Computer Games As Landscape Art [1st ed. 2024, 1st ed. 2023] 3031376331, 9783031376337

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Computer Games As Landscape Art Peter Nelson

Computer Games As Landscape Art

Peter Nelson

Computer Games As Landscape Art

Peter Nelson Academy of Visual Arts Hong Kong Baptist University Ngau Tau Kok, Hong Kong

ISBN 978-3-031-37633-7    ISBN 978-3-031-37634-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book was inspired by the support and assistance of a great number of people. I thank Gary Carsley and Royce W. Smith, whose undergraduate classes on landscape and geopolitics had an enduring impact. I thank Gary Wiggins, who has pursued the question of landscape with me for over a decade. I thank curators Johnson Chang and Valerie Doran for speculative conversations on landscape that helped me reflect on the questions I was asking of computer games. I thank my academic supervisor from my graduate student years, Olli Leino, who knew when to leave me alone with my research and when to intervene with detailed critical feedback. From this time I also thank Minka Stoyanova, Ariel Huang and Bogna Konior, for frequent conversations that were so helpful. I also thank the wonderful people I met during my short research exchange at IT University of Copenhagen. I also thank the wonderful people I met during my research exchange at IT University Copenhagen, who provided invaluable feedback over lunch of while waiting for the kettle to boil. In particular, I thank Espen Aarseth and Hans-Joachim Backe for reading my work front to back and for consenting to the innumerable conversations that proved so helpful. I also thank the community of art history, game, media and geography scholars who engaged and influenced me during this project, in particular Emma Fraser, Clancy Wilmott, Nick Rush-Cooper, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux. I would also like to thank my dear friends Andrew Luk and Alexis Mailles for all the fun and discovery we had making Autosave: Redoubt together. Finally, I would like to thank City

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

University of Hong Kong for hosting my graduate study research and Hong Kong Baptist University for allowing me to run a creative laboratory where I can write books like this while also playing with robots and paint brushes.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 What Is a Landscape?  9 3 What Is a Computer Game? 29 4 Half-Life 2: Could I Apocalypse? 57 5 Tourism  and Gun-Running in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive 83 6 Autosave: Redoubt119 7 Garry’s Mod: The Computer Game Becomes Photoshop139 8 Conclusion173 Creative Works Cited179 References181 Index195 vii

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Thomas Gainsborough. 1748–1750. Mr and Mrs Andrews. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London 2 Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow), 1836. Oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2 Caspar David Friedrich, Ruins of Eldena, near Greifswald, 1825. Oil on canvas. Old National Gallery, Berlin 17 Albert Bierstadt, Valley of the Yosemite, 1864. Oil on paperboard, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 18 Falling over in QWOP, 2008. Bennet Foddy 35 Falling over in Death Stranding, 2019. Kojima Productions 35 Wang Hui. The ‘Southern Tour’ of the Kangxi Emperor, c.1689–1692. Detail of hand scroll on silk, Palace Museum, Beijing38 Screenshot from Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, 2010. Blizzard Entertainment39 The landscape as a standing reserve in Minecraft, 2011. Mojang Studios 43 Ascending Death Mountain in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, 2017. Nintendo 45 An obstacle course landscape, built just for us, Half-Life 2, 2004. Valve Corporation 64 Chases through the administrative architecture of canals in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1991. Directed by James Cameron72

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4

Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6

Chases through the administrative architecture of canals in Half-Life 2, 2004. Valve Corporation 72 Chases through the administrative architecture of an asylum in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1991. Directed by James Cameron73 Chases through the administrative architecture of an asylum in Half-­Life 2, 2004. Valve Corporation 73 An architectural collage of Eastern European ruins and an alien skyscraper in Half-Life 2, 2004. Valve Corporation 75 Photographic textures of rocks and grass in Half-Life 2, 2004. Valve Corporation 76 An example of a database (textures.com) from which computer graphics artists can source textures, author’s screenshot 77 Reciprocal lines of sight in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, 2012. Valve Corporation 90 Running through the ‘Canals’ map in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, 2012. Valve Corporation 100 The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive map ‘Office’, 2012. Valve Corporation101 Still image from the BBC series The Office, 2001. Capital United Nations Entertainment 102 Weapon skin for the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive weapon Glock-18. Source: https://CS:GOitems.pro/. Author’s screenshot107 FN 5-7 pistol with custom ceramic coating. Source: Black Sheep Arms (Instagram) 108 Recreating the Shing Mun Redoubt in the Hammer editor, author’s screenshot 120 A trench and tunnel opening as part of the Shing Mun Redoubt site, author’s photograph 121 A tunnel section rendered to the 1 foot = 16 Hammer Units grid. The faint black lines represent the original survey data. The blue lines represent the geometry that we built in Hammer 127 A tunnel section rendered to the 1 foot = 16 Hammer Units grid. The faint black lines represent the original survey data. The blue and pink lines represent the geometry that we built in Hammer 128 Plan view of the popular Counter-Strike: Global Offensive map ‘Dust II’, superimposed on a plan view of Autosave: Redoubt129 Using a literal conversion of geographical measurements into Hammer units, our first prototype tunnels looked too wide. Author’s screenshot 130

  List of Figures 

Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6 Fig. 7.7 Fig. 7.8 Fig. 7.9 Fig. 7.10 Fig. 7.11 Fig. 7.12 Fig. 7.13

The narrow scale of the Shing Mun tunnels in Autosave: Redoubt and in real life as seen by a 35 mm lens. Authors’ screenshot and photography This lighting configuration allowed us to balance the need for ambient light inside the tunnels with an illusion that a light source was coming from the outside Spawning objects into a blank landscape in Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios The driveable bathtub car—a common first project for learning to build in Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios Adding a tree into a game map within the Hammer editor, author’s screenshot Adding trees into Garry’s Mod from the player perspective, 2006. Facepunch Studios I park my Lamborghini and watch a nationalistic Korean video selected by another player in a Garry’s Mod sandbox environment, 2006. Facepunch Studios Alduin battles the Combine in a fragmented set of City 17, in Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios Imprisoned in a cage by server admins in the Garry’s Mod version of Minecraft, 2006. Facepunch Studios Stabbed in the ‘Swamp Cinema’ server, Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios Ruminating in apocalyptic idyll - playing Tetris over Neoclassical Ruins while holding a cat in Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios Watching TV with discarded children’s toys in Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios A group of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump ‘Nextbots’ chasing YouTuber MsBreezy across the Lost Highway in Garry’s Mod. MsBreezy. 2016b. YouTube Screenshot Haphazard ludic architecture in a Garry’s Mod sandbox server. 2006. Facepunch Studios A recreation of coloured barrel landscape stenography in Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios

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131 134 140 140 146 147 152 153 154 156 159 161 163 166 167

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The painting Mr and Mrs Andrews (Fig. 1.1) by Thomas Gainsborough (c.1750) depicts a husband, wife, and their dog posing, or perhaps sitting, in front of a landscape. The painting was commissioned by the sitters to celebrate the agricultural wealth that furnished their new marriage. Mr. Andrews gazes at us with a clear but casual authority, reinforced by the rifle slung under his arm and the loyal attention of his hound. Mrs. Andrews sits in a static pose underneath the tree, hands on her lap. We could look at this painting as a representation of the love of nature and countryside shared by Gainsborough and the Andrews family, as suggested by art historian Kenneth Clark in 1949 (Clark 1949, 34); or as a representation of property, wealth, and ownership, as suggested by John Berger in 1972 (Berger 1972, 107); or as an encoding of both women and land as property and reproductive resources, as suggested by Gillian Rose in 1993 (Rose 1993, 91–3). When contemplating Thomas Cole’s dramatic landscape painting The Oxbow (1836)  (Fig. 1.2), Simon Schama sees the historical processes that shaped the American frontier, the desire to overlook the conflicts of colonial dispossession and to focus on a Romantic tension between an untamed sublime nature and the hope of a biblical promised land (Schama 1995, 365–7) and Edward Casey sees the birth of American modernism in the transposition of Albertian perspective and Dutch landscape painting composition onto a newly conquered territory © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Nelson, Computer Games As Landscape Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4_1

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Fig. 1.1  Thomas Gainsborough. 1748–1750. Mr and Mrs Andrews. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London

Fig. 1.2  Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow), 1836. Oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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(Casey 2002, 162). This layering of interpretations reminds us that landscape images actively and passively encode historical processes and ways of seeing. How we represent the physical environment tells us a lot about who we are and how we relate to the world around us. In these examples, the landscape image encapsulates a relationship between the artist, the painting, the subject, and the events that shaped the physical environment itself and how it has been represented. This type of art historical analysis was one of the inspirations for this book. I was originally trained as a painter and art historian, and my study of computer games is indebted to this side of my life. Human geography and cultural studies position landscape as a lens for analysing how we have encoded the physical environment with our own history, and how our attempts to represent it beam this history back to us. When I started seriously engaging with computer games as a 3D artist and a graduate student in 2015, I was fascinated by the repeated references to concepts such as ‘space’, ‘place’, ‘landscape’, and ‘representation’. In this book, I want to bring together what I have learned from other scholars on how we might think of space, place, and landscapes in computer games, and how, like the paintings mentioned above, we might be able to see our historical position reflected back to us if we consider computer games as landscapes. If I started with art history and landscape painting, why write about computer games? Well, there is a reason that art museums around the world are often filled with landscape paintings. At the time when European powers were building global trade networks and colonial empires, landscape painting was a new and popular genre. It was an art form that could be commissioned and purchased by recently wealthy agricultural and merchant classes, one that could represent the commodity of private land domestically and in distant colonies, and one that could advertise non-­ European territories as Edenic promised lands to new investors. If you want to understand just how differently people were starting to see the world during this period, landscape paintings are a good place to start. To make my small contribution to helping us understand how history unfolds around us, I want to extend this art historical line of thinking to computer games, even though at times this book will not feel like an art history book, it will feel like a book about computer games. Computer games now find themselves at the centre of academic and popular debates around technology, culture, and society. Their commercial dominance as a popular media and their technological relationship to non-game virtual

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environments suggest that it might be useful to examine how games reveal aspects of our history as it is unfolding. I argue that computer games are our most important contemporary medium of landscape and in the first two chapters, outline a way of analysing them that is different from how we might look at a painting, a photograph, or a film. For the art historian, I show how to analyse computer games as landscapes by playing them, not just by looking at screenshots or video recordings. For the game designer, I show how games not only absorb artistic influences, but become part of a long cultural conversation, sometimes consciously and sometimes quite unintentionally. This book offers a language of landscape for computer games based on a combination of art history, geography, play-based game studies, and platform studies, where the game engine, like paint and canvas, becomes the medium of landscape. Twentieth-century art historians transformed eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century landscape paintings into portraits of a changing world. This book attempts something similar for computer games. Landscape is the lens through which our relationship to the environment can be observed. Landscape studies for computer games reveal how our relationship to the environment is changing and how we are expressing this through computer games, whether it be through our obsessive recreation of ‘normal’ places as sites of gameplay, or through the chaotic and bizarre recycling of place fragments into digital swamps of subversive, ambiguous meaning. But with the breadth of this promise comes a limitation. In the first two chapters, I bring together landscape and game studies to show how they can work together, citing a wide range of artworks and computer games. But in my own case studies, I focus on computer games made using a single game engine, the Valve Source Engine. These games are Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), Garry’s Mod, and a CS:GO mod I co-authored Autosave: Redoubt. The reason for this limitation is to show the value of depth over breadth in landscape studies. There are already some excellent meta-analyses of archetypal landscape spaces in computer games (see Fuchs 2019), and what I wanted to do is to show how the social and economic context of the game, its players and even its software environment can deepen our understanding of what these games mean as landscapes and cultural artefacts of their time. For those with less experience with games, a computer game engine is the software environment that the computer game exists within. Other notable examples

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include Unity 3D, the Unreal Engine, CryEngine, and Godot. A game engine is responsible for the rendering of sound and graphics, as well as calculating physics simulations, artificial intelligence procedures, networking, and all other forms of programmatic representations that uphold the player’s experience of the game (Zerbst and Düvel 2004). The distinction between the computer game and the game engine reflects a contemporary trend in game development of using the same engine to make multiple games, rather than building a new software environment for every new game. The way that game engines are appropriated to make new games, how their repeated use changes the engine over time, and how this accumulation of production leads to an identifiable medium with its own cultural and economic structures, is the process that I examine across my chapters to bring depth and meaning to the games I study. By analysing a carefully chosen set of games, I reveal how the Valve Source Engine functions as a distinct medium of representation, and a distinct medium of landscape. Game scholar Espen Aarseth observed that computer games are not a medium per se because the variation in forms they can take is so impossibly vast from a Furby to GTA V. By focusing on a single game engine, I have provided a temporary solution that allows me to talk about computer games and landscape with a degree of medium specificity—the Valve Source Engine is the medium that gives these four games a shared context for comparison. The experience of each game is an experience of the Valve Source Engine, and each game creates a different relationship between the player and the software. This is especially apparent as the divisions between playing and creative game modification are slowly broken down, from player-produced content in Counter-Strike to modding as a form of playing in Garry’s Mod. These changes in game experience and the economic relationships they create present a rich fabric of experience that unfolds as I explore the Valve Source Engine as a medium of landscape. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the concept of landscape, and the delicate interplay between how we transform the physical environment, how we make images of it, and how we normalise our past transformations into a new state of nature. Chapter 3 gives some basic definitions of computer games, how they can be studied, and how existing scholars have analysed game environments and game worlds. At the conclusion of Chap. 3, I offer my own synthesis of landscape and game studies and share the analytical template I use to study computer games as landscapes. In Chap. 4, I look at the genre of the single-player first-person shooter game (FPS) using Half-Life 2 as the central example. Starting from play-based analysis,

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I draw landscape parallels to Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of theme parks and Angela Ndalianis’s analysis of the landscape safari and the touristic gaze. I demonstrate how the alienating tunnel vision of the first-person shooter avatar re-enforces the validation of danger, challenge, and pleasure that the game uses to create a heroic protagonist whose presence in the landscape is rewarded, culminating in triumph. I argue that the single-player first-person shooter provides pleasure via the contrast of the protagonist’s safari landscape to the bureaucratic anonymous and precarious experience of the modern workplace. The protagonist’s landscape offers a pleasurable vision of societal collapse by simplifying life into a chain of heroic tasks. If your working life seems inconsequential, FPS offers you the chance to climb out of the office via the air-conditioning vent and save the world by fighting monsters with a crowbar. In Chap. 5, I examine the landscape of the tactical multiplayer first-person shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), which began as a player-made modification (mod) of Half-Life. Despite their visual similarities, the multiplayer FPS is a radically different type of landscape to the single-player. Now the player is no longer the protagonist and becomes one of many competing within a shared environment. The protagonist’s landscape has been replaced by something more like a basketball court and the finite single-player safari is replaced by endless online competition with an exponential rise in skill and difficulty. CS:GO introduces the shift in computer game materiality where games and their environments are designed by volunteer player-modders rather than professional game developers. These landscapes are often free content donated by fan artists onto the servers of game publishers, and like all user-generated content, they often step into uncomfortable territories, such as recreating high schools and university campuses as the battleground for a shooting competition. Chapter 5 also examines how the uncharacteristic longevity of CS:GO is underpinned by gambling and how this economy has been utilised for money laundering and the marketing of real firearms. What emerges in Counter-Strike is a landscape of reciprocal military vision fuelled by economic structures similar to those found in sports geography and tourism. Chapter 6 adopts a slightly different approach to the first two case studies and I describe the process of making my own CS:GO mod using the Valve Source Engine. In 2017, I was a co-­ author of the project Autosave: Redoubt, which was a recreation of a historical site in Hong Kong within CS:GO. Converting accurate geographical data into CS:GO revealed a new way of looking at the Valve Source Engine. Using geographical data and historical accounts as a goal, we encountered

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limitations in digital geometry and gameplay that can help to move the conversation away from quixotic distractions of ‘realism’ in games and refocus our analysis on the medium-specific ‘game-ness’ of these Source engine landscapes. Chapter 7 looks at what happens when the player from Chaps. 4 and 5 are merged with the modder of Chap. 6. The sandbox game introduces another layer to the landscape of computer games. Using the Valve Source Engine game Garry’s Mod, I examine how the transition from a game to something more like a creative software environment reveals the underlying abstraction of the computer game landscape. When we remove rules, goals, and narratives, the objects in Garry’s Mod become like toys in a toybox, waiting to be given a temporary meaning by the games invented by players. The safari and the sports field are transformed into a Situationist playground where we glimpse the underlying landscape of Web 2.0, a social and commercial space mediated by player networks and populated by haphazard ludic remixes. Examining Garry’s Mod alongside the growth of user-generated content, I explore the lack of ownership or remuneration available to game modders and a peculiar media enfolding where games start to resemble both creative software and social media platforms akin to Adobe Photoshop and YouTube. This chapter identifies a sort of billionaire simulator swampscape where everything is available yet seems to have lost all of its value. It is a toy box world of ludic spare parts, ready to be repurposed into something entirely unpredictable and entirely temporary. The conclusion of the book summarises the methodological question of how to analyse computer games as landscapes and the insights gained from applying this to the Valve Source Engine games. By focusing on games made using the same piece of software, I show the art historian, the geographer, and the cultural critic that we cannot make conclusions about games based on visual parallels alone. For the visually-minded scholar, gameplay is the sorting mechanism for representation where objects are given meaning and hierarchical importance based on their significance to the player, and this is where we find our landscape reading of the protagonist safari, the sports tourist and the billionaire simulator swampscape. Games, like paintings, books, and films, exist in economic, social, and technological networks that influence their meaning. This comprehensive analysis of computer games as the paradigm medium of landscape illustrates how the interaction between visual representation, gameplay experience and technological networks reveals an insightful portrait of contemporary life, which after all, is the goal of landscape studies. I hope

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that this book can demonstrate the value of considering computer games as landscapes and provide the reader with a rich historical context for what I think are some of the most fascinating cultural works of our age.

References Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger. London, Harmondsworth: British Broadcasting Corporation, Penguin. Casey, Edward S. 2002. Representing Place: Landscape Painting & Maps. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Clark, Kenneth. 1949. Landscape into Art. Boston: Beacon Press. Fuchs, M. 2019. Phantasmal Spaces: Archetypical Venues in Computer Games. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Rose, Gillian. 1993. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. London: Fontana Press. Zerbst, Stefan, and Oliver Düvel. 2004. 3D Game Engine Programming. Portland: Premier Press.

CHAPTER 2

What Is a Landscape?

[T]he landscape may indeed be a text on which generations write their recurring obsessions. —Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, 1995, 12.

In this introduction, I outline what I mean when I say ‘landscape’, what benefit we can get from thinking about computer games as landscapes, and how this relates to other research that has been done on the topic of computer games, spatial experience, and virtual worlds. At this early stage, I want to make the disclaimer that the ‘landscape’ I refer to is primarily that of the European and colonial diasporic conception. Whilst there are many independent cultural modes for representing the physical environment in song, literature, or image, many of which are casually referred to today using the term ‘landscape’, accommodating them within a single overview without serious comparative analysis would bend them out of shape and undermine their individual significance. James Elkins demonstrated this problem in his book Chinese Painting as Western Art History, where despite close formal similarities between Chinese and European painting traditions, there are radically different philosophies at play, from the symbolic meaning of forms such as trees and mountains to the social function of the art object itself. An oil painting connotes both the sanctity of the religious artefact and a commodity value, whereas a scroll might be gifted between generations and physically annotated with new poetic © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Nelson, Computer Games As Landscape Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4_2

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inscriptions like the opening pages of a book. My use of the term ‘landscape’ refers to the form of visuality that travelled the world from colonial expansion to the global consumer economy, a particular way of framing the environment that we see in paintings, photography, film, and, I argue, computer games. But the reader should be reminded that cultural and historical lineages are never simple, exclusive, or tracing a single line of historical power structures. For example, when Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet were becoming enamoured with Japanese Ukiyo-e prints in the nineteenth century, what is often overlooked is the fact that these prints were already entirely modern hybrids that combined Chinese and Japanese techniques with new visual conventions from Dutch landscape paintings imported by traders in Dejima two centuries prior (Mizutani and Nakamura 1998), therefore what the Impressionists were picking up on was already a semi-digested form of the modern European landscape, reinterpreted using various approaches from East Asia. The hybridity of contemporary visuality is no different, and in this book, where relevant, I highlight similar moments when the spatiality of computer games was shaped by unexpectedly congruent influences, such as that of sprite graphics and isometric side-scrolling with the Chinese history of parallel projection and boundary painting. But as a general rule, this book focuses on the origins and functions of landscape tracing European visual and linguistic precedents. So let’s start with the word itself. In his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama writes the German word ‘landschaft’ originally signified a physical area of human occupation that might make a pleasing subject for an image. The word entered the Dutch language as ‘landschap’ and was used to refer to the image of the physical environment, rather than the physical environment itself (Schama 1995, 10). According to philosopher Edward Casey, the German term ‘landschaft’ referred to a border zone where nature and culture collided, where buildings situated amongst agricultural land can be a contrast to ‘wilderness’. Casey argues that the transition of the German word into the Dutch ‘landschap’ occurred at a time when nearly all proximal land had become in some way civilised, and the term came to be used to refer to a site that would be represented by a painter or mapmaker. Anne Whiston Spirn incorporates the process of human land-shaping more directly into her etymological reading, and highlights a connection to the Dutch word ‘landskab’, where ‘land’ (the physical environment) was combined with ‘skabe’ and ‘schaffen’, which means ‘to shape’, and the suffixes ‘–skab’ and ‘–schaft’ and ‘skip’ mean ‘in

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association or partnership’. Whiston Spirn writes “there is a notion, embedded in the original world, of a mutual shaping of people and place: people shape the land, and the land shapes the people” (DeLue and Elkins 2008, 92). The word ‘landskip’ entered the English language at the end of the sixteenth century, referring to decorative scenery paintings (Casey 2002, 258–9). Art historian Mark Roskill writes that up until the late sixteenth century, the physical environment functioned in a painting as a “container or surround for actions and events” or as a symbolic representation of possible “worlds”, generally composed from the lexicon of Judeo-Christian or Ovidian symbols (Roskill 1997, 8). In the seventeenth century, the landscape in Dutch painting moved from a theatrical background for religious scenes to the primary subject matter of the painting itself (Macarthur 2007, 20). These Dutch paintings, dubbed ‘Landskips’, became popular collector’s items for English aristocrats (Schama 1995, 10) and began to turn landscape into a very specific subject, something that could be objectified and quantified with a specific economic value and aesthetic function, encapsulating the objectifying gaze that Europeans would transport across the world. From the etymological outset, ‘landscape’ refers to a world transformed by human culture and the desire to look back on the world as if it were an image. The particular ways of seeing the world embedded in our landscape images don’t arise out of nowhere and are relatively new. The better we can understand where traditions of image-making come from, the better we can step back and see our own cultural moment afresh and appreciate what works such as computer games might be reflecting back to us. In the 1970s, Marxist material analysis and feminist scholarship began to challenge what we might describe as a sort of formalism in the study of landscape images, where visual composition and technical mastery had been the dominant criteria for discussing the quality of landscape images. While the principles of mastery and formal composition remain highly relevant, material and feminist analyses revealed other stories encoded into landscape images that artists might not have directly intended, but were more artefacts of their time. In this section, I will give an overview of two important traditions in landscape painting, the Picturesque, and the Romantic, and show how quite fascinating histories are embedded into landscape images that we might think are quite benign, and how some of these histories can transform into the digital landscapes of today.

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The Picturesque Landscape painting emerged as a popular genre in Europe at a time of immense change. For the Dutch and Golden Age painting, their recent independence from the Spanish, and the successful reclamation of land using windmills, drainage, and dikes resulted in a pastoral school of painting that took the physical environment as both a principal subject matter and an object of national pride, and created a new market for small-scale landscape paintings. These transportable commodities were no longer overtly religious as in the case of genre painting, and of a small enough scale to appeal to a new consumer market of recently wealthy agriculturalists, both in the Netherlands and in other European centres. During the mid-seventeenth century, the Second Agricultural Revolution saw British farmers abandon the age-old practice of resting fields between crop cycles, and start rotating crops with nitrogen-fixing plants such as turnips and clover, leading to a boom in productivity. With productivity came profit, and a consumer demand for Dutch Golden Age landscapes. So popular were these landscape paintings that their subject matter and aesthetic came to influence how British landowners started to physically transform their own properties (Fussell 1984, 10; Daniels and Watkins 1994, 20; Schama 1995, 10; Macarthur 2007, 46). The Second Agricultural Revolution was tied in with the later Industrial Revolution. Agricultural historian G. E. Fussell describes how as the population of London was growing, pressure was placed on food production, which the rotations of turnip and clover answered, but with a new system of land ownership that also brought about the land privatisations that transformed a feudal countryside into a modern capitalist countryside. The Enclosures Acts of the 1760s was a series of laws that shifted agricultural production from smaller subsistence models (using common grazing areas) to larger estates that could systematically implement the more productive farming techniques of crop rotation (Fussell 1984, 15). They removed the rights of common people to farm common lands and privatised these lands so that wealthier individuals could implement modern farming methods at a larger scale. This had several consequences, from increased economic productivity to increased economic inequality between landowners and peasants, and a surplus of labour, which further fuelled the Industrial Revolution (Fussell 1984, 58). Land ownership was consolidated into the hands of the rural aristocracy, who transformed some subsistence farmers into waged employees, and pushed others to find work in

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the cities (Fussell 1984, 15; Copley 1994, 50; Modiano 1994, 208; Roskill 1997, 92; Macarthur 2007, 7). The consolidation of land ownership facilitated the creation of vast private gardens, the dramatic remodelling of the English countryside, and the pastoral visions that are at the core of the modern notion of ‘landscape’. For these wealthy farmers, Picturesque design theory became a fashionable way to transform the landscape. Inspired by the Dutch and Flemish paintings they had been collecting, local landowners/Picturesque theorists advocated that British gardens should be built in a rustic manner, not looking ‘designed’ like the geometrical topiary of the French, but reaching for an almost invisible aesthetic, something that looked like it had always been there, and something that could both aesthetically and ethically justify this new balance of ownership and control. Picturesque theorist William Gilpin wrote in 1794, “we must ever recollect that nature is most defective in composition; and (it) must be a little assisted” (Gilpin 1794). Despite their naturalistic ethos, these improvements were often quite dramatic, including hills and lakes as well as artificial ruins (known as ‘follies’), and a peculiar type of fence known as a ‘ha-ha’, which was a ditch that could prevent livestock from wandering off the property but could not be seen from the perspective of the house, giving the landowner a visual impression of a boundless property (Fussell 1984, 16; Schama 1995, 539). From around the 1970s, Marxist material scholarship emphasised that in addition to studying the formal qualities of Picturesque gardens and paintings, we need to understand that this movement was partly an attempt to morally justify the mass privatisation of public lands. Comparative literature scholar Raimonda Modiano writes: [there was] “no way of ignoring the fact that the major aestheticians of the Picturesque were wealthy landowners and that their ability to reserve vast amounts of land for the enjoyment of the Picturesque views was made possible by the profits they drew from enclosures” (Modiano 1994, 208). Ian Macarthur connects the process of landscape image composition, and dividing the image surface in “parallel thirds” to structure landforms such as water, mountains, and distant horizons, to a manifestation of an “aesthetic of ownership” (Macarthur 2007, 197) and that the process of assimilating a physical environment into this conception of landscape automatically communicates a sense of property, because it requires the viewer to identify as separate from what they are perceiving (rather than being engulfed, surrounded, or part of it, as one might find in the immersive patterned abstractions of

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Western Desert painting in Australia). For Macarthur, this conception of landscape is inseparable from the process of image-making, and making modern landscape images implies some form of commodification, turning the environment into something that can be identified, owned, and consumed, either as a resource or as a visual experience (Macarthur 2007, 195). While the Enclosures Acts of the 1760s had a dramatic influence over the socio-economic relationships of rural England, the more abstract capitalist division between a commons and proprietary boundaries has seen the notion of ‘enclosure’ take on a much wider significance in economic theory. In his 2017 book Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies, Sean Cubitt uses the ‘enclosure’ history of landscape to discuss economic externalities in digital media technology, arguing that just as Picturesque landscapes concealed their economic enclosures, our digital images conceal their environmental enclosures. He suggests that the environmental degradation brought about by resource extraction, industrial waste, and atmospheric emissions can still be understood using the metaphor of enclosure and that the modern sense of enclosure separates landscapes that should be used for resource extraction from those which should be aestheticised as ‘wildernesses’. There are those we travel great distances to take photographs of, and those which we go to great means to ignore, such as the open-cut mines that supply the minerals needed for the cameras used to take the photos, or the unimportant forests that continue to be cleared to meet the local needs of economic expansion (Cubitt 2017). Just as Picturesque aesthetics sought to naturalise property ownership, consumer technologies present a dual aesthetic frontier where the design of the technology and the experiences it facilitates is coupled with the concealment of externalities, such as conflicts over rare minerals, environmental contamination, or the End User Licence Agreements that might ‘enclose’ the free labour of users from the private profits generated by software platforms. Cubitt writes: Land enclosures turned farmers into agricultural labourers; industrial enclosures turned artisans into workers. The new change is so recent we have yet to find our terminology, but we might say that it is changing knowing creatures into ‘prosumers’ of knowledge: people who both produce and consume it in relations no longer of shared information but of data exchange, and therefore mediated by exchange value. What is clear is that today knowledge is no longer something held as common sense between people, as familiar as a hammer in the hand once was. Knowledge has become an

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e­ nvironment confronting us as something apart: alien and inhuman, even anti-­human. (Cubitt 2017, 162)

When it comes to representations of landscape in computer games, Cubitt argues that virtual worlds are upheld by their dependence on supply chains of resource extraction, as well as on the labour practices that go into their production (Cubitt 2017, 158). This book argues that enclosure and the objectifying gaze of landscape is simply the aesthetic language that has developed alongside the broader processes of industrialisation, colonialism, and globalisation. I am not making a moral or ethical judgement that what we find in computer games is particularly good or bad, I am simply trying to find a balanced description of what they might be, in a way that an art historian might help us see the deeper significance of cultural works in their own context. For the reader of this book, I hope we can find pleasure in being able to reflect on the beauty and complexity of computer games when we zoom out and try to look at them as if they are landscapes, the cultural texts that describe us and how we relate to the world.

The Romantic While the Picturesque was more concerned with a secular economic rationalisation of landscape, the Romantic landscapes of the nineteenth century had a more religious and metaphysical mission. For Romantic landscape painters such as Caspar David Friedrich, landscapes were a place where the abject danger of the Swiss Alps or the imperceptible vastness of the ocean could eclipse the artificiality of the factory and the rituals of the church and return oneself to the humility of the divine (Rewald 2001, 36) or even experience the sublime, as described by Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke (Punter 1994, 220). The Romantic desire to escape the scientific objectification of enlightenment culture and find God in the wilderness is also a relatively modern development. Scientific objectification, the optical developments in telescopes and microscopes, and the new systems of standardised measures to systematise and rationalise the world were extended by European nations in their exploration, cartography, and colonisation (Descola 2013, 40–1). Anthropologist Philippe Descola argues that this period more than any other led to a radical distinction between nature and culture. The Copernican revolution, the Cartesian rationalisation of space, and the development of lens-based optics led to a

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privileging of the visual, and projection of these concepts both conceptually and geopolitically via European colonialism. Of this process, Descola writes: Nature, now dumb, odour-free, and intangible, had been left devoid of life. Gentle Mother Nature was forgotten, and Nature, the cruel stepmother, had disappeared; all that remained was a ventriloquist’s dummy, of which man could make himself, as it were, the lord and master. (Descola 2013, 41)

Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes that the European concept of ‘wilderness’ also shifted dramatically during this period, once a signifier for chaos and the realm of demons in the Classical period, the modern Romantics transformed the concept of wilderness into a desirable relief from the expanding Industrial world. Tuan writes: Images are reversed so that the wilderness stands for order (ecological order) and freedom whereas the central city is chaotic, a jungle ruled by social outcasts. Suburb, once perceived as the place for paupers and obnoxious trades, has now greater prestige than the decaying city core. Time-honoured meanings of ‘core’ and ‘periphery,’ ‘centre’ and ‘margin’ are reversed. (Tuan 1974, 248)

Art historian Timothy Mitchell argues that for German Romantic painters such as Philip Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich (Fig. 2.1), the desire to develop landscape painting into a spiritual language divorced from codified religious orthodoxies is precisely a product of this exaggerated contrast between enlightenment empiricism and the sense of the divine that this empiricism left behind (T. F. Mitchell 1977, 79–80). This spiritual motivation later collided with geopolitics, and Friedrich’s landscapes became infused with a German nationalism set against the French Revolution, later recognised by the Nazi party as “true Germanic art” (T. F. Mitchell 1977, 9). The Romantic view of landscape also played a fascinating role in the colonial expansion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where distant lands and cultures were defined according to the desires of Europeans. The artist William Hodges (1744–1797) accompanied James Cook on his second voyage across the Pacific Ocean (1772–1775). Art historian Mark Roskill describes Hodges’s painting A View Taken in the Bay of Oaite Peha (Tahiti Revisited) (1775) as a sort of Romantic postcard for the European investor, which filtered Tahiti through the language of landscape, where Tahitian women are transformed into bathing nymphs, alluding to an

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Fig. 2.1  Caspar David Friedrich, Ruins of Eldena, near Greifswald, 1825. Oil on canvas. Old National Gallery, Berlin

Edenic island, a sexually liberated paradise and an economically fertile land ringed by sublime mountains. Similar compositions would later be repeated in the North American paintings by Hudson River school painters such as Thomas Cole (Roskill 1997, 97–401). When studying the influence of Romanticism on artists working in colonial territories such as California and the Yosemite Valley, Rebecca Solnit writes that Christian Arcadian sentiment and burgeoning North American nationalism are vital for understanding how landscape painting helped redefine the conquered territories of Native Americans into a new promised land within the aesthetic imagination of British Protestantism. Solnit describes the rapid speed with which the Yosemite Valley was transformed from an Indigenous stronghold, to a fierce battleground and then into a Romantic tourist spectacle for the future of the North American Californian landscape: The citizens of the United States had laboured under a mighty inferiority complex when they looked back at Europe. The European landscape was given meaning by the long history that could be read in its names and ruins

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and monuments. The American landscape lacked all that to its newcomers. Over the decades, a new Yankee credo arose, in which the landmarks of Europe were evidence that the place was weary, spent, used, soiled almost; the supposed newness of the U.S. demonstrated that it was fresh, young, pure, a child of promise with its history all laid out before it, a tabula rasa on which a heroic history would be inscribed. (Solnit 1994, 116–7)

She continues: The United States of America has, ever since this strange upwelling of nationalistic optimism, been distinguished by its amnesias, its sense of prodigious destiny, its looking ever forward and never back – and its frenzied transformation of landscape into real estate. (Solnit 1994, 117)

Looking back at the North American Romantic paintings of Albert Bierstadt (Fig. 2.2) the photographs of Carleton Watkins and ‘The Course of Empire’ series by Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole (Fig. 1.2), Solnit identifies the Romantic projection of primeval wilderness combined with the melancholy of a paradise lost, a Utopian optimism of a perfectible

Fig. 2.2  Albert Bierstadt, Valley of the Yosemite, 1864. Oil on paperboard, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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American future made possible by the promised land of the New World. By aesthetically characterising the indigenous Ahwahneechee people as extinct by disease, warfare, or miscegenation, they could be mourned and absorbed into the mythology of the landscape, whilst the environment itself could be converted into a visual spectacle of American modernity (Solnit 1994, 258). At the same time that the nearby Sierra Nevada was being enthusiastically excavated by the California Gold Rush, Yosemite was becoming a destination to experience the unspoiled beauty of the North American landscape. The amnesia of these historical rebrandings of wilderness and landscape continues to create new chains of consequence today. Like many of Australia’s most agriculturally productive regions, the Edenic meadows of the Yosemite Valley were not permanent features but were man-made products of indigenous fire-farming.1 The colonial disruption of Ahwahneechee land management disturbed the germination of pine cones from the giant sequoias which required fire, and much like in Australia where I’m from, regular controlled burns have been replaced by irregular catastrophic wildfires, which plague us to this day (Solnit 1994, 280). Like my description of Picturesque landscapes, this quick overview of Romanticism is not intended as a moral condemnation of entire periods of art-making, it simply seeks to unpack what Schama wrote about landscapes as social texts that reflect contextual histories back at us. This summary is intended to acclimate us to seeing landscapes as both aesthetic statements of visual beauty and layered encapsulations of historical moments, where even the most breathtaking mountains can arise out of the fertile soils of historical contradiction. As an avid hiker and ocean swimmer, I can’t discount the breathtaking wonder of submitting myself 1  Almost 30 years after Solnit’s research, Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate On Earth similarly catalogues how the Australian landscape, before the British invasion, was shaped by a complex regime of controlled burning by Indigenous people (Gammage 2011). Like Solnit, Gammage uses this history to point out that present-day national parks in Australia, much like Yosemite, are very different landscapes compared to when they existed under Indigenous management. In both Australia and North America, concepts such as ‘wilderness’ must be understood as a European projection that requires the erasure of the history of indigenous land management, and the recognition that the landscapes painted by colonial settlers often depicted the results of indigenous land management practices, not Edenic promised lands.

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to cold and treacherous seas or a dizzying climb. But my knowledge of landscape and historical context reveals the layers we are walking on, and that perhaps my breath is being taken in a very particular way, or that my attraction to certain places will derive from the inseparable fusion of my biological preferences (I will later introduce Jay Appleton’s prospect and refuge theory) and cultural conventions, some new, some ancient. I say inseparable because if we are living in a physical environment that has been reshaped by generations of humans, and assuming that this physical environment, in turn, shapes us, separating our biological from our cultural preferences in landscape becomes somewhat paradoxical. In 1992, Tim Ingold wrote an explicit criticism of a materialist reading of landscape, arguing that it is not a framework for perceiving the world, but simply for interpreting it. He presents these materialist historical frameworks as second-­order rationalisations of first order experience—the experience of landscape is not pre-determined by the existence of historical narratives, but at the same time, it cannot be abstracted from them. Ingold writes: Humans do not, in the ordinary course of life, experience the environment as a ‘blank slate’, i.e. as space, awaiting the imposition of cultural order; but rather as a structured set of affordances in the context of current action. (Ingold 1992, 53)

On the one hand, Ingold situates landscape primarily in experience, but on the other, acknowledges that this experience is ‘structured’ by the affordances of context. In the landscape theory seminar, art historian Maunu Häyrynen presents a similar compromise. Häyrynen writes: Textual and phenomenological interpretations of landscape do not exclude one another. The representable and the unrepresentable occur in constant interaction, resulting in the historical stratification of both. While landscape experience can hardly be totally free from ideological framing, representation of landscape has to relate somehow to the lived environment. (Häyrynen 2008, 177)

Hiking up a mountain peak, I cannot separate my exhaustion from the beauty of the view, nor from my knowledge of the writings on such beauty, nor the myriad postcards that have framed this view before me, which flicker in my mind as I wipe the sweat from my brow. Sean Cubitt argues

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that the post-Romantic nature we experience today is defined either by a “pantheistic integration” or by an invented nostalgia for “an impossible return to the formless state of nature” (Cubitt 2017, 28), putting both the hiker and the computer game player in a tricky position. Just as we can only experience the world within the parameters of our bodily senses, the study of landscape implies that our aesthetic inheritance and our conceptual architecture travel along with us, structuring what we see.

Definitions of Landscape Now that I have covered some contextual histories of landscape, I want to introduce a few key definitions, which will be referred to throughout this book. These definitions, like my definitions of computer games in Chap. 3, will set up the language for the major analysis of this book. In 1984, geographer Dennis Cosgrove, in his book Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, gave the following definition of landscape: Landscape represents a way of seeing – a way in which some Europeans have represented to themselves and to others the world about them and their relationships with it, and through which they have commented on social relations. Landscape is a way of seeing that has its own history, but a history that can be understood only as a part of a wider history of economy and society; that has its own assumptions and consequences, but assumptions and consequences whose origins and implications extend well beyond the use and perception of the land. (Cosgrove 1998, xiv)

In 1994, art historian W. J. T. Mitchell offered the definition of landscape that, like Cosgrove, draws heavily on material relations and the history of imperialism. Mitchell writes: . Landscape is not a genre of art but a medium. 1 2. Landscape is a medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other. As such, it is like money: good for nothing in itself, but expressive of a potentially limitless reserve of value. 3. Like money, landscape is a social hieroglyph that conceals the actual basis of its value. It does so by naturalising its conventions and conventionalising its nature.

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4. Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and a presented space, both a signifier and a signified, both a frame and what a frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum, both a package and the commodity inside a package. 5. Landscape is a medium found in all cultures. 6. Landscape is a particular historical formation associated with European imperialism. 7. Theses 5 and 6 do not contradict one another. 8. Landscape is an exhausted medium, no longer viable as a mode of artistic expression. Like life, landscape is boring, we must not say so. 9. The landscape referred to in Thesis 8 is the same as that of Thesis 6. (W. J. T. Mitchell 1994, 5) Mitchell argued that the physical environment is inseparable from the process of representing it and that landscapes both as images and as the physical environment itself should be understood as a feedback loop that we are stuck inside of. Human activities shape the physical environment, and the physical environment shapes human activities. Landscape presents the physical environment as a thing or something that can be looked at, yet at the same time, does a paradoxically good job of encoding entire histories connected to this way of seeing. Geographer Gillian Rose argues that whilst Cosgrove and Mitchell’s definitions re-inject the historical contexts that formal analyses might have overlooked, they miss the varying positions of subjectivity also encoded in landscapes. Rose points out that the explorer and the empiricist looking onto the landscape might see things very differently according to gender or ethnicity (Rose 1993, 7). Rose writes: Masculinist rationality is a form of knowledge which assumes a knower who believes he can separate himself from his body, emotions, values, past and so on so that he and his thoughts are autonomous, context-free and objective. Many feminists see this desire for autonomy as typical of the master subject, but the assumption of an objectivity untainted by any particular social position allows this kind of rationality to claim itself as universal. (Rose 1993, 6–7)

Rose offers simple geographical examples, such as how the open space of an empty street can become an oppressive space when a sense of detached safety is replaced with feelings of threat or danger, to the point

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where space becomes “an enemy itself” (Rose 1993, 143), pointing out that the implicit removal of the body found in empiricism can lead to a male-biased reading of space. Like Yi-Fu Tuan, Casey, and other geographers influenced by the philosophy of phenomenology, Rose re-inserts the body as a critical consideration for how we understand the meaning of a landscape. As we will see later, the body and the lack thereof in computer games can provide a fascinating way to step aside and see the vision of the world that computer games are presenting to us. In place of a homogenous subject position, Rose argues that notions such as space, place, location, cartography, and landscape should be characterised by what she calls “paradoxical space”, that which is “lived, experienced and felt” and produces “radically heterogeneous geometries” (Rose 1993, 140). In the early 1970s, geographer David Harvey focused on economic relationships and social processes to destabilise the notion that landscapes, both physical and represented, can be understood by formal relationships between objects in the neutral container of Cartesian space (as was espoused, e.g., by the Picturesque theorist William Gilpin). Instead, Harvey argues that ‘place’ as experienced by the body, produces ‘space’ according to the material and historical position of the observer (Harvey 1973, 306). The Marxist revision of space not only challenged the notion of space as a neutral absolute container but also sought to contextualise Cartesian space as itself the result of material historical processes. In The Production of Space (1974) Henri Lefebvre argues that the mathematical system of absolute space of Descartes and Spinoza obscures how space actually functions (Lefebvre 1991 [1974], 9). As an example of how Cartesian space is culturally constructed in the landscape, Lefebvre describes how perspectival representation partly derived from patterns in land ownership developed in the Italian countryside during the thirteenth century. The mêtayage system of agriculture, where production was incentivised by redistributing a share of agricultural produce to mêtayers (former serfs) was introduced to meet the demand for produce coming from the increased population of town-dwellers. The local division of architectural space, from the houses of the mêtayers to the mansions of the landowners, and the delineation of rural properties using straight rows of cypress trees, created a particular rural space that lent itself to converging perspective lines and the Cartesian plotting of a landscape environment in two dimensions, required for a typical abstract spatial conception. Whilst this is only one of many contingent factors, Lefebvre argues that even the scientific invention of perspectival drawing cannot be disentangled from

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particular socio-economic relations within the landscape (Lefebvre 1991 [1974], 78). The following passage from Lefebvre summarises his argument for how a social space should be understood as a result of a contingent series of interactions: A social space cannot be adequately accounted for either by nature (climate, site) or by its previous history. Nor does the growth of the forces of production give rise in any direct causal fashion to a particular space or a particular time. Mediations and mediators have to be taken into consideration: the actions of groups, factors within knowledge, within ideology, or within the domain of representations. Social space contains a great diversity of objects, both natural and social, including the networks and pathways, which facilitate the exchange of material things and information. Such ‘objects’ are thus not only things but also relations. As objects, they possess discernible peculiarities, contour and form. Social labour transforms them, rearranging their positions within spatiotemporal configurations without necessarily affecting their materiality, their natural state (as in the case, for instance, or an island, gulf, river or mountain). (Lefebvre 1991 [1974], 77)

For Lefebvre, space is a political construction, borne out of the experience of individuals and their social practice. It is not a neutral Cartesian res extensa;2 it is the emergent fabric weaved from “the exchange of material things and information” (Lefebvre 1991 [1974], 77). Space is not the neutral interval between objects, it is the politically charged interval that results from social-spatial practice and ultimately stems from the experience of the body. Tuan’s work in human geography made a similar case for space as a product of human experience and sought to position the body as the fundamental locus of this experience. In reference to the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Tuan positioned the body as the anthropocentric locus around which spatial prepositions are developed (a book is on a table rather than a table being under a book due to the logical relationship both objects have with the human body) (Tuan 1974, 45) Tuan used this approach to argue that geography should be based on the shifting relationships that societies and individuals have to the notion of 2  In The Production of Space, Lefebvre criticises the notion of infinitely extendable abstract space implied by René Descartes’s concept of res extensa. In Descartes’s ontology, res extensa (translated as ‘extended thing’) exists in binary opposition to res cogitans, which refers to consciousness or the non-physical mind, typically associated with dualist or idealist philosophy (Lefebvre 1991 [1974], 39).

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‘place’ and how this shapes the political and social status of their spatial fabric. For example, Tuan describes how rectilinear architecture, whether as urban structures or the orthogonal division of rural properties correlates to the tendency of individuals to perceive shapes on a flat place, such as a parallelogram, or indeed a straight line as an extension into a hypothetical space (Tuan 1974, 76). Given that I have been discussing how landscape experience produces a particular kind of ‘space’, it is worth mentioning two influential and related theories that present landscape through an instrumental biological or militaristic experience. Jay Appleton’s 1975 book The Experience of Landscape used John Dewey’s philosophy of aesthetic experience to derive what he termed the ‘habitat’ and ‘prospect-refuge’ theories of landscape experience. Habitat theory states that the aesthetic enjoyment of a landscape derives from the perceived potential of an environment as providing safety and sustenance. The prospect-refuge theory states that aesthetic enjoyment of a landscape derives from the perceived ability to safely survey an environment without being seen yourself. According to Appleton, landscape elements can be encoded with remnants of these biological qualities, which collectively contribute to the aesthetic experience of a particular landscape (Appleton 1975, 63). Appleton’s focus on a sort of survival-based instrumentality can also be seen in the work of philosopher Paul Virilio. Influenced by Merleau-­ Ponty’s phenomenology, Virilio developed a theory of landscape-based on war and the military gaze. In War and Cinema: The Logistics of Vision (1989) and The Vision Machine (1994), Virilio outlined a theory of landscape based around spatial dominance, the line of sight, and a theory of military optics that linked modernist architecture to technologies such as the lens, the camera, and the moving image. In contrast to Marxist materialist accounts of landscape as value and commodity, Virilio focused on speed and the ‘war machine’ as the dominant force in the landscape, towards which production, the market and the state are subservient (Virilio 1994, 3). Within this whirlwind round-up of theories of landscape and spatial experiences, what emerges is a paradoxical tension between whether physical landscapes and their visual representations are to be understood as texts, via art history or cultural studies, or as experiences of the body, via phenomenology. The two quotes below, the first from James Elkins and the second from Rachel Ziady DeLue are taken from a 2007 debate on landscape, and summarise this tension quite well:

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Like the body, landscape is something we inhabit without being different from it: we are in it, and we are it…the object isn’t bound by our attention, it binds us. (Elkins 2008, 69) The landscape is always ‘for us,’ since we construct it; but it seems to me that one of the things that a phenomenological reading allows us to do is to break down the subject-object relation, to break down the idea of landscape as a view. It is about lived experience, rather than ‘me-it,’ or self and other. That is one of the things the phenomenological has to offer: landscape as a thing that we live within. (Ziady DeLue 2008, 104)

Whether landscapes are texts to be studied or experiences that unfold is exactly the problem we will find in the next chapter on computer games. Are games texts that are composed of files and processes that can be studied objectively, or are they experiences that change every time they are played? When preparing for this book, I repeatedly encountered the use of experiential frameworks as a tool of primary analysis. I start with the experience of playing the game and worked back from there. But I also needed to find a way to contextualise this experience in order that it was not so esoteric that a second person playing the same game could sympathise and resonate with the insights I identified, but no so deterministic, following Ingold, that my historical and contextual worldview was pre-determining the experience in front of me. I wanted to make claims that, should someone else play the game, I could feel reasonably confident that they could see what I was talking about, and therefore we could agree that this method can help us enjoy some deeper truths about these marvels of contemporary culture. In landscape studies, I was particularly taken by the works of anthropologists Ingold and Christopher Tilley. In Place, Paths and Monuments: A Phenomenology of Landscape (1994), Tilley offers a framework for analysing landscape according to the different levels of spatial understanding that arise from landscape experience, which comprise somatic space, perceptual space, existential space, architectural space and cognitive space (Tilley 1994, 15–17). I found that these five spatial layers provide a practical set of questions with which one can analyse the experience of place, space, and landscape, and as I show in the next chapter, can be converted into an interesting way to analyse the meaning of computer games when experienced as landscapes.

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References Appleton, Jay. 1975. The Experience of Landscape. Landscape Planning. London and New York: Wiley. Casey, Edward S. 2002. Representing Place: Landscape Painting & Maps. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Copley, Stephen. 1994. William Gilpin and the Black-Lead Mine. In The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cosgrove, Denis E. 1998. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. 2nd ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Cubitt, Sean. 2017. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Daniels, Stephen, and Charles Watkins. 1994. Picturesque Landscaping and Estate Management: Uvedale Price and Nathaniel Kent at Foxley. In The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeLue, Rachael Ziady. 2008. Elusive Landscapes and Shifting Grounds. In Landscape Theory, ed. Rachel Ziady De Lue and James Elkins. New York and London: Routledge. DeLue, Rachel, and James Elkins. 2008. Landscape Theory. New York and London: Routledge. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Elkins, James. 2008. Writing Moods. In Landscape Theory, ed. Rachel Ziady De Lue and James Elkins. New York and London: Routledge. Fussell, G.E. 1984. Landscape Painting and the Agricultural Revolution. London: Pindar Press. Gammage, Bill. 2011. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Gilpin, William. 1794. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching; To Which Is Added a Poem on Landscape Painting. London: Printed for R. Blamire. Harvey, David. 1973. Social Justice and the City. London: Arnold. Häyrynen, Mäunu. 2008. Assessment of Landscape Theory Roundtable Seminar. In Landscape Theory, ed. Rachel Ziady De Lue and James Elkins. New York and London: Routledge. Ingold, Tim. 1992. Culture and the Perception of the Environment. In Bush Base: Forest Farm, ed. E. Croll and D. Parkin. London: Routledge. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space. Edited by Donald Nicholson-Smith. The Production of Space. 1991st ed. Oxford and Cambridge, MMA: Blackwell.

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Macarthur, John. 2007. The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities. London: Routledge. Mitchell, Timothy Frank. 1977. Philipp Otto Runge und Caspar David Friedrich: A Comparison of Their Art and Theory. Doctoral thesis. Indiana University. Mitchell, William John Thomas. 1994. Imperial Landscape. In Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T.  Mitchell. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Mizutani, Takeshi, and Setsuko Nakamura. 1998. Dutch Influence on the Reception and Development of Western-Style Expression in Early Modern Japan. In 64th Annual Conference 64. Modiano, Raimonda. 1994. The Legacy of the Picturesque: Landscape, Property and the Ruin. In The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Punter, David. 1994. The Picturesque and the Sublime: Two Worldscapes. In The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rewald, Sabine. 2001. Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers. New  York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rose, Gillian. 1993. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Roskill, Mark. 1997. The Languages of Landscape. University Press, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. London: Fontana Press. Solnit, Rebecca. 1994. Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Tilley, Christopher. 1994. Place, Paths and Monuments, a Phenomenology of Landscape. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press. Virilio, Paul. 1989. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Vision. London and New York: Verso. ———. 1994. Bunker Archeology. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

CHAPTER 3

What Is a Computer Game?

The ability to propel ourselves into the rich visual environments of computer games makes it natural to start thinking about them as landscapes. We can compare what these worlds look like to the vistas we find in paintings and photographs, where a view of the world is framed on a flat surface, and to films, where moving images and moving cameras bring us into a represented world with its own diegetic time and space. But computer games offer us something different, we can control the camera, interact inside them, make decisions, and have these decisions affect the environment, our position in it, and even how we relate to other people occupying the same virtual world, as in the case of a multiplayer game. Computer game studies have struggled with the visual comparisons between games and film and the structural comparisons to narrative literature, partly because there are just so many different experiences that we house under the label ‘computer game’ that in some cases, certain comparisons make a lot of sense, and in others, they make no sense at all (consider the narrative significance of Tetris (Pajitnov 1984) versus The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda 2011)). If we remove the word ‘computer’, we can start to see the problem more clearly. It would be strange to analyse a game of soccer or chess as a film or an image, even if we were watching it on a screen. We could retrospectively read a narrative struggle between the players of the game relative to the rules, contextualised by biographical specifics of each team, but it would be a stretch to read this narrative in the design of the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Nelson, Computer Games As Landscape Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4_3

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jerseys of the stylistic carvings of the individual chess pieces. In this chapter, I give a brief overview of how more sophisticated versions of these comparisons have played out amongst scholars who study computer games, and offer a framework that I believe is reasonably congruent with what I have just discussed concerning the idea of landscape. From these two perspectives, I outline a method for analysing computer games as landscapes and hopefully justify my assertion that computer games could be the paradigmatic form of landscape in contemporary media.

A Game Must Be Played To simplify things, I will leave the word ‘computer’ aside for a moment and focus on the word ‘game’. In Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman offer a useful overview of various definitions of games, and how in the English language, the term ‘game’ exists in a dynamic relationship with the term ‘play’. Salen and Zimmerman’s definition of a game is as follows: “a system in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (Salen and Zimmerman 2004, 80). Within this definition, they argue that a game should be understood according to how players relate to a system that includes a set of rules that distinguishes the game from real life, what Johan Huizinga (1964 [1955]) called the ‘magic circle’. The rules structure the artificial conflict or competition, and the quantifiable outcomes, such as points, or a win/lose condition, separate this type of ‘play’ from less structured or formal activities, such as kicking a ball around a parking lot or playing with your food (Salen and Zimmerman 2004, 172). Another way of looking at a game is from the perspective of the player rather than the rules and mechanics. In his book The Grasshopper: Games, Life, Utopia (1978), philosopher Bernard Suits wrote that a game exists when players decide to treat something like a game when they approach it with a “lusory attitude”, and when they accept the restrictions of the rules to satisfy their desire to play. According to Suits, a game is not a formally defined object, but an experience that exists when players approach it with a lusory attitude (Suits 1978, 35). In this definition, a game is not a matter of a formal description, it is an experience. Game scholar Olli Leino adapts Suits’s formulation to argue that when a player decides to play, every object takes on a new meaning, they become objects that can help the player survive in the game. Here, Leino is adapting Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential philosophy to argue that objects inside games have a sort of ‘existential ludology’,

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where their meaning relies on how they might help or hinder the ability of the player to survive in the game. Leino defines this ‘gameplay condition’ as follows: Given that I desire to play, and am willing to demonstrate the lusory attitude, the materiality of the game artefact imposes on me a freedom of choice of which I am responsible in my choices. (Leino 2010, 133–4)

From this perspective, games and the objects inside them have specific meanings for players compared to passive observers examining screenshots and recordings, just as a soccer ball means something different to the player, and spectatorship means something different to a sports fan compared to someone who does not understand the game. Put simply, a computer game is more than just what it looks like, and its most intimate meanings will be derived by those who are playing.1

Using Computers to Play Games When we bring the word ‘computer’ back into the mix, a few things start to change. Unlike regular games where players have to rearrange physical tokens to uphold the rules and the game state, a computer can do all of this automatically and to a greater degree of complexity, interpreting player actions relative to rules and providing audiovisual feedback to advance the state of the game, often before players have understood exactly what the rules even are (Juul 2005, 6). Due to the complexity of how computer game software interacts with rules and players, Lars Konzack (2002) defines computer games using a series of discrete layers, to isolate and define key features. Konzack’s layers are hardware, program code (software), functionality, gameplay, meaning, referentiality, and the socio-cultural layer (Konzack 2002). Konzack’s ‘functionality’ layer is largely derived from Aarseth’s Cybertext, where the computer game is situated in a broader category of other interactive texts. In the inaugural issue of the Game Studies journal, game scholar Espen Aarseth argued that because the term ‘computer game’ applies to such a wide variety of media that defining computer 1  This is not to discount the notion of spectatorship, which is especially relevant for ESports and the spectacle of Let’s Play YouTube videos, both of which will be discussed in Chaps. 4 and 6 respectively.

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games using a consistent set of formal criteria, or defining them, as a medium is a fool’s errand (Aarseth 2001). In Aarseth’s book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Aarseth proposed a framework for understanding various configurable and dynamic textual forms, which he dubbed “ergodic literature”. In this formulation, like any form of representation, a text is dependent on its medium. It comprises information that may or may not make sense to the reader and this information comprises signs “as they appear to the reader” (scriptons), and signs “as they exist in the text” (textons). In the case of a computer game, textons might be in-game objects such as a 3D model of a barrel or a sound file, whereas a scripton would be that barrel exploding in front of the eyes of the player (Aarseth 1997, 62). For Aarseth, a computer game is a “cybertext”, which is a mechanically organised text that requires the reader to actively engage with non-trivial effort to derive meaning (Aarseth 1997, 1). Aarseth uses the physics term “ergodic” to describe how the reader of a cybertext (or the player of a computer game) traverses, or moves through a cybertext. A cybertext, like a computer game, will always appear slightly different, as the scriptons will appear differently depending on which moves the reader makes.

Rules, Mechanics, Simulations, and Interpretation Due to the complexity of rules that a computer game can maintain, various game scholars have suggested that computer games make meaning via a sort of simulation, where the rules function to communicate the metaphorical meaning of the game to the player, what Ian Bogost (2007) called ‘procedural rhetoric, such as the correlation between U.S. airstrikes and insurgent recruitment in the Iraq War in the game September 12th, or the visions of urban planning outlined in the rules of the SimCity series. In 2001, game designer Gonzalo Frasca proposed that rather than telling narrative stories, computer games simulate concepts for players who can experience and experiment with them (Frasca 2001). The complexity in this argument, and as we will find in my analysis of games like Counter-­ Strike, is that often the rules of a game simulate something different from what is rendered on the screen of the player (I suggest that Counter-Strike shares more rules with tennis, rather than the counter-terrorism operations visualised on screen). Like Frasca, Bogost located the procedure of the game as the point at which the game designer can make a persuasive argument, which the player experiences via what is seen on the screen.

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Bogost argued that when what is seen on the screen is congruent with the procedural rhetoric, a game can make a successful representation, measured by the degree to which the player is persuaded by the argument being made by the game designer. According to this line of thinking, a ‘serious game’ might not be so serious if how it appears on the screen is trivial, but an existing game can be ‘reskinned’ with more serious visuals and a new procedural meaning can be generated (Bogost 2007, 49, 238–41). One of the problems with the procedural rhetorics argument is that the player might not act or interpret meanings as the designers intended, as this would constitute, as Miguel Sicart points out, an authorial fallacy. Following the logic of Roland Barthes (“the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination … the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author”) (Barthes 1967, 6), Sicart writes “against procedurality an army of players stand and play, breaking the rules, misunderstanding the processes, appropriating the spaces of play and taking them somewhere else, where not even the designer can reach” (Sicart 2011). While Sicart’s repost to Bogost is reasonable, I think we can take it with a grain of salt and imagine a plausible set of assumptions by which a player willingly engages as a player. If they throw the game controller across the room or pour ketchup into their console, perhaps they have started playing something else. A more fine grained and pragmatic solution to how players might interpret simulated meaning in a computer game traces back to what Leino dubbed ‘the gameplay condition’, or simply the desire to stay in the game. In the paper Emotions about the Deniable/Undeniable: Sketch for a Classification of Game Content as Experienced (2007) Leino makes the distinction between computer game representations that have a deniable or undeniable significance to the player—do they help or hinder the player to stay in the game. Leino defines this distinction as follows: Undeniable meanings are the ones the player cannot deny without decreasing his possibilities to act in the game, e.g. the importance of making it to the next checkpoint in Turbo Outrun. Deniable meanings are the ones which can be denied without such consequences, like the shape of Bismarck’s moustache in Civilization IV. (Leino 2007, 116)

There is a hierarchical elegance in this distinction. While there can be interesting objects with no ludic value to the player, their meaning can be objectively separated from those that a player cannot ignore such as a

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dangerous enemy or a vital health pack, and these differences will be confirmed at the programming layer of the game. The existential drive of the player to stay in the game can give us a fixed point of meaning, around which we can balance other interpretations the player might make relative to whatever the game designers might have intended. This division between what is seen on the screen (what the graphics card renders as a moving sequence of still frames) and the mechanics that the player must resist to stay in the game are what Sara Mosberg Iversen refers to as the rendered spectacle versus the abstract mechanical rules. Iversen proposes that the dualism of a mechanics layer and a representational layer be understood according to ludic and thematic representations. Ludic representations exist as “the state machine with its objectives, legal and illegal actions, points, and measurements of success” and thematic representations refer to the story fragments that exist in characters and environments, driven by functional characteristics, but “interpreted within the frame of everyday cultural significance” (Iversen 2009, 80–1). Borrowing from the literary concept of the implied reader, Iversen argues that computer game representation on ludic and thematic levels must be triangulated by the implied player, who is both an assumed player produced by the expectations of the game mechanics and a subjective, or ‘situated’, individual who parses what they experience in the game and its perceived cultural significance relative to their experience of the world (Iversen 2009, 41–58).

Avatars and Game Spaces As geographer Gillian Rose pointed out, the same landscape can be experienced differently depending on relevant variations in the individual, such as age, gender, physicality, and so on. The word ‘avatar’ derives from the Sanskrit for a deity descended to earth in bodily form. It was transformed by Neal Stephenson in the book Snow Crash to refer to the electronic bodies that players use to inhabit a virtual world. Following Rose’s logic of landscapes, it would be fair to guess that different avatars would offer a different experience of a computer game landscape. Can the avatar run, and if so, can they get tired, can they fall over, or do they simply glide forwards endlessly with the push of a joystick or keystroke  (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2)?

3  WHAT IS A COMPUTER GAME? 

Fig. 3.1  Falling over in QWOP, 2008. Bennet Foddy

Fig. 3.2  Falling over in Death Stranding, 2019. Kojima Productions

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In the browser-based game QWOP by Bennett Foddy (2008), players use the keyboard keys ‘Q’, ‘W’, ‘O’, and ‘P’ to rotate the hip and knee joints of a virtual runner in 2D space. Unless the player can master the correct rhythm of keystrokes, the runner avatar simply falls flat on their face. In Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding (2019), a more complex version of the same effect takes place, where uneven terrain and a heavy backpack can make the player-avatar fall over and damage important items in the game. In both examples, we can see how the experience of space in these computer games is very different from those where avatar navigation is simply moving a virtual camera through the game. In his dissertation What Is the Avatar? (2006b) and subsequent papers such as Enter the Avatar (2012), Rune Klevjer explores the phenomenological relationship between the human player, their avatar, and the fictional character they connect to within the game. Klevjer defines the avatar as “an instrument or mechanism that defines for the participant a fictional body and mediates fictional agency; it is an embodied incarnation of the acting subject” (Klevjer 2006b, 87). While the avatar might appear in a 2D game as little more than a cursor on a screen, in 3D games, the movement of the avatar can draw the player into the world behind the screen like a “prosthetic navigable camera” that temporarily gives the player a different sense of bodily awareness (Klevjer 2012, 16). The avatar is part of the simulated world of the game, and in the language of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it polarises the body of the player, filtering the experience of the game environment, and redefining a new sense of what is forwards, backward, left, and right according to the spatial capabilities it has been programmed with. Peter Bayliss describes the avatar as the “locus of manipulation”, the tool that “extends the player’s ability to realise affordances within the game world” (Bayliss 2010, 179). Bayliss looks to Martin Heidegger’s distinction between the ready-to-hand and the present-­at-hand to describe how, as the player becomes more aware of the limitations of the avatar as a locus of manipulation, the limits become internalised, and the avatar-as-tool disappears, allowing the player to be embodied in the game (Bayliss 2010, 51). Klevjer writes something similar, that at the beginning of a computer game, the player might feel like they have awoken from a “drunken stupor”, where they have to learn to use their body and slowly achieve a more skilful inhabitation of the game environment:

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Analysing it through the theoretical prism of Phenomenology of Perception, we must conclude that our embodied self is actually being relocated, ­transported into screen space. Our familiar body-image, our intuitive awareness of where we are as perceiving and acting subjects, is being dramatically altered once we step into a prosthetic relationship with the avatarial camera-­ body. (Klevjer 2012, 18)

Like an expert driver who is no longer thinking about the pedals, the gearstick, or the wheel, the player will eventually inhabit the avatar and start running, jumping, and looking around corners, no longer aware of their previous clumsiness with a computer mouse, keyboard, or joystick. Through the avatar, the player can also inhabit a fictional character. Alison Gazzard describes this using the programming language of the parent/ child hierarchy, the character is the child of the avatar, which in turn is the child of the player, and this is the relationship through which the player experiences the world of the computer game (Gazzard 2010, 25).

Space and Place in Computer Games Computer games are often categorised not only by the mechanics they use, such as racing, fighting, puzzle, or simulation but also by the spatial systems they employ, such as 2D platformers, first-person shooters (FPS), maze and isometric strategy games (Wolf 2002). While this book primarily examines the perspectival spaces of first-person computer games, elsewhere (Nelson and Macmillan 2016) I have examined the structural and historical overlaps between isometric computer games and Chinese scroll paintings, using excellent research done by Bernadette Flynn and Jan Krikke, to explore alternative directions for RTS games like Starcraft based on spatio-narrative structures found in historical scroll paintings. Working within the graphical processing limitations of the 1980s and 1990s, game developers experimented with parallel isometric projection systems as a computationally efficient compliment to tabletop strategy games, which could give the illusion of a large number of game characters moving in space, without the need for perspectival scaling (objects in the foreground and background remain the same size in parallel projection). Common in industrial design and architecture, the ‘God’s eye view’ of parallel projection lends itself to the strategic spatial management and control of the RTS genre, and also provokes fascinating comparisons between historical artistic traditions that employ this spatial technique. In

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my 2017 paper with EH MacMillan, we speculate on whether the storytelling techniques found in Chinese scroll paintings, where parallel projection is used to depict the journey through landscapes over time, could be explored as a feature in RTS games, where a prolonged traversal over difficult terrain could decimate or split armies, and the landscape itself becomes a more active storytelling element (Figs. 3.3 and 3.4). When thinking more generally about how modes of spatial representation are often used to classify games into their genres, Aarseth concluded that “the defining element in computer games is spatiality”, but with the interesting catch that this space is allegorical, and depends on how the mechanics of the game make this space available to the player (Aarseth 2000, 169). For example, even though they may look similar on screen, a single-player FPS game is likely to be based on a linear chain of challenges or achievements that guide the player through a game world, whereas a multiplayer FPS that looks very similar probably needs to create a balanced arena of play where players can compete without advantage being given to either side (Aarseth 2000). In The Construction of Ludic Space (2003), Ernest W. Adams describes this type of game architecture as ‘ludic architecture’, where the normal architectural restrictions such as the requirements of the human body, natural light and the engineering of physical materials are replaced by ludic architectural restrictions, such as the ‘playability’ of a space and the engineering ‘cost’ of a computer to simulate it

Fig. 3.3  Wang Hui. The ‘Southern Tour’ of the Kangxi Emperor, c.1689–1692. Detail of hand scroll on silk, Palace Museum, Beijing

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Fig. 3.4  Screenshot from  Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, 2010.  Blizzard Entertainment

(e.g. rectilinear shapes in 3D software consist of fewer polygons than curved shapes and therefore require less processing power for a computer to render them on screen). In Video Game Spaces (2008), Michael Nitsche makes a similar argument, where the represented space of computer games requires a sort of ‘ludic translation’ of architectural terminology, where computer game space might be better thought of in terms of how long it takes the player to traverse from one location to another, rather than an abstract conversion of virtual metres or miles (Nitsche 2008, 7–10). Within the ludic architecture of computer games, players experience spaces that are easy or difficult to traverse, places of discovery, places of victory and places of loss. In analysing the various types of spaces the digital world creates, McKenzie Wark describes a transition from the “fixed geometry of topography” to the “variable forms of topology”, where virtual space can be defined by how difficult or easy it is to traverse, rather than simply how it appears on screen or how it is geometrically constructed (Wark 2007, 41). Wark writes:

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Topology is experienced more as a gamespace than a cyberspace: full of restrictions and hierarchies, firewalls and passwords. It is more like a bounded game than a free space of play. Once again: If it is free, it is valueless. Those odd lines within topology where anything goes are the ones of no consequence. (Wark 2007, 48)

Extending Wark’s description of topology into how computer games are experienced, Leino writes that if computer games are considered from a player perspective, the language of game ‘spatiality’ must be measured by how difficult or easy that space is to play, rather than simply a topographical description of its geometric features. We can describe the 2D and 3D objects within a game system in terms of Cartesian geometry, but to understand their meaning, we have to look at how they are experienced by the player via the avatar. Much like the spatial analysis of Harvey, Lefebvre, and Rose, the abstraction of Cartesian space in a game is downstream of what the player experiences. Using the example of Sid Meier’s Railroads! (2006), Leino argues that the player learns what a steep mountain is when they find it more difficult to build a functional railroad on compared to flat terrain. Leino writes: A description more faithful to the role of space in the experience of computer game play would mention ‘playability’ (as in ‘playable space’) instead of ‘representation’ (as in ‘represented space’), ‘simulation’ (as in ‘simulated space’), or ‘virtuality’ (as in ‘virtual space’). (Leino 2013, 9)

Leino argues that the phrase ‘playable world’ is therefore a more accurate term to describe space in computer games: What distinguishes computer games from ‘navigable spaces’, ‘virtual environments’, and the like seems to be the subordination of spatial representation, among other representations, to gameplay. This prompts a shift from ‘game spaces’ to what we might call ‘playable worlds’. (Leino 2013, 6–7)

Having calibrated our understanding of games towards rules, mechanics, and playable space, I now want to extend this and take a look at how other scholars have approached the topic of landscape in computer games and where we can make a few improvements.

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Game Spaces and Landscapes In his 2013 paper ‘Games as Landscape’, philosopher and game scholar C. Thi Nguyen argued that landscape theory should be thought of as a companion to the ludological study of computer game environments, with a focus on how landscape architecture can help us understand the obstacles and challenges presented by the game environment. Nguyen writes that “landscapes do not contain narratives; rather they are environments which encourage people to build their own narratives, and in that way, they are a very close kin to games” (Nguyen 2013). Whilst this comparison is undoubtedly true and has been explored at length by theorists such as Ernest W.  Adams (2003), Michael Nitsche (2008), and Steffen P. Walz (2010), this book argues that landscapes do contain narratives and it is the layering of historical knowledge that makes the landscapes of computer games so interesting. The language of landscape is continually re-­ written in books, paintings, films, games, and on the land itself through gardens, national parks, and all of the wars, celebrations, architectural endeavours, and disasters that punctuate our history. When computer games construct landscapes, somewhere in between the polygons and the pixels, this history is reconfigured once again. Bjarke Liboriussen’s doctoral dissertation contains a detailed account of how landscape and architectural theory can be applied to computer games. Liboriussen uses the conceptual split between a ‘naturalist’ view of how a landscape affects human survival—as found in Appleton’s Prospect/ Refuge theory, and a ‘culturalist’ view, where landscapes are thought of as symbolic images to explore the division between game mechanics and what is rendered on screen, where the mechanics are the natural conditions which the player must overcome to survive, and what is rendered on screen is the cultural layer, which the player enjoys as a visual spectacle once the existential conditions are satisfied (Liboriussen 2009, 100–21). Alexander Galloway writes that there are moments in many computer games when we no longer have to struggle to survive and can contemplate the idyll of the game environment. In what he calls “the ambience act”, many games allow the player to stop triggering new challenges, and simply enjoy the sights and sounds around them (Galloway 2006b). For Liboriussen, the cultural enjoyment of the disinterested gaze comes at this moment when the player can take a break from the existential struggle of the ‘naturalist’ game landscape.

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In their description of EverQuest’s (Sony 1999) ‘Norrath’, Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp describe a distinct difference between what the landscape looks like on screen compared to the logic of how it is played. Underneath the visual layer of a Romantic fantasy landscape, they identify a “schizophrenic” remix of the present, where the “nostalgic dream of medieval Europe” provides players with a representation of landscape that recognisable and desirable, but is driven by the entirely modern “fantasy of pure completion” (Hayot and Wesp 2009). They write: [A]n account of the passive and active pleasures of a world like Norrath suggests once again that virtual worlds must be thought of as part of, rather than apart from, the real world in which they take place. Norrath expresses rather than evades the culture of supermodernity in which we live.

And continue: In the combination of a powerful fantasy of pure competition mediated by world-like geography (a geography completely indifferent to the planet outside our computers) and the nostalgic return to a pre-industrial geography populated by none of the trappings of contemporary modernity, one sees, not for the first time, the thick schizophrenia of the current historical imaginary. (Hayot and Wesp 2009)

Their description of a contemporary topology nested within a Romantic landscape is a great insight into the sort of landscapes computer games are creating, utterly different to those of film, photography, and painting due to the networked and ludological nature of the medium. Hayot and Wesp extrapolate the significance of landscape features of undeniable significance to the player and link the modern competitive structure of EverQuest to the nostalgic turn to pastoralism as a pertinent contradiction that can be observed across a wider array of cultural artefacts. By illustrating how the landscape is structured by the behaviour of thousands of players as well as software updates released by the proprietors of the game, Hayot and Wesp have made a plausible extrinsic reading of the landscape of EverQuest (Fig. 3.5). Daniel Vella (2013) made a fascinating analysis of Minecraft (2011) and Proteus (2013) and how open-world games can make different landscape expressions depending on how the player-avatar relates to the game topology. Using a phenomenology of being (after Heidegger) and of

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Fig. 3.5  The landscape as a standing reserve in Minecraft, 2011. Mojang Studios

emplacement (after Husserl), Vella argued that the player will orient themselves to see the landscape of Minecraft as the modern Heideggerian ‘standing reserve’, defined by its potential to be mined, harvested, and improved, whereas the more passive world of Proteus transforms the player into a Romantic wanderer, where the landscape is only present as an aesthetic spectacle (Vella 2013, 13–14). This combination of ludological and audiovisual analysis can be extended even further to unpack how computer games fit into the broader complexity of how landscapes communicate our histories back to us. For example, when Vella compares the ‘standing reserve’ of landscape resources in Minecraft to the island in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), we have an opportunity to unpack a fascinating set of landscape representations in both the book and the game. For example, the hostile non-player characters (NPCs) in Minecraft recall the cannibals often associated with tropical islands, which as Gananath Obeyeskere points out, was often an exaggerated in colonial European art and literature as either a conscious or unconscious justification for their jurisdiction over new territories in the pacific (Obeyesekere 2002, 96). Furthermore, Jill H.  Casid describes how the iconic royal coconut palms grafted onto the European imagination of the Caribbean were cash crops transplanted from South Asia during the colonial period (Casid 2008, 182). All of this is simply to say that once we start to read computer games as part of a longer historical conversation in landscape, we can see how our assumptions, histories, and environmental

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relationships are reconfigured and often transformed anew by this particular interactive artform. There are, however, landscape concepts in computer games that must be interpreted with caution, and one of the most misinterpreted I have encountered is that of the sublime. In his 2011 paper, Paul Martin does a nice job of exploring how the apparent vastness of the landscape in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion might conjure a sense of astonishment, awe, or even the sublime, but as players overcome challenges and become more familiar with it, this feeling gives way to a Picturesque sense of pastoralism, or benign aesthetic appreciation: “Tamriel, as a game environment, is not, as we have come to realise, the terrifyingly vast landscape promised in the game’s opening. It is, like Camoran’s paradise, merely a garden” (Martin 2011). While a brief moment of awe caused by the illusion of scale might approximate Kant’s description of the mathematical sublime, we have to be careful not to apply historical descriptions of real-world experiences to how we encounter game topologies. For example, Gerald Farca et  al.’s (2020) description of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) makes a lovely description of ‘regenerative’ environmental play, but their description of terror, awe, and the sublime is somewhat implausible. Their description of “long hikes” where “players gain respect for the land they traverse” (Farca et al. 2018, 5, emphasis in the original) blurs important differences between seeing an avatar hike on screen while sitting on a sofa with one thumb on a joystick and the physical experience of ascending a mountain with exhausted legs and a sweaty brow (Fig. 3.6). Their description of fear, terror the sublime when ascending ‘Death Mountain’ in the game (ibid., 11) seems to muddle Vella’s (2015) concept of the ludic sublime (where extreme difficulty impedes the player’s ability to understand the game object itself) with Kant and Burke’s descriptions of existential fear of actual mountains, where avalanche and disaster blend terror with the perverse pleasure of the sublime. Put simply, when playing the same game myself, I found it implausible that an implied player might experience terror on Death Mountain, and more likely that this fictional volcano was being confused with the utterly different experience of a real one. There is, however, a very plausible manifestation of the sublime in computer games and in our experience of the digital world, articulated by Eugenie Shinkle and Sianne Ngai in their work on the technological sublime. Ngai (2012) invents the term ‘stublimity’ to describe how the repetitive challenges of computer games lull us into a particular form of

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Fig. 3.6  Ascending Death Mountain in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, 2017. Nintendo

stupefied boredom.2 Shinkle contrasts this repetitive ‘stublimity’ with the astonishment and terror of the technological sublime, where we are uncomfortably confronted with the scale and complexity of the digital world. These moments of terror might range from being interrupted by a glitch, to a malware attack that locks you out of your computer files, to a hardware failure that blocks you from the digital world and alienates you back into a room, staring at a blank screen you no longer understand (Shinkle 2010). Having experienced both a hardware failure and the ascent of Death Mountain in Zelda, I feel like Kant’s mathematical sublime was far more present in the former than the latter, and that these distinctions are important if we are to describe the landscapes of computer games accurately. To introduce an elegant synthesis of how computer games might function as a mediator between the individual player and the vastness of the digital world, Thomas Betts offers this wonderful summary:

2  The subject of ‘ludic boredom’ and Heidegger’s profound boredom has been explored at length by Sybille Lammes, Tomasz Majkowski, Sebastian Moring and Olli Leino and is another fascinating way to understand the perverse pleasure that can be found in the repetitive monotony of many computer games.

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Video games present an alluring invitation to become lost in the generative space of code and imagination. They also pose no real physical risk, allowing us to wander into the heart of a digital hurricane or dive into a code-built sea. Although video games cannot replicate the dynamically sublime experience of the natural world, they offer mathematical simulations that are mutable and extensible in ways that the real world cannot be. I propose that video games represent a meeting of the dynamical and the mathematical, combining the drama and aesthetics of the former with the infinities of the latter. The result of this merger is more than just a simulation of previous forms, it offers a new version of the sublime that is moulded by the virtual world and reflects the unique traits and concerns of that space. It offers a new trajectory to the sublime, but rather than projecting the mind beyond the sensory boundaries of nature or the logical limits of pure mathematical form, it projects the mind through the boundless virtual world of code. (Betts 2014, 129)

While this discussion can be extended into how graphical interfaces of many kinds mediate our experience of the ocean of code, for now I think this is enough to remind us that graphical representations of things like mountains, cliffs, and valleys must be separated from their topological meanings and a reasonable description of how we experience them as players. In a more recent book on the landscape experience of computer games, Matthias Fuchs uses Fox Harrel’s definition of the ‘phantasm’ and Gaston Bachelard’s ‘topoanalysis’ to look for universal psychological archetypes in computer game environments. For example, how the claustrophobia of a cave might conjure the trauma of birth and the separation from the mother, the cliff as a dangerous precipice and the lofty perch of heroes and heroines, and the landscape of architectural ruins as a sort of historical necrophilia, the memento mori and the expression of long cycles of creation and destruction (Fuchs 2019, 9, 30).3 Fuchs builds the credibility of his argument on the psychological plausibility of these archetypes, and also recommends we contextualise each landscape experience alongside the history it evokes (Fuchs 2019, 36). This latter recommendation is essentially the contribution and gap I want to fill with this book. Using an approach grounded in game studies and the experience of the player, I want to connect the landscapes we experience in computer games to the broader web of texts and associations that tell the story of our relationship 3

 Emma Fraser, mention, then return to later in the book.

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with the physical environment and allow us to see computer games in new ways, and to find new insights about our own historical moment from the reconfigurations that computer games are making in contemporary culture.

Games as Artefacts in the World In the final section of this introductory chapter, I want to bring in the materiality of computer games and how they exist in the world as pieces of software. In the Platform Studies series, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost describe how the physical and economic structure of computer game software can help situate their meaning as cultural artefacts, where the ‘platform’ helps us link “the fundamentals of digital media work to the cultures in which work was done and in which coding, forms, interfaces and eventual use are layered upon them” (Montfort and Bogost 2009, 147). When discussing landscape painting, I argued that the commodity status of a painting is inseparable from its signification of landscape, and indeed the materials a painting is made from are inseparable from the images they offer us. For example, Ravi Mangla’s analysis of the rare mineral made to produce ultramarine blue, lapis lazuli, correlates visual changes between Renaissance and modern era painting to industrial developments. Prior to the nineteenth-century invention of synthetic French Ultramarine, the use of ultramarine blue in a painting demarcated an extravagant show of wealth as it could only be produced from the semi-precious mineral lapis lazuli, mined almost exclusively in Afghanistan (Mangla 2015). From the structure of source code to the economics of who owns it, computer games are also integrated into fascinating economic networks, which I believe should be considered when we analyse them as cultural artefacts. Like the ownership of the paintings mentioned in the introduction, these social and economic contexts will go a long way in helping us identify the cultural insights that come from looking at computer games as landscapes. Computer games can be situated in the world in all sorts of ways. How a computer game can be played, and even who is playing it, can develop a form of contextual or social realism depending on how fictions and mechanics parallel the real-life experiences of players. Alexander Galloway argues that the U.S.  Army’s recruitment game America’s Army (2002) creates a different relationship with the suburban North American teenager compared with the games Special Force (released by Lebanese organisation Hizbullah in 2003) and Under Ash (released by Syrian publisher

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Dar Al-Fikr in 2001), which might be played by teenagers who grew up and live in conflict zones (Galloway 2006b, 76–81). In both cases, the mechanics and rendered representations of the game can produce different meanings as they intersect with the social context of their players. On a more general level, numerous scholars have pointed to how game mechanics and topologies can mash historical landscapes together with contemporary patterns of behaviour. McKenzie Wark argues that beneath the historical diversity of rendered cultures and periods in Civilization III (2001), there is a constant simulation of twentieth-century capitalism, where the player succeeds by resource extraction, trade deals and a combination of military and economic domination, ultimately culminating in the Cold War and the Space Race (Wark 2007, 54). Leino and Möring argue that the industrial-era notion of free play as a contrast to work has been increasingly blurred by a neoliberal notion where play is continually monetised, from fully professionalised eSports to the achievements that are attached retrospectively to play sessions: The player who shows off her collection of badges in her Steam profile may, of course, derive immediate gratification from looking at this collection, but essentially the badges there are to be looked at and appraised by someone at some point in the future. (Möring and Leino 2016, 10)

Much like the achievements on an exercise app or the quantified ‘likes’ on a social media post, Leino and Moring conclude that computer games fall into a broader neoliberal pattern where the self-contained pleasures of the individual are brought into a broader network of quantification. Within this context, Galloway argues that play lost its anti-work status and functions not as a respite from work, but rather as an “after-image” of it, with “repetition, displeasure, and competitive interaction being but symptoms for deeper social processes” (Galloway 2006a). As Nick Yee points out, playing in a clan or guild of an online multiplayer game can require similar clerical and logistical commitments as a regular job, but in this case, the player is paying for the right to play (Yee 2006). In Chap. 2, I cite Sean Cubitt’s materialist reading of digital media to show how the concept of ‘enclosure’ has been applied to computer hardware and digital media platforms. In Game Studies’ Material Turn (2012), Tom Apperley and Darshana Jayemanne make a similar point by combining media ecology and platform studies to link the acceleration of computer graphics capabilities to their reliance on electronics factories, e-waste

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dumps and the controversial conditions under which rare earth minerals such as coltan are mined (Apperley and Jayemanne 2012, 14). They write: In their status as objects in the world, digital games are linked to topics of global importance, for example, international relations, finance, organisation of labour, and environmental issues. (Apperley and Jayemanne 2012, 15)

As a responsible art historian and game scholar, I believe this move from play to the context of the game itself will allow us to understand computer games as an expression of our relationship with the physical environment. Neither seeking to valorise or condemn this medium, computer games offer us fascinating opportunities to take a popular cultural form and see how it might reflect our world back in ways that we have not seen before.

How to Study a Computer Game from the Perspective of a Player This section is mainly written for other scholars interested in the specifics of how I analyse games as landscapes, and perhaps reusing aspects of my approach. For those who are more interested in what I have to say about specific games as landscape, feel free to skip this section, but for those who are interested in how I built the critique, I have reproduced the analytical template I made from methodology papers in game and landscape studies. This is my technical response to the general question of how to study computer games as landscapes. In a 2015 paper on computer game aesthetics, Vella examined how the computer game presents itself to us as an aesthetic object. Just as the painting repositions us into pictorial subjects conscious of our own act of seeing, games, Vella argued, transform us into players, a ludic subject facing an active world structured by the hierarchies of the gameplay condition (Vella 2015a, 12). Rapid advances in computer graphics engines can distract us into blurring what a player experiences compared to what a spectator experiences, which might appear similar to the experience of television, film, or other visual media. Like sports, there is a large industry focused purely on computer game spectatorship, but to keep things simple in this book, I am interested in analysing computer games and landscape from the perspective of the player. Both my chapters on landscape and on game studies brought us to a tension between landscape as a historical text and landscape as something that is experienced. In

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my analytical template reproduced below, I outline how I believe we can analyse computer games as landscapes and generate conclusions that are not overly subjective or esoteric, and arrive at readings that are plausible and interesting to others. Aarseth’s paper Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis (2003) suggests an approach for analysing computer games4 based on the different ways a game can be played. A play-based investigation can focus on gameplay (the players’ actions, strategies, and motives), the game structure (the rules of the game, including the simulation rules) and the game world (fictional content, topology/level design, textures, etc.). A game can be played superficially for a few minutes, lightly to gather a general understanding, to partial completion, to total completion, or repeatedly to levels of varying expertise. Alternatively, as was also suggested by Sicart, a game can be played in an esoteric or innovative style where esoteric strategies or goals can be pursued (Aarseth 2003). Writing in response to Aarseth’s methodology paper, Sybille Lammes pointed out that the undefined quality of the implied player risks occluding what Lammes refers to as “situatedness” in play. An overdetermined focus on the implied player can homogenise important subjective differences, such as gender, culture, and material differences between players (Lammes 2007, 27), a similar critique is made by Rose in her study of how landscapes can be experienced differently. To address this, Lammes takes an anthropological stance and argues that situatedness and reflexivity on the part of the researcher-as-player can help ensure that “game culture is viewed as a local and embodied social practice and to avoid making universal knowledge claims” (Lammes 2007, 29). This raises a classic paradox with no ultimate solution, on the one hand, we do not want to write subjective and esoteric analyses that might have no relevance to an implied reader, but on the other, there is no universal subject position from which we can make neutral knowledge claims, and so any interpretation could be labelled esoteric—“the humanist is trying to exclude themself from the interpretation while acknowledging that this is impossible” (Aarseth 2007). Leino, like Lammes, identifies the tension between those who seek objectivity and those who study the game as a player. To ease the 4  In this paper, Aarseth referred to computer games as ‘games in virtual environments’ to distinguish between games that can be played in a virtual environment upheld by a computer, and other similar activities in a similar environment that would not be suitable to be analysed as games, such as simulations.

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contradiction between the essentialist and the esoteric, Leino distinguishes between a first-person and third-person analytical perspective. The first-­ person analysis requires the player to identify and reflect upon the conditions by which they are able to experience the game in the world. How are you playing, what are your goals and how does your experience produce undeniable and deniable meanings relative to the gameplay condition? The third-person sociological analysis can then examine how the same game can appear differently relative to the experience of others, where we might expect to have more divergence in deniable readings and less divergence in undeniable readings. In my own analysis of the games Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Garry’s Mod, I strive to make clear distinctions between first-person undeniable readings and third-person deniable correlations that I believe are relevant and to some degree, generalisable. In doing so, I pursue my goal of analysing computer games as landscapes, according to the relationship between the player and the game and how they exist together in the world, and summarising a critique that might be plausible to you, the reader. To start with, I play a game multiple times, taking screenshots and making notes as I go, some of which I include in the chapters as first-person recollections. I observe shifts in my competence and the style of my play in reference to Leino’s existential gameplay condition (how good or bad I am at staying in the game) and more high-level concerns, such as Bjarke Liboriussen’s conditions of landscape experience in a game (do I have moments where I can gaze upon the landscape as a disinterested observer, or am I always trapped in a struggle for survival?). After I finish playing, I move through Christopher Tilley’s phenomenological landscape framework and try to understand how my experience of the game generates responses to each spatial category. Within each category, I give myself a series of prompts, based on game and landscape scholars that I think are useful at each point. The categories and prompts look something like this: 1. Somatic space: Somatic space is the space of unselfconscious action, where sensation and movement begin with the human body structuring the world in perception (Tilley 1994, 15–17). At this point, I write anything that comes to mind without trying to overthink it, from where I’m playing to how I feel in my chair. 2. Perceptual space: Perceptual space is egocentric, and relative to the individual, and connects intentionality to movement and perception of the relative position of the body to direction and distance (Tilley

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1994, 15–17). Even with a small amount of reflection, moving from the sensations of the body to the ego, my observations on how I felt as a player later became very valuable, especially when I found myself reflecting on the apocalyptic fantasies of the single-player first-person shooter, compared to my reality sitting at my office computer late at night. The transition from somatic to perceptual to existential space marks the egocentric awareness of what Lammes refers to as the ‘situated’ player, being aware not only of one’s experience, but of one’s position in the world relative to the game. The first-person begins to shift to the third person. 3. Existential space: Existential space is mobile, and is produced and reproduced through the actions of members of a group. It produces social meanings and symbolic or sacred spaces of human attachment. Places are sites of meaning creation, and boundaries mark out social distinctions, oppositions, differences, and otherness (Tilley 1994, 15–17). Leino’s gameplay condition exists somewhere between perceptual space and existential space, game objects are given meaning relative to the resistance of the game (what Salen and Zimmerman refer to as the artificial conflict) and the freedom the player can achieve over this resistance. In the topology of a singleplayer game, I might appreciate a checkpoint after a significant period of struggle, and in a multiplayer game, I remember places where I would meet my team-mates or places where we would all struggle and die when facing a stronger team. . Architectural space: The perception of architectural space exists 4 downstream of perceptual and existential space. Architectural space divides inside and outside spaces and articulates channels of movement and shapes (Tilley 1994, 15–17). Moving from experience towards reflection and analysis, I start to bring in more external references, from Elverdam and Aarseth’s (2001) typological framework of game spaces (how much of the space each player can see, how the external time of the physical world affects the internal time of the game, whether players and game agents can act simultaneously or sequentially, and so on), to geometrical descriptions of game spaces, from Adam’s “ludic architecture” (2003) to Nitsche’s (2008) conceptual planes for game spaces (rule-based spaces, mediated spaces, fictional spaces, play spaces and social spaces). . Cognitive space: This is where we reflect and theorise alongside the 5 thoughts and analyses of others (Tilley 1994, 15–17). It is the final

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shift from first to third person, where I consider the game as a cultural artefact in the world and I refer to a range of scholarship too broad for this template, and more specific to each game, adopting influences from cultural studies, feminist and human geography and art history. By feeding my gameplay notes and experience through these five categories, I generated a set of perspectives and observations that formed the basis of the following chapters. My goal is to describe computer games as a medium of landscape, something that is experienced as a cybertext, but also something that exists as a cultural artefact of its time.

Creative Works Cited America’s Army. 2002–2013. United States Army. (PC). Death Stranding. 2019. Kojima Productions. (Console). The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. 2011. Bethesda Game Studios. (PC). EverQuest. 1999. Sony Online Entertainment. (PC). The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. 2017. Nintendo. (Console). Minecraft. 2011. Mojang. (PC). Proteus. 2013. David Kanaga. (PC). QWOP. 2008. Bennett Foddy. (Web browser). Sid Meier’s Civilization III. 2001. Firaxis Games. (PC). Sid Meier’s Railroads! 2006. Sid Meier. 2K Games, Feral Interactive. (PC). Special Force. 2003. Hizbullah Central Internet Bureau. (PC). Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. 2010. Blizzard Entertainment. [PC]. Tetris. 1984. Pajitnov. Under Ash. 2001. Dar Al-Fikr. (PC).

References Aarseth, Espen. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2000. Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games. Cybertext Yearbook 2000: 152–171. ———. 2001. Computer Game Studies, Year One. Game Studies 1 (1): 4–7. ———. 2003. Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis. In Level Up: Digital Games Research Conference Proceedings. Utrecht: The University of Utrecht. ———. 2007. Doors and Perception: Fiction vs. Simulation in Games. In Intermédialités: Histoire et Théorie Des Arts, Des Lettres et Des Techniques, October, 35.

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Adams, Ernest W. 2003. The Construction of Ludic Space. In Level Up: Digital Games Research Conference Proceedings. Utrecht: The University of Utrecht. Apperley, Thomas H., and Darshana Jayemanne. 2012. Game Studies’ Material Turn. Westminster Papers 9 (1): 5. Barthes, Roland. 1967. The Death of the Author. Aspen, 5–6. Bayliss, Peter. 2010. Videogames, Interfaces, and the Body: The Importance of Embodied Phenomena to the Experience of Videogame Play. Doctoral thesis, RMIT University. Betts, Thomas. 2014. An Investigation of the Digital Sublime in Video Game Production. Doctoral thesis, University of Huddersfield. Bogost, Ian. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games. Vol. 53. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Casid, Jill H. 2008. Landscape Trouble. In Landscape Theory, ed. Rachael Ziady DeLue and James Elkins. New York and London: Routledge. Farca, Gerald, Alexander Lehner, and Victor Navarro-Remesal. 2018. Regenerative Play and the Experience of the Sublime. In Mythopoeic Narrative in The Legend of Zelda. New York. Routledge. Farca, Gerald, Alexander Lehner, and Victor Navarro-Remesal. 2020. Regenerative Play and the Experience of the Sublime: Breath of the Wild. In Mythopoeic Narrative in the Legend of Zelda, 205–221. Routledge. Frasca, Gonzalo. 2001. Simulation 101: Simulation Versus Representation. Ludology.org, 16–17. Accessed 5 June 2016. http://www.ludology.org/articles/sim1/simulation101.html. Fuchs, M. 2019. Phantasmal Spaces: Archetypical Venues in Computer Games. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Galloway, Alexander R. 2006a. Warcraft and Utopia. CTheory, 1000 Days of Theory. ———. 2006b. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Gazzard, Alison. 2010. Player as Parent, Character as Child: Exploring Avatarial Relationships in Gamespace. In Proceedings of the 14th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments, 25–31. Tampere, Finland. Hayot, Eric, and Edward Wesp. 2009. Towards a Critical Aesthetic of VirtualWorld Geographies. Game Studies  - The International Journal of Computer Game Research 9 (1): 1–23. Huizinga, Johan. 1964 [1955]. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press. Iversen, Sara Mosberg. 2009. Between Regulation and Improvisation: Playing and Analysing ‘Games in the Middle.’ Doctoral dissertation. IT University of Copenhagen.

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Juul, Jesper. 2005. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press. Klevjer, Rune. 2006b. What Is the Avatar? Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-­ Based Singleplayer Computer Games. Ph.D. thesis. University of Bergen. ———. 2012. Enter the Avatar. The Phenomenology of Prosthetic Telepresence in Computer Games. In The Philosophy of Computer Games, ed. Hallvard Fossheim, Tarjei Mandt Larsen, and John Richard Sageng, 17–38. London and New York: Springer. Konzack, Lars. 2002. Computer Game Criticism: A Method for Computer Game Analysis. In Proceedings of the Computer Games and Digital Culture Conference Tampere, 89–100. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Lammes, Sybille. 2007. Approaching Game-Studies: Towards a Reflexive Methodology of Games as Situated Cultures. In Situated Play: Proceedings of the Third International Conference of the Digital Games Research Association, ed. Baba, 25–30. Tokyo: University of Tokyo. Leino, Olli Tapio. 2007. Emotions About the Deniable/Undeniable: Sketch for a Classification of Game Content as Experienced. Situated Play Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference, 113–20. ———. 2010. Emotions in Play: On the Constitution of Emotion in Solitary Computer Game Play. Doctoral dissertation. IT University of Copenhagen. ———. 2013. From Game Spaces to Playable Worlds. Philosophy of Computer Games, 1–12. Liboriussen, Bjarke. 2009. The Mechanics of Place: Landscape and Architecture in Virtual Worlds. Doctoral thesis. University of Southern Denmark. Mangla, Ravi. 2015. True Blue. The Paris Review, June 8. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/08/true-­blue/. Martin, Paul. 2011. The Pastoral and the Sublime in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Game Studies 11 (3): 1–19. Montfort, Nick, and Ian Bogost. 2009. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press. Möring, Sebastian, and Olli Leino. 2016. Beyond Games as Political Education Neo-Liberalism in the Contemporary Game Form. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 8 (2): 145–161. Nelson, Peter, and MacMillan, E.H. 2016. Starcraft II and Chinese Scroll Painting: Narrative Ideas for RTS Computer Games. Usage Guidelines, 121. Ngai, Sianne. 2012. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Nguyen, C.  Thi. 2013. Games as Landscape. In The Proceedings Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Bergen, 1–16. Nitsche, Michael. 2008. Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Game Worlds. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press.

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Obeyesekere, Gananath. 2002. Manufacturing the ‘Cannibal’ Body. In Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism, and Colonialism in the Pacific, ed. Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn. New York: Routledge. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. 2004. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press. Shinkle, Eugénie. 2010. “Video Games and the Technological Sublime”. In Tate Papers. 14. p.3. Sicart, Miguel. 2011. Against Procedurality. Game Studies 11 (3): 209. Suits, Bernard. 1978. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press. Tilley, Christopher. 1994. Place, Paths and Monuments, a Phenomenology of Landscape. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Vella, Daniel. 2013. The Wanderer in the Wilderness: Being in the Virtual Landscape in Minecraft and Proteus. In The Proceedings Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Bergen, 1–16. ———. 2015a. No Mastery Without Mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime. Game Studies 15 (1): 96. ———. 2015. The Character of the Ludic Muse. In The 9th International Conference on the Philosophy of Computer Games, Berlin. Walz, Steffen P. 2010. Toward a Ludic Architecture: The Space of Play and Games. Halifax: ETC Press. Wark, McKenzie. 2007. Gamer Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolf, Mark, J. ed. 2002. The Medium of the Video Game. University of Texas Press. Yee, Nick. 2006. The Labor of Fun How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play. Games and Culture 1 (1): 68–71.

CHAPTER 4

Half-Life 2: Could I Apocalypse?

[Gameplay notes] The air-conditioning is too strong in this office but my PC tower is warming the small space under my desk. I slip my shoes off and I start a new game of Half-Life 2. I hear noises in my headphones before I see what is making them in the game. The first thing I learn is that if I hear something strange, I should look around for a threat or prompt to action. The thumb of my left hand is resting on SPACE, my pinkie finger is on SHIFT, my ring finger on A, middle finger on W and index finger on D. I adjust the angle of my keyboard to relieve the growing strain on my wrist. Panning the view on my screen with my mouse, I scan the surroundings. I’m on a train carriage, pulling into a station, introducing me, the player, to a city. CTRL lowers my point of view. SPACE temporarily raises it, I can crouch and jump. I don’t seem to have hands, but if I walk close to some objects like wooden crates, I can pick them up by pressing E and they levitate in front of me. There is a crosshair at the centre of the screen. My body feels like a single eyeball standing on a 6-foot pole. I can rotate and move the eyeball forwards and backwards, left and right, but there are no legs, arms, or torso. I press W and glide smoothly into the game world, a machine sounding footsteps in my wake. It’s like being a teenager again, my movement is friction-less, free from injury, endlessly energetic. My game body does what I command, and the world is defined by my ability to climb all over it. Walking through the city, the friendly NPCs seem depressed, and the hostile NPC soldiers confirm that I’m a prisoner. One friendly NPC © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Nelson, Computer Games As Landscape Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4_4

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r­ ecognises me as a long lost hero and gives me a crowbar. I am now a walking eyeball with a powerful limb that can smash and kill. Clicking the left mouse button, I smash the wooden crates that are close to me, and attack a soldier and take his gun. As a left-handed person, I realise that in this game I am right-handed. My eyeball is looking down a one-point perspective space. Pointing my crosshair at the vanishing point, I zoom into the landscape and shoot at whatever aligns with my crosshair. As I run forwards, my gun bounces around on the lower right-hand side of my screen and I can collapse space by lining up my crosshair and shooting distant objects. NPCs shoot back at me, the game is on and the world of Half:Life 2 is looking back into the eyeball of my avatar. As NPCs fire back, my existence in the game is threatened so I press the ESC key and save my progress before returning to the game, where I press W and move forward into the landscape.

Who Is in the Landscape, and How? If a computer game is a landscape, and this landscape is something different from a painting, a photograph or a film, we have to start with how we even experience or gain access to this landscape. In my gameplay notes, I shift between describing myself as a player sitting at a computer controlling an avatar, to a character in a game defined by that avatar. To paraphrase Klevjer (2012), the beginning of the game places me in a drunken stupor as I try to get used to the controls, but as I get better, I start referring to game actions in the first person, I crouch, I run, I jump, I shoot. To quote Peter Bayliss, as I acclimatise to the game, the avatar as a “locus of manipulation” disappears, and I become embodied as a player in the game (Bayliss 2010, 51). The player is Peter Nelson, a PhD student sitting in a communal office late at night, the avatar is the coded response to my keyboard and mouse inputs and the character is a prisoner-turned-hero named Gordon Freeman, who has now killed a soldier with a crowbar and stolen his weapon. The landscape emerges as the barriers between the player, the avatar and the character dissolve. Gillian Rose (1993) and Edward Casey (2002) wrote that the meaning of a landscape begins with how we can be in it, how we are ‘emplaced’, the position we occupy, our age, our gender, our relative safety, comfort, or distress. Do we look out upon a landscape with the satisfaction of the hiker who has reached a summit, or the desperation of that same hiker when they realise they are lost and injured and night is quickly approaching? In Half-Life 2 I have discovered that some objects can be picked up, destroyed, climbed upon or used as weapons, and some objects are like 3D wallpaper and cannot be interacted with at all. Klevjer’s paper “The Way

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of the Gun” (2006a) provides a starting point for how the worlds of FPS computer games are made accessible to the player. Klevjer writes: Because the hand with the gun is fixed in relation to the framing of the first-­ person perspective (as if mounted to a subjective camera, immovable), the gunpoint is always at the centre of the player’s vision. Looking and targeting comes together in the same movement, and the player is invited to, as it were, follow his gun. (Klevjer 2006a, 1)

And continues: The first-person camera of the FPS is not really just a camera, but a camera-­ and-­gun joined in the same virtual apparatus, a camera-gun. (Klevjer 2006a, 2)

The merging of the gun and the camera creates an experience driven by precise aiming, movement, and speed, and the suspense that occurs when the landscape obscures aiming, movement, and speed. Klevjer argues that the contrast between the navigable potential of the avatar in 3D space versus the ‘tunnel vision’ provided by the monocular camera creates an important contrast between different game spaces. In a narrow, tunnel-­ like space, I can easily see approaching enemies, but in open environments, I must continually turn around to check for dangers outside my narrow field of view (Klevjer 2006a, 2). In this situation, as Klevjer points out, it is often sound effects that warn the player of oncoming danger. This contrast of experience resulting from the design of the avatar versus variations in the game space simulates the ‘prospect and refuge’ landscape theory of Jay Appleton, where landscape experience is shaped by our biological inheritance of the savannah, where we prefer spaces where we can see without being seen over spaces where we are visibly exposed to the gaze of unseen predators (Appleton 1975). In the single-player first-­ person shooter, my tunnel vision encourages me to seek auditory prospects, and I judge hazards and challenges according to how they sound—I typically hear a dangerous NPC before I see them. Klevjer’s description of the FPS avatar as a camera-gun leads us to a very specific type of landscape embodiment. Rose writes that the landscape that is experienced without the consideration of the body is never entirely body-less, it is usually just one where the female body has been removed. For Rose, the ability to understand your position in the world as without a body is often only available to the physically able white male as

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other subject positions such as the elderly, people with disabilities, people of colour, women, and so on, are more likely to understand their position in space relative to various forms of social or physical friction (Rose 1993, 82). Rose asks the reader to compare how these different subjects would experience the common location of a dark street at night time. So before we look at the relationship between the player and the fiction of Half-Life 2, the body-less simulation of the avatar presents an experience of the world subtly encoded with the body of a healthy white man, or to be less contextually deterministic, anyone who might feel a sort of friction-less presence in the world.

A Landscape Is Seen Through the First-Person Shooter Frame The experience of space in the first-person shooter is like a cartoon of one-­ point perspective. Modern 3D computer graphics are, as Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000) point out, a remediation of the Albertian window, where a two-dimensional image plane is rendered 30 or 60 times per second using a rapid calculation of coordinate geometry and the rules of perspectival recession, where objects farther away appear smaller than those close to the viewer, and close object obscure faraway objects by parallax. Bernadette Flynn (2005) writes that the relatively narrow horizontal and vertical field of view in the first-person shooter emphasises an exaggeration of the depth axis, and the separation between foreground and background elements, where the tension between the visual and physics simulation of ‘objects’ and ‘emptiness’ encourages the player to penetrate into the game, and the game itself is defined by this forward trajectory down the depth axis. Sitting at my keyboard, I tend to lean heavily on the ‘W’ key, constantly moving deeper into the game environment. While we can understand the origins of 3D graphics in Renaissance perspective and the lens-based optics of photography and film, the idea of framing the landscape into an image or a view has its own fascinating history. Theorists of the eighteenth-century Picturesque movement wrote some of the first travel guides for how to turn a landscape experience into what we would now recognise as tourist snapshots. William Gilpin wrote landscape theory in the form of a travel guide, and his Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty (1794) advised weekend wanderers to plan their enjoyment of the English countryside around finding a nice place to sit and

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sketch, where the environmental subdivisions of mountains and lakes (background), valleys and woods (middle distance) and rocks, cascades, and broken ruins could be balanced into a pleasing image (Roskill 1997, 25). But if we take away a viewer who wants to make an image, the physical environment itself has no foreground, middle ground or background, nor does it have a centre or a periphery, these require a sort of image-­ making mindset. By focusing on the experience of landscape as an experience of searching for images, the Picturesque movement laid the foundations for much of how we experience landscape today via tourist photography, where the first instinct upon reaching a vista is to take a photograph. Willian Gilpin wrote a similar Picturesque theory for the owners of English estate gardens, advising that the ‘landscaping’ of these estates be focused around their ability to form pleasing images. Literary theorist David Punter writes that Picturesque artists, unlike their Romantic contemporaries, achieved a ‘denaturalised nature’ transformed perpetually into a picture-in-waiting for the “framing and shuttering effect of the ego” (Punter 1994, 228). Today, photography has become a way of reproducing the visual language of landscape with the convenient alibi of simply trying to record an authentic experience of a place, whilst making sure the picture balances all of the correct elements. In their study of tourist photography, Crawshaw and Urry argue that no matter the location, the framing and aesthetic conventions of the tourist photograph reproduce a way of seeing more than they record any other new information about the experience of a particular place (Crawshaw and Urry 1997, 183). Where Picturesque theorists happily advised tourists to alter and improve the landscape aesthetics of their drawing by moving objects until they looked right, tourist photography seeks to downplay the tension between the unique environment and the overarching aesthetics of landscape photography, where the photograph must simultaneously be a record of a unique experience, as well as be a good-looking landscape photograph. This tension can be recalled in WJT Mitchell’s definition of landscape as that which “naturalises its conventions and conventionalises its nature” (W. J. T. Mitchell 1994, 5). To understand Half-Life 2 as a landscape, we can combine the desire to frame the world as an image with the fixed perspective that defines the first-person shooter genre. What Klevjer describes as the camera-gun is compared by Alexander Galloway to the subjective point-of-view shot favoured by directors such as Mike Nichols (The Graduate 1967) and Paul Brickman (Risky Business 1983) and the more specific predatory subjective

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point-of-view shot found in films such as Spellbound (1945) and Topaz (1969) by Alfred Hitchcock, or The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and The Terminator (1984) directed by Jonathan Demme and James Cameron respectively (Galloway 2006b, 63). For Galloway, the subjective point of view shot can convey both a sense of alienated or emasculated vulnerability and the view of a predator. The transition between alienated vulnerability and predation is evident in Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987), when the initial helplessness of the protagonist’s cyborg subjectivity, reminiscent of the snorkelling mask in The Graduate, is transformed into the thermo-­ vision of a ‘super-cop’. Galloway links these transitions of subjectivity to the ‘first-person shooter prototype’ shots used by Alfred Hitchcock in Topaz and Spellbound, where the coalescence of the camera and the aim of the gun emphasises the actionable diegetic space (Galloway 2006b, 67). What Galloways describes as ‘gamic vision’ reminds us that this first-­ person point of view is not only predatory, but alienating, a vision of a world trapped in a subjective camera, which we will find, resonates with the character that emerges in Half-Life 2. We have arrived at a starting point for what type of landscape the single-player first-person shooter creates. No matter what comes next in the fictional world of the game or the visual spectacle on screen, we know that the only way this world can be accessed is via this body-less camera-gun, alienated from the game world, with a single vector of action where the crosshair meets the vanishing point. This perspectival tunnel vision gives us both a view of alienation and of predation, as well as a sort of pictorial gaze, where the world is not seen in the stereoscopic view of the human body, but through a camera lens, which is continually framing and composing images.

A Gladiator in a Theme Park [Gameplay notes] The landscape of Half-Life 2 feels like a line, with a distinct sense of forwards and backwards. The line is divided into sections that give me a chance to rest in between challenges of increasing difficulty. If I coordinate my keystrokes with my mouse, I can balance on a thin wooden plank and sneak past the monsters hiding in the sand below. The landscape is an obstacle course for me to overcome. No matter where I am on this landscape line, I am the centre of attention. The line confirms my existence and purpose. The line also determines time. When I stop moving forwards, the landscape

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stops to wait for me, if there are enemies up ahead, they don’t race forwards to find me, they wait for me to advance while the game sounds ambient echoes of this world in my headphones. If I leave the line, the landscape guides me back. I tried jumping off a cliff, but the ocean was full of electric eels, and I woke up, back on the line again. The line is not a war zone, it is a skill-tester. The line is subdivided into a chain of checkpoints that judge my activities as pass or fail. A flying gunship fires at me in regular bursts. If I fire my rocket launcher in between these bursts, I can shoot down the gunship and move on. The landscape line feels like a warm hand on my shoulder guiding me forwards. It forgives my mistakes, offers me second chances, and allows me to prove myself again. Driving down the Lost Highway, I see a single house up on the clifftop. Such an aberration must contain danger. The house is filled with rolling landmines, which chase me onto the grass. I pull out my gravity gun and hurl the mines over the adjacent cliff and into the ocean below. I run back into the house and greedily search for health packs and ammunition as my reward. I die at the next checkpoint down the road, but not before learning where my enemies will be hiding. I respawn sharper and wiser, kill two enemies, quick-save my progress and perfect my response to the line of the landscape.

The broader FPS genre has great variation in rules and experiences (Fig. 4.1). The tactical FPS encourages the player to avoid direct conflict whereas the adventure FPS positions the player as a gladiator who experiences the “explorative linearity” of an adventure world comprising enemies to destroy and puzzles to solve (Klevjer 2006a, 7). Klevjer refers to Half-Life (the prequel to Half-Life 2) as a prototypical model of the adventure first-person shooter, and writes: Half-life follows a rather elaborate logic of scientific-industrial instrumentalism, one that was only implied by the general structure of Doom. The name of the developer, Valve, is quite illustrative, suggesting that this is a game for the engineer as well as for the soldier. Progressing through the game is like an exercise of rational, problem-solving, painstakingly systematic, and ultimately very civilised, work. (Klevjer 2006a, 5)

The landscape trains and tests the player in what Jespur Juul calls a ‘game of progression’ (Juul 2002). Whilst Juul’s alternate category—the game of emergence—might provide more interesting strategies and variations when played, the progression structure is a powerful insight into what makes the landscape of the single-player first-person shooter game so

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Fig. 4.1  An obstacle course landscape, built just for us, Half-Life 2, 2004. Valve Corporation

interesting and so satisfying. My perspectival desire to penetrate the depth axis resonates with its linear chain of challenges such that the entire landscape can be understood as a measuring and confirmation device for my effort and ability. Concerning World of Warcraft, Espen Aarseth writes: The nature of the game dynamics can be compared to a theme park ride, the Fordist paradigm of assembly-line mass entertainment as pioneered by Disney: “Move along, please, more enjoyable monsters and sights await around the next corner.” (Aarseth 2008, 114)

The theme park is a great analogy for the linear landscape of sequential challenges I experience in Half-Life 2. Not only can we consume landscape by the search for images, as we find in tourism, but we can consume landscapes via the consumption of play and challenge. In the FPS theme park, distances are compressed to avoid the boredom of travel (I would never drive more than two minutes down the Lost Highway without a challenge) and the world becomes “a conglomerate or parkland quilt of connected playgrounds built around a common theme” (Aarseth 2008, 121). In Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1995 [1981]), the

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theme park is described as “a cover for a simulation of the third order” (Baudrillard 1995 [1981], 8). Baudrillard writes: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. (Baudrillard 1995 [1981], 8)

For Baudrillard, the theme park is not simply a discrete landscape restructured for the enjoyment of park visitors, it reveals the ultimate structure of the “hyper-reality” of the rest of the world outside the park, the world that we live in, where the copy cannot be distinguished from the real, and we experience copies of things before we experience real things. The theme park is not outside this world of copies, it is simply less subtle in its fakery. To quote W. J. T. Mitchell once again, landscape “naturalises its conventions and conventionalises its nature”. Angela Ndalianis makes a fascinating examination of pleasure and threat in the theme-park incarnations of Jurassic Park. The fictional world of Jurassic Park envisioned in Michael Crichton’s original book (1990), famously adapted into a film by Stephen Spielberg in 1993 presented a theme park where the attractive threat of re-incarnated dinosaurs became real when the fences of the park were breached and the dinosaurs started attacking the park visitors. In the Sony PlayStation game The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), the player was able to inhabit the fictional world of Jurassic Park, performing the roles of both humans and dinosaurs. In the theme park ride Jurassic Park Island (1999) at Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Florida, visitors could experience “wonder turn to terror when they were stalked by raptors and a mammoth Tyrannosaurus, barely escaping with their lives” (Ndalianis 2004, 2). Whilst the existential threat experienced in the theme park is negligible, Ndalianis’s examination of the levels of simulation and simulacra that operate in the theme park expands the strength of Aarseth’s theme-park analogy beyond a simple game world/real-world binary. The theme park is not simply a compressed landscape of choreographed spectacle, it is, as Baudrillard described, a condensation of layered simulacra that allegorises postmodernity in a more general sense. So while Aarseth’s comparison between World of Warcraft and the

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theme park is valid, it doesn’t quite get to the core of what distinguishes the game as a unique type of landscape. Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins (1995) compared the problem-solving landscapes of computer games to the travelogues that provided the literary accompaniment to the colonisation of the New World. They point to John Smith’s adventures in Virginia (1624) as a prescient example of a landscape, conquered via colonialism, then transformed by narrative into a world of challenge and adventure. The way that colonisation defined ‘Virginia’ by vulnerability and survival is replaced by the adventure, heroism, and spatial conquest of John Smith’s rescue of the Lost Colony or Walter Raleigh’s quest for El Dorado (Fuller and Jenkins 1995). Fuller and Jenkins write: John Smith’s ability to trade for corn to feed a starving colony was unarguably more critical than the story about the rescue of the Lost Colony that the Virginia Company tried to impose on him or the story about Pocahontas that he recounted 16 years after the event and 6 years after her death. (Fuller and Jenkins 1995)

These adventure novels were written after the messier and more violent process of colonialism, and the ability to see the landscape as a place for heroic adventure is the mythology that could only come after existential struggle and conquest. In Half-Life 2, the goals in the landscape are shaped for the player, and traversal of the landscape results in a chain of personal achievement. In real life, half the challenge is to work out what the challenge should be and what decisions will shape our personal and professional lives. Half-Life 2 removes self-doubt, and places me on a linear safari where all I need to do is apply myself to the challenge at hand. I am in a landscape of binary challenges which makes sure that there is a captive lion for me to shoot at journey’s end. Unlike the theme park visitors of Ndalianis or Aarseth, I am not passively along for the ride; I have come to test myself against all of the challenges that the safari has to offer. The topology of Half-Life 2 is a corridor of confirmation that congratulates me on my increased mastery. The warm hand on my shoulder is the landscape that is facing me at all times, monitoring my progress, entertaining me with new sights and sounds, and confirming my purpose and direction. Behind this corridor is what Marc Bonner describes as the ‘world-shaped hall’, the “non-walkable area full of

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sculptural objects” which “acts as an intermediary between the active level structure and the large-format panoramic skybox” (Bonner 2021, 66).

At Least One Alien in the Landscape [Gameplay notes] A smog-tinted sunset spreads out over a toxic wasteland, where rushes and reeds have overgrown sun-bleached boats. My traversal is relentless, unlocking doors, finding a path across the swamp, and killing hordes of soldiers and monsters. It is better to run than to walk in Half-Life 2. The architectural banalities of urban administration, drainpipes, ventilation shafts and stormwater canals, have become the lonely footpaths of my adventure. Some doors can never be unlocked, some fences can never be climbed, no matter how many wooden crates I stack next to them or how many grenades I throw at them. I am the hero of this landscape, the scientist Dr Gordon Freeman, saviour and liberator of humanity.

Through my avatar, I am playing the fictional character of Dr Gordon Freeman. Peter Bayliss has written that the first-person shooter game is especially proficient at creating player-character relationships precisely because we do not see the visual cues of the character as is the case in third-person computer games, where the player avatar can be seen running in the foreground of the screen (Bayliss 2010, 192). My role-play as Dr Freeman feeds back into the masculine camera-gun I described earlier. Friendly NPCs worship me as Dr Freeman, their liberator from alien oppressors, and alien oppressors speak of me to each other as public enemy number one. Despite this illusion of a fictional society, my relationship with the landscape is solitary. Olli Leino writes that contrary to the social competition found in multiplayer games and sports, the single-player computer game offers a primarily existential experience, where the struggle of the game is the ability to stay in it, like stacking tetrominoes before they touch the ceiling, or juggling balls before they drop. The ability to perform creative tricks like clearing three Tetris rows at once or passing the juggling ball under my leg are secondary bonuses that are available only after I have overcome the challenge of simply staying in the game, or as Leino puts it, once I have satisfied the ‘gameplay condition’ (Leino 2013). In Half-Life 2, my gameplay condition is to survive in this landscape alone as I move forwards.

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My character, Dr Gordon Freeman, is an unlikely supersoldier, a scientist who witnessed aliens invade the earth via a dimensional portal in the first Half-Life game, and is now the sole protagonist travelling the earth to liberate humans from these alien invaders. Playing as Dr Freeman I am surrounded by the landscape of modern urban architecture, but without its familiar functionality. Roads no longer have traffic regulations, apartments are not rented or mortgaged, and like Bruce Willis’s John McClane in Die Hard (1988) air-conditioning vents are now thoroughfares for adventurous heroes. As a player, I enjoy the alien invasion as a liberation from the dull routines of my regular life. In Half-Life 2 I am not defined by my tenuous employment status, my personal life or my fears about the future, I am defined by my ability to overcome the next challenge in the landscape. Within the fiction of the Half-Life series, Dr Gordon Freeman is a scientist, alienated from his work, and unaware that his employers were experimenting with dangerous aliens and interdimensional portals. His liberation comes in the form of a workplace accident where the aliens are let loose and run rampant, first over his laboratory, and eventually over the whole world. Amid the chaos of explosions and alien attacks, Dr Freeman abandons his life of research and becomes a gladiatorial hero. Dr Gordon Freeman reads like a surreal pun on Marx’s description of alienation: [I]f the product of his labour, his labour objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. (Marx 1844, 79)

Unbeknownst to him, the product of Dr Gordon Freeman’s labour was actual aliens, which violently exploded his workplace, liberating him from a job he did not understand and propelling him into the role of a saviour protagonist in a post-apocalyptic landscape. As a PhD student sitting at a computer in my cubicle after hours, I revelled in my emancipation as Dr Freeman and enjoyed running rampant through the ruins of my bureaucratic life, busting down doors and climbing through air-conditioning vents, whilst remaining guided by the warm hand of purpose, the linear landscape safari that was built just for me and for my adventure. Emma Fraser writes that a playable ruinscape “plunders a vast archive or real and imagined ruins, a familiar set of tropes and ways of thinking about the city which in turn carry the weight of an implied ‘what if?’, producing their own spatial, urban and ruin imaginaries” (Fraser 2016, 6). The Half-Life

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narrative starts by invalidating the workplace and transforming it into a network of air-conditioning ducts to crawl through and enemies to overcome, eventually spilling out onto the whole world. As a player, I am struck by the similarity of my workplace to Dr Freeman’s, and the thrill of its decay. I feel a communion with Dr Freeman, we both seem more suited to the safari than to our regular lives. The landscape simplifies everything, and replaces complex decisions with clearly defined goals. Our player-­ character relationship is at its strongest when I enjoy a pause in the game and stare at the air-conditioning duct in my own office and wonder if I could kill a monster with a crowbar and escape through the duct, could I apocalypse? In his writings on play, Sean Cubitt touches on this particular form of player-character identification: A similar process of negation is involved in the genesis of the form of play which it seems dominates corporate culture. We are still involved in techniques of absorption and in a bounded and timeless play world, but now the goal of play is self-realisation in the face of a more thoroughly alienated environment, both natural and human. The players seek neither to meld with others nor to subordinate themselves to a greater external environment, but to ratify their existence as separate, definite and defined individuals. (Cubitt 2009)

Despite the temporary co-operative relationships Freeman forms with secondary characters, the game begins with Freeman being inexplicably inserted into the world at the railway station by the mysterious ‘GMan’ character, and concludes with Freeman being extracted in an equally inexplicable way. Within the fiction of the game, Freeman is the ultimate alien in the landscape, and as a player, I experience this world as the alienated Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, staring through the diving mask of my camera-gun, ready to consume the landscape safari safely laid out in front of me. Art historian Robin Kelsey characterises the transformation of a physical environment into a landscape as a physical and visual fantasy of ‘not belonging’. Kelsey argues that the entire concept of the world as landscape emerged from Romance and Germanic languages, and was based around the idea of the landscape as something separate from the simple space of existence, and as a spectacle for political identification. Kelsey writes:

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Landscape as Landschaft was thus about the political belonging of the people of a place to the Landschaft and not to a distant sovereign. (Kelsey 2008, 205)

Kelsey argues that as the modern landscape process transformed the physical environment into a visual spectacle for political identification, it morphed into a “perspectival fiction” that re-enforced the separation between people and the environment (Kelsey 2008 205). Much like the word ‘animal’ distinguishes the exceptional status of the human being, Kelsey argues that the word ‘landscape’ created an objectification to distinguish humanity from the physical environment and repurpose the environment as an object of cultural identity. With the advent of industrial modernity, Kelsey argues that Romanticism repurposed landscape into a statement of not belonging to the physical environment but having an aestheticised longing for the physical environment (Kelsey 2008 205). Kelsey provides several variations for how the concept of landscape manifests a Western fantasy of ‘not belonging’, each of which correlates to the suppression of a particular paradox: The futuristic fantasy: Humanity belongs to a distant, galactic tomorrow. The suppressed paradox: The trajectories of history and the propensity of humans to move their mistakes from one location to the next. The unilateral fantasy: The earth is obdurate and resilient, so our belonging is not required. The suppressed paradox: The unilateral fantasy suppresses the mounting evidence that our ecology is delicate relative to our patterns of consumption. The nostalgic romantic fantasy: Humanity does not belong, but it used to and longs to belong once again. The suppressed paradox: The nostalgic fantasy, many studies have suggested, entails habitual dishonesty about the ecological insensitivity of ancestors. (Kelsey 2008, 208–9)

Elements of all three of Kelsey’s versions of not belonging are present in the landscape of Half-Life 2. The nostalgic romantic landscape of not belonging can be found in the post-industrial ruins of the game, and the unilateral and futuristic fantasies combine into this vision of a high-­ technology alien invasion brought about as a consequence of irresponsible human scientific experiments. Kelsey’s argument that landscape functions as an ideological filter on our experience of the physical environment

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complicates our ability to analyse the experience itself. It proves an inseparability between the experience of landscape and the historical and material factors that shape this experience and takes us back to the phenomenology/material culture debate in landscape studies that I recounted in Chap. 2. The single player is an alien guest in this landscape of code, their avatar squints through the monocular camera-gun, and their character adventures through a safari of challenges built from the fragments of a vaguely familiar modern city.

The Promethean Dystopia and the Neo-Baroque Remix Landscape Moving into the cognitive space of this landscape analysis, the fictional narrative of Half-Life 2 can be understood within a long tradition of Promethean dystopias, where human scientific experimentation leads to apocalyptic disaster. In Gordon Freeman’s world, human scientific experimentation to a cataclysm whereby the earth became overrun with alien overlords and monsters. According to Langdon Winner, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (A Modern Prometheus) provided the essential template for this technological dystopia. In one of the most sensitive and devastating narrative twists, Shelley characterises the monster as the victim of Dr Frankenstein’s creative ambition, transforming the Greek Promethean myth into a cautionary tale for human creativity, where parents bear existential responsibility for their children, and humanity bears existential responsibility for our technology, which is especially prescient when our technology becomes conscious (Winner 1977, 306–7). In the Greek Prometheus myth, humans were dealt a bad hand when Epimetheus left us without the strength or claws of other animals. To remedy this, Prometheus stole the technology of fire from the Olympian Gods and gifted it to humanity, setting in motion our relationship with technology, and potentially, our ability to create artificial intelligence in the manner of the Gods, thereby inverting the process once again. In the dystopia of Half-Life 2, Dr Freeman begins the game ludologically naked, neither a clawed monster nor a heavily armed alien soldier. The game begins with the search for a crowbar and ends with Freeman achieving military dominance over the landscape (Figs. 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5). Sociologist Majid Yar cites James Cameron’s first two Terminator films as another example of the Promethean landscape dystopia (Yar 2014, 53).

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Fig. 4.2  Chases through the administrative architecture of canals in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1991. Directed by James Cameron

Fig. 4.3  Chases through the administrative architecture of canals in Half-Life 2, 2004. Valve Corporation

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Fig. 4.4  Chases through the administrative architecture of an asylum in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1991. Directed by James Cameron

Fig. 4.5  Chases through the administrative architecture of an asylum in Half-­ Life 2, 2004. Valve Corporation

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Interestingly, in both Half-Life 2 and Terminator 2, action sequences are housed in the abandoned institutions of modernity, where the protagonists transform hospitals, factories, prisons, and water infrastructure networks into obstacle courses for pursuit and conflict. Cultural theorist Angela Ndalianis argues that the correlation between narrative structures, in this case the Promethean dystopia, and visual languages, in this case the post-industrial ruin, evidences the acceleration in global trade and exchange, which results in a more rapid remediation between similar texts and the expansion of franchises and sequels between media such as film, games, literature, and so on. Much like Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the ‘global village’ (1964) Ndalianis writes that as global trade expanded from nautical to digital networks of exchange, cultural representations adapted to reflect an accelerated exchange of aesthetic material, which is exemplified in the modular reproducibility of digital worlds (Ndalianis 2004, 147). Ndalianis uses the phrase ‘neo-baroque’ to refer to the increased frequency with which representational material can be exchanged between mediums and how the shift to post-Fordist corporate structures encourages the expansion of such a franchised multimedia approach. These accelerations condition audiences to understand and accept an expanded lexicon of textual references. Ndalianis writes: Examples of popular culture, past and present, exist side by side, and the gap between memory and history grows smaller. The ruins of popular culture are ever-present. (Ndalianis 2004, 97)

In Chap. 7, I discuss the broader function of the postmodern remix relative to computer games and computer game modding; however, it is worth noting the cultural remix is already alive and well in the landscapes of Half-Life 2. The visual appearance of Half-Life 2’s ‘City 17’ was based on Eastern European cities, where the ruins of nineteenth-century architecture overlaid with pre-war and communist architecture from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1970s. Having simulated these historical strata in their level design, Valve developers added their own layer of high-tech science fiction alien architecture (Valve Corporation 2004, 166). But even here it is fascinating to note that Valve artists Jeff Ballinger and Viktor Antonov based their designs for the technologically advanced headquarters of the alien ‘Combine’ (‘The Citadel’) on the totalitarian architecture of the twentieth century, from Nazi Germany to the communist governments of the Cold War (Valve Corporation 2004, 246). Therefore when looking out over

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City 17 through the eyes of Dr Gordon Freeman, I am already looking at a sort of architectural remix of ruined modernity (Fig. 4.6). This landscape remix can be traced down to a micro scale. When Dr Freeman and I are not too busy shooting clawed monsters and Combine soldiers, we can stop and look around, enjoying the detached gaze of what Galloway calls the ‘ambience act’, when I have overcome a game challenge, but have not moved forwards far enough to trigger a new one. Looking closely, I see that the surfaces of the rocks in an underground cave are composed of photographs of real rocks, the concrete walls of a sewer drain are covered with photographic textures of real concrete, and the grass outside is composed of photographs of real grass. It becomes clear that the entire landscape is a collage of photographic samples, little bitmap emissaries of the outside world plastered onto the surfaces of this dystopian landscape. Half-Life 2 and the Valve Source Engine highlights one of my favourite moments in 3D computer graphics, where the use of 2D photographic textures to add details to low polygon environments is artfully convincing, whilst also being somehow more technologically transparent than the more high-polygon and dynamic level-of-detail

Fig. 4.6  An architectural collage of Eastern European ruins and an alien skyscraper in Half-Life 2, 2004. Valve Corporation

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(LOD) systems driving the more photorealistic contemporary game engines. Standing still in Half-Life 2 and exploring the photographic textures close-up allows me a glimpse into the remixed and collaged world of the game developer and their library of textures, much like seeing the underpainting on an unfinished Leonardo Da Vinci painting allows me to imagine the process behind the more immaculately rendered surfaces of a finished work (Figs. 4.7 and 4.8). André Bazin describes photography as liberating the plastic arts from their responsibility to optical mimesis. Renaissance painting was proto-­ photographic, defined in part by artist scientists experimenting with lenses and lighting conditions, until the final automation of these technologies in the form of camera and film freed these artists from the laborious task of hand-painted optical realism (Bazin 1967, 13–14). But the invention of the camera did not grant the photograph an automatic authority over representing what is real, it simply conjured its own fictional reality, where the chemical wizardry of the dark-room gave birth to surrealist photography (Bazin 1967, 232) and the pixel-by-pixel manipulations of Photoshop and AI-generated images. The collage of

Fig. 4.7  Photographic textures of rocks and grass in Half-Life 2, 2004. Valve Corporation

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Fig. 4.8  An example of a database (textures.com) from which computer graphics artists can source textures, author’s screenshot

photographic surfaces in the landscape of Half-Life 2 evokes the cropclone-duplicate creativity of Adobe Photoshop and the database approach to creativity described by Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media, where the digital archive becomes the palette and algorithmic functions become the brush (Manovich 2001, 129–34). The visually transparent nature of this software remix landscape again recalls Emma Fraser’s description of ruins, where ruined landscapes result from a sense of cultural excess, and our landscape safari is also a journey through an overgrown weedscape of collaged images and fragments of something that was once familiar.

When the Adventure Is Over [Gameplay notes] I finished the final mission of Half-Life 2 and my relationship with Dr Freeman. It was 2 am, and I stared at the air-conditioning ducts in my office.

As I reached the end of Half-Life 2, I no longer thought of my keyboard as a tool for typing words, it had naturalised into a control system for Dr Freeman. ‘4’ was a shotgun for close-range, double-tap ‘3’

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summoned a powerful machine gun, and single-tap ‘5’ was a grenade to quickly hurl over rubble at soldiers hiding behind a burned-out car. My relationship to the landscape had become a synchronised set of skills and the prosthetic of my avatar had disappeared and I was embodied as Dr Freeman. When nearing the end of the game, the antagonist villain Wallace Breen said to my character “you have destroyed so much, what is it that you have created?”, I couldn’t help but feel this question be directed at me, the player, glued with sweat to the back of my chair, sitting in an empty office in the middle of the night. When the game ended, the alienation I avoided by joining Dr Freeman on the safari adventure came rushing back as I quit the game and peeled myself from the chair and looked around the student office. Aarseth compared completing a single-player computer game to losing your job. He writes: The game world is its own reward, and the end, if and when it comes, does not offer dramatic satisfaction, but a feeling of limbo. There is no turning back, and no going forward. You are no longer employed by the game. Time to buy another. (Aarseth 2004)

Towards the height of my embodiment, I felt like a gladiator, an unlikely hero who had mastered my avatar, my weapons and the landscape itself. At the end, the gameplay condition evaporated, my emotional employment in this landscape of personal validation was terminated and I felt a sense of loss, like an emotional hangover. I put Dr Gordon Freeman back in the toy box and sat in reflection in my cubicle. The non-linear landscape of my life felt strange in contrast to the linear landscape of purpose I had just mastered. When cultural theorist Mark Fisher described the “comfort food oblivion of PlayStation”, he was writing about the contrast that Giles Deleuze outlines, between the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault, and the control society of Capitalism (Fisher 2009, 23). The disciplinary society experienced by the child at school, and then the adult in the factory, the prison or the hospital provides a linear regimentation that is absent in the society of control. The society of control diffuses structure more subtly throughout the system, and regulation is achieved at the level of the individual who replaces the structure of class, lunchtime, and timed breaks with a personal obligation to perpetual activity (Fisher 2009).

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[Gameplay notes] It is 2 am on a Monday. I am writing my gameplay notes in my office cubicle and instant messaging. Outside my building is a jobless recovery, stagnant real wage growth and an increasing cost of living.

The significance of the Half-Life 2 landscape becomes clear when the adventure is over. I enjoy the landscape with a sort of nineteenth-century Stockholm Syndrome, where I find pleasure in a disciplinary life where I know what I am supposed to be doing. Outside the game, I miss being the hero, the protagonist, and the simple pleasure of resistance, success, and validation. Unlike an unknown wilderness, the landscape of the first-­ person shooter was a structured safari that could guarantee a simulation of adventure and heroism every time. The gameplay relationship between my playable avatar resonated with the fictional relationship between my character, Dr Freeman, and the Promethean dystopia he had to traverse. The outside world was always present in familiar landscape tropes, and photographic textures reminded me that someone had made this collaged world from their observations of another. My avatar and my character were exceptional outsiders in a landscape where we were the only witnesses. It was a linear landscape of risk and reward that was always facing me, condensed through the single eyeball of the camera-gun. This landscape analysis is based on my experience of Half-Life 2, however, I suspect that it can be generalised to several single-player first-person shooters. In the next chapter I demonstrate how a simple change in game mechanics can take a similar world and produce an entirely different landscape reading. As we move from the single player to the multiplayer game, I show how what looks similar on screen is, to the player, a different landscape altogether.

Creative Works Cited Adventures in Virginia. 1624. John Smith. (Novel). Die Hard. 1988. Directed by John McTiernan, Silver Pictures. (Film). The Graduate. 1967. Directed by Mike Nichols. Mike Nichols/Lawrence Turman Productions. (Film). Jurassic Park. 1990. Michael Crichton. Published by Alfred A. Knopf. (Book). Jurassic Park Island. 1999. Orlando: Universal Theme Park. (Amusement park ride). The Lost World: Jurassic Park. 1997. DreamWorks Interactive, Appaloosa Interactive. (Console).

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Risky Business. 1983. Directed by Paul Brickman. Geffen Pictures. (Film). The Silence of the Lambs. 1991. Directed by Jonathan Demme. Strong Heart/ Demme Production. (Film). Spellbound. 1945. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Selznick International Pictures, Vanguard Films. (Film). The Terminator. 1984. Directed by James Cameron. Hemdale, Pacific Western Productions, Cinema ’84. (Film). Terminator 2: Judgement Day. 1991. Directed by James Cameron. Carolco Pictures, Pacific Western Productions, Lightstorm Entertainment, Le Studio Canal+S.A. (Film). Topaz. 1969. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Pictures. (Film).

References Aarseth, Espen. 2004. Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation. In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, ed. N. Wardrip Fruin and P. Harrington. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ———. 2008. A Hollow World: World of Warcraft as Spatial Practice. In Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, ed. Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press. Appleton, Jay. 1975. The Experience of Landscape. Landscape Planning. London and New York: Wiley. Baudrillard, Jean. 1995 [1981]. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Bayliss, Peter. 2010. Videogames, Interfaces, and the Body: The Importance of Embodied Phenomena to the Experience of Videogame Play. Doctoral thesis, RMIT University. Bazin, Andre. 1967. What Is Cinema? Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bonner, Marc. 2021. The World-Shaped Hall. In Game| World| Architectonics: Transdisciplinary Approaches on Structures and Mechanics, Levels and Spaces, Aesthetics and Perception, ed. Marc Bonner. Heidelberg University Publishing (heiUP). Casey, Edward S. 2002. Representing Place: Landscape Painting & Maps. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Crawshaw, Carol, and John Urry. 1997. Tourism and the Photographic Eye. In Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. Chris Rojek and John Urry, 176–195. New York and London: Routledge. Cubitt, Sean. 2009. A Critique of Play. Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, November Issue.

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Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative. Winchester: Zero Books. Flynn, Bernadette. 2005. Imaging Gameplay – The Design and Construction of Spatial Worlds. In Imaginary Worlds  - Image and Space International Symposium. Sydney: University of Technology Sydney. Fraser, Emma. 2016. Awakening in Ruins: The Virtual Spectacle of the End of the City in Video Games. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 8 (2): 177–196. Fuller, Mary, and Henry Jenkins. 1995. Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue. In Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Steven G. Jones, 57–72. Sage. Galloway, Alexander R. 2006b. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Gilpin, William. 1794. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching; To Which Is Added a Poem on Landscape Painting. London: Printed for R. Blamire. Juul, Jesper. 2002. The Open and the Closed: Games of Emergence and Games of Progression. Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings, 1–6. Kelsey, Robin. 2008. Landscape as Not Belonging. In Landscape Theory, 203–213. New York and London: Routledge. Klevjer, Rune. 2006a. The Way of the Gun: The Aesthetic of the Single-Player First Person Shooter. In Doom. Giocare in Prima Persona, ed. M. Bittanti and S. Morris, 1–11. Milano: Coster & Nolan. ———. 2012. Enter the Avatar. The Phenomenology of Prosthetic Telepresence in Computer Games. In The Philosophy of Computer Games, ed. Hallvard Fossheim, Tarjei Mandt Larsen, and John Richard Sageng, 17–38. London and New York: Springer. Leino, Olli Tapio. 2013. From Game Spaces to Playable Worlds. Philosophy of Computer Games, 1–12. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Screen 27 (1): 354. Marx, Karl. 1844. Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts. Moscow: Progress Publishers. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York City: McGraw-Hill. Mitchell, William John Thomas. 1994. Imperial Landscape. In Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T.  Mitchell. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Ndalianis, Angela. 2004. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Punter, David. 1994. The Picturesque and the Sublime: Two Worldscapes. In The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Rose, Gillian. 1993. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Roskill, Mark. 1997. The Languages of Landscape. University Press, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Valve Corporation. 2004. Half-Life 2 Raising the Bar. Roseville: Prima Games. Winner, Langdon. 1977. Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Yar, Majid. 2014. The Cultural Imaginary of the Internet: Virtual Utopias and Dystopias. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 5

Tourism and Gun-Running in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

To the external observer, Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) might look similar, they are both first-person shooters made using the Valve Source Engine using a related lexicon of game objects. The major changes that drive this chapter are the shift from a single-player to a multiplayer game, and the shift from a game made by Valve developers to one made by modders, or to be more specific, made by modders, remade by developers, sold back to players, and now regularly augmented by modders and developers. The Counter-Strike series is the most enduring and commercially successful mod produced from the Half-Life series, and arguably the most successful game mod of all time (Küchlich 2005). It also illustrates just how dramatically the landscape experience changes when the player is no longer alone in the game world. This chapter looks at the wide range of representational spaces that populate the servers of CS:GO using tourism studies and sports geography and examines how the extrinsic economies of Esports, online gambling, and money laundering have contributed to the longevity of Counter-Strike and its landscape environments.

The Game Engine, the EULA and the Ha-Ha Before I get into how the landscape experience of the multiplayer first-­ person shooter differs from the single-player first-person shooter, I want to return to the topic of the game engine as a representational medium. As © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Nelson, Computer Games As Landscape Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4_5

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previously mentioned, a computer game engine is the software environment that the computer game runs on, responsible for the rendering of sound and graphics, as well as calculating physics simulations, artificial intelligence procedures, networking, and all other forms of programmatic representations that uphold the player’s experience of the game (Zerbst and Düvel 2004). It is becoming increasingly common for a single game engine to be used to make several different games, and this repeated repurposing of the same software environment is useful for us when it comes to analysing games as landscapes with a common form of mediation. The rise of landscape painting as a popular genre can be materially tied to the earlier rise of oil on canvas painting in Venice in the fifteenth century. As merchant capitalists gradually replaced the Church as the commissioning consumers for paintings, the sailing cloth of Venice provided a flexible support for paintings which now had to be portable, exchangeable commodities. As discussed in Chap. 2, the rise of landscape paintings not only reflected widespread changes occurring in the physical environment, but were embedded in the same exchange networks that were driving these very changes (Mitchell 1995). The technological and economic networks of the Valve Source Engine are similarly important for understanding the historical landscape relationships reflected in the computer games I analyse in this book. As I mentioned in Chap. 3, the ‘platform studies’ approach moves beyond the game experience and seeks an analysis that is “situated in culture, society, economy and history” via an examination of the material affordances of its medium (Montfort and Bogost 2009, 147). This book does not go down to the level of computer hardware, but it does dig into how the Valve Source Engine, like the offcuts of Venetian sailing cloth or powdered lapis lazuli, shapes the overall significance of computer games when thought of as contemporary landscapes. In 1997, id Software published the source code for their game Doom, marking a distinct growth moment for the practice of ‘modding’. A ‘modder’ makes alterations to a computer game at various levels, by changing texture files, designing new game levels, and often making new products that are almost unrecognisable compared to their source material. In ‘Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry’ (2005) Julian Küchlich outlines some economic distinctions between how games are produced, played, shared, and modded, describing the computer game developer, who retains the intellectual property rights of their creation as stipulated by the End User Licence Agreement (EULA), who can sell their game, as different from the modder, who has the legal right to develop new creative works, but is typically not able to commercialise their

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creation (Küchlich 2005, 5).1 The mod, whilst not sell-able, often brings commercial windfalls for the EULA holder (the developer) because it can extend the lifetime of the original game, and maintain a core community willing to pay for and play the game and the new mods it might host. Küchlich introduces the term ‘playbour’ to highlight the economic variations we encounter between players, modders, developers, and platform owners, where outwardly similar engagements with game software can be defined by very different economic relationships. In 1996, two ex-Microsoft employees, Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, formed the Valve Corporation and licensed the Quake engine from id Software. They used a commercial licence of the engine that was already used to make the popular game Quake to develop their new engine, referred to as the GoldSrc, or ‘GoldSource’ engine. GoldSrc was used to produce the first Half-Life game as well as Day of Defeat (2003) and the first instantiations of the Counter-Strike game series. According to Half-­ Life engineer Ken Birdwell, the GoldSrc engine left some aspects of the Quake engine relatively unchanged, such as core rendering and the way game maps are compiled, however other aspects were drastically changed, such as the game logic, the AI system, and several other graphical and server-client properties (Bokitch 2018). The Valve Source Engine was produced as an extension of this process and included further innovations, such as the addition of radiosity normal mapping and other improvements to the programmatic and rendered representations that the engine was capable of delivering (Mitchell et al. 2006). The first version of Counter-­ Strike was developed in 1999 as a ‘total conversion’ mod of the first Half-­ Life game. It was made by a small team of modders, headed by Canadian college student Minh Le, in collaboration with Jesse Cliffe. Counter-Strike pits two teams against one another in a small first-person shooter environment. The ‘Terrorist’ team seeks to plant a bomb or hold hostages, whilst the ‘Counter-Terrorist’ team seeks to defuse the bomb or rescue the hostages, or alternately, kill all of the members of the opposing team. Le and Cliffe developed Counter-Strike in close collaboration with the Half-Life modding community and online players of the Half-Life Deathmatch multiplayer game (Overwiki n.d.). After developing Counter-Strike, its weapons, rules and player structures, Le and Cliffe adjusted it based on 1  The degree to which modders can commercialise their creative output is continually shifting. In my 2023 paper in the journal Game Studies, I have done my best to summarise how these legal boundaries have shifted over time.

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feedback from the modding community, and as the Counter-Strike mod grew in popularity, more game environments (referred to as maps) were shared and tested by players (Te 2014). In the years following the first release of Counter-Strike and its most popular iteration CS:GO, development passed through several commercial and amateur phases. According to Le, during the beta testing phase, the modding team received technical advice from the Valve Corporation, and the Canadian-based production company Barking Dog Studios (Gestalt 2000). In 2000, Valve purchased the rights to Counter-Strike and released the first non-beta versions (ESCalation 2015). During the same year, Rogue Entertainment was contracted to develop Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, however, development reverted back to Valve, who contracted Gearbox Software, Ritual Entertainment, and finally, Turtle Rock Studios, who finally published the game in 2004 (Remagen 2004; ESCalation 2015). During this period, Minh Le was employed by Valve to rebuild Counter-Strike from the GoldSrc engine used for Half-Life into the Source Engine that was being developed for the upcoming release of Half-Life 2. This new version— Counter-Strike: Source—was released only months after Counter-Strike: Condition Zero had been released in 2004 (Te 2014). In 2012, CounterStrike: Global Offensive was released by Valve and Hidden Path Entertainment as a means of expanding certain aspects of gameplay as well as the platforms on which the game could be played (Lahti 2015). Much like the development process that links Half-Life 2 to the Quake engine, the iterative process behind Counter-Strike saw asset libraries and game engine properties undergo significant overhauls. Julian Küchlich refers to Counter-Strike as “the most successful mod in computer game history” (Küchlich 2005). To simplify the relationship between the Half-Life series and the Counter-Strike series, the first iteration of Counter-Strike is built quite directly from Half-Life, and the current iteration of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is built using the Half-Life 2 engine (the Valve Source Engine), but as a commercial game in its own right, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has received updates and revisions that now make it quite distinct from the world of Half-Life 2. The iteration and elaboration that links these games together can be framed as the cumulative development of the Valve Source Engine as a medium of representation. The production process of Counter-Strike is an interesting case because the game seems to have traversed the boundary between a player-made mod and a licensed game multiple times. It began as a community mod and is now a commercial title, but continues to be expanded

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by community-made landscapes, demonstrating how the categories of commercial game and mod are frequently blurred in contemporary computer game production. By the time the Valve Corporation licensed Counter-Strike, all of the primary research, development, and play-testing had been done for free by Le, Cliffe, and the modding community and it also already had a wide player base to whom Valve could market the game, reducing the need for expensive play-testing and advertising. Much like the endless sequels and seriality of the neo-Baroque identified by Ndalianis, Hector Postigo argues that the iterative seriality in contemporary game development is an outcome of the accelerated commercial media landscape, where the online distribution and rapid production systems lead to short market lives which make static consumer products less profitable, and the rapid speed at which modders innovate is a valuable resource for neo-Baroque market demands (Postigo 2003; Ndalianis 2004). At the time that Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 were being released, Valve made it clear that their relationship with the modding community was vital for how they developed Source Engine editing tools, and that their systems of distribution would encourage further experimentation by modders (Valve Corporation 2004). Understood using the analysis of Küchlich and Postigo, this strategy helped Valve monetise the creative labour of modders, maintain innovation in their product and insure themselves against the risk of competition by catering to this existing community. Like all landscapes, Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike have a relationship to the boundary and to enclosure. When the Valve Corporation licensed the Quake engine and distributed modding software with the first Half-Life game, the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) enclosed the amateur modder from the professional software developer. When Valve licensed Counter-Strike, Minh and Cliffe went from being voluntary modders to professional developers, placing them on the producer rather than consumer side of the EULA.  Valve’s commercial licence of the Quake engine allowed them to sell Half-Life as a stand-alone product, whereas the EULA prevents modders from selling their games, keeping the intellectual property with Valve. The shift between paid and unpaid labour in the landscape of Counter-­ Strike brings up the contemporary digital version of the history of enclosure that is used to contextualise picturesque landscape painting, where the distinction between platform owners and content creators becomes a critical concern for understanding the social and historical context of contemporary cultural production. In this chapter, I explore how the ­player/

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modder/developer distinction brings CS:GO into the larger discussion of user-generated content and Web 2.0. It is not a deterministic narrative for these works by any means, but it enriches our understanding of how games such as this have survived for so long, and how some of its more esoteric and controversial landscapes came to be. Postigo argues participatory modding culture stems from the desire to overcome alienation, and to find community through a shared passion, as is seen in the case of volunteer work and Küchlich argues that Half-Life is no less derivative of Quake than a number of the more extravagant mods made by the player community, however their relationship as modders rather than commercial developers is markedly different. The key distinction between modding and voluntary work is that voluntary work is almost universally associated with not-for-profit enterprises (Postigo 2003). Küchlich argues that the public relations of the games industry attempts to obscure the enclosed boundary by emphasising community and the participatory nature of computer game culture (Küchlich 2005), and indeed there have been numerous attempts to share profits between modders and developers (described in Chap. 7). Given the significance of the obscured boundary between modder and developer, I make the comparison of the ‘ha-ha’ in the Picturesque garden (see Chap. 2). Without the conspicuous decree of ownership represented by a fence, the ha-ha marked a boundary, prevented livestock from crossing, and conveniently could not be seen from the inside, giving the landowner the visual impression of boundless fields (Fussell 1984, 16; Schama 1995, 539). As Sean Cubitt notes, enclosure is a useful concept for understanding the relationship between labour and property and the parallels that underlie how voluntary work functions in digital economies. When I return to a more contextual reading of CS:GO, I will return to the idea of the EULA as the ‘ha-ha’ to understand how the experience of the game landscape can be enriched by an understanding of the material context of the game itself.

Guns Looking at Guns [Gameplay notes] When I first play Counter-Strike, my headphones erupt in an auditory chaos of gunfire and footsteps from the game world overlaid with the distorted yelling of other players through their microphones. Most conversations on this server seem to be in Russian, between men and boys. Watching while I

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wait to join, my fingers rest on the same keys as Half-Life 2, but I’m not alone anymore. When the game restarts, I join and die quickly, then it’s back to waiting. Apparently, I overestimated my skills as Dr Gordon Freeman, and everyone else has been practising. I can’t pause the game, and everything is so fast that I can’t check my phone until I’ve been killed and am waiting for the next round. Over the repetition of rounds, I mimic the behaviour of other players and start to survive a little longer. If I kill one enemy team member before I die, I feel like I have made a net neutral contribution to my team. But I want to be a net positive. After more practice, I kill two enemy players in one round. Someone mentions my player name in the chat – “Who is this guy?”, and they kick me off the server. Being kicked off the server feels like a more personal form of game death than being killed as Dr Gordon Freeman, largely because I don’t know what I did to deserve it. Was it how I hid and waited for the last player that I killed or is this server just for a group of friends? Who was this guy? I start another game. I’m playing with a different group of people, all speaking Russian again. This time I am careful with my etiquette. When a vote is called to kick a different player from the server, I vote ‘No’. The better I get, the more time I spend alive, and the less time I spend watching. My screen goes black – my laptop has run out of power because I forgot to plug in my charger.

I experience the landscape of Counter-Strike through a similar avatar to Half-Life 2, but the camera-gun has left the solitary safari and I am transported into a multiplayer arena. Instead of being a lonely avatar wrapped in a landscape, I am a camera-gun looking through the landscape towards other camera-guns, monitoring reciprocal lines of sight for who can see me and who I can see. Hearing the distorted voices of other players mixed in with the game sounds is a dramatic change. In Half-Life 2, my headphones immersed me in an isolated world, but in CounterStrike, my headphones immersed me in an online social space. The Russian conversations remind me that I am also sitting in a room with its own ambient noise, an office for visiting students at my exchange university in Copenhagen, where the fastest Counter-Strike servers seem to be mainly Russian. As I play, I am reminded that there are other people sitting at their computers somewhere else in the world, playing the same game as me. Counter-Strike is a repetitive struggle over line of sight, where I dance with opposing players, exposing and concealing ourselves between a landscape of occluding objects, making the gaps between trees, tables, or office furniture of critical importance (Fig. 5.1). Through this repetition, I learn

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Fig. 5.1  Reciprocal lines of sight in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, 2012. Valve Corporation

where I should throw a grenade without looking and which doorways will expose me to the camera-gun of an opposing player. Every time I fail to dominate a line of sight, my avatar dies, and I am thrown out of the first-­ person perspective, and into the perspective of my opponent, where an action replay shows me exactly how they won the moment. Instead of progressing through a landscape of challenges, Counter-Strike is played repetitively over a small number of environments over and over again such that players develop expert knowledge of the ludic architecture of these environments and the strategies that work best for each. Instead of testing myself against the challenges and puzzles of the safari, I am juggling to develop enough skill to compete with other players, while trying to understand social rules that are not enforced by the game itself. In Half-Life 2 the computer would let me know if I did something wrong, I would die and respawn, but in Counter-Strike mistakes not only result in avatar death, but I can get yelled at by my teammates or kicked out of the game. I have gone from kicking a ball against a wall to a game of street football. The shift from the single-player to the multiplayer game demonstrates what phenomenologist Robert Sokolowski describes as the “manifolds of

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intersubjectivity”, now that I share the environment with other players and compete against them, I am aware that this world and my actions are being observed. Sokolowski writes: I now see it not only as the thing I would see differently if I were to move this way and that but also as the very same thing that is being seen, right now, from another perspective by someone else. The object is given to other viewers through manifolds that are different from those facing me, and I see the object precisely as being seen by others through viewpoints that I do not share. (Sokolowski 2000, 32)

In Counter-Strike, it’s not just that others are seeing the same landscape from different viewpoints, it’s that these reciprocal viewpoints have become the most important feature of the gameplay condition, whoever sees and shoots first wins and the landscape is simply the mediator. The multiplayer experience of landscape in Counter-Strike is also one of extreme repetition. A game can comprise 15 or 30 rounds played on the same map and a round lasts only a few minutes. Counter-Strike maps are smaller and more contained than the landscapes of Half-Life 2 as teams need to find and engage each other quickly, rather than spend a long time trying to find one another. Players on a given server tend to select the same maps repeatedly so that after a few hours of playing on a server, I have played hundreds of rounds in the same industrial warehouse and the same office building. Through failure and repetition, my movements achieve the fluidity of muscle memory; I sail fearlessly through the empty part of the map at the beginning, knowing that this is not a first contact zone, then I slowly wrap myself around the walls and doorways where I know I will meet opposing players. Round after round, I learn to collaborate with my teammates in negotiating the intricacies of each map. I might become known through my actions as that player who starts each round with a particular tactic—an incendiary grenade thrown blindly around a corner, followed by a race to dominate the sniping position. Any success is easily reversed and such predictability can be exploited by opposing players. If I survive late into the round, I am aware that my dead teammates are watching me in spectator mode, and that their judgement of my performance becomes an opportunity to be noticed and praised or ridiculed and kicked. Being kicked off a server is what Marcus Carter, Martin Gibbs and Michael Arnolds refer to as the ‘informal rules’ (Carter et al. 2017). Unlike coded or formal rules, my server kick was based on a majority vote

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by my teammates. Even though I never learned what informal rule I had broken, when I joined a new server, I tried to play to a higher standard to ingratiate myself with my new teammates. When I won a round for my new team, I achieved a sense of belonging that compensated for the rejection of the original kick. In Cybertext, Espen Aarseth notes that Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) were about momentary escape from society, but also about the creation of a mirror society where real people interact in real-time (Aarseth 1997, 144). In his ethnographic study of the social space of Counter-Strike, Nicolas Ducheneaut argues that the relationship between player abilities, conversation in the game chat, and the social barriers to membership of formal teams is similar to the social dynamic of a frat house (Ducheneaut 2010). While digital evangelists may blindly celebrate the ‘social emergence’ that has grown in multiplayer online environments, TL Taylor warns that such praise should be tempered by the acceptance that these mirror societies might also reproduce all of the behaviour and conflicts that we seek to avoid in the physical world. Taylor writes: Rather than simply identifying “emergent culture” as a prime property of MMOG [Massive Multiplayer Online Game] life and stopping there, we also need a better understanding of the complex nature of player-produced culture and its relation to technical game artefacts. (Taylor 2008, 188)

When I finished playing Half-Life 2 I was left with the disappointment of a redundant skillset. In Counter-Strike, my skills not only have found currency, but are appreciated in an environment where players can perfect them together ad infinitum. Counter-Strike is a shared landscape that mediates the mutual gaze of camera-guns and a feedback loop, where camera-gun skills can be mutually validated and practised to perfection. [Gameplay notes] The players have voted to play on the map Agency – the “sleek and modern offices of a prestigious advertising agency” (Puddy 2013). A new round begins and I jump from off the helipad and run into a corporate foyer. Moving past the reception desk, I slow down; there is a corridor on the right that will put me in the direct line of sight of the opposing team. Facing the wall, I look forward, press ‘A’, look down the corridor, shoot my rifle, then immediately press ‘D’ to move back and out of view. I was shot twice by a player from the upstairs atrium, but I hit them too. I repeat the same move, ‘A’, shoot, but before I can press ‘D’, my avatar has been killed. My point of

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view slumps to the ground and inverts to show me what my opponent saw. In slow motion I see myself peep around the corner to look and shoot once, then twice. The death of my avatar is defined by this final line of sight. The players vote to play on the Militia map – an American Midwest farm being held siege by a rural militia (Counter-Strike Wiki 2018). A new round begins and I run up the driveway and throw an incendiary grenade high into the air. By the time it explodes, I am hiding behind a large boulder. I know there will be terrorists on the open grass between the boulder and the house, but I’m not sure if anyone is hiding in the barn. I peek around to the left, snatch a glance, and strafe back behind the boulder. The absence of gunshots suggests that no one is there. Crouching, I shift to the left and shoot at the first player I see standing near the house. My shots are inefficient; I kill the other player but take damage myself. Another opposing player shoots me from the rooftop of the farmhouse and I watch my death in action replay.

The repetition of the multiplayer experience reveals the underlying logic of Counter-Strike landscapes. The reciprocal gaze of camera-guns looking at camera-guns takes us from the safari landscape from Half-Life 2 into the military sports arena of Counter-Strike. In the Militia map, there is a fence post at the end of the driveway from which I can access a line of sight to the windows and rooftop of the farmhouse without exposing myself to a terrorist in the barn. In the Agency map, there are two doorways that I can run between and monitor counter-terrorist players advancing both through the second-floor offices and across the ground-floor atrium. These maps are representations of the physical environment, transformed by the military logic of the line of sight. Every object that the player encounters is there to moderate the line of sight in an equal and reciprocal way for players on each team. As two camera-guns approach one another, the landscape mediates their gaze for fair and balanced competition. Espen Aarseth observes that multiplayer games tend to produce environments structured by abstract symmetry in order not to confer an advantage for any player or team (Aarseth 2000, 169). This symmetry can exist visually in the game geometry, or ludologically in the programmatic balance of the software interface. Michael Nitsche observes that Counter-­ Strike maps achieve the balance of a ludic arena, where opportunities and obstacles are distributed equally for each team (Nitsche 2008, 186–7). An experienced player can abstract a Counter-Strike map into a series of pathways and focal points that differentiate the design of a Counter-Strike farmhouse from a real-world farmhouse where line of sight is not a typical

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consideration. The architectural logic of a farmhouse might combine the logistics of agricultural work with the pragmatism of construction costs, maintenance, and homely Picturesque aesthetics. The architectural logic of an advertising agency might seek to impress the prospective client or create a working environment that benefits the creative practice of making advertisements. In Counter-Strike Militia, there are no farms and no farmers, and in the Agency, there are clients and no advertisers. The aesthetics of the game are designed to convince Counter-Strike players that this is a farmhouse and that this is an advertising agency, but the architectural logic is purely line of sight. The height of the windows, the length of the corridors and the angles of the doorways are all proportioned to control the line of sight and the speed with which players can run through them. On the Steam Workshop page for the ‘Agency’ map, the designer (‘Puddy’) has listed the most recent updates to the map. These include altering the windows in a room to remove an extra sniping position, and lowering a large desk slightly so that it does not interrupt angles of gunfire across the room (Puddy 2013). The provision of natural light is not a design constraint in Counter-Strike, nor are there player activities that require any simulation of a table. These objects are simply collision boxes to moderate the line of sight. Underneath the visual irregularity of a Counter-Strike map is an architectural symmetry that balances the reciprocal gaze of the camera-gun. The landscape of the reciprocal camera-gun has its home in Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema: The Logistics of Vision (1989), where Virilio outlines the historical relationship between film and military vision. Virilio’s description of military vision is a reasonably good precursor for the landscape logic of Counter-Strike: The act of taking aim is a geometrification of looking, a way of technically aligning ocular perception along an imaginary axis that used to be known in French as the ‘faith line’ (ligne de foi). Prefiguring the numerical optics of a computer that can recognise shapes, this ‘line of aim’ anticipated the automation of perception  – hence the obligatory reference to faith, belief, to denote the ideal alignment of a look, which, starting from the eye, passed through the peephole and the sights and on to the target object. Significantly, the word ‘faith’ is no longer used in this context in contemporary French: the ideal line appears thoroughly objective, and the semantic loss involves a new obliviousness to the element of interpretive subjectivity that is always in play in the act of looking. (Virilio 1989, 3)

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Using Virilio’s logic, we might say that the line of sight of the camera-­ gun simply evidences how modern vision quantified the physical environment. According to Virilio, the colt revolver inspired the invention of the revolving film canister, and following this parallel development, the normativity of targeted vision formed the foundation of modern optics. The empirical objectivity that we ascribe to optical devices such as the microscope and the telescope should, according to Virilio, be tempered by the loss of other forms of perception that are subjugated by the dominance of military vision (Virilio 1989, 4, 15). With this in mind, it is not surprising that Klevjer’s ‘camera-gun’ concept is so similar to what we read in Virilio: [T]he pilot’s hand automatically trips the camera shutter with the same gesture that releases his weapon. For men at war, the function of the weapon is the function of the eye. (Virilio 1989, 26)

Reproduced below is a quote from Dziga Vertov—a World War I veteran who later worked as a propaganda film-maker for Vladimir Lenin, which Virilio quotes in support of his argument: I am the camera’s eye. I am the machine which shows you the world as I alone see it. Starting from today, I am forever free of human immobility. I am in perpetual movement. I approach and draw away from things – I crawl under them – I climb on them – I am on the head of a galloping horse – I burst at them full speed into a crowd – I run before running soldiers – I throw myself down on my back – I rise up with the aeroplanes – I fall and I fly at once with the bodies falling or rising through the air. (Virilio 1989, 26)

Counter-Strike reifies the historical relationship between the camera and the weapon. Unlike Half-life 2, where the Promethean protagonist is confirmed and validated by a sequence of safari challenges, the landscapes of Counter-Strike are designed purely according to the reciprocal exchange of the military gaze. The single-player landscape is built around the affirmation of the player’s progress and their sense of purpose, whereas the landscapes of Counter-Strike are built to balance the competitive gaze of opposing players. In short, we have moved from a linear structure where the landscape is constantly facing the player to a symmetrical structure where the landscape must stand in-between players.

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Converting a Counter-Strike Landscape When writing about the types of landscape environments in Half-Life 2, I introduced Fuller and Jenkins’ argument that the action-based landscape environments found in computer games can be traced back to seventeenth-­ century travel literature, where landscapes became the site of action for the adventurer-protagonist. Using the example of Street Fighter II (1991), Fuller and Jenkins describe how a variety of settings function as a backdrop to the spectacle of gameplay, and a narrative reference to the international fighting styles represented by the game characters. Jenkins writes: The game, however, offers players a global array of possible spaces where the individual competitions can occur: a Brazilian dock, an Indian temple, a Chinese street market, a Soviet factory, a Las Vegas show palace. In the Indian sequence, elephants sway their trunks in the background. Water drips from the ceiling into a Japanese reflecting pool. In Spain, flamenco dancers strut and crowds cheer as the combatants struggle for dominance. All of these details constitute a form of visual excess (‘eye candy,’ as computer enthusiasts call it), a conspicuous consumption of space. Such spectacular visions are difficult to program, unnecessary to the competition, yet seem central to the game’s marketing success. (Fuller and Jenkins 1995, 4)

The range of landscapes in Counter-Strike reveals a similar pattern to what Jenkins and Fuller observed in Street Fighter II. When playing on competitive Counter-Strike servers, the types of maps that are available are limited to a pool that is selected from thousands of maps uploaded by modders and professional developers. These maps are divided into several categories, such as ‘Hostage Scenario’, ‘Bomb Scenario’ and ‘Deathmatch’, and, depending on which mode a player selects, they will join a server where gameplay repeats across a small rotation of these representational environments. Table 5.1 compares the aesthetic characteristics of a selection of Counter-Strike maps and the green and red boxes represent the most common aesthetic features that I observed from playing on each map. I have grouped the maps whose distribution of red and green aesthetic features are similar so that you can see how Fuller and Jenkins’ typological argument is borne out in the aesthetic similarity between various Counter-Strike maps. From this surface analysis, it seems that the landscapes of Counter-­ Strike achieve consistency in diversity, and we can find something interesting here regarding how the landscape has been transformed into a

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Table 5.1  All the maps shipped with CS:GO as of February 2018, coded for their representational features Map Name

Industrial

Workplace

Rustic

Warzone

Tourist Site

Domestic

Cache

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

No

Nuke

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

No

Train

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

No

Canals

No

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

Inferno

No

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

Cobblestone

No

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

Italy

No

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

Agency

No

Yes

No

No

No

No

Ofice

No

Yes

No

No

No

No

Dust II

No

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Mirage

No

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Insertion

No

No

Yes

No

No

Yes

Lake

No

No

Yes

No

No

Yes

Shipped

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

No

Overpass

Yes

No

Yes

No

No

No

Austria

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

competitive sporting ground. When writing about the modern rise of landscape paintings a popular genre, anthropologist Philippe Descola writes that this obsession over the landscape as a visual spectacle emphasised a growing separation of ‘nature’ as something distinct from the zones of human culture, something that instead of simply being lived in, became something that could be looked at. Descola writes: Nature, now dumb, odour-free, and intangible, had been left devoid of life. Gentle Mother Nature was forgotten, and Nature, the cruel stepmother had disappeared; all that remained was a ventriloquist’s dummy, of which man could make himself, as it were, the lord and master. (Descola 2013, 41)

The typology of landscapes in Counter-Strike provides aesthetic novelty and while fulfilling their primary purpose of supplying challenging obstacles for a line of sight competition. Counter-Strike landscapes function differently from the Promethean dystopia of Half-Life 2. The single-player

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FPS landscape uses a fictional setting to validate the heroic achievements of the player-protagonist, whereas the background environments of Counter-Strike are as aesthetically ‘odour-free and intangible’ as the astroturf and white lines of a tennis court. Reminding ourselves that Counter-­ Strike originated as a game mod, and is continually replenished by player-made maps, we can start to see the environments of Counter-Strike alongside things like skateboarding parks or improvised football fields. From both the modder and the player’s perspective, the Counter-Strike map of an office building or a ruined castle tourist site is an implicit answer to a modder asking themselves ‘can we play Counter-Strike here?’ Answering this question in the affirmative, the conversion of non-game landscapes such as office buildings, industrial warehouses and city parks into Counter-Strike shares something in common with location-based computer games such as Pokémon GO (Niantic 2016), where the physical environment is redefined by the question ‘can we play Pokémon GO here?’ But Counter-Strike takes this one step further, and instead of locating the game in a physical environment, it makes a replica and completely reorganises the space to satisfy the demands of line of sight and competitive balance. So what might look like a ruined castle or an office building is always a meticulously balanced arena, where the height of a table is balanced by the angle of view of an adjacent door frame. The question ‘can we play Counter-Strike here’ is not that different from ‘can we skateboard here’, except instead of rubbing wax onto benches and gutters to lubricate the grind, the odour-free landscape must be reorganised to balance the line of sight for both teams. As Emma Fraser (2016, 183) notes of Fallout 3 (Bethesda 2008) play offers a respite or resistance to how certain spaces are typically experienced, exploring an iconic city that has been hypothetically destroyed offers a new type of transgressive pleasure which, I argue, is not dissimilar to the pleasure of playing a shooting game in an otherwise mundane and unpleasant office building.

Tourist Landscapes Tourism scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that for modern tourism to function, landscapes must pass through a process of caricature-­ like objectification, where they are dissected into sites for site-seeing with easily accessible narratives to confer a historical sense of place. In a similar logic to Baudrillard, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett recounts how in the twentieth century, theme parks became the ultimate template for how tourists

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expected to have all historical sites presented to them, complete with suggested routes of approach and placards that separate key historical features from unexceptional landscape elements. For Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, marketing campaigns advertising New Zealand with cows roaming on idyllic dairy farms, or for the Bikini Islands with nuclear bombs and sunken aircraft carriers, both essentialise the landscape into something that fits the cognitive map of the tourist, and can be packaged up for touristic consumption accordingly (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1988, 170). In Mythologies (1972), Roland Barthes describes the tourist guidebook as the “cultural alibi”, a “labour-saving adjustment” that reduces geography “to the description of an uninhabited world of monuments” (Barthes 1972, 74–6). Literary theorist Jonathan Culler expands upon Barthes’ cultural alibi and describes tourism as the “tendency of culture to convert history into nature” arguing that while tourism is often maligned as crass, inauthentic, or insensitive, it reveals a more general principle in how we consume the physical environment as a landscape (Culler 1988, 155). Culler writes: A semiotic perspective advances the study of tourism by preventing one from thinking of signs and sign relations as corruptions of what ought to be a direct experience of reality and thus of saving one from the simplistic fulminations against tourists and tourism that are symptoms of the touristic system rather than pertinent analyses. Tourism, in turn, enriches semiotics in its demonstration that salient features of the social and natural world are articulated by what Percy calls ‘symbolic complexes’ and its revelation of the modern quest for experience as a quest for an experience of signs. Its illustration of the structural incompleteness of experience, its dependency on markers, helps us understand something of the nature of semiotic structures. (Culler 1988, 165)

Culler is suggesting that while we might turn our noses up at the inauthentic excesses of tourism, this is actually at the core of how we semiotically consume landscape. Tourism simplifies the complex question of how to ‘experience’ a new environment by highlighting self-fulfilling signs (a restaurant in Paris offers the concept of Parisian restaurant) so that landscapes become a series of semiotic markers that can be consumed, and the visitor can rest assured that they have adequately visited a place. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett describes reducing physical environments to tourist landscapes, tourism and marketing campaigns as a highly virtual

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Fig. 5.2  Running through the ‘Canals’ map in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, 2012. Valve Corporation

experience, where environments are abstracted into signs for consumption, which are cognitively consumed before, during, and after the trip (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1988, 171). Counter-Strike manages to crystallise something similarly essential in its representation of touristic landscapes such as European castles, Aztec ruins or Venetian canals. It merges the lens-based military gaze of the camera-gun with the lens-based gaze of the tourist as well as the repetitive and goal-oriented attitude of the player. Consider the Counter-Strike map ‘Canals’  (Fig. 5.2), designed by Iikka Keränen, and inspired by the city of Venice (McVicker 2017). According to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a city such as Venice objectifies itself to the touristic gaze; every feature performs as a sign for itself (a plaza in Venice is a Venetian plaza filled with Venetian restaurants, bordered by Venetian canals with Venetian gondolas). From Renaissance paintings of the Grand Tour to postcards and favoured tourist photo locations, Keränen’s work as a map designer was made easier by the fact that Venice had already been chopped up into consumable chunks by the tourism industry for hundreds of years. As a Counter-Strike player, I can run past signs that point towards museums and splash through canals that look like postcards, all the while playing a game whose rules give purpose and structure to my exploration.

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Venice is a pre-packaged spectacle ready for Counter-Strike appropriation and conversion, and Keränen exploits this to make an exciting landscape combination of tourism and military action, which itself is already a Hollywood staple, as seen in classic gondola chase scenes such as Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (Steven Spielberg 1989) and Moonraker (Lewis Gilbert 1979). When it comes to landscape environments that are not overtly touristic, the conversion and consumption of landscape as an objectified spectacle is very similar. In the CS:GO map ‘de_Dust’, I consume a vague approximation of conflict in the Middle East, in the map ‘Militia’, I consume the phenomena of the ‘rural siege’ in North America, and in the map ‘Office’, I consume what appears to be my own workplace, appropriated as a site of non-work. As a sort of landscape converter, Counter-Strike recreates environments that touch on something already familiar, like odour-free theatre sets accurately reconstructed from environments that we have already divided up into signs and key features. In the case of the CS:GO ‘Office’ map  (Fig. 5.3), it is pretty funny that their version of a stereotypical office is almost identical to the one

Fig. 5.3  The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive map ‘Office’, 2012. Valve Corporation

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Fig. 5.4  Still image from the BBC series The Office,  2001. Capital United Nations Entertainment

parodied in the British comedy series The Office (Fig. 5.4), right down to the colour of the carpet, the sofa and the obligatory indoor plant. Like the Venetian restaurant in Venice, the office has achieved the status of a self-signifying generic monument. But much like my fantasy of crawling out the air conditioning duct in my office after finishing HalfLife 2, Counter-Strike offers its own pleasure in playing a shooting game in a place I should be either working or taking tourist photographs. I must confess that Counter-Strike maps that resemble sites of work provide me with the most pleasure. There is a small joy in banishing mundane work from a mundane workplace, jumping over desks and becoming members of a tactical military assault team. When the Venetians and the tourists have left Venice, we Counter-Strike players become super tourists, playing a highly specialised game that requires no guidebook. I don’t have to worry about which building requires me to become a temporary enthusiast of sixteenth-century architecture or which restaurant is inauthentic and over-priced, I can measure my experience by line of sight just as a parkour player measures their experience by the height of a staircase and the distance between railings.

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Sports Landscapes Some modern sports grew out of ancient folk games, such as Mayan stone courts, Native American running tracks and European ‘cache’ (the ancestor of tennis), whereas many modern sports have more recent origins, such as basketball and volleyball, which originated in Massachusetts in the late 1890s. But both ancient and modern sports were transformed substantially by the modern era, specifically, by industrial standardisation. Sports geographer John Bale writes: Both industrialisation and sport grew out of the changed outlook following the Newtonian revolution of the seventeenth century … affected by the desire for precision, quantification and the quest for records. (Bale 2003, 57)

During the twentieth century, sporting fields became even more artificial, with the introduction of border fences, as well as AstroTurf and concrete to replace irregular grass and compressed earth. Bale compares the standardisation of the sports field to the manufactured landscapes of the English Picturesque garden and their dramatic expansion of artificial landscape features such as lakes, hills, and ruined cottages. For Bale, the artificial landscape of the golf course and the abstract geometry of the basketball court both facilitate the sporting pleasure of mastering repetitive tasks within a standardised enclosed environment divided by measurable distances (Bale 2003, 151). With the rise of professional Esports, these same factors of environmental symmetry and balance are of heightened importance in games such as Counter-Strike, where both teams must be able to encounter each other quickly, and have an equal chance to reach strategic points in the map. Further objectives such as securing bomb sites or rescuing hostages require that the entire distance of the map can be rapidly traversed and crisscrossed by players, the same way that sports fields must be traversed back and forth. In a study of Counter-Strike Esports players, Emma Witkowski noted that both the tactical patterns of controlling the field and the bodily experiences of pose, breath control and team dynamics were highly analogous to her experience as a professional basketball player (Witkowski 2012). Zooming out from the experience of the player to the socio-economic context of the game, TL Taylor’s research into the history of ESports highlights a number of similar factors to Bale’s general description of sports geography. In the case of South Korea, the strong penetration of broadband internet and government support for IT-based activities,

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combined with local licensing laws that allowed a net café to own multiple subscription accounts to a single game, led to a favourable business model for online gaming and the rapid expansion of professional Esports in South Korea (Taylor 2012, 18–20). Taylor argues that by negation, cities and countries where these external factors are not so favourably aligned will lead to a less vibrant Esports community and fewer exceptional players and teams, subtly undermining the assumption that Esports is defined by a friction-less meritocracy where anyone with skill will rise to the top. Like other sports, Taylor demonstrates that geography and socio-economic context still shape the path to success (Taylor 2012, 125). While players compete via the virtual bodies of their avatars, Taylor also revealed how the frictions of gender and sexuality one might expect to find in sports locker rooms are also reproduced in Esports, where the banter and ribbing between players features similar patterns of heterosexist discussions of the female body and homophobia as a means to leverage social capital amongst male players. Similarly, sexualised marketing campaigns of female players and competition organised by gender are also familiar features in Esports, despite the virtualised nature of the physical competition (Taylor 2012, 125). Counter-Strike landscapes might look like Venetian canals or ruined castles, but they are, in fact, precisely balanced sporting fields with players whose national, local, and personal identities are no less virtual than their counterparts in conventional sports. Bale writes that sports landscapes reveal social topologies, from rallying community sentiment around the success of a local team to providing a focal point for economic activity, such as advertising, product placement, and gambling. In Counter-Strike, we encounter visual landscapes that crystallise locations with the efficiency of a postcard, and competitive landscapes that reveal the reproduction of sports geography within a virtual networked environment. In the next section, I examine the commercial side of sports landscapes, in particular, how product placement, gambling, and money laundering have played a crucial role in the long-term success of the Counter-Strike game series.

Skin in the Game: Guns and Money Whilst Taylor writes that the growth of Esports and the Cyberathlete Professional League was linked to the expansion of Counter-Strike as a formal competition (Taylor 2012, 8), the long-term survival of Counter-­ Strike as a commercial title is also closely linked to the strange economy of

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‘weapons skins’ trading and allegations of money laundering. ‘Skins’ are colourful alterations to Counter-Strike weapons that were introduced by Valve as in-game purchases and collectables. When one player kills another, they can pick up the gun of their defeated opponent, and the defeated opponent can watch the rest of the round in spectator mode, shown from the perspective of other players. Taking the gun of another player can save the victor from having to purchase a gun in a new round, and can act as a brag to mock their defeated opponent, highlighted if the gun has a colourful skin. A year after CS:GO was released, it still had not overtaken the older Counter-Strike: Source as the most popular version used by players. Lahti argues that the introduction of weapon skins in CS:GO directly correlates to its rise as the dominant game version. Furthermore, the introduction of souvenir skins to reward amateur players for watching Global Offensive tournaments online added momentum to the growth of ESports spectatorship, and the trading of weapon skins between players subsequently expanded into a multi-billion dollar gambling industry (Lahti 2015). The colourful nature of weapons skins also marked a departure from the military aesthetics of Counter-Strike. As Valve released new skin designs, players repeatedly favoured brightly coloured skins over those with more dull military camouflage. As Valve technical artist Bronwen Grimes recounted: Although we started off thinking military camouflage was cool…it turns out what our community really values are the finishes that look more like paintball guns. We needed a reminder that although Counter-Strike is military-­ inspired, it’s not a military simulation. It’s a sport. When our customers play, they don’t aspire to be soldiers, they aspire to be Elite Counter-Strike Players. So maybe it’s not that surprising that the closest real-world analogue we’ve got to our preferred aesthetic comes from a sport. (Richardson 2015)

As is the case with sports such as boxing, horse racing and football, with its growing success, Counter-Strike was soon transformed into a medium for gambling and money laundering, facilitated by the virtual currency that tradable weapon skins provided. Writing for Bloomberg BusinessWeek in 2016, Joshua Brunstein and Eban Novy-Williams argue that this trade constitutes an illegal gambling practice due to the lack of regulation, particularly when it comes to participation by minors. Brunstein and Novy-­ Williams estimate that around US$2.3 billion worth of weapon skins were

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placed as bets in 2015 alone (Brunstein and Novy-Williams 2016). In 2017, the US Federal Trade Commission fined two YouTubers for marketing the use of a third-party betting website ‘CSGO Lotto’ in which the pair owned a partial stake (Gault 2017) and in 2019, the Valve Corporation admitted that “nearly all” purchase of Counter-Strike loot box keys were being used for money laundering (Gault 2019). Whilst the specific mechanisms of the weapon skins economy are likely to undergo continual change, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux (2017) demonstrated that the substantial financial reserves invested in this virtual currency are likely to cause the continual creation of new pathways for ‘cashing out’ weapon skins into fiat currency. Following Lahti’s argument that the long-term success of Counter-Strike is largely due to the weapon skins economy, from which the Valve Platform generates revenue, we are back at John Bale’s argument for the materiality of sports landscapes. The representational environments of Counter-Strike are not only structured by the abstract principles of a sports field, but funded by similar economies, and their commercial materiality is therefore just as important as the tourist postcard, the Romantic colonial portrait or the Picturesque garden landscape. The economic forces supporting the landscape might not determine its every aesthetic feature, but they help us understand how and why the landscape came to be. Valve technical artist Bronwen Grimes’s observation that CS:GO represented a fusion of sports and military aesthetics has, paradoxically, spilled over into the firearms industry itself. Computer game journalist Simon Parkin compared the representation of real guns in computer games to the manufacture of chocolate cigarettes by candy companies, where children’s toys seeded desire in a potential future client base. Parkin quoted Ralph Vaughan, who negotiates contracts between the Barrett firearms company and computer game developers, who said “video games expose our brand to a young audience who are considered possible future owners” (Parkin 2013). While Sega, Sony, EA, Activision, and Codemasters refused to comment on the matter, Parken interviewed the French company Cybergun, who negotiate licences for games companies to represent proprietary guns, such as Uzi, Kalashnikov, FAMAS and Colt, and showed that despite the lack of comment from game developers, there are probably contractual agreements behind the representations of proprietary weapons in computer games. In Parkin’s article, Cybergun state very clearly that there is a market correlation between the sales of real guns and their appearance in popular computer games:

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We definitely see sales of particular guns increase when they are featured in popular video games, such as Call of Duty. (Parkin 2013)

Journalist Lee Fang linked the weapon skins economy to the sales and marketing of real firearms, where the attempt to attract young customers resulted in a shift away from the camouflage aesthetics of the military towards the bright colours used in computer game weapon skins, a shift that is evidenced in the purchasing habits of young Americans (Fang 2018). Companies such as Blacksheep Arms specialise in applying coloured ceramic coatings to guns that mimic the aesthetic of computer game weapon skins (see the image comparisons in Figs. 5.5 and 5.6). As a concrete illustration, in 2012, Electronic Arts included a link on the official website of Medal of Honour: Warfighter (2012) to the MacMillan firearm company that manufactures the TAC-3000 sniper rifle depicted in the game (Smith 2012). The sales of firearms using computer games aesthetics and the correlation between gun sales and gun violence is perhaps another important area for research, however, it would require an empirical investigation that is outside the scope of this book. But the representational influence between Esports and the marketing of weapons is important, and just like cross-training shoes are used to consume a

Fig. 5.5  Weapon skin for the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive weapon Glock-18. Source: https://CS:GOitems.pro/. Author’s screenshot

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Fig. 5.6  FN 5-7 pistol with custom ceramic coating. Source: Black Sheep Arms (Instagram)

running trail or a high-quality digital camera is used to consume Venice, the hybridisation of sports and military economies is an important material consideration for understanding the meaning of Counter-Strike as a representational landscape.

The School Shooter Landscape I’m going to finish this chapter with a controversial story about landscape representation in Counter-Strike and the multiplayer first-person shooter. Despite all I have written about camera-guns and the landscape of the first-person shooter, I have not yet touched on the subject of violence in computer game landscapes as it is a tricky question. As I demonstrated in Chap. 2, landscapes reveal a layering of historical factors, revealing and concealing histories that are often violent and contested. Arguments about the relationship between computer games and violence have been a media staple for over 30 years, and given the case studies I have selected for this book on landscape, I thought it fitting to include an example that combines one of the most controversial taboos in-game violence, the school

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shooting, with what we already know about the representational apparatus of the multiplayer first-person shooter. The shocking nature of this violent phenomenon presents a topic that must be treated with great care and sensitivity. The examples I present below and the sociological research I provide seeks to promote a more sensitive and nuanced approach to how we consider violence in computer games alongside the communities of players and creative people that make and play them. We could look at Counter-Strike as a subversive experiment in militarising familiar landscapes, from office buildings to tourist landscapes into abstracted sports arenas. In the world of sports geography, there are transgressions in landscape representation we accept, and transgressions in landscape representation that we reject. An annual marathon run will divide a city in half, cutting off major roadways and thoroughfares for a day, to the pleasure of some and the inconvenient displeasure of others. Skateboarders will transform an outdoor plaza into the zone of obstacles, attracting appreciative spectators and angry complainants alike. Tourism can be similarly divisive, where a crowd of amateur photographers at St. Mark’s Square in Venice might seem fitting, whereas a similar gathering on the train platforms at Auschwitz might feel distasteful. These cases test the cultural alibi of sports and tourism due to their incongruity with other landscape narratives. In this section, I examine one of the most notorious transgressions in Counter-Strike map making, and in computer games more generally—when an amateur modder makes a Counter-Strike map of their high school. In 2007, a student from Clements High School, Texas, was expelled for creating a Counter-Strike map of their school. Due to the relatively large amount of gun violence present in American schools compared to other countries, combined with its dominance in American media, parents and teachers alike were alarmed by the representational transgression made by this particular student (Sinclair 2007; Wales 2018). The question of ‘can I play Counter-Strike here?’ was answered with a firm ‘no’, and the student was expelled from school. But there is an interesting game made by different developers which I think complicates this story. In 2018, the US Army and the US Department of Homeland Security released the software simulation tool ‘EDGE’ (Enhanced Dynamic Geo-Social Environment), which uses the Unreal game engine and a first-person shooter mechanic to train first responders in how to deal with a school mass-shooting event (Wales 2018). EDGE not only look looks strikingly similar to the Clements High School map, but also repeats the same landscape transgression—it

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appropriates a landscape (the school) and converts it to the logic of military vision for a first-person shooter experience. It offers the ability to play from the perspective of teachers, whose goal is to barricade doors and evacuate children, the police, whose goal is to disable the school shooter and even the shooter, whose goal it would be to shoot children. While Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Milt Nenneman describes the EDGE simulation as a “virtual training tool” rather than a game (DHS 2021), it uses the same basic first-person shooter avatar and FPS mechanic analysed throughout this book. While we should assume the best intentions on the part of the authors of the EDGE system, the contrast in reception between these two FPS representations of high school environments is striking, and complicates the idea of transgressive landscape representations in games. It seems that it is not simply a case of what landscapes are represented in what games, but who is representing them and with what justification. When writing about the Picturesque art movement, John Macarthur describes how it was not uncommon for wealthy landowners to find aesthetic pleasure in images of rural poverty. This pleasure is often related in the construction of deliberately ruined cottages as decorative elements on a country estate, which still functioned as accommodation for actual impoverished agricultural workers. Macarthur writes: The lover of the lower Picturesque sees truly every detail of the cottage’s shattered roof, ivy-choked chimney and damp walls, but is lying, nonetheless, through a failure to be affected by poverty and decay. (Macarthur 2007, 100)

This might be an unexpected analogy, but I think the relationship between the cause of poverty and its representation in the Picturesque can be a relevant prelude for the cause of violence versus its representation in the case of Counter-Strike high school landscapes. While there is a simple surface logic to make a training simulation using a shooting game, the contrast between this transgression and that of the student invites a closer look at the sociological factors behind school shootings, and how we might meditate on the meaning of these two very different examples. In 2013, four researchers from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, Germany—Nils Böckler, Thorsten Seeger, Peter Sitzer and Wilhelm Heitmeyer—edited a collection of international research papers into the causes of school mass-shootings. They found that

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statistically, school shooters are predominantly male children of white middle-class families in rural or suburban areas of highly developed industrial countries (with The United States of America accounting for the majority of school mass-shootings) (Bockler et al. 2013, 10). They use the umbrella concept of ‘Social Disintegration Theory’ to encapsulate the most statistically relevant factors surrounding the causes of school shootings. Social Disintegration Theory hinges on a perceived loss of control, both in social institutions and on the individual level. Böckler et al. write: 1. On the individual level loss of control relates to the situation of the perpetrators and their loss of control over their own lives. This is (a) evoked through negative recognition and erosion of recognition in families, schools, and peer groups as agents of socialisation, which (b) raises issues of social disintegration. 2. Societal loss of control consists in the following factors: (a) failure to respond to the crucial factors influencing the scientifically known setting of the act; (b) the largely unexplained systematic interaction between the processes triggering the act; and (c) insufficient knowledge of the trigger causes. (Heitmeyer et al. 2013, 28)

This loss of control manifests in the school shooter as a ‘recognition gap’, where adolescent white males have been conditioned to expect upward socio-economic mobility, but this is less and less possible in contemporary circumstances. In the United States, this expectation, according to the researchers, borne out of mild social privilege, is typically not experienced by women or people of colour, and collides with the contemporary reality of low economic growth and low social mobility, which widens the recognition gap. At a local level, the social re-enforcement of narrow definitions of masculinity contributes to this same demographic of young white males experiencing a heightened sense of failure at a young age, defined by the competitive drive for a narrow band of characteristics and opportunities. Male adolescents who are physically weaker are more likely to feel marginalised by structures of heteronormative masculinity that reward physical dominance, such as school sporting culture (Heitmeyer et al. 2013, 33). Böckler et al. summarise their findings by writing: The background against which school shootings occur is characterised by great ambivalences relating to the loss of control. Adolescents growing up in today’s society lose control over their own lives under the influence of social pressure and structural insecurity about the possibility of realising

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their life-plans. This process is based in social dynamics of integration and disintegration: The thwarted desire for recognition generates an addiction to recognition, and this addiction fosters a desire to exercise control over others. Violence is a means of exercising control. (Heitmeyer et al. 2013, 51)

These contextual factors should not be confused with determinism at an individual level. Heitmeyer et al. are examining the common ground across all prior cases of school shooters, rather than looking for individual explanations. When it comes to the role of computer games, the authors position games within a much broader consumption of media. Regarding the most statistically relevant media, one in eight school shooters shows an interest in violent computer games, one in four show an interest in violent films and books, one in three express their violent desires through creative writing and half of the school shooters express their violent desires through drawing (Sitzer 2013, 289). On top of this, researchers identified another factor far more important than the media consumption habits of school shooters, which was the ‘violence-affirming setting’ of the social and media environment, where violence is promoted as a socially acceptable response to the desire for recognition. In the case of North America, the authors identify a violence-affirming setting in the competitive nature of American society, where masculinity is defined relative to fearlessness, dominance in sports, and the use of aggression as a means to realise one’s goals. This milieu combines with the additional risk factors of the decision-­ making ability of the adolescent, their consumption of media (including violent films and games) and their access to, and skills with deadly weapons (Heitmeyer et al. 2013, 43–8). Regarding shooting-based computer games, the researchers conclude that computer games are not a principal motivation or trigger, but are components within a broader pattern of media consumption and can influence how adolescents envisage their violent acts. They write: The decision to commit an act of violence (“whether to act”) is prompted not by the availability of violence in the media or by the use of such media, but rather by the unbearable negative recognition balance. This alone, however, is not sufficient to prompt the crime; a justification of violence (“why to act”) is necessary for lowering the inhibition threshold for violence. In other words, it is necessary to allocate the blame for the negative recognition balance. The school and the peer group are the core targets in the apportioning of blame. And they are available at predictable times and in

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predictable places as the field of action for a demonstration of power aiming to maximise the number of victims. (Heitmeyer et al. 2013, 36)

Social Disintegration Theory includes parental, community, governmental, and broadcast media responses to school shootings as a key factor in the prevalence of the phenomenon. Mass media reports often satisfy the desire for recognition and demonstrate to other would-be shooters that the recognition gap can be overcome by perpetuating this type of highly visible violence. The researchers suggest that government leaders might find conscious or unconscious motivation to exaggerate the relative threat of school shootings to justify expensive security and surveillance contracts, or to gain votes by demonstrating dominance and control over the situation. The researchers also cite the sporadic media focus on gun control as an unlikely panacea, due to the lack of a broader willingness to combine such measures with social integration and prosperity measures that can address the alienation that is at the core of the Social Disintegration Theory model (Heitmeyer et al. 2013, 50). With the question of computer games, violence, and representation in mind, let’s compare the two examples we have of a first-person shooter set in a school. Much like the Clements High Counter-Strike mod, the EDGE simulation militarised the school environment using the first-person shooter engine and the world of the camera-gun. The EDGE simulation operates at a lower level of abstraction concerning the school mass-­ shooting phenomena than the Clements High Counter-Strike mod. In the mod, the school environment is appropriated for a competitive shootout between the two opposing Counter-Strike teams, whereas in the EDGE simulation, the school environment includes teachers, first responders and children. As a thought experiment, we could imagine a very different game based around the factors identified by Social Disintegration Theory, a training simulation that taught teachers to identify young people suffering a recognition gap, or that encouraged government and community members to reflect on their role in a ‘violence-affirming setting’, rather than focusing on games that further militarise the school environment. This thought experiment is not intended to disrespect those facing the tragic reality of school mass-shootings or the challenges that face first responders, it is simply highlighting the contrast between the sociological factors identified in the research, the expulsion of a potentially alienated school student and the creation of a similarly militaristic tool by the Department of Homeland Security.

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Let’s consider this relative to a Picturesque landscape. To censure Thomas Gainsborough’s paintings of rural poverty would require the eighteenth-century subject to censure the entire system of dispossession that spread from the English countryside to the furthest reaches of Empire. Similarly, to censure the transgression of the Clements High School Counter-Strike mod would require a broad reconsideration of the entire structure of contemporary violence and military technology that the game is reflecting. To draw an overall distinction between the Clements High Counter-Strike map and the EDGE simulation, I would say that the Clements High School map, made by an unpaid student modder with perhaps more creative than violent ambitions sits more closely with the symptom of the Social Disintegration Theory, a dispersed multitude of modders who freely donate their creative energy, but are usually unable to generate any income from this quite skilful activity, which is perhaps emblematic of labour structures that might be challenging for their upward social mobility. On the other hand, I would say that the EDGE simulation has a different relationship to the factors identified by Böckler et al. Made with a reported budget of $US5.6 million, the use of significant public funds to produce a school shooter simulator corresponds more to Böckler et al.’s notion of a ‘violence-affirming setting’ than it does to simulating and educating the community on the root sociological causes identified in the research. Put simply, we might evaluate the safety benefits derived from the EDGE simulation against the costs of further militarising the school environment. Philosopher and geographer Jeff Malpas writes that a landscape is not simply a representation, but an instantiation of a way of being (Malpas 2011, 10). Counter-Strike collapses military vision, sport, and tourism into a single representational statement. The relationship between the Clements High School Counter-Strike mod and North American school shootings generated a form of disgust in the community due to representational proximity to recent violence. However, when such violence is perceived as less literal in other Counter-Strike maps, such as the Office or Venice maps, the abstraction of the landscape is more or less accepted as a sporting ground, much like we accept the tourist photographers in Venice or the marathon runners shutting down 1st Avenue in Manhattan. In Counter-Strike we can see how the single-player protagonist safari of Half-Life 2 was radically transformed into a multi-authored landscape with an entirely different meaning. The appropriation of non-game environments into Counter-Strike, such as industrial landscapes, office

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buildings and rural properties, requires a complete architectural conversion to balance the line of site game. This transgressive appropriation repeats an objectification similar to that of tourism, but the consumption of space via tourism has been replaced with the consumption of place via Counter-Strike play, where the pleasurable, repetitive sport-like rhythm allows the player to speculatively ask ‘could I play Counter-Strike here?’ The economies of Esports and weapon skins show how the relationship between sports and military vision spreads much further than the gameplay experience of the player or the modder. Commercial competitions, gambling, and money laundering reproduce exactly what we would expect to find in regular sports geography, but with differences based on the materiality of Counter-Strike, namely the distribution, consumption, and regulatory patterns of digital networks. In the next chapter, I describe my process of making a Counter-Strike landscape, and how the structural limitations of computer game software, like the material limitations of a painting or a camera, can help us understand the meaning of the computer game as a landscape.

Creative Works Cited Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. 2012. Valve Corporation. (PC). Day of Defeat. 2003. Valve Corporation. (PC). Fallout 3. 2008. Bethesda. (PC). Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. 1989. Steven Spielberg. (Film). Medal of Honour: Warfighter. 2012. Danger Close. (PC). Moonraker (Lewis Gilbert 1979). (Film). Pokémon GO. 2016. Niantic. (Android). Street Fighter II, Capcom, 1991. (Arcade).

References Aarseth, Espen. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2000. Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games. Cybertext Yearbook 2000: 152–171. Bale, John. 2003. Sports Geography. New York and London: Routledge. Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. New York: The Noonday Press. Böckler, Nils, Thorsten Seeger, Peter Sitzer, and Wilhelm Heitmeyer. 2013. School Shootings: Conceptual Framework and International Empirical Trends. In School Shootings: International Research, Case Studies and Concepts for Prevention, ed. Böckler, Thorsten, Peter, and Wilhelm. New York: Springer.

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Bokitch, Chris. 2018. VERC Half-Life’s Code Basis. VERC Collective. http:// collective.valve-­erc.com/index.php?go=q1_or_q2. Boluk, Stephanie, and Patrick LeMieux. 2017. Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brunstein, Joshua, and Eben Novy-Williams. 2016. Virtual Weapons Are Turning Teen Gamers into Serious Gamblers. Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Accessed 16 March 2018. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-­virtual-­guns-­ counterstrike-­gambling/. Carter, Marcus, Martin Gibbs, and Michael Arnold. 2017. The Demarcation Problem in Multiplayer Games: Boundary Work in EVE Online’s eSport. Game Studies 15 (1): 1–19. Culler, Jonathan. 1988. The Semiotics of Tourism. In Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. Oxford: Blackwell. Department of Homeland Security. 2021. Enhanced Dynamic Geo-Social Environment (EDGE). Media Library Informational Video. Accessed 23 February 2023. https://www.dhs.gov/medialibrary/assets/videos/22858. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Ducheneaut, Nicolas. 2010. The Chorus of the Dead. In Utopic Dreams and Apocalyptic Fantasies: Critical Approaches to Researching Video Game Play, ed. Talmadge J.  Wright, David G.  Embrick, and Andras Lukacs. Lanham: Lexington Books. ESCalation. 2015. History of Counter-Strike—From Beta 1 to CSGO. YouTube Video. 12:31. Posted by ESCalation. May 6, 2015. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=WCrl1Bqqy_4. Fandom. 2018. Competitive. Counterstrike Wiki. http://counterstrike.wikia. com/wiki/Competitive. Fang, Lee. 2018. Even as a Student Movement Rises, Gun Manufacturers Are Targeting Young People. The Intercept, February. Fraser, Emma. 2016. Awakening in Ruins: The Virtual Spectacle of the End of the City in Video Games. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 8 (2): 177–196. Fuller, Mary, and Henry Jenkins. 1995. Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue. In Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Steven G. Jones, 57–72. Sage. Fussell, G.E. 1984. Landscape Painting and the Agricultural Revolution. London: Pindar Press. Gault, Matthew. 2017. FTC Gives YouTubers WHo Peddled ‘Counter-Strike’ Gambling Site a Slap on the Wrist. In Vice. September 8th. https://www.vice. com/en/ar ticle/paajy7/ftc-gives-youtubers-who-peddled-counterstrike-gambling-site-a-slap-on-the-wrist

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———. 2019. ‘Nearly All’ Counter-Strike Microtransactions Are Being Used for Money Laundering. In Vice. October 29th. Gestalt. 2000. Minh Le of Counter-Strike Team: Half-Life Mod’s Designer Interviewed. EuroGamer.net, March. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/ counterstrike. Heitmeyer, Wilhelm, Nils Böckler, and Thorsten Seeger. 2013. Social Disintegration, Loss of Control, and School Shootings. In School Shootings: International Research, Case Studies and Concepts for Prevention, Böckler, Nils, Thorsten, Peter, and Wilhelm Heitmeyer, ed. New York: Springer. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1988. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Oakland: University of California Press. Küchlich, Julian. 2005. Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry the History of Modding the Economy of Modding. The Fibreculture Journal 5. Lahti, Evan. 2015. How $ 400 Virtual Knives Saved Counter-Strike. PC Gamer, September. http://www.pcgamer.com/how-­400-­virtual-­knives-­saved-­counter-­ strike/. Macarthur, John. 2007. The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities. London: Routledge. Malpas, Jeff. 2011. The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies. Massachusetts: MIT Press. McVicker, Tyler. 2017. New CSGO Operation & Map Info. YouTube video. 6:33. Posted by Valve News Network, April 7, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gHFso3sKuvQ&feature=youtu.be&t=1m51s. Mitchell, William John Thomas. 1995. Gombrich and the Rise of Landscape. In The Consumption of Culture:1600-1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer. London: Routledge. Mitchell, Jason, Gary Mctaggart, and Chris Green. 2006. Shading in Valve’s Source Engine. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2006, 129–42. Montfort, Nick, and Ian Bogost. 2009. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press. Ndalianis, Angela. 2004. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Nitsche, Michael. 2008. Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Game Worlds. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press. Overwiki, Combine. n.d. Half-Life (Multiplayer). Combine Overwiki. Accessed 15 August 2017. http://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Half-­Life_(multiplayer). Parkin, Simon. 2013. Shooters: How Video Games Fund Arms Manufacturers. EuroGamer.net, January. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-­02-­01-­ shooters-­how-­video-­games-­fund-­arms-­manufacturers. Postigo, Hector. 2003. From Pong to Planet Quake: Post-Industrial Transitions from Leisure to Work. Information, Communication & Society 6 (4): 593–607.

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Puddy. 2013. Agency. Official page and update log. Counter-Strike Global Offensive Workshop. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/ ?id=174668691. Remagen, Bridget. 2004. PC Games: Counter-Strike. PC World2, July. https:// www.pcworld.idg.com.au/ar ticle/76094/pc_games_counter-­s trike_ condition_zero/. Richardson, Emily. 2015. How Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s Economy Works. Rock Paper Shotgun, August. https://www.rockpapershotgun. com/2015/08/14/CSGO-­skin-­economy-­explained/. Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. London: Fontana Press. Sinclair, Brendan. 2007. “Student transferred for making Counter-Strike map based on school”. In GameSpot. May 2. Accessed online. Sitzer, Peter. 2013. The Role of Media Content in the Genesis of School Shootings: The Contemporary Discussion. In School Shootings: International Research, Case Studies and Concepts for Prevention, ed. Nils Böckler, Thorsten Seeger, and Peter Sitzer. New York, Heidelberg, Dordrecht, London: Springer. Smith, Ryan. 2012. Partners in Arms. The Gameological Society, August. http:// gameological.com/2012/08/partners-­in-­arms/. Sokolowski, Robert. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, T.L. 2008. Does World Warcraft Change Everything? How a PvP Server, Multinational Playerbase, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause. In Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, ed. Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. ———. 2012. Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Te, Zorine. 2014. Dust to Dust: The History of Counter-Strike. Gamespot, May. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/dust-­to-­dust-­the-­history-­of-­counter-­ strike/1100-­6419676/. Valve Corporation. 2004. Half-Life 2 Raising the Bar. Roseville: Prima Games. Virilio, Paul. 1989. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Vision. London and New York: Verso. Wales, Matt. 2018. “New mass shooting simulator aims to help teachers respond more effectively in a crisis”. In Eurogamer. January 2. Accessed online. Witkowski, Emma. 2012. On the Digital Playing Field: How We “Do Sport” with Networked Computer Games. Games and Culture 7 (5): 349–374. Zerbst, Stefan, and Oliver Düvel. 2004. 3D Game Engine Programming. Portland: Premier Press.

CHAPTER 6

Autosave: Redoubt

From the ‘Playing I’ to the ‘Modding We’ As well as needing a natural limit for the games analysed in this book, I landed on the Valve Source Engine through a bit of artistic serendipity. In 2017, I met the Hong Kong artist Andrew Luk at a party, and we got to talking about computer games. Andrew was telling me about these old World War II tunnels in Hong Kong and how he thought it might be an interesting act of site-preservation to rebuild them in Counter-Strike, one of the most long-lasting popular game titles. His thinking was that a 3D reconstruction housed within Counter-Strike might outlast the software cycle and rolling updates on platforms such as Unreal and Unity. Coincidentally, I had made an amateur recreation of Sydney Harbour in Starcraft II a couple of years earlier and agreed to join Andrew on this modding project. Through some connections at Hong Kong University, Andrew had managed to get the files from a recent geographical survey of the site, so we had highly accurate 3D data, combined with a recent historical study as a reference point. Shortly after I began experimenting with the geographical CAD data and the Hammer level editor of Counter-­ Strike (Fig.  6.1),  I realised that I was technologically out of my depth. While I have familiarity with importing contemporary 3D files into engines such as Unity, the Hammer editor did not permit such operations, and seemed to operate according to different principles. Through another twist of fate, another artist friend from Taiwan, Alexis Mailles, had turned © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Nelson, Computer Games As Landscape Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4_6

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Fig. 6.1  Recreating the Shing Mun Redoubt in the Hammer editor, author’s screenshot

up in Hong Kong, and hiking through the forest one day, I asked if he could help. Alexis has over 25 years’ experience in 3D and a meticulous approach to technological problem-solving. What followed was about a year of working, mainly late at night, troubleshooting between Andrew’s historical research, my skills in 3D software and coordination, and Alexis’s deeper knowledge of 3D topology and programming. At times there was a clear split in our labour, where Andrew was responsible for historical research, Alexis did the brush architecture and displacement modelling, and I did the custom asset production, lighting, and sound design. However, there was so much collaboration and porosity across all aspects of this project that it is simpler to refer to decisions taken and discoveries made using the collective ‘we’ rather than the singular ‘I’. At the time of writing, our Counter-Strike mod, entitled Autosave: Redoubt remains on the Counter-Strike Steam Workshop as a recreation of the historical site of the Shing Mun Redoubt inside Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. It is a reconstruction of a series of tunnels, bunkers, and pillboxes that exist in various stages of decay in the mountains of Kowloon, Hong Kong (Fig. 6.2). The British colonial government constructed these tunnels in the 1930s, and on the 8th of December 1941, they became the

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Fig. 6.2  A trench and tunnel opening as part of the Shing Mun Redoubt site, author’s photograph

site of the first conflict in the Battle of Hong Kong between Japanese and Allied soldiers. The name ‘Shing Mun Redoubt’ is commonly used to refer to the entire system of underground tunnels and pillboxes as well as the main command post (the redoubt). This chapter might be thought of as a more in-depth version of the Clements High School Counter-Strike mod. By selecting a historical site with a degree of controversy, we got to test out all sorts of questions regarding the historical and geographical realism of computer game environments, and I was able to learn about the landscape medium from a completely different angle. What began as an exercise in artistic curiosity intersected with my search for a way to study landscapes in computer games, and I decided that the technical knowledge I was gaining about the Valve Source Engine, combined with its pertinent history made an ideal limitation for my in-depth analysis of landscape and computer games. This chapter also serves as a bridge to Chap. 7, where I claim that the player of Garry’s Mod is defined by collapsing playing and modding into a single activity, where the player begins to play with the game engine itself in a sort of postmodern Situationist remix.

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The Implied First-Person Shooter In their chapter ‘Can Games Get Real?’ Ian Bogost and Cindy Poremba (2008) discuss how the highly constructed nature of computer games help to remind us that other media, such as documentary films, are all in some way artificial, rather than transparent records of historical events (Bogost and Poremba 2008, 12). Instead of seeking to obscure the camera operator, they argue that the computer game can explore historical subjects using innovative reconfigurations, events, and choices, whilst embracing the limits of gameplay to simulate extreme experiences such as conflict and the fear of death. It is already quite common for 3D computer game software to be used in the representation of real places, and in the reconstruction of historical sites. Architectural historian and new media scholar Ahmed El-Antably conducted an epistemological investigation into how 3D game software can recreate historical sites in virtual space, and concluded that papering over the game engine that is running the site recreation would produce “the fallacy of presentism”, where “present day perspectives are projected on interpretations of the past” (El-Antably 2010, 6), in this case, our casual familiarity with the vision and navigation system of the first-person shooter game would blind us to the distortions it produces in the site recreation. El-Antably argued that virtual archaeological representations must make it explicitly clear that they are not trying to reconstruct an original experience or a site in its totality (which would be impossible), and that whatever has been recreated is heavily mediated and reshaped by computer game technology (El-Antably 2010, 6). Virtual archaeology specialists Adrian Herwig and Philip Paar (2002) identify some of the biases and limitations that face the virtual archaeologist. In reference to the Unreal Engine, they point to the scale of the navigable space that the engine can uphold and the number of high detail or dynamic elements that can be simulated at any one time (which elements do we leave in and which do we leave out?), as boundary conditions that must simplify the subject matter in order for the software to retain the frame rate adequate for a smooth and immersive visual experience (Herwig and Paar 2002). Similarly, in a 2017 review of virtual archaeological practice, archaeologist Paul Reilly recommended that any representation should be accompanied by an interrogation of how the game engine has been used,

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and where its limitations and biases lie. Drawing an analogy from the archaeological dig itself, Reilly argues that opaque methodologies can produce “institutional amnesia”, where specialists, diggers, and excavation directors can make decisions that highlight certain narratives but diminish or erase others, and that the use of 3D game engines should be accompanied by the assumption that their limitations and biases will skew the representation, and that best practice should be foregrounded with at least an understanding of what these limitations and biases are (Beale and Reilly 2017). It is my opinion that first-person game engines, even when the gun is removed, retain the feeling of Klevjer’s camera-gun, in everything from the angle of view and the keyboard navigation, to the run/walk footsteps and the bobbing head movement, and anyone who has played FPS games might find themselves leaning on SHIFT to run, strafing around corners and scrolling the mouse wheel for weapons. This feeling that a 3D site reconstruction brings with it an implied first-person shooter lurking underneath inspired the team of Autosave: Redoubt in our decision to ‘leave the gun in’. Much like my discussion in the previous chapter regarding violence in computer games, these discussions in virtual archaeology are important when we ask what we consider to be ‘realistic’ in a computer game landscape, and in Autosave: Redoubt, our decision to ‘leave the gun in’ the recreation can be seen as a gesture towards the sort of transparent mediation that these virtual archaeologists are talking about.

The History of the Shing Mun Redoubt [S]hort blind chases through claustrophobic concrete tunnels. (Lai et al. 2011, 26)

In 2011, a team of researchers led by Professor Lawrence Lai from Hong Kong University published a new historical collection based around their geographical survey of the Shing Mun Redoubt. Their investigation used a ‘line of sight analysis’ to evaluate the accuracy of reports made by British and Japanese soldiers after World War II. The quote above refers to the first-hand accounts from soldiers who fought in the conflict between Japanese and Allied forces on the 8th of December, 1941. Today, the site is often used illegally by airsoft players, who run around the tunnels shooting BB-guns in a game with similar rules to CS:GO. The Gin Drinkers Line is a defensive network of bunkers, pillboxes, and tunnels that stretches across the mountains of the Kowloon Peninsula. Built in the 1930s, it was

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part of a broader trend in architectural fortifications constructed by European powers between the first and second world wars. Wary of the rise of Fascism in Italy and Germany, the French built fortifications along their Eastern border, known as the Maginot Line. Nearby European nations followed suit, and defensive concrete structures were built along national boundaries around the globe (Kwong and Tsoi 2014, 61). The intention of these defensive lines was based on theories developed in the aftermath of the First World War. These lines were not meant to hold or repel invasions, but to absorb and slow an attack, to inflict mass casualties, and then be abandoned, forcing a weakened invading army to advance, stretching their supply lines into territory more favourable to the defender. To quote Virilio, by inflicting large numbers of casualties, the “military animal” was to be reduced from a gallop to a crawl (Virilio 1994, 23). The Gin Drinkers Line, later nicknamed the “Maginot Line of the East”, was never exactly a line, but rather four battalion-sized fortifications, the largest of which being the Shing Mun Redoubt, connected by paths and tunnels across the Kowloon Peninsula. At the Shing Mun Redoubt, the unpredictable undulation of underground tunnels, constantly zigzagging back and forth and climbing up and down, was intended to make running and shooting with rifles as difficult as possible (Lai et al. 2011, 38). The tunnels were named after famous London Streets, including Shaftesbury Avenue, Haymarket, and Piccadilly, in order to help British soldiers already familiar with these streets navigate the underground labyrinth. The defence of Hong Kong during the Second World War was sandwiched between a technological shift and a strategic shift in colonial priorities. In 1938, due to unforeseen technological changes in contemporary warfare (notably airborne munitions), the British suspended the construction of the Gin Drinkers Line. In 1940, the British War Command determined that Hong Kong was no longer a desirable commitment from a military point of view, but was retained in order to legitimise British rule across other parts of their Asian colonies. With the entry of Japan into the Second World War, Hong Kong became a symbol of Japanese containment, and an indication of British support for the Chinese resistance (Kwong and Tsoi 2014, 115). When in 1941, Canada committed two Battalions to Hong Kong, the British General Christopher Maltby decided to reconfigure the defences of Hong Kong, and re-occupy the previously abandoned Shing Mun Redoubt, this time with only half the number of soldiers it was intended for (Lai et al. 2011, 23).

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On the 8th of December 1941, Japan’s 21st, 23rd, and 38th Regiments were ordered to invade Hong Kong. They reached the Shing Mun Redoubt within two days, and within hours, the site was captured. In addition to the contradictions in how the Shing Mun Redoubt was designed and defended, the events of the 8th and 9th of December were equally controversial. The inadequate number of soldiers stationed at the site meant that Japanese soldiers could sneak above ground and over the structure without the soldiers underground noticing. Communication lines between the pillboxes and the redoubt were broken, and a general sense of disorientation ensued. Soldiers chased each other through the confusing dark tunnels, too confined to shoot their rifles, but remarkably, and quite unexpectedly, these physical constraints led to a very low number of casualties; however, tragically, two Indian engineers were killed by grenade inside the Redoubt (Lai et al. 2011, 28). The monumental concrete ruins at Shing Mun and the Maginot Line look like one thing but are in fact another. They are monuments to technological redundancy and colonial indifference, where outmoded defences revealed that imperial priorities, for some time, lay elsewhere. For Autosave: Redoubt, these nested historical illusions added to our fascination of what a realistic site reconstruction within Counter-Strike would actually be. Virilio describes the concrete bunkers of World War II as myths of the present and the absent—present is our reflection of technology and death, and absent is the contradiction that these bunkers often did not function as the killing machines we imagine from Hollywood films. By the time these bunkers were built, the technology of warfare had changed, and these fortresses were often viewed from the windows of rapidly moving aeroplanes and tanks (Virilio 1994). Just as the Maginot Line did not slow the German invasion of France, the Shing Mun Redoubt did not slow the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong.

Building a Landscape in the Hammer Editor Aside from the surveying data, the most valuable resource for making our virtual reconstruction of the Shing Mun Redoubt was the Valve Developer Community website, which offers a comprehensive guide for building game content in the Hammer editor. The surveying data combined the elevation of the local terrain with the coordinate points for the tunnels, bunkers, and pillboxes. One of our first blunt attempts to import this data into the Hammer editor was to convert the surveyor’s CAD files into a

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generic 3D format and then follow the Valve Community’s pathway for converting obj files into the proprietary formats used by the Valve Source Engine. We converted the surveyor’s (.dwg1) files into 3D mesh (.obj2) files that could be read by the 3D modelling program Blender. Using a community made plugin, we exported a test version of a single tunnel into the proprietary Valve .smd3 file. This file then had to be combined with a “.qc” script4 and “.vmt” and “.vtf” files.5 When these files are placed in the correct directories of Counter-Strike, the Hammer editor could import the entire Shing Mun tunnel network. The first hurdle was that any custom object imported using this method (referred to as a “custom prop”) can only be read as having convex physics geometry, which means that for an object such as a table, the space in between the table top, the legs and the floor would be considered “full”, such that the physics of the table would read as one large box. By the same principle, a tunnel imported from Blender to Hammer would not allow a player to walk inside it, which would not work at all for our purpose, and is a process more suited to small static objects, rather than in-game architecture. Readers familiar with the Valve Source Engine will appreciate my naivety in this first attempt. The Valve Source Engine derives from an earlier generation of 3D game software, and has geometrical limitations in terms of what kind of architectural shapes it can build. As John Carmack, the programmer of Doom explained in a recent interview, the intersection of angled walls in 3D game engines requires more complicated algebraic calculations than the intersection of perpendicular walls. Furthermore, when two sloped surfaces intersect, their intersection points no longer add up to clean integers, which makes graphical calculation much more complex (Carmack 2022). In Davey Wredon’s game The Beginner’s Guide (2015)—a 1  The “.dwg” (abbreviation of “drawing”) file is a proprietary file format used for 3D data, commonly used in Computer-aided design (CAD) applications. 2  The “.obj” is a 3D geometry file commonly used across a wide range of 3D modelling and animation applications. 3  An “.smd” or Studiomdl file stores 3D models in ASCII, storing collision, animation, and vertex data. 4  A “.qc” script (Quake C) tells the Source engine how to interpret the scale, material, physics, and animations of any object that is imported. 5  The “.vmt” (Valve Material Type) and “.vtf” (Valve Texture Format) files tell Source how to render the visual appearance of a 3D model (textures, etc.) and how the surface of objects will respond in a physics simulation.

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self-referential game about modding and experimental design using the Valve Source Engine, the narrator directs the player’s attention to the rectilinear nature of the game environment and locates this feature as characteristic of the Valve Source engine. In the Hammer editor, an architectural element such as a wall, a ceiling or a floor is built with what is called a ‘brush’. Each ‘brush’ is a rectangular prism that is rendered by the Source engine, and according to the principle of building ‘on grid’, each brush had to meet at vertical points of intersection. This constraint meant that we were slightly limited in the architectural shapes we could create. Following Alexis’s experience with older 3D engines, combined with advice from the Valve Developer Community, we devised a system for building our tunnels as closely as possible to the grid lines of the Hammer editor to avoid the errors and crashes that can arise from introducing more complex algebraic computation when building ‘off grid’. Using a scaled conversion I explain below, we rendered our survey data onto a 2D grid in top and side orthographic projections that converted our geometry into Hammer’s internal measurement units. Figures 6.3 and 6.4 show how we had to adjust certain twists and turns of the real tunnels into something that would be congruent with building ‘on grid’ in the Hammer system. In Fig. 6.3, the translation process retains a high degree of accuracy, but in Fig. 6.4, substantial changes had to be made in order to build a particular turn in the tunnel system. This constraint represented an interesting limit condition for our landscape. While the player would be unlikely to notice a small deviation in

Fig. 6.3  A tunnel section rendered to the 1 foot = 16 Hammer Units grid. The faint black lines represent the original survey data. The blue lines represent the geometry that we built in Hammer

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Fig. 6.4  A tunnel section rendered to the 1 foot = 16 Hammer Units grid. The faint black lines represent the original survey data. The blue and pink lines represent the geometry that we built in Hammer

their path, it represented a significant deviation from the accuracy and realism of our recreation, despite our best efforts. The line of sight analysis of Lai et al was focused on the firing apertures of the bunkers and pillboxes, which we were able to recreate accurately, but technically, the ‘rounding errors’ we had to introduce for our tunnels would change any analysis of the virtual site. Early on in the level building process, it also became apparent that the geographical scale of the Shing Mun Redoubt and the virtual scale of a normal Counter-Strike map were highly incongruous. In Fig. 6.5, I overlay a topographical render of the Shing Mun Redoubt tunnel network with the popular ‘Dust II’ Counter-Strike map. The difference in scale is obvious, and as Alexis pointed out, if we were making a game map substantially bigger than a regular Counter-Strike level, we should expect bugs and errors to accumulate into potential problems, and so our approach to building the tunnels cleanly on grid became even more essential. The maximum scale allowed by a CS:GO map is a cube with a side length of 32,786 Hammer Units. A Hammer Unit is the standard measurement within the Hammer editor and 16 Hammer Units equal approximately 1 foot (Valve Developer Community 2023). Given the large scale of our map, we could already anticipate that players would have to run long distances before encountering the opposing team, but in

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Fig. 6.5  Plan view of the popular Counter-Strike: Global Offensive map ‘Dust II’, superimposed on a plan view of Autosave: Redoubt

learning precisely what these distances might be, we discovered another limitation of scale—the player-avatar and the field of view (Fig. 6.5). Peter Bayliss describes the world of Tomb Raider (2001) as being built in ‘Lara units’, where “the game-space of Tomb Raider is designed to offer affordances that fit the locomotive abilities of Lara Croft, and therefore provides a spatially meaningful game-space” (Bayliss 2010, 178). This is exactly what happened when we tried to build our tunnels to match the Counter-Strike player. In real life, I have to bend down slightly to walk inside the Shing Mun tunnels, but this would not be possible for the Counter-Strike player, as the speed of locomotion in ‘crouch’ mode is much slower than simply running in a stooped manner, so the size of our virtual tunnels had to match the size that a Counter-Strike avatar could comfortably run through. According to the developer site, 16 Hammer Units equals approximately 1 foot (Valve Developer Community 2023). When we translated this measurement precisely, our tunnels looked far

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larger than they appear in real life, both due to the ratio provided on the developer website and possibly the angle of view of the virtual camera attached to the player-avatar (in a tight environment, a 15 mm lens would give a far more spacious representation than a 50 mm lens) (Figs. 6.6 and 6.7). So in the end, our spatial rule became the tunnel size that allowed the player to run without getting stuck in narrow places, and which gave the visual appearance that approximated what we saw in real life. This was an unexpected rule to encounter, and proved once again the importance of the player-avatar relationship as the locus of realism and experience in the game environment. The geometric restrictions of the Valve Source Engine highlight the medium transparency I noted in Chap. 2, where the ability to see the collaged nature of photographic textures functioned as a pleasurable reminder of how the simulation around me functioned. In the case of the geometric constraints in Hammer, I was reminded of Reilly, Beale, and El-Antably’s call for medium transparency in virtual archaeology, and of philosopher

Fig. 6.6  Using a literal conversion of geographical measurements into Hammer units, our first prototype tunnels looked too wide. Author’s screenshot

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Fig. 6.7  The narrow scale of the Shing Mun tunnels in Autosave: Redoubt and in real life as seen by a 35 mm lens. Authors’ screenshot and photography

Edward Casey’s description of the geometric survey contrasted against human experience: The Newtonian surveyor, in contrast, is not concerned with depth: given his superior posture, he is interested only in how many of his geometric projections a flat surface can bear. But the surveyor of place, the true geographer, concentrates on the depth of what he sees spread out below: he moves his body – not his instruments, much less his mind – down into the galley of the shadow of places. (Casey 2002, 223)

For those seeking empirical measurement like Reilly, Beale, and El-Antably, our tools must be foregrounded by a description of their limitations, just as the scientist must foreground the margins of error within their methodology. For Casey, our desire to measure is confounded by our tools of measurement, be they technological or cognitive, and the experience of the body becomes the ultimate measuring tool. The geometric restrictions of the Valve Source Engine are not just artefacts of limited processing capability in the 1990s, they are streamlined features of a system that prioritises processing speed and line of sight calculation over complex geometry. As Andrew pointed out at the beginning of Autosave:

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Redoubt, the popularity of Counter-Strike is what created an unexpectedly stable and archival medium of representation, and Counter-Strike relies on absolutely minimised graphical processing so that small differences in player response time can be reflected in game outcomes. Moving outside the tunnels, when it came to representing the mountainous terrain outside the tunnels, we faced one final geometric problem. We had already discovered that we could not simply import the geographical data we had from the site, which left us with the ‘displacement’ brush tool in the Hammer editor, which allows for the manual sculpting and shaping of undulating surfaces, but not for the precise recreation of topographical data. Using an imported convex landscape topography as a guide, we traced the mountainous terrain visually using a large number of interconnecting displacement brushes, resulting in a far more approximate recreation than what was achieved with the architecture of the tunnels and bunkers. This undulating terrain is not typical for the Valve Source Engine, and we found it difficult to overlap our displacement brushes without inevitably creating small gaps in the map that the player-avatar fell through. After many nights spent creating invisible physics boundaries to stop the player falling off the map, we settled on a highly restricted area of navigable outdoor space, focusing our recreation on the internal spaces of the tunnels and bunkers.

Lights and Sounds in Dark Tunnels As we moved through the construction process, our adherence to accuracy had to become more abstract and poetic as we encountered both technical and moral boundaries. The 1941 Japanese attack on the Shing Mun Redoubt occurred at night, and the majority of the tunnels contained no source of artificial light, other than the occasional flashlight from soldiers. Simulating darkness in a computer game can go in a few directions. For the environment outside the tunnels and bunkers, we were able to use an ‘environmental lighting’ solution, where an image of a cloudy night sky emits an ambient light source that communicates the idea of a moonlit night, without tempting the player to adjust their screen brightness, but for the tunnels we had to look for another solution. The bodily sensation of feeling your way through a pitch black room is not quite the same as staring at a black monitor, and if a game is unplayably dark, players usually just increase the gamma settings on their screen until

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it is brighter.6 In the versions of Counter-Strike prior to 2013, the “F” key activated a player flashlight that followed the gaze of the camera-gun, however, in 2013, the ‘Arms Deal’ update to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive removed the flashlight from the “F” key and replaced it with a function that allows players to inspect their weapon and highlight decorative weapon skins. You can add a flashlight prop into the game map, but the player can’t pick it up and use it because the only objects that players can pick up and use are weapons. For CS:GO maps, weapons are stored on the server rather than locally to enforce the rules, so to have a flashlight that could be picked up like a weapon, we would need to host Autosave: Redoubt on our own custom server and it would not be available as a conventional CS map on the steam servers, which would defeat the purpose of trying to ‘archive’ this landscape on the servers of CS:GO. To cut a long story short, tunnels with no flashlights would just look like a blank computer monitor, so we had to invent a fictional lighting setup that would approximate the description of chases through dark tunnels, without tempting players to ‘fix’ the low lighting by adjusting their monitor settings. Our first solution was to create an optical illusion of moonlight filtering through the tunnel air vents, but there were not enough vents in the tunnels for this solution to work on its own as it left large sections of complete darkness, so we developed a system where each vent would have one light inside it, but be left dark on either side, with a more dim light further along the tunnel, so that from the player’s perspective, the tunnels have a dark ambient light, with a shadow around every vent, and a brighter light piercing through as if cast by moonlight from the outside. Figure 6.8 illustrates this arrangement. Designing the sound for Autosave: Redoubt required even more poetic licence than the lighting. The internal game sounds of a regular CS:GO map normally consist of footsteps and gunshots, which might approximate a simplistic reduction of what happened at the Shing Mun Redoubt in December 1941, but we felt it created more of a moral historical gap. As in my critique of the sublime in Zelda (Chap. 3), we must remember that the player sitting down at a game console directing an avatar up a digital mountain is radically different to climbing a physical mountain with our own body. Running through a dark tunnel in Counter-Strike can also not 6  A notable innovation in this space is the game Blind (Tiny Bull Studios 2018), which combines a dark screen and temporary animations of echolocation to simulate a sense of being visually impaired.

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Fig. 6.8  This lighting configuration allowed us to balance the need for ambient light inside the tunnels with an illusion that a light source was coming from the outside

be compared to running through a dark tunnel as a young man fearing for your life during World War II. This gap bothered us, and it also bothered some other artists whom we shared the problem with. At an early sharing session of Autosave: Redoubt in Hong Kong, artist, curator, and researcher Ellen Pau suggested that we ‘fill the tunnels with ghosts’ to remind the player that the computer game is a computer game, and to fill the abstractions of these empty tunnels with some sort of recognition of this fact. Pau’s comment became our inspiration for making a historical soundscape inside the tunnels, where in the final work, the player might spawn into a room where a radio is softly oscillating between an original British broadcast about the defence of Hong Kong, radio static and Japanese jazz from the 1940s. If the player runs into the tunnels, they experience a long period of silence, which is eventually broken by an aged recording of a woman’s voice, which says: “I’m not the only one in human history who has paid a heavy price.” Turning the corner, the woman’s voice fades and is overtaken by Japanese post-war Boogie Woogie jazz. At this point, the player faces a junction between two tunnels. Turning right will start another long period of silence and footsteps. As the player approaches a bunker at the end of this tunnel, a man’s voice is telling stories in Cantonese about growing up in Hong Kong under the Japanese occupation. Our use of remixed sound samples was a radical departure from the primary source material of the Hong Kong University study and looked to secondary

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sources to match sounds to the historical materials described. We used the confusion that characterised the events of the 8th of December 1941 (“short blind chases through claustrophobic concrete tunnels”) as a focal point for a sonic journey and placed the sounds so that as players run through the tunnels by themselves, they become an unintentional DJ, triggering fragments of music and dialogue that tell a wider story about the disruption, confusion, and tragedy of the global conflagration. Talking to players after playtesting events, our sound design achieved two interesting outcomes. First, with repeated play, we found that they could remember where they were in the underground tunnel network based around what part of the soundscape they were in. Second, by replacing the conventional Counter-Strike soundscape with this historical collage, we wanted to create a mood for the player that would be a little closer to the sonic atmosphere of 1941, whilst reminding them of the abstract medium of the game engine that we were using to trigger these experiences. From everything we read in the Hong Kong University study, we felt that a sense of confusion and instability defined this moment. A quiet map felt like a dark map with no lights, the player would fill it with their own sounds, but a soundscape filled with ghosts could help us recreate something poetically closer to our source material.

Playing the Reconstruction During our playtest events in 2017, Autosave: Redoubt, was presented via two different game modes. The first mode was Autosave: Redoubt 1v1, where only two opposing players are spawned into the map. The large scale of the map required that we add a single command into the configuration file ‘MP_roundtime 25’, extending the game from the usual 2 minutes to 25 minutes, to allow players enough time to find one another in the underground labyrinth. The disorienting nature of the tunnels meant that players spent a long time by themselves, which is a rare experience in Counter-Strike, and at times, players started to behave as if they were in a walking simulator, rather than a FPS game. The moment when players first encountered one another around the corner of a tunnel was usually characterised by a moment of shock and the rapid firing of weapons, ending the game for both players. The feature of having only two players produced a hidden ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ mechanic, where if neither player shot the other, the game could continue as a walking simulator, leaving it

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up to the players to decide whether the historical recreation should end as an FPS shooter or continue as a site exploration for the full 25 minutes. The second gameplay configuration was to make a five versus five map (uploaded to the Steam Workshop as ‘Autosave Redoubt 5v5’). This configuration responds to the medium specificity of Counter-Strike and allows players to treat the site as a more conventional Counter-Strike map. In this instance, the line of site logic and Virilio’s theory of the dysfunctional design of the bunker is simulated as a form of what Bogost and Poremba call “generative” realism. Once the players started chasing each other through the tunnels, the design of the site became highly dysfunctional, and superior player numbers and tactics cannot be used to trap or outmanoeuvre an opponent. Instead, one player could easily shoot a number of opposing players simply by waiting for them to squeeze around the corner of a tunnel one at a time. Autosave: Redoubt 1v1 experimented with the finitude of two players encountering one another, whereas Autosave: Redoubt 5v5 experimented with the conventional team experience of Counter-Strike within the paradoxical design of the Shing Mun Redoubt. In both modes, we placed little formal restrictions on player behaviour. To downplay the Counter-Strike focus on contemporary weapons, we did not add weapon ‘buy zones’ into the map, however experienced players were technically able to add these themselves in using console cheat commands that we consciously did not block. By not blocking cheat commands in the config file, we left the possibility open for players to change and experiment with the landscape that we created, and during our playtest sessions, players eventually moved from an earnest exploration the map we had designed, to more experimental uses of no-clip flying through the map and altering graphics settings, which we filed as examples of not obscuring the medium of reconstruction. At the end of the day, we were modding a popular game whose enthusiasts sought to explore on their own terms.

The Landscape of Autosave: Redoubt: Using the Limits Working on Autosave: Redoubt brought unexpected levels of insight into how the Valve Source Engine functions as a medium of representation. The premise of Autosave: Redoubt was that the first-person 3D game engine implies the first-person shooter and that by using Counter-Strike instead of a 3D engine such as Unity or Unreal, we could highlight the

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‘gameness’ of virtual site reconstruction as well as something that might plausibly outlast a typical Unity build. The limitations we encountered constituted a tangible response to the questions posed by Bogost and Poremba’s ‘documentary games’ as well as by Reilly, Beale, and El-Antably’s methodological concerns about game engine representation. Autosave: Redoubt revealed a more nuanced response to questions of realism and representation in games which are often lost in more passionate discussions of games, violence, and so on. The line of sight analysis and architectural survey data provided an interesting subject with which to experiment in the process of appropriation and conversion, a process I have previously described using the question ‘can I play Counter-Strike here?’ and has implicitly been rephrased to ‘how can I play Counter-Strike here?’ The form of realism that the Valve Source engine produces is geared towards spaces that render quickly for a line of sight game. The topology of a computer game landscape is measured relative to game mechanics and as it turns out, this undeniable significance can also be read in the structure of the engine itself and the sort of geometry that it allows. The Valve Source Engine bends the world to best accommodate Valve Source Engine games, and all the landscapes that it upholds will be affected by the ludic priorities that are encoded into it as a medium. Autosave: Redoubt is a landscape according to the Valve Source Engine, and a landscape according to Counter-Strike.

Creative Works Cited The Beginner’s Guide. 2015. Davey Wreden and Everything Unlimited. (PC). Blind. 2018. Tiny Bull Studios. (PC).

References Bayliss, Peter. 2010. Videogames, Interfaces, and the Body: The Importance of Embodied Phenomena to the Experience of Videogame Play. Doctoral thesis, RMIT University. Beale, Gareth, and Paul Reilly. 2017. After Virtual Archaeology: Rethinking Approaches to the Adoption of Digital Technology. Internet Archaeology 44. Bogost, Ian, and Cindy Poremba. 2008. Can Games Get Real? A Closer Look at “Documentary” Digital Games. In Computer Games as a Sociological Phenomenon, ed. A.  Jahn-Sudmann and R.  Stockmann. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Carmack, John. 2022. Lex Fridman Podcast Episode 309 John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets. August 4th, 2022. 309. Timestamp: 02:50:36. Casey, Edward S. 2002. Representing Place: Landscape Painting & Maps. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. El-Antably, Ahmed. 2010. The Virtual (Re)Construction of History: Some Epistemological Questions. In The Proceedings of Spaces of History/Histories of Space: Emerging Approaches to the Study of the Built Environment. Berkeley: University of California Berkeley. Herwig, Adrian, and Philip Paar. 2002. Game Engines: Tools for Landscape Visualization and Planning? In Trends in GIS and Virtualization in Environmental Planning and Design, Wichmann Verlag, 1–10. Heidelberg: Wichmann Verlag. Kwong, Chi Man, and Yiu Lin Tsoi. 2014. Eastern Fortress: A Military History of Hong Kong, 1840–1970. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Lai, Lawrence, Stephen N.G.  Davies, Ken S.T.  Ching, and Castor T.C.  Wong. 2011. Decoding the Enigma of the Fall of the Shing Mun Redoubt Using Line of Sight Analysis. In Surveying & Built Environment: Special Issue to Commemorate the 70th Anniversary of the Battle of Hong Kong, 8 December to 25 December 1941, December. Valve Developer Community. 2023. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive/Mapper’s Reference. https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Counter-Strike:_Global_ Offensive/Mapper%27s_Reference Virilio, Paul. 1994. Bunker Archeology. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

CHAPTER 7

Garry’s Mod: The Computer Game Becomes Photoshop

The final game I analyse closely in this book is Garry’s Mod, a player-made mod that became one of the most successful and innovative sandbox games of its time. Garry’s Mod collapses the distinction between playing and modding, and seems a fitting end to this book, where the player is getting closer to playing the representational medium as both artist and spectator. Garry’s Mod crystallises a lot of Web 2.0 culture, from the economic relationships created by user-generated content and Web 2.0, to the transformation of visual language from postmodern sampling to something more operational and productive, which I identify via Aarseth’s ergodic literature and Alan Kirby’s notion of ‘digimodernism’. Garry’s Mod takes the props and game objects of Valve Source Engine games such as Half-Life 2 and Portal (2007), removes their fictional worlds, goals and rules, and leaves behind a playground of game objects waiting to be played with (Figs. 7.1 and 7.2). This strange repurposing of game objects into an improvised sandbox implies that once we have finished a game like Half-­ Life 2 and the software just kept running, something like Garry’s Mod would be left behind. The non-player soldiers and monsters would all be there, as would all of the other players, and we would all just have to work out what to do next. The way we play with our cultural fragments and the way we put them back together shines a light on who we are at this moment, and the historical forces we are living with. From the protagonist’s safari to the touristic sports arena to the game that is played after all

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Nelson, Computer Games As Landscape Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4_7

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Fig. 7.1  Spawning objects into a blank landscape in Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios

Fig. 7.2  The driveable bathtub car—a common first project for learning to build in Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios

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games have finished, I hope that this final chapter helps you see what inspired me to write this book, and why looking at computer games as landscapes can be so interesting.

A Game Made from Other Games The origins of Garry’s Mod share a lot in common with the origins of Counter-Strike. It was conceived as a Half-Life 2 mod by a young computer programmer named Garry Newman, who published it online in multiple stages of development, seeking feedback via the ‘Something Awful’ web forum. In December 2004, Newman released the freely downloadable Garry’s Mod 1, which allowed players to spawn ‘Manhack’ NPCs from Half-Life 2 into the game environment, Garry’s Mod 2 allowed players to spawn assets, relocate them in space with a ‘Physics Gun’ and connect them together with rope and welding constraints, and Garry’s Mod 3 introduced the ‘gm_construct’ environment and allowed players to spawn characters from Half-Life 2 and pose them into any position. Garry’s Mod 4 allowed multiplayer interaction, Garry’s Mod 5 introduced a full spawn menu of assets from Half-Life 2, Garry’s Mod 6 allowed players to pose the facial expressions of Half-Life 2 characters and also included a ‘Multitool Gun’ that could be programmed by the player to perform complex building functions. In Garry’s Mod 8, Newman allowed players to alter the game itself using the Lua scripting language, which allowed new mechanics to be built by players, and Garry’s Mod 10 was finally released as a licensed game for purchase on Steam (Pearson 2012). The iterative history of Garry’s Mod, its symbiosis with community feedback, and its eventual licensing as an independent product parallel the process I described for Counter-Strike, where a mod transitions from an ecosystem of player-­ generated content to a new commercial title, repackaged under a new End User Licence Agreement (EULA). Garry’s Mod could almost be seen as both a culmination and a microcosm of the modding process that began with the licensing of the Quake engine to make Half-Life. Garry Newman and his company Facepunch Studios effectively bought a licence of the Valve Source Engine, and like Newell and Harrington of Valve and Minh Le and Jesse Cliffe of Counter-­ Strike, formed a new economic enclosure that separates modders from proprietors. As Küchlich points out, it is a paradox of game modding that voluntary creative activity needs to form a viable relationship with commercial platforms. The licensing of a mod redefines users according to

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what side of the EULA they are on, and this boundary is often pushed and pulled by copyright lawsuits, campaigns from user groups, as well as general market forces and competition. The transformation of a computer game engine into a platform for user-generated content is not unique to Garry’s Mod or to the Valve Source Engine, and can be seen in games such as LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule 2008), Tabletop Simulator (Beserk Games 2015), Super Mario Maker (Nintendo 2019) and Dreams (Media Molecule 2019). As I outline in a longer paper on the aesthetics of modding, all platforms that rely on user-generated content must face what George Caffentzis (2010) calls the ‘Midas Limit’, whose lower limit is where users freely use and upload to the system but the platform is not profitable enough to sustain itself, and whose upper limit is where the platform exploits users so much that they abandon it entirely in favour of a competitor. Garry Newman provides a great description of this balancing act, weighing the costs and benefits between players, modders, game developers and Valve. Newman writes: So obviously Valve and Game Devs are the biggest winners right now. That’s the wrong way around in my opinion. The modders should be getting the majority share of the revenue from this—that just seems like common sense. It’s obvious that Valve and the game developer need to make money here too, enough to cover costs at least—but it’s the modder’s work that is making the money. I don’t know whose choice that is though, but it feels like someone is being a greedy asshole. This is something that will get better with time. (Newman 2015)

How the conditions described by Newman might improve is a big question for the economic future of creative platforms that rely on user-­ generated content, and the content creators who rely on these platforms for income, and while it is outside the scope of this book, I believe the Midas Limit will remain a convenient shorthand for whatever improvements can be sought within this balancing act. As Olli Sotama notes, there is a range of motivations driving how modders engage and devote their time to a game or modding platform. Players might engage to improve their experience of a treasured game, hackers might seek deeper knowledge of a system, researchers might spend more time gathering external knowledge to make more accurate creations and entire artistic teams might collaborate to realise the ambitions of a shared goal (Sotamaa 2010 246). Olli Sotamaa (2004, 2005) has done extensive research surveying the intrinsic motivations of modding communities and Julian Küchlich

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(2005), Hector Postigo (2003) and Hanna Wirman (2009) have analysed at length the economic imbalances that separate game modding from other related practices such as homebrew software and regular software development. Of equal relevance are the analyses of Lawrence Lessig (2008) and Christina Hayes (2007), who have recounted fascinating stories of copyright lawsuits between platforms and their users, demonstrating the highly fraught and dynamic relationship between platforms and content creators. Rather than present all of their research again here, I would simply point the reader to these authors for further interest, then return us to the context that their work provides, which is a sort of extrinsic landscape of Web 2.0, defined by the shifting boundaries of End User Licence Agreements and copyright law. Garry’s Mod marks a blurring of the boundary between playing and modding and continues to evolve the commercial relationships it strikes with its users. There are a number of third-party add-ons for Garry’s Mod (e.g. the Prometheus System) that allow server administrators to facilitate in-game donations to contribute to the running of an individual server. Server developers such as Swamp Servers (mentioned later) can also run donation programs through Steam. Perhaps the most prominent form of monetisation for modders at the time of writing is by uploading videos to YouTube. The YouTube channel Vanoss Gaming has over 25 million subscribers, has posted a large number of Garry’s Mod machinima videos, and generates significant revenue from the YouTube platform (Youtubers.me 2023). With only 820,000 subscribers, MsBreezy (also mentioned later as my guide to Garry’s Mod’s ‘Swamp Cinema’) would generate a significant, but comparably modest revenue. Küchlich’s analysis and Newman’s comments concur that these examples of generating revenue from Web 2.0 activities reach only a minority of people whose creative contribution to Garry’s Mod might otherwise be considered as work. The majority of Garry’s Mod players, modders, server administrators, and machinima makers, will be playing on a licensed copy of the game, voluntarily exchanging their time, creativity, and labour for the pleasure they derive from these activities. In my chapter on Counter-Strike I argued that these types of external factors are useful for us to keep in mind when we analyse transgressive landscapes in computer games, and in this chapter, I will continue that line of thinking, that what I later describe as a sort of memefied swamp in Garry’s Mod is a productive visualisation of a more general moraise of Web 2.0, and in the context of landscape, functions well to visualise a world that can otherwise be hard to see.

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Just as YouTube transformed the underground culture of experimental film and video art into a mainstream past-time, platforms like Garry’s Mod helped to transform the more niche and specialised work of game modification into a mainstream mode of play. Just like how Counter-Strike transitioned from successful mod into a successful commercial game, Garry’s Mod transitioned from a successful mod into a successful modding platform, encapsulating the cycle of landscape production found in the Valve Source Engine. As with other titles that house user-generated content, I can launch Valve’s Steam platform to launch Garry’s Mod and then find new games hosted on Garry’s Mod as I might otherwise have done on Steam. With three simple moves from Half-Life 2 to Counter-Strike to Garry’s Mod, we have entered an environment of nested landscapes and worlds within worlds. Games, like other media of their generation, have been transformed by user-generated content and networked creativity. Not only do we consume games, television, film, and audio from subscriptions nested with apps such as Steam, Netflix, and podcast clients, some of the largest platforms (most notably YouTube) house their own microworlds of user-generated content. We could describe Garry’s Mod as a sort of YouTube for games, where the Valve Source Engine functions as both the camera and the video codec, providing the basic creative restrictions within which new worlds are created. Some of the most popular game modes played on Garry’s Mod servers, such as ‘Trouble in Terrorist Town’ and ‘Prop Hunt 2’ were developed during a game-jam event hosted by Garry Newman’s Facepunch Studios in 2009 (Facepunch Studios 2010). Some are hosted on Garry’s Mod servers, others are shipped as part of the game, and some build their own economies via player donations to the server.

Playing as Modding [Gameplay notes] The first Garry’s Mod server I join is a public ‘gm_construct’ sandbox. I spawn in and hear a fractured composition of in-game sounds – footsteps, gunfire, and the familiar twanging of the Half-Life 2 crossbow, interrupted by distorted voices over game microphones cutting through the ­soundscape. The landscape is a large grassy block surrounded by apartment buildings, with a small body of water in one corner. The apartments are like those I remember from Half-Life 2 – Eastern European, 1970s. The first player I

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encounter has a charred corpse for an avatar and is building something out of large gridded blocks. I realised that I don’t have a microphone on my headset, so I stand next to him, dumb. Someone runs past and shoots me. My avatar collapses to the floor, and I see it for the first time. I am Dr Kleiner from Half-Life 2. A player with an anime avatar runs past me, carrying the offending shotgun. I lie on the grass, my screen tinted death red, and watch the other players go about their business. I click my mouse and respawn. The charred corpse is still building with blocks and my anime killer is nowhere to be seen. I take on a more careful approach and run around strafing, as I would in Counter-Strike or Half-Life 2, trying to balance curiosity while making myself a harder target to hit. Within a minute or so I am run over by a player driving the buggy from Half-Life 2, and again, I see Dr Kleiner fall to the ground, my screen tint red, and the buggy ramble on past my fallen avatar. I repeat this process a few too many times, until I finally switch from my PC to my laptop, and search “how to play Garry’s Mod”, and start to read the ‘Steam Beginner’s Guide to Garry’s Mod’.

When I started playing Garry’s Mod, I had no idea what was going on. Consulting the internet was as much about learning what keys to press as it was about getting tips for how to entertain myself in this gameless game. Sean Duncan observed a similar phenomenon for players of Minecraft (Mojang 2011), where the decision of “what to do next” distinguishes a new generation of players who are comfortable with the directionless open-world sandbox, and also with rapidly switching between the game and paratexts like Youtube and online Wiki resources (Duncan 2011, 5). In addition to the Steam Beginner’s Guide to Garry’s Mod, I watched two YouTube tutorials —Garry’s Mod for Beginners! (How to Play Garry’s Mod Basics: What is it, How Garry’s Mod Works) (Grobeman Gaming 2017) and Garry’s Mod Beginner’s tutorial [(COMMENTARY) BETTER VERSION] (EscBoss 2014). I learned how to spawn objects into the map, manipulate their properties, move and rotate them, and toggle their physics properties from objects that can fall down and roll around, to static immovable items that could be suspended in any position. I learned to import a soldier from Half-Life 2, bend it into a yoga pose and connect wheels and thrusters to a bathtub to make it into a driveable car. There was no tutorial mode in Garry’s Mod to teach me any of this internally, and instead these YouTube videos connected me to the broader social space of the game that spreads across Web 2.0 platforms. I experience the landscape of Garry’s Mod through the same basic avatar as Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike, but because the linear landscape

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safari and the line-of-sight competition have disappeared, my weapon no longer feels like the primary prosthetic, and instead, I am more focused on the menu of spawnable objects and tools that expand my ability to engage with the game sandbox. Like using Photoshop or Blender, my Garry’s Mod skills are less about the crosshair and more about my ability to quickly call up functions from menu arrays and keyboard shortcuts. Playing Garry’s Mod feels like making Autosave: Redoubt—I make alterations to graphics, textures, and the environment, but I do not produce a radically different game. From a practical perspective, the process of importing an object into Garry’s Mod is similar to importing an object using the Hammer editor, except that in Garry’s Mod, I more clumsily position a tree using a first-person avatar, rather than the precise orthographic views of Hammer (Figs. 7.3 and 7.4). After learning to spawn assets and combine them, I learn to save them into prefabricated arrangements, which can be re-spawned and iterated into more complex constructions. I also learn how to download asset inventories added by other players, which include recreations of objects from other games. I downloaded the ‘Skyrim Snpcs’ package which contained the 3D meshes, animations, and other data for a range of characters from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda 2011), which had been ported

Fig. 7.3  Adding a tree into a game map within the Hammer editor, author’s screenshot

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Fig. 7.4  Adding trees into Garry’s Mod from the player perspective, 2006. Facepunch Studios

from the original Bethesda files, scripted, and compiled to be compatible with Garry’s Mod by user Silverlan in 2012. Out of curiosity, I conducted a test to work out how these objects from other games had been translated into this new context. After spawning the dragon Alduin, without the spells or magic I might use in Skyrim, it took me 49 shots to kill him with my Half-Life 2 rocket. In a second test I was able to kill this Garry’s Mod version of Alduin with one shot from my GGN40 Skullsmasher anti-­ material rifle,1 but as a point of reference, I can shoot down a Half-Life 2 Combine Gunship with 3 shots from my rocket launcher, but the gunship is immune to damage from my GGN40 Skullsmasher, presumably because the gunship retains a coded rule from Half-Life 2 where it can only be damaged by this one weapon. It clearly doesn’t matter who Alduin might have been in Skyrim, all that matters is how Alduin’s 3D mesh has been reincarnated and coded into a Garry’s Mod spawnable object. As Garry’s Mod absorbs fragments from other games, it flattens all of them via the lowest common denominator of the Valve Source Engine. 1  A custom weapon uploaded to the Steam workshop by player Heavy-D (“designed by Dr Seuss in WWI to shoot down Nazi starships) (Heavy-D 2013).

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The Playground Landscape [Gameplay notes] I return to the multiplayer sandbox server with a headset microphone and toggle into no-clip mode and start flying around looking for other players. I get killed once or twice, so I spawn some weapons and return fire. ‘Gm_ construct’ has a small body of water in one corner. With most of my avatar concealed underwater, I peek up and kill another player using the crossbow from Half-Life 2. Within seconds I am kicked from the server. Apparently, I was playing the wrong game. I join another server, ‘Ruu’s Playground’, which is running on the ‘gm_bigcity’ map and spawn into a grassy square enclosed by a forest of skyscrapers; the tallest buildings look like the New  York twin towers. I have a list of player controls and console commands written down on a piece of paper in front of me that remind me how to play. Holding down “C” I change my avatar from Dr Kleiner to a decapitated soldier from Half-Life 2. Holding down “X” I experiment by greeting the other players on the server, careful not to stand out too much, but signalling my desire to play. As I set about spawning some large building blocks onto the grass, a young Irish accent answers my greeting with a cheerful “Hello!” and we chit chat as I start to rope my building blocks together. I hold up a thirty-metre long chain of giant blocks joined by bouncy rope and Batman asks if I’d like to come for a ride in the cart he has just built. Excited by the invitation, I suggest joining my blocks to the back of the cart. Batman tells me that I need to adjust the player permissions on my game objects and verbally guides me through my menu until I grant him collaborative access to my game objects. His cart consists of a small rectangular crate with circular saw blades for wheels (projectile weapons from Half-Life 2). While we are attaching my blocks to the back of the cart, a third player appears and kills me. Batman complains that this was uncalled for, but I laugh and say it’s fine, secretly happy to have the support of a more experienced player. I respawn and all three of us return to the cart. Batman duplicates the cart into three carriages, and we go joyriding around ‘gm_bigcity’, laughing as our avatars flail around and the saw blades skid and scratch across the road. I jump out of the cart and am immediately thrown into a pool of toxic sludge, which starts rapidly taking health points from my avatar. Batman lifts me up into the air with his physics gun, but we agree it would probably be funnier if I just drop back into the sludge, die, and respawn.

Even though Garry’s Mod has the same Valve Source Engine look and feel as Half-Life 2, there is no ‘direction’, no obvious challenge and no sense of shared competition. My avatar can be damaged and die, but the

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significance of this is reduced to an inconvenience at worst, and a humorous expression at best. The gameplay condition has collapsed and its topology has been flattened to the point where objects only take on meaning when we decide to play with them. Being a beginner, improvising games and making new friends transported me back to the playgrounds of my childhood, where meaning temporarily coalesces around a patch of grass that might be a ‘home base’ and bonds of socialisation are constantly tested with temporary inclusion and exclusion. In 2001, philosopher Hubert Dreyfus attempted to define what sort of existential social spaces might be supported in networked online environments. Dreyfus identified the risk-free consumption of spectacle, what Søren Kierkegaard called the “aesthetic sphere” and compared this with the serious engagement that involves personal risk and the production of a stable identity, what Kierkegaard refers to as the “ethical sphere” (Kierkegaard 2001, 103; Dreyfus 2001, 80). Dreyfus was interested in the relationship between personal risk and meaningful encounters in virtual environments, and using Second Life (2003) as an example, concluded that these spaces would not support the focal practices and shared moods that generate meaning for us in the real world, primarily because Second Life avatars could not visually express meaningful emotions. Dreyfus writes: the sense that the shared mood is shared is constitutive of the excitement…it is what binds the participants together in a focal event and makes the occasion in a self-contained world.

And continues: To determine whether this practice that helps make life worth living in the real world is reproducible in virtual worlds we must begin by considering to what extent moods can be experienced, communicated and shared. (Dreyfus 2001, 109–10).

Looking back upon two decades of social media after Dreyfus’s book, it seems that he underestimated the degree to which focal practices could occur without expressive or empathetic avatars. My mood of enjoyment in Ruu’s Playground emerged between executing an animated ‘hello’, talking on a low fidelity voice chat, and collaboratively playing with game objects. This focal event also constitutes Tilley’s third category of landscape experience—existential space—mobile, produced through the

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actions of members of a group, resulting in social meanings, sacred spaces and human attachment (Chap. 2). Even according to Dreyfus’s limited criteria, I was bound with Batman in a focal event in a shared world, but what sort of world is it, and how can we translate this as an experience of landscape? Garry’s Mod is a landscape defined by a flattened topology where goals and resistance are removed and the form of flattening simply highlights how the engine is simulating the objects. Lee Shuen-Shing (2003) describes how “critical games” and “art games” introduce a form of medium reflexivity by removing certain game elements from the computer game simulation and quotes American game designer Greg Costikyan in saying that “a game without struggle is a game that’s dead” (Costikyan 2002) to argue that critical games and art games are resurrected “dead games” that reflect on the computer game as a language of expression. When a game has removed the goals, challenges, and win conditions, Lee writes: A player’s score is an empty sign. His effort to stave off death in these game spaces through retrial is futile, only signifying a possible misunderstanding of the games. They are dead games, by Costikyan’s criteria. However, it is not until the games go belly up that their ulterior motive emerges. Both games are meant to morph the player from an in-gaming loser into an off-­ gaming thinker. (Lee 2003)

Lee cites examples such as the Arena art mod by the collective Jodi and Brody Condon’s Adam Killer (2011) as examples where removing struggle functions as a reflexive critique on the first-person shooter. The entropic abstraction that Lee observes when the gameplay condition is removed neatly encapsulates what I see as the medium reflexivity of Garry’s Mod as a whole. The Garry’s Mod landscape is flattened by the absence of goals— the game is gone, the pieces remain in place, and the player must confront the underlying condition of the virtual environment. Garry’s Mod surrounds the player with objects from other games, but it is as if they have all been set to idle mode. Their surface representations and mechanics have been simulated, but the game is no longer in session. Nothing attacks me unless I ask it to and there is no game unless I make one. The game has neither begun nor finished, it is waiting in a potential form. Using Roger Caillois’ distinctions of play activities, the landscape of sequential challenges (ludus) has been replaced by the open sandbox of improvised

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experimentation (paidia) (Caillois 2001 [1961], 13). With Half-Life 2, I was able to derive a succinct landscape topology from the confluence of linear challenges and dystopian representational tropes. For CounterStrike I expanded this to find the geography of sports tourism, where objectification, appropriation, conversion, and consumption were mixed in with gambling and money laundering. The challenge and validation of Counter-Strike allowed me to play until my laptop ran out of battery, but in Garry’s Mod I am bored after five minutes. I am not in the repetitive stublimified boredom of Shinkle’s digital sublime, I am in the boredom of a child who doesn’t know how to make their own fun, the boredom that adults learn to hide from by filling our weekends with errands and activities, and our vacations with ‘must see’ schedules. Like Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic painting The Monk by the Sea (1808–1810), I am gazing out into the ocean of computer game representation, confronted by my diminutive relationship to it. I am no longer the protagonist and my purpose is not measured by structured competition, only my ability to respond to this vast set of potential relationships. Lee writes: In the longer process of critical game playing to investigate and understand what it is all about, what happens to the player is that he becomes less and less of the game, and more and more of ‘me.’ (Lee 2003)

I spawn a Lamborghini and race around Ruu’s Playground, but after crashing it a few times, I lose interest and delete it from the game (Fig. 7.5). I load a level from Half-Life 2 into Garry’s Mod and fly above the landscape of linear challenges, watching idle NPCs waiting for the gladiator protagonist who never arrives. I spawn in Alduin and watch Skyrim’s World Eater battle the Combine soldiers for me (Fig. 7.6). The landscape of linear challenges has dissolved and revealed itself as a film set, with nothing behind the row of buildings that contain the safari. When the adventure is over and the competition finished, I am forced to confront myself and this once familiar game environment. Looking at the familiar trees and buildings, I start to focus on the qualities that are not simulated, a tree is just a display mesh with collision properties that can be placed anywhere, and is functionally identical to any other static object. I start to imagine the outlook of the billionaire playing life on God Mode, money has lost all meaning and all objects all start to look the same. There are only so many times I can race a Lamborghini around the city, only so many walls to crash into, until I confront myself, surrounded by the rubble of infinite possibility.

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Fig. 7.5  I park my Lamborghini and watch a nationalistic Korean video selected by another player in a Garry’s Mod sandbox environment, 2006. Facepunch Studios

Garry’s Mod doesn’t just simulate Source engine objects and environments, it is continually absorbing other games as players reproduce their favourite characters and objects to play out more elaborate game fantasies. If I load the ‘gm_mc_hillside.bsp’ map, I can play Garry’s Mod in a Minecraft-style landscape  (Fig. 7.7), but the landscape is not made of destructible voxels so I cannot mine or craft, it is coded with the same file structure as Counter-Strike or Autosave: Redoubt (a combination of .bsp, .vmt and .vtf files), and can only function according to the physics properties of the Valve Source Engine. Just as a Skyrim dragon will always be the dragon according to Garry’s Mod, ‘gm_mc_hillside’ is Minecraft according to Garry’s Mod. The more Garry’s Mod simulates other games, the easier it is to understand the underlying look and feel of the Valve Source Engine. Having created the grand enclosure of the game engine that absorbs other games, I have no idea what to do with them or what they all mean. The only way I can start to answer this question is to pour over the fragments of what was enclosed, to see what survived the lowest common denominator process of reduction and simulation. How much tree survived in the tree object? How much rock survived in a rock object? Very

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Fig. 7.6  Alduin battles the Combine in a fragmented set of City 17, in Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios

little it would seem. They are like the foil wrappers around a chocolate Easter egg, colourful coatings with nothing inside. The game world has become completely ‘deniable’, a crate is now a tree, and I can build a spaceship with either of them. The description of Nature I previously used from anthropologist Philippe Descola to describe the landscape conversions of Counter-Strike as “dumb, odour free and intangible” has dramatically expanded to the sprawling servers of Garry’s Mod and the world according to the Valve Source Engine. This world is a landscape remix where all that exists does so by being condensed into the appropriate file types. The crate, the tree, the dragon and the Minecraft hillsides are only what the Valve Source Engine allows them to be, defined by a mesh, a texture, and the coded properties of a Quake C script.

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Fig. 7.7  Imprisoned in a cage by server admins in the Garry’s Mod version of Minecraft, 2006. Facepunch Studios

Sean Cubitt argues that the “return to nature” often romanticised in contemporary culture by beige linens and a ‘tree change’ relies on a modern fetishised Nature where the physical environment, enclosed by the post-industrialisation gaze, is only available as an aesthetic object that has survived the modern process of classification, which divides the world into domestic, commercial, industrial, resource extraction and aesthetic spheres. The ‘Nature’ that we return to is the aesthetic object that is not accounted for by these other categories, and comes to us with a form of demarcation, such as a Nature Reserve or a National Park. Natural objects in Garry’s Mod are peculiar, as they are just differently shaped Easter Egg foil within the same flat topology. Choosing between spawning in a tree or a refrigerator feels like purchasing either of these items on Amazon.com, they have become aesthetically discrete and somewhat interchangeable. Garry’s Mod has enclosed all things at the expense of the world itself, it is the aestheticised externality of Nature writ large, a decontetualised rubble functioning like a box of Lego that has been poured out onto the floor.

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Postmodern Rubble or a Digimodern Swamp? [Gameplay notes] I type “weird Garry’s Mod server” into YouTube, and watch ‘WEIRDEST SERVER EVER’ by MsBreezy (2016b). MsBreezy and friends walk out into a public square, framed by a crumbling industrial city and a stormy sky. They pass a host of other players idlying around, player names floating above their avatars and we hear a distorted version of the theme song from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, overlaid with Adolf Hitler’s closing speech from the Triumph of the Will. The narrator of the YouTube video mutters “what the fuck?” then asks two friends to meet over at the Kool Kid’s Klub, where they start playing a game of chess with another player, who is wearing a Donald Trump avatar. The three players hosting the Youtube video start playing a game in a toxic waste dump, running around stabbing each other, laughing that this must be “what hell is like”. They leave the dump and walk around to a mini-golf course, and an aiming overlay appears on screen. As they putt, the players start talking in mock-British accents, imitating TV golf commentators. “Guys, I swear this server is like an ADHD dream. It’s like a 4chan server. If you go into the cinema rooms, you’ll usually find YouTube poops and porn playing”. (MsBreezy 2016b) After watching half of MsBreezy’s video, I switch to Garry’s Mod go looking for the server myself. I find ‘Swamp Cinema’ and play on the mini golf course and try the stabbing game in the waste dump (Fig. 7.8), but neither are as fun as they appeared in the YouTube video. Garry’s Mod cinemas mimic regular cinemas by using a media player add-on, which facilitates a YouTube party inside a virtual multiplex. I walk past the candy bar, grab a bucket of popcorn, and go into the first theatre. The first video that plays is ‘CupcakKe-Deepthroat’, and the second is ‘Top 10 Scary British Urban Legends.’

Garry’s Mod has an average of around 25,000 players at any given time, and there are over 1.25 million assets on the Garry’s Mod Steam Workshop page (Steam Charts 2023; Steam Workshop 2023). Early on in this book, I said that comparisons between mountains in paintings and mountains in computer games would miss the insightful potential of landscape entirely. The mountains in eighteenth-century paintings reveal themselves through complex networks of how and why they were made, and to understand the chaotic memescape of Garry’ Mod, we need to understand how what we observe within the game resonates with broader patterns in political philosophy. In this section I first demonstrate how Garry’s Mod can be

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Fig. 7.8  Stabbed in the ‘Swamp Cinema’ server, Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios

understood as a rubble of what Fredric Jameson would describe as postmodern pastiche and then shift towards the more active stance of what Jean Francois Lyotard describes as language games, and the ergodic version of this found in Alan Kirby’s description of ‘digimodernism’. Following the recurrent tension between the dry recycling implied by Jameson’s description of pastiche and the wet hybridisation implied by Lyotard’s postmodern language games, I explore the idea of Garry’s Mod as a sort of unpredictable landscape of experimentation, where the algal blooms of the transitional swamp feed on the decomposing matter of yesterday’s landscape. Building on Frasca’s claim that the player and the game work together to form sign relationships (Frasca 2001, 196), Garry’s Mod simulates other games, and produces new sign relationships based on how objects have been translated into the game and repurposed by the player. These

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objects are not limited to games, and include any cultural artefact a player chooses to add to the system. Garry’s Mod servers present recycled fragments of games and popular culture, given temporary new meanings by how they played with. Thinking back to Emma Fraser’s analysis of gameplay in ruined cities, Garry’s Mod completes the structural ruin that Fraser uses to describe computer games, where “dislocated landscapes built out of individual models and files” are now transformed not just into a Promethean obstacle course, but into a reconfigurable toy box for the creation of temporary new meanings (Fraser 2016, 185). When Fraser questions whether the ruined playscapes of computer games present a fetishised celebration of apocalypse or a productive sowing of “seeds for critical alternatives” (ibid., 191), I feel like Garry’s Mod provides an elegant argument for the latter. Where Half-Life 2 articulated the egocentric question ‘can I apocalypse’, Garry’s Mod invites us to improvise social games with Batman, old saw blades and a pool of toxic waste. Rather than a fetishistic adventure of challenge and conquest, Garry’s Mod confronts us with ourselves, and what opportunities and new meanings we can make out of a landscape of ludic rubble. In the late 1970s, philosopher Jean François Lyotard characterised postmodern society as a linguistic shift from a world where meaning followed the logically connected structures of grand narratives, to a more fragmented and relativistic system of “language particles”, where the transition of meaning between two individuals can no longer be based on the assumption that they share the same rational ontology (Lyotard 1979, xxiv). Under the postmodern condition, rational communication would increasingly be confined to “patches” of “local determinism”, and knowledge and discourse would tend towards perspectivism, local narratives and temporary institutions. Lyotard characterises this in terms of Wittgenstein’s term ‘language games’. He writes: It is useful to make the following three observations about language games. The first is that their rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players (which is not to say that the players invent the rules). The second is that if there are no rules, there is no game, or not, between players (which is not to say that the players invent the rules). The second is that if there are no rules, there is no game, that even an infinitesimal modification of one rule alters the nature of the game, that a “move” or utterance that does not satisfy the rules does not belong to the game they define. The third remark is suggested by what has just been said: every utterance should be thought of as a “move” in a game. (Lyotard 1979, 10)

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The implications of this were predictive for the patches of local determinism that define our polarised bubbles in contemporary media, where our worlds within worlds are typically linked by temporary bridges of mutually launched accusations of bias, immorality, or dishonesty. Similar to Lyotard’s diagnosis of collapsed grand narratives, Hiroki Azuma described the Otaku as a group young Japanese men in the 1990s who opted out of mainstream social values and immersed themselves in personalised worlds of obsessive cultural fandom, creating their own arrangements of characters and fictional fragments, bent around their personal preferences (Azuma 2009, 27–8). Following the development of user-­generated content and Web 2.0, Azuma shifted his analysis away from the Otaku, arguing that their mode of personalised curation had simply extended itself out onto the mainstream, and that while most of us don’t plaster our bedrooms with anime posters, we nevertheless departed from a shared narrative, and live in personalised media bubbles (Azuma 2014). Garry’s Mod servers are a nice visual representation of these media bubbles, spatialised into something we might recognise as a landscape. Sprawled across a network of temporary servers, players can start with the same information of cultural fragments and arrange and repurpose them for whatever form of role play, competition, or satire satisfies their desires. Political theorist Fredric Jameson gave a far more specific characterisation to the “random cannibalisation of all styles of the past” (Jameson 1991, 65) and “the play of stylistic allusion” that are associated with postmodernism, and perhaps the visual language of Garry’s Mod. Jameson identified these forms of self-referentiality and appropriation as being rooted in the consumer desire for a world populated only by images of itself, and ultimately as symptomatic representations of the imperceptibly large networks of global capitalism, where logical chains of meaning and representation are replaced by “schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers” (Jameson 1991, 72). Jameson writes: The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerising and fascinating, not so much in its own right, but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp – namely the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself. (Jameson 1991, 79–80)

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Viewed as a postmodern spectacle, the millions of objects uploaded into Garry’s Mod could be read as a signifier for the immense globalised networks of exchange too large to be observed discreetly, a heightened version of Ndalianis’s neo-baroque that observed in Half-Life 2. For Jameson, this type of recycling and pastiche signifies a collapse in the ability to think in longer aspirational historical trajectories, and a retreat to the apocalyptic consciousness Fraser mentioned, where visions of catastrophe and collapse have replaced alternative visions of the future, and the visual language bends back into a retrograde nostalgia, obsessed with resampling the perpetual “moment of truth” of globalised capitalism (Jameson 1991, 88). It would be depressing if these meme landscapes were nothing but a terminal recycling of a cognitive end-point and indeed the tension between apocalyptic pastiche and experimental language games marked a difference in how Jameson and Lyotard viewed the postmodern condition (Fig. 7.9). Following the model of the language game, if we look back to Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga’s early text on game studies, he refers the sports arena, the tennis court and even the court of law as exhibiting the form

Fig. 7.9  Ruminating in apocalyptic idyll - playing Tetris over Neoclassical Ruins while holding a cat in Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios

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and function of a playground—“temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart” (Huizinga 1964 [1955], 10). For Huizinga, play creates a new sense of order within the arena—“into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection” (Huizinga 1964 [1955], 10). Huizinga continues that the player takes a chance, makes an attempt, in order to resolve the tension and uncertainty of the play situation. Returning to the logic of play, we can rescue Garry’s Mod from the apocalyptic stasis of postmodernism, and recast it as a projective world of ludic re-evaluation, where temporary order is sought through chance and experimentation. Whilst the lexicon of Garry’s Mod might start as a postmodern rubble of signifiers, its ludic function can produce a new order beyond pastiche and spectacle. Cultural theorist Alan Kirby took precisely this line of argument, and wrote that if postmodernism began, as Jameson claims, with the institutionalisation of modernism in the 1950s, and the perceived failure of Marxism to achieve lasting social and political transformations, then ‘digimodernism’ as an active form began with the institutionalisation of postmodern pastiche, where postmodernism ceases to be subversive critique of modernism, and simply becomes a functional language of its own, capable of launching its own productive visions, rather than being locked in the recycled stasis Jameson described. Kirby started by looking at a new generation of children’s movies like Toy Story (1995) and Shrek (2001), and argued that these films position postmodern self-referentiality as yesterday’s style, a baseline for a new form of comedy and adventure, rather than simply remixes about remixing (Fig.  7.10). These films construct “an infantilised adult and a cool kid as a pair of viewers embraced by an all-­ encompassing postmodern aesthetic” (Kirby 2009, 14) that transformed the postmodern aesthetic into “a tiresome, convoluted and recycled postmodern blizzard” that was now being driven by a new cultural logic (Kirby 2009, 16). Kirby positioned computer games as the paradigm digimodern text and Aarseth’s ergodic literature as the template for how they function. Kirby used the terms ‘grammar’ and ‘rhetoric’ (based on Aarseth’s ‘scriptons’ and ‘textons’) to describe how digimodern texts use mechanics to repurpose cultural fragments in the manner of: a machine: considered as a system by which meaning is made, not as meaning. Postmodernist features denote either a textual content or a set of tech-

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Fig. 7.10  Watching TV with discarded children’s toys in Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios niques, employed by an antecedent author, embedded in a materially fixed and enduring text, and traced or enjoyed by a wilful reader/viewer. The traits of digimodernist textuality exist on a deeper level: they describe how the textual machine operates, how it is delimited and by whom, its extension in time and in space, and its ontological determinants. (Kirby 2009, 51)

For Kirby, digimodern texts are produced by multiple authors, often indistinguishable from platforms, with a lexicon determined by a chaotic structure of collective authorship in networked environments, but nonetheless rambling towards something productive, rather than a static apocalyptic pastiche. Kirby injects optimism into the evanescent and haphazard spaces of YouTube and Twitter by arguing that it is their hands-on nature that separates them from what Guy Debord described as ‘the Spectacle’ (Kirby 2009, 59). What I am looking for in the landscape of computer games is not dissimilar to what Kirby was looking for in the rhetoric of the digimodernist text—he wanted to know what vision of society is revealed through the ‘grammar’ and ‘rhetoric’ of the digimodern text. According to Kirby, the ‘grammar’ of YouTube facilitates a freely available platform for short

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videos to be uploaded, watched, and commented on, and the ‘rhetoric’ of YouTube (what it actually says) is a haphazard ethnography of the Internet. YouTube’s lexicon is generated by YouTubers, who Kirby divides into the ‘recorder/sharer’ (of existing broadcast content), the ‘historian/enthusiast’ (who shares archival content), the ‘home movie-maker’, the ‘video blogger’, the ‘instructor’, the ‘amateur reporter,’ the ‘budding performer’, the ‘aspiring film-maker’ or the ‘online businessperson’ (Kirby 2009, 119). A similar typology might be made for the implied player of Garry’s Mod—the ‘asset uploader’, the ‘instructor’, the ‘role-player’, the ‘builder’, the ‘machinima maker’, the ‘troll’, and so on. Whilst the grammar of Garry’s Mod is ludic experimentation with the Valve Source Engine, the rhetoric reveals something similar to YouTube—a haphazard ethnography of online culture. By transforming the Valve Source Engine into a playable digimodern text, Garry’s Mod turned the lexicon of the computer game into a collection of ludic memes, which begin by recasting the rhetoric of their ancestor games with the ironic detachment Kirby describes in the characters of Shrek and Toy Story, and conclude by providing a fertile new ground for experimentation. I don’t play Garry’s Mod as Dr Gordon Freeman; I play as an ironic signification of Dr Gordon Freeman. I play Garry’s Mod’s Pedobear hide and seek game in a Lego Worlds landscape, trying to earn enough experience points to buy an anime avatar so that I could run away from the Pedobear Nextbot2 in style, but I could just as easily play the same game running away from Nextbot heads of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton (MsBreezy 2016a). Garry’s Mod operates in a mirror landscape that deconstructs the pantomime of Half-Life 2, or put another way, Garry’s Mod is the creepy meme landscape that lies in potential underneath Half-Life 2, where players and programmers can prototype new games and forms of cultural expression. YouTuber ‘Gargin’ puts this very well when he describes the underlying landscape of Half-Life 2, without the game or the adventure, as ultimately an eerie and desolate landscape, and the programming of the ‘Nextbot’ mod as an innovative leap forwards in game mechanics and representation, built on top of the unsettling landscape built by Valve developers (Gargin 2023). 2  Pedobear (short for paedophile) is a cartoon bear that developed between the Japanese 2channel image board, and 4chan. It is an Internet shorthand used to make fun of paedophiles, or to imply that someone has sexual interest in children. Pedobear is commonly depicted chasing young anime girls. A Nextbot is an innovative game mechanic whereby players are relentlessly chased by a two-dimensional image navigating a three-dimensional environment.

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One of the interesting features of the digimodern text is an unpredictable form of productivity, borne out in phenomena such as YouTube becoming a universal education resource or Twitter becoming a critical battleground for political campaigns (Fig. 7.11). Educational movements and ideological campaigns alike were built by what Kirby described as “multiple, almost innumerable” authorship “scattered across obscure social pseudo communities” (Kirby 2009, 52). Kirby maintained Jameson’s language of consumer culture in postmodern aesthetics, but removed the spectacle and the spectator, and inserted the collective, non-trivial activity of the cybertext, drawing a parallel between the structure of Web 2.0 platforms (the digimodern text), the narcissistic neoliberal self-branding these platforms require, and the sort of ‘desocialised autism’ that characterises the sociality on these ‘pseudo communities’. The standard ‘hello’ in Garry’s Mod is to shoot someone with a rocket launcher, and via Kirby, the swamp of memes that constitute its rhetoric (or lexicon) can be understood through the socio-political context that drives digimodernism. Kirby defined this context using factors such as increasing urbanisation

Fig. 7.11  A group of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump ‘Nextbots’ chasing YouTuber MsBreezy across the Lost Highway in Garry’s Mod. MsBreezy. 2016b. YouTube Screenshot

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and urban density, increasing surveillance, the near impossibility of solitude, the economics of flexibility and precarious employment, the valorisation of hyperactive social skills and the increasing contempt of knowledge, in favour of conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific quackery (Kirby 2009, 230).3 In Chap. 2, I described eighteenth and nineteenth-century landscape paintings as artefacts of a very particular world, where the agricultural revolution, the enclosure of public lands, the expansion of colonialism, the desire to remythologise conquered territories, and the repositioning of Nature as an enclosed ‘other’ in the face of Enlightenment empiricism and industrialisation all shaped the vision of the physical environment and how it was presented in the paintings we look upon today. At this point in the book, I feel like Kirby’s description of digimodernism starts to give us a similarly succinct summary of the world which produced the landscapes of Garry’s Mod. As a landscape platform that evolves in real-time through a haphazard and dispersed authorship, Garry’s Mod has a different shape to the more discrete protagonist safari of Half-Life 2, or the competitive arena of Counter-Strike.

The Unexpected Uses of Garry’s Mod As Sotamaa notes, game modding is both progressive and retrograde, just as likely to innovate a new mechanic as to make a ‘nude patch’ that removes the clothes of game characters (Sotamaa 2003), and Kirby’s productive optimism is not an ethical celebration of what is produced, it is simply a celebration of unexpected creativity in all forms. Kirby writes: The death of competence is digimodernist because the latter stumbles on to a blasted landscape violently rearranged by a postmodernism that in retrospect played into the hands of a triumphalist and totalising consumerism. (Kirby 2009, 245)

For Kirby, the ergodic participatory structures of digimodernism are tasked with trudging through the wasteland and doing the best we can by repurposing its fragments. Digimodern action is the cultural practice that  Another factor to add to this contextual list might be climate change. The idea that contemporary media is collectively and indirectly indexing the underlying anxiety of climate change is an argument that has been made extensively by Julia Leyda (2016) and Bogna Konior (2020). I do not make this link in my analysis simply because the games did not point me in that direction, however for readers interested in how contemporary media is affected by the science and discourse of climate change, I recommend these two sources. 3

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crawls out of the enclosure of the Web 2.0 swamp where you have access to excellent tools and resources but you probably never own what you make. You might invent one of the most popular game mechanics of tomorrow, you might become a developer, you might get slapped with a copyright lawsuit, or this might just become a hobby you can no longer afford. In the paragraphs below, I detail two unusual examples of digimodern productivity, where Garry’s Mod is repurposed for an unexpected use. In a 2006 paper, architects Ralph Johns and Russell Lowe demonstrated how real-time 3D game environments such as Garry’s Mod can function in an educational setting, and that the shift from 3D modelling applications such as 3DS Max or SolidWorks to first-person real-time simulations might transform the relationship between digital design and virtual environments. Johns and Lowe write: The enhanced ability to immerse oneself in a fully responsive three-­ dimensional world and the ease with which these results are made possible by the latest game editors (and even in-game editing) will drive a new understanding of the ‘basics’ or ‘fundamentals’ of new media use in landscape architecture. (Johns and Lowe 2006)

In his doctoral dissertation, engineering student Yizhe Chang also demonstrated how the physics simulation and complex mechanical assemblies supported by Garry’s Mod allow engineers to work collaboratively to design gear chains using the ‘feature slots’ coded into Garry’s Mod assets (Chang 2016, 47). Both Johns and Lowe and Chang show how the highly configurable grammar of Garry’s Mod starts to resemble a piece of collaborative creative software more than a computer game, filling a niche that might not yet exist for collaborative 3D design, and might be the goal of future simulation developments for ‘Metaverse’ and ‘Web 3’ industries. While I’m sure this was not their intention, I can’t help thinking about an architect working on a new building and suddenly being ambushed by a Nextbot, or playfully hit with a crowbar. Thinking back to the critiques of virtual archaeology I mentioned in Chap. 6, using Garry’s Mod as a platform for architectural design would certainly expose architects to the critiques of the community prior to launch. If Norman Foster designed his futuristic 30 St Mary Street Axe skyscraper in Garry’s Mod, maybe somebody might have told him it looked like a gherkin before the concrete had been poured? This type of anti-establish playfulness was a mainstay of

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radical architecture in the 1970s, and I can’t help but notice visual parallels between Garry’s Mod, the platonic geometry of diagrammatic drawings by the Italian radical architecture collective Superstudio and the haphazard maquettes of Situationist architect Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon (Fig. 7.12). While contemporary architects switching from CAD to Garry’s Mod is a bit unlikely, the thought experiment brings to mind Edward Castronova’s 2005 book Synthetic Worlds, and his prediction that as young people who grew up playing in virtual environments aged into political participants, the social, economic, and governance structures of online multiplayer environments would exert an increasing influence on the policies of the non-virtual world. The increasing political controversy over what is essentially server and content moderation on social media seems to have proved Castronova correct, and with his prediction in mind, along with Kirby’s description of digimodern productivity as haphazard and unpredictable, I went searching for other examples of unexpected crossovers of the virtual and non-virtual in the landscape of Garry’s Mod.

Fig. 7.12  Haphazard ludic architecture in a Garry’s Mod sandbox server. 2006. Facepunch Studios

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The most plausible and unexpected crossover I encountered was that proposed by a group of cybersecurity analysts from the Rochester Institute of Technology at the 2012 International Conference on Security and Management. According to these analysts, the client render model of multiplayer online games such as Garry’s Mod means that while player interactions occur on the server, the graphical rendering of the visual environment only occurs on the player’s computer, which opens the door for these games being used as optical channels of covert communication, where what is seen on the screen is not seen on the server logs. To illustrate their hypothesis, the analysts devised a system where one player spawns a group of 55-gallon barrel objects, each with their RGBA (red, blue, green, alpha) values altered. Because RGBA values can be decoded into ASCII decimal values between 0 and 255, the colour of each barrel can represent four numbers, which in turn could be transcoded into letters and words. By temporarily spawning a set of coloured barrels, two players could exchange a hidden message that would not be recorded anywhere on the server logs, as it would only be visually rendered on the computer of each player (Fig. 7.13). By logical extension, the authors argue that the entire

Fig. 7.13  A recreation of coloured barrel landscape stenography in Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios

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landscape of Garry’s Mod could be transformed into an encrypted stenographic code, invisible to the surveillance of government or other entities (Deffenbaugh et al. 2012). Whilst obscure, and certainly not a popularly discussed function, the repurposing of Garry’s Mod as a secure channel of covert communication is significant in the context of the increased surveillance and algorithmic tracking endemic to Web 2.0. If Garry’s Mod became a tool for covert communication, first, we would have no idea, and second, it would become an entirely different piece of software, cloaked under the veneer of a Web 2.0 memescape. Within this thought experiment, we cannot predict what might be communicated and what ethical response we should have, but the basic principle of a private, encrypted stenographic landscape built from the rubble of postmodernism inside the panoptic networks of Web 2.0 seems like a fitting example of digimodern productivity, ergodic, and haphazard. This might not be the perfect parallel for digimodern landscape stenography, but thinking back to the relationship between Romantic pastoral painting and colonialism, it was not uncommon for representations of landscape to thematically present one thing, whilst unwittingly depicting another. In Chap. 2, I discuss how pastoral paintings of the Yosemite Valley in California, or the New South Wales Central Tablelands in Australia unwittingly depicted landscapes manicured by indigenous fire-­ farming, rather than the natural Edenic pastures that colonists took them for. The cognitive dissonance of these paintings is discussed at length by Bill Gammage in his book The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011), in particular the strange quality of artists observing something that might be obvious once the cultural zeitgeist had shifted, but at the time, the artists and audience were structurally unable or unwilling to see. In summarising my conclusions for this book, I will run through some of the insights that we uncovered by playing and analysing computer games as landscapes, where the world that these games were reflecting back might seem obvious upon reflection, but were hard to see directly without the aid of this landscape mirror.

Creative Works Cited Adam Killer. 2011. Brody Condon. (PC). Dreams. 2019. Media Molecule. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. 2011. Bethesda Game Studios. (PC).

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LittleBigPlanet. 2008. Media Molecule, SCE Cambridge Studio, Tarsier Studios, Double Eleven, XDev, United Front Games, Sumo Digital. (PlayStation). Minecraft. 2011. Mojang. (PC). Portal. 2007. Valve. [PC]. Second Life. 2003. Linden Lab. (PC). Shrek. 2001. Directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. (Film). Super Mario Maker. 2019. Nintendo. Tabletop Simulator. 2015. Berserk Games. (PC). Toy Story. 1995. Directed by John Lasseter. (Film).

References Azuma, H. 2009. Otaku: Japan’s database animals. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2014. General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google. New  York, NY: Vertical, Inc. Caffentzis, George. 2010. The Future of ‘The Commons’: Neoliberalism’s’ Plan B’ or the Original Disaccumulation of Capital?. New Formations 69 (69): 23–41. Caillois, Roger. 2001 [1961]. Man, Play and Games. Translated by Mayer Barash. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Chang, Yizhe. 2016. Virtual Environment for Mechanical Assembly Situation and Its Application. Doctoral thesis, Stevens Institute of Technology. Costikyan, Greg. 2002. I Have No Words but I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games. In Computer Games and Digital Cultures, ed. Frans Mäyrä. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Deffenbaugh, Michael D., Daryl Johnson, Bo Yuan, and Peter Lutz. 2012. A Physical Channel in a Digital World. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Security and Management (SAM), Athens. Dreyfus, Hubert. 2001. On the Internet. New York and London: Routledge. Duncan, Sean C. 2011. Minecraft, Beyond Construction and Survival. Well Played (1, 1). Pittsburgh. ETC Press - Carnegie Mellon University. EscBoss. 2014. Garry’s Mod Beginners Tutorial (COMMENTARY) BETTER VERSION. YouTube Video. 23:27. Uploaded by EscBoss, April 23. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoYHALkoUrE. Facepunch Studios. 2010. Fretta Contest Winners. Archived from the original on July 10, 2011. Retrieved 15 January 2018. Frasca, Gonzalo. 2001. Simulation 101: Simulation Versus Representation. Ludology.org, 16–17. Accessed 5 June 2016. http://www.ludology.org/articles/sim1/simulation101.html. Fraser, Emma. 2016. Awakening in Ruins: The Virtual Spectacle of the End of the City in Video Games. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 8 (2): 177–196. Gammage, Bill. 2011. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

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Gargin. 2023. How I made the Most Unnerving Nextbot AI. YouTube Video. 10:24. Uploaded October 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXyRKXb 2NQQ GrobeMan Guides & Gameplay. 2017. Garry’s Mod Tutorial for Beginners! (How to Play Garry’s Mod Basics: What Is It, How Garry’s Mod Works). YouTube Video. 15:01. Uploaded July 21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= N9N63OhRPjU. Hayes, C.J. 2007. Changing the Rules of the Game: How Video Game Publishers Are Embracing User-Generated Derivative Works. Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 21 (2): 567–587. Heavy-D. 2013. GGN40 Scullsmasher. Steam Workshop Page. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=143273665. Accessed 5 April 2023. Huizinga, Johan. 1964 [1955]. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Johns, Ralph, and Russel Lowe. 2006. Unreal Editor as a Virtual Design Instrument in Landscape Architecture Studio. Journal of Design Research 5 (2). Kierkegaard, Søren. 2001. “The Present Age”, a Literary Review. Translated by A. Hannay. London and New York: Penguin. Kirby, Alan. 2009. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle The Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. New York and London: Continuum. Konior, B. 2020. Modelling Realism: Digital Media, Climate Simulations and Climate Fictions. Paradoxa 31: 55–76. Küchlich, Julian. 2005. Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry the History of Modding the Economy of Modding. The Fibreculture Journal 5. Lee, Shuen-Shing. 2003. I Lose, Therefore I Think—A Search for Contemplation amid Wars of Push Button Glare. Game Studies 3 (2). Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. London: Penguin. Leyda, Julia. 2016. The Cultural Affordances of Cli-Fi. In The Dystopian Impulse in Contemporary Cli-Fi: Lessons and Questions from a Joint Workshop of the IASS and the JFKI (FU Berlin). Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (November 2016 Working Paper). 11–18. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1979. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MsBreezy. 2016a. Running from Presidency. YouTube Video. 7:38. Uploaded by MsBreezy on October 25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdi6 DY7CHNA. ———. 2016b. WEIRDEST SERVER EVER. YouTube Video. 7:47. Uploaded by MsBreezy on November 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Yrx2 LF8B8w.

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Newman, Garry. 2015. Paying for Mods There Are Still Free Mods. Blogpost on garry.net. Accessed 25 March 2018. https://garry.net/posts/2015/04/24/ paying-for-mods/ Pearson, Craig. 2012. A Brief History of Garry’s Mod: Count to Ten. Rock Paper Shotgun, August. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/08/29/a-­brief-­ history-­of-­garrys-­mod-­count-­to-­ten/. Postigo, Hector. 2003. From Pong to Planet Quake: Post-Industrial Transitions from Leisure to Work. Information, Communication & Society 6 (4): 593–607. Sotamaa, O. 2003. Computer Game Modding, Intermediality and Participatory Culture. New Media, 1–5. ———. 2004. Playing it My Way? Mapping the Modder Agency. Internet Research Conference 5: 19–22. ———. 2005. “Have Fun Working With Our Product!”: Critical Perspectives on Computer Game Mod Competitions. In Proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Conference: Changing Views - Worlds in Play. Vancouver. ———. 2010. When the Game Is Not Enough: Motivations and Practices Among Computer Game Modding Culture. Games and Culture 5 (3): 239–255. Steam Charts. 2023. Accessed 4 April 2023. https://steamcharts.com/app/4000. Steam Workshop. 2023. Accessed 4 April 2023. https://steamcommunity.com/ app/4000/workshop/. Wirman, Hanna. 2009. On Productivity and Game Fandom. Transformative Works and Cultures 3: 1–40. Youtubers.me. 2023. VanossGaming. Youtubers.me. Accessed April 31. https:// us.youtubers.me/vanossgaming/youtube-estimated-earnings.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

This book connects the language of computer games, graphics and culture to parallels in art history and geography to see how computer games might contribute to the broader idea of landscape. Returning to the etymological discussions that preface discussions of landscape, the shaping and layering of the world implied in the ‘skabe’ and ‘shaffen’, combined with the interplay of images and physical processes located in the Romantic and the Picturesque, we can now connect Schama’s statement that landscapes are a text on which generations write their recurring obsessions, to the layered landscapes of computer games. The single-player first-person shooter Half-Life 2 offered a landscape that is ludologically wrapped around the player, a safari of interlinked challenges that allows the player to temporarily inhabit the role of the hero and protagonist. During this adventure down the z-axis, the landscape emerged through the subtle resonance between the constrained perspective of the camera-gun and a fictional protagonist who is both saviour and alien. The relationship between the ruined sites of modernity in Half-Life 2 and films such as Terminator 2 betrayed a similar vocabulary of ‘ruined modernity’, where the narrative theme of the Promethean dystopia temporarily removed me from the directionless entropy of my office cubicle and allowed me to crawl out through the air-conditioning ducts into a post-apocalyptic landscape where my purpose was clear. The multiplayer arena of Counter-Strike collapsed my sense of heroic security and transformed my avatar into that of someone who just wasn’t as good at the game as everyone else. The © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Nelson, Computer Games As Landscape Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4_8

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landscape was no longer facing and confirming me, but mediating the competition between myself and other players who were facing each other through the landscape. By replacing the linear chain of structured challenges with a symmetrical sports field of repeated competition, a more virtuosic play emerged, from the amateur servers I trained on right up to the professional ESports leagues. The player-made origins of Counter-­ Strike reveal the productive tensions between computer game developers, modders and players, where everything from game mechanics, the style of play and the game environments emerge from a diffuse authorship and controversial patterns of ownership. Landscapes built for Counter-Strike are furnished by the objectification of the military and touristic gaze. The implicit question of the tourist ‘could I consume this place?’ is replaced by the appropriative question of the modder ‘could I play Counter-Strike here?’ If the ‘here’ is already a touristic site, all the better, as the objectifications of tourism do half the work of dissecting the world into a discrete set of self-fulfilling signs (otherwise known as a game asset library). This appropriation and conversion results in a typological convergence, where similar kinds of landscapes populate the competition pools of Counter-­ Strike servers (the industrial, the workplace, the rustic, the war zone and the touristic). Like other sports such as skateboarding, the challenge of converting non-game landscapes into Counter-Strike is transgressive and can inspire strong reactions. By comparing two school-shooter game landscapes, I demonstrated that once again, computer games must be analysed beyond a surface visual reading, and consider what sort of game is being played, by whom and for whose benefit. Successful Counter-Strike landscapes incubate economies similar to other sportsgrounds, becoming a medium for gambling, money laundering, product placement and other forms of monetisation that follow high-level competition and spectacle. The weapons skins economy helped to ensure the long-term popularity of Counter-Strike as an ESport, which, like the patronage of the Picturesque painting, became an indispensable factor for the signification of these landscapes. Shifting temporarily from a player to a modder, the Autosave: Redoubt project allowed me a detailed insight into the technical features of Valve Source Engine landscapes. In the discipline of virtual archaeology, I found a set of practical questions which helped highlight the representational biases and limit conditions between our geographical data, our historical data and the Valve Source Engine. The requirement to construct geometry ‘on grid’ forced the Autosave: Redoubt team to adjust the architectural

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structure of our site into something that would be congruent with the topological structure of the Hammer editing environment and while our survey data contained scale units that could be converted into Hammer units, like the ‘Lara Units’ of Tomb Raider, our tunnels ultimately had to be measured according to the spatial ‘feel’ of the game when experienced by through the avatar. This adventure with the Hammer level editor helped me see the landscapes of Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike as an assemblage of brushes, displacements and props, and prepared me for the final role as a player-modder in Garry’s Mod. Garry’s Mod was the logical conclusion of the tension between the modder and the player introduced in the earlier chapters, and reflects the more general upload and share mechanic of Web 2.0 culture. The structured ludus of Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2 was replaced by the sandbox void of paidia, and I was confronted with the game that is played after all other games have finished, or what happens when you finish a computer game and the engine keeps running. Garry’s Mod presented the underlying conditions of the computer game—a simulated environment of rule-based objects that can house almost anything so long as we accept the necessary reductions of the game engine hosting the simulation. Garry’s Mod revealed the ergodic semiotics of user-generated culture, spatialised in the quiet desolation of a Half-Life 2 derived landscape. It expanded the question ‘can I play Counter-Strike here?’ to ‘what is the world according to Garry’s Mod?’ and became an extreme example of Philippe Descola’s ‘dumb and odour-free’ Nature and Cubitt’s digital enclosure, where millions of objects from games and popular culture are all simulated together, mutually flattened by the limitations of the Valve Source Engine. Without the ludic structure of the single-player protagonist landscape or the multiplayer competitive arena, Garry’s Mod confronts us with an improvised playground with every toy we could imagine, but no great game to play. Alan Kirby’s ‘digimodern’ formulation articulates a productivity that transcends what might otherwise be dismissed as the apocalyptic recycling of postmodern memes. If the defining landscape quality of the single-player FPS landscape was the pleasure of being the heroic protagonist, looking past the recycling of postmodern rubble, Garry’s Mod reveals a patchwork landscape of productive cultural re-evaluation. It is a haphazard digimodern playground, where temporary meanings are continually reassembled by players, users and developers from an impossibly large lexicon of cultural fragments. The ludic content and emergent behaviour of Garry’s Mod resembles the content and structure of Web 2.0 platforms and led me to describe Garry’s

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Mod as the ‘YouTube of computer games’. Returning to Mr and Mrs Andrews, just as enclosure formed an important framework for the materiality and visual representations of the painting, the digimodern enclosure forms a key extrinsic paradigm for what is being represented and reflected in the landscape of Garry’s Mod, a haphazard Web 2.0 swamp, a landscape of temporary pseudo-communities, built from the megalomania of participatory consumerism. The haphazard structure of digimodern texts predicts that unexpected behaviours will arise from these platforms, and the speculative use Garry’s Mod as a multiplayer swamp for architectural design or a stenographic landscape for covert communication in a surveilled internet emerged as two examples of the unpredictable productivity these types of landscapes afford. Over the past three decades, the graphical capabilities of computer games have advanced dramatically from more constrained implementations of 2D, isometric and low fidelity 3D graphics, to the increasingly high detailed simulations we see in modern AAA titles. For the visually minded scholar, these advances can tempt us into comparisons between film and prior media which, while interesting, can miss larger points about what computer games are actually communicating, just as the presence of guns or violence on screen can distract the ethically minded scholar from understanding precisely what type of game people are playing. After a lengthy exploration of the underlying topics of landscape and computer games, this book analysed the Valve Source Engine as a landscape medium, via a small selection of its most well-known games. The Valve Source Engine gives us games that are somewhere in the mainstream middle of such potential misreadings—their 3D graphics are advanced, but can still be read as digital collages, and their relationship to controversies over violent representations are contemporary, but long enough ago for us to gain some useful perspective. As the art historian understands the materiality of canvas and oil paint or the film scholar understands celluloid, the history and function of this engine helped to enrich an understanding of the landscapes it produced, from its origins as a proprietary mod of the Quake Engine, to the ever shifting sands of the Midas Limit of user-­ generated content, where the potlatch of freely donated creativity continues, until it doesn’t. The use of landscape terms such as ‘enclosure’ by media theorists like Cubitt helped me build bridges between these histories, to which I added further specific comparisons such as that between the ‘ha-ha’ and the End User Licence Agreement. I became fascinated by the notion of Garry’s Mod as an enclosure of the world according to the

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Valve Source Engine, not just contingent on the computational structure of how the engine simulates a landscape, but a direct result of the relationships that the engine upholds between people, from proprietors and developers to modders, players and machinima-makers. The conclusion of this analysis revealed the broader meaning of what a computer game landscape is, how it can be experienced, and how it exists in a broader socio-­historical context. It is what it becomes when played, the player organises its objects into hierarchical meanings depending on the game at hand. It is the layering of who made it and what pieces they used to put it together. It is something that can be played differently, put to different purposes, and transformed and stretched as the medium allows, to fit the purposes of whoever is holding the controller. When we look back at these landscapes, we see the trace of all of this, and the particular shapes these landscapes take on reflect the players, producers and produsers at any given time, spatialised into traversable environments, rendered on screen. The obvious question at the end of this book is, how would a parallel analysis of another contemporary computer game engine replicate or contradict the readings I derived from the Valve Source Engine? The structures of representation, play and licensing identified in this book are by no means exceptional, so I hope that the methods articulated here can be recycled or improved by others interested in similar topics, and would like to think that if my case study was replaced by another, then a different set of specific qualities would emerge, but that my landscape conclusions might paint a similar picture.

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Index1

A Agricultural revolution, 164 American frontier, 1 Apocalypse, 57–79, 157 Archaeology, 122, 123, 130, 165, 174 Architectural space, 23, 26, 52 Art history, 3, 4, 25, 53, 173 Australia, 14, 19, 19n1, 168 Autosave: Redoubt, 4, 6, 119–137, 146, 152, 174 Avatar, 6, 34–37, 44, 58–60, 67, 71, 78, 79, 89, 90, 92, 93, 104, 110, 129, 133, 145, 146, 148, 149, 155, 162, 173, 175 B Body, 22–26, 34, 36, 38, 51, 52, 57, 59, 60, 62, 95, 104, 131, 133, 144, 148

Boredom, 45, 45n2, 64, 151 Bunkers, 120, 123, 125, 128, 132, 134, 136 C Camera-gun, 59, 61, 62, 67, 69, 71, 79, 89, 90, 92–95, 108, 113, 123, 133, 173 Capitalism, 48, 78, 158, 159 Cartography, 15, 23 Chinese scroll paintings, 37, 38 Cognitive space, 26, 52, 71 Cole, Thomas, 1, 2, 17, 18 Colonial, 1, 3, 9, 10, 16, 17, 19, 19n1, 43, 106, 120, 121, 124, 125 Colonialism, 15, 16, 66, 164, 168 Competition, 6, 30, 42, 67, 87, 93, 96, 97, 104, 115, 142, 146, 148, 151, 158, 174

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Nelson, Computer Games As Landscape Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4

197

198 

INDEX

Copyright, 142, 143, 165 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO), 4, 6, 51, 83–115, 120, 123, 128, 129, 133, 141, 144, 164 CryEngine, 5 Cybertext, 32, 53, 163 D Dystopian, 75, 151 E Economic context, 4, 47 Emplacement, 43 Enclosure, 13–15, 48, 87, 88, 141, 152, 164, 165, 175, 176 Enclosures Acts, 12, 14 Encrypted, 168 End User Licence Agreement (EULA), 14, 83–88, 141–143, 176 Enhanced Dynamic Geo-Social Environment (EDGE), 109, 110, 113, 114 Enlightenment, 15, 16, 164 Environment, 3–7, 9–15, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 29, 34, 36, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50n4, 59–61, 69, 70, 75, 83–86, 90–96, 98–101, 103, 104, 106, 110, 112–114, 121, 127, 130, 132, 141, 144, 146, 149–152, 154, 161, 162n2, 164–167, 174, 175, 177 Ergodic, 32, 139, 156, 160, 164, 168, 175 Esports, 31n1, 48, 83, 103–105, 107, 115, 174 Existential space, 26, 52, 149

F Feminist, 11, 22, 53 Film, 4, 7, 10, 29, 41, 42, 49, 58, 60, 62, 65, 71, 74, 76, 94, 95, 112, 122, 125, 144, 151, 160, 173, 176 First-person shooters (FPS), 5, 6, 37, 38, 59, 63, 64, 98, 110, 123, 135, 136, 175 FPS, see First-person shooters G Gainsborough, Thomas, 1, 2, 114 Gambling, 6, 83, 104, 105, 115, 151, 174 Game engine, 4, 5, 76, 83–88, 109, 121–123, 126, 135–137, 142, 152, 175, 177 Gameplay condition, 31, 33, 49, 51, 52, 67, 78, 91, 149, 150 Gardens, 13, 41, 44, 61, 88, 103, 106 Garry's Mod, 4, 5, 7, 51, 121, 139–168, 175, 176 Goals, 6, 7, 50, 51, 53, 66, 69, 110, 112, 139, 142, 150, 165 Godot, 5 Golden Age, 12 H Ha-ha, 13, 83–88, 176 Half-Life 2, 4, 5, 51, 57–79, 83, 86, 87, 89–93, 95–97, 102, 114, 139, 141, 144, 145, 147, 148, 151, 157, 159, 162, 164, 173, 175 Hammer level editor, 119, 175 High school, 6, 109, 110 Hong Kong, 6, 119, 120, 124, 125, 134

 INDEX 

I Implied player, 34, 44, 50, 162 Industrial Revolution, 12 Isometric, 10, 37, 176 L Landscape, 1, 9–26, 29, 41–47, 58–62, 67–77, 83, 96–104, 108–115, 121, 125–132, 136–137, 141, 148–154, 173 Landschaft, 10, 70 Lapis lazuli, 47, 84 Line of sight, 25, 89, 90, 92–95, 97, 98, 102, 123, 128, 131, 137, 146 Ludic, 7, 33, 34, 38, 44, 49, 93, 137, 157, 160, 162, 175 Ludic architecture, 38, 39, 52, 90, 166 Ludology, 30 M Machinima, 143, 162 Marxist, 11, 13, 23, 25 Mechanics, 30, 32–34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 47, 48, 79, 137, 141, 150, 160, 162, 165, 174 Memescape, 155, 168 Midas Limit, 142, 176 Military, 6, 25, 48, 71, 93–95, 101, 102, 105–108, 110, 114, 115, 124, 174 Military gaze, 25, 95, 100 Modding, 5, 74, 84–88, 119–121, 127, 136, 139, 141–147, 164 Money laundering, 6, 83, 104–106, 115, 151, 174 Mountains, 9, 13, 17, 19, 20, 24, 40, 44, 46, 61, 120, 123, 133, 155

199

N Narrative, 7, 20, 29, 32, 37, 41, 66, 69, 71, 74, 88, 96, 98, 109, 123, 157, 158, 173 Nature, 1, 5, 10, 13, 15, 16, 21, 24, 42, 46, 61, 64, 65, 77, 88, 92, 97, 99, 104, 105, 109, 112, 122, 127, 130, 135, 153, 154, 157, 161, 164, 175 Neo-Baroque, 74, 87, 159 Nextbot, 162, 162n2, 163, 165 Not belonging, 69, 70 O The Office, 6, 102, 114 Otaku, 158 Ownership, 1, 7, 12–14, 23, 47, 88, 174 P Pastiche, 156, 159–161 Perceptual space, 26, 51, 52 Phenomenological, 20, 26, 36, 51 Phenomenology, 23–25, 37, 42, 71 Photorealistic, 76 Pictorial gaze, 62 Place, 3, 4, 11, 15, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 36–40, 42, 52, 58, 60, 61, 66, 70, 98, 99, 102, 113, 115, 122, 130, 131, 150, 174 Platform studies, 4, 48, 84 Play, 9, 26, 30–32, 38, 40, 44, 48–52, 64, 69, 85, 88, 89, 92–94, 98, 105, 109, 110, 115, 121, 135, 137, 139, 144, 145, 148–152, 155, 158, 160, 162, 174, 175, 177 Playbour, 85 Postmodern, 74, 121, 139, 155–164, 175

200 

INDEX

Procedurality, 33 Prometheus, 71 Prospect and refuge, 20, 59 Prosumers, 14 R Realism, 7, 47, 76, 121, 128, 130, 136, 137 Remix, 7, 42, 71–77, 121, 153, 160 Representation, 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 15, 20, 23–25, 32–34, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 48, 74, 84–86, 93, 100, 106, 108–110, 113, 114, 122, 123, 130, 132, 136, 137, 150, 151, 158, 162, 168, 176, 177 Resource extraction, 14, 15, 48, 154 Romantic, 1, 11, 15–21, 42, 43, 61, 70, 106, 151, 168, 173 RTS games, 37, 38 Ruins, 13, 17, 46, 61, 68, 70, 74, 75, 77, 100, 125, 157 Rules, 7, 10, 29–34, 40, 50, 60, 63, 85, 90–92, 100, 123, 124, 130, 133, 139, 147, 157 S Safari, 6, 7, 66, 68, 69, 71, 77–79, 89, 90, 93, 95, 114, 139, 146, 151, 164, 173 Sandbox, 7, 139, 144–146, 148, 150, 152, 166, 175 School shooting, 108–111, 113, 114 Scroll, 9, 37, 38 Shing Mun Redoubt, 120, 121, 123–125, 128, 132, 133, 136 Simulation, 5, 32–34, 37, 40, 46, 48, 50, 50n4, 60, 65, 79, 84, 94, 105, 109, 110, 113, 114, 126n5, 130, 150, 152, 165, 175, 176 Situationist, 7, 121, 166

Social Disintegration Theory, 111, 113, 114 Software, 4, 5, 7, 14, 31, 39, 42, 47, 77, 84, 85, 87, 93, 109, 115, 119, 120, 122, 126, 139, 143, 165, 168 Somatic space, 26, 51, 52 Space, 3, 4, 7, 15, 20, 22–26, 24n2, 29, 33–47, 51, 52, 57–60, 62, 69, 83, 89, 92, 96, 98, 115, 122, 126, 132, 133n6, 137, 141, 145, 149, 150, 161 Sport, 6, 7, 31, 49, 67, 83, 93, 103–106, 108, 109, 112, 114, 115, 139, 151, 159, 174 Stublimity, 44, 45 Sublime, 1, 15, 17, 44–46, 133, 151 T Technological sublime, 44, 45 Technology, 3, 14, 25, 71, 76, 114, 122, 125, 158 Theme park, 6, 62–67, 98 Topoanalysis, 46 Topology, 40, 42, 44, 48, 50, 52, 66, 104, 120, 137, 149–151, 154 Tourism, 6, 64, 83–115, 151, 174 Tourist, 7, 17, 60, 61, 98–102, 106, 109, 114, 174 Trees, 1, 9, 23, 89, 146, 147, 151–154 U Ultramarine blue, 47 Unreal Engine, 5, 122 User-generated content, 6, 7, 88, 139, 142, 144, 158, 176

 INDEX 

V Valve Corporation, 64, 72–76, 85–87, 100, 101, 106 Valve Source Engine, 4–7, 75, 83–86, 119, 121, 126, 127, 130–132, 136, 137, 139, 141, 142, 144, 147, 148, 152, 153, 162, 174–177 Violence, 107–110, 112–114, 123, 137, 176 Virtual archaeology, 122, 123, 130, 165, 174

201

W Web 2.0, 7, 88, 139, 143, 145, 158, 163, 165, 168, 175, 176 Wilderness, 10, 14–16, 18, 19, 19n1, 79 World-shaped hall, 66 Y Yosemite, 19, 19n1 YouTube, 7, 143–145, 155, 161–163