latour, 2005: 17). I would add to this that such an approach also permits the researcher to be a participant who sets out as an onlooker, but becomes slowly more involved in and part of the terrain and people she visits. Hence it allows for a reflexive attitude as is so much needed when researching games as interactive expressions. Furthermore, a travel guide is of course highly appropriate when one wants to map and understand the spatiality of games, since the researcher becomes herself a voyager through a magic landscape.

In relation to the aforementioned cultural function of the games under scrutiny, the researcher/player has to ask certain specific and basic questions to be able to tease out how spatial regimes are being generated. During the journey she has to ask how the landscape looks, what means are at her disposal to look (mapping) and how the field changes during and due to her intervention (touring). The latter question involves both how resources such as the gathering of knowledge, technology and goods are employed in the shifting of borders as well as how the player becomes tribal (“going native”) and finds allies and enemies. When the games are visited in such a fashion a picture emerges that ties in with other games and other cultural expressions. Thus a travelogue is being written which pays special attention to the postcolonial spatial functions of computer games.

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