Phantasmal Spaces: Archetypical Venues in Computer Games 9781501332920, 9781501332951, 9781501332944

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Phantasmal Spaces

Phantasmal Spaces Archetypical Venues in Computer Games

MATHIAS FUCHS

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 This paperback edition published in 2021 Copyright © Mathias Fuchs, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Isle of the Dead, Arnold Böcklin, 1883. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-­party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents Acknowledgements  vii



Introduction: Phantasmal Spaces  1

1 The Road  11 1.1  Road phantasms  12 1.2  Driving games and driving game interfaces  16 1.3  Psychology of driving  19 1.4  Transmedia road phantasms  22

2 The Ruin  27 2.1  Painting decay  30 2.2  Digital dust  32 2.3  Sigmund Freud’s death drive and the opponents thereof  33 2.4  S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Tarkovsky’s wastelands  35

3 The Cave  39 3.1  Cave men  39 3.2  Boolean subtract  40 3.3  Claustrophobia  42 3.4  C-movies  48

4 The Cloud  53 4.1  The beauty of clouds and industrial steam  53 4.2  Cloud rendering  56 4.3  Head in the clouds: daydreaming  62 4.4  Transmedia cloud formations  64

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Contents

5 The Cliff  69 5.1  Running and falling  69 5.2  Physics engines  72 5.3  Psychology of risk taking  74 5.4  Leaping from one medium to another  78

6 The Forest  85 6.1  Nibelungen forests  85 6.2  Tree-generators  88 6.3  The uncanny  91 6.4  Tale of Tale of Tales  95

7 The Portal  99 7.1  Doors, gateways, passages  100 7.2  Warp zones  102 7.3  Rites of passage  105 7.4  Portals in transmedia spacetelling  106

8 The Island  109 8.1  You are alone!  109 8.2  Chiselling mountains – fetching pretty sunrises  113 8.3  Really alone!!!  119 8.4  Robinson Crusoes  123

Conclusion: Atmospheric Spaces  127

Notes  137 References  147 Ludography  157 Index of names  163 Index of games  167

Acknowledgements A

n important part of this book has been written when I had the privilege  to be a Senior Fellow of MECS in Lüneburg. MECS is an Institute for Advanced Study on ‘Media Cultures of Computer Simulation’ funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at Leuphana University Lüneburg. It became apparent during the time of my fellowship that computer simulation and computer games have a lot in common and I owe inspiration about the epistemological basis of large-­scale simulations to the MECS directors Claus Pias and Martin Warnke. Together with the other fellows we had ample opportunities to discuss which problems and knowledge constellations can be addressed via computer simulation, which new forms of knowledge it generates and to what extent it represents a historical break. I also would like to thank my colleagues from the Institute of Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media (ICAM) for their critical and supportive comments on my ideas. The psychoanalytical section in this book would not have been possible without the intellectual input from the research network ‘Affect- and psychotechnology studies – emergent technologies of (self-) control mechanisms on the affect and emotions level’. Marie-Luise Angerer from the University of Potsdam has been directing this network and was a source of inspiration and support. Markus Rautzenberg helped me from the very beginning of this publication project with his profound knowledge about philosophy and games and his friendly patience in discussing complicated matters. Chris Bateman opened my eyes to many aspects of the games industry and to the history and philosophy of video games. Ernst Strouhal from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna has long since been a mentor and friend whom I learned a lot from: theory of board games, magic tricks, chess and good food. A heartfelt thank you to my editors and proofreaders at Bloomsbury for working so efficiently and stressfree in the planning and production phases. Finally, my sons Renzo (11) and Noam (7) showed me games that I would not have looked at on my own. It is due to their enthusiasm about Wii games and smartphone apps like the fabulous Mekorama (2016) that I learned to appreciate ‘unsophisticated’ visuals and saw that gaming joy is not a matter of high-­end pseudorealistic graphic engines.

Introduction: Phantasmal Spaces

Everyone I know has seen the clouds in the sky. Many people have traversed a forest. Some have jumped from a cliff. Most of the people I know have been in a cave. And almost everyone has been on an island and travelled on a road.

A

ll these people share an experience of space that is strongly anchored in the spatial disposition of a venue, a passage or a site and embraced by the poetics of these spaces. As much as the venues are topological containers for an individual to be situated within, they are also poetic machines that could be viewed with the eyes of a psychologist, a psychoanalyst, a philosopher or an artist. This book is written with the intention to obtain alternating points of view. Gaston Bachelard found a fitting notion for such a diversity of methods, when it comes to an analysis of space. He suggested that the ‘radiation’ of the poetic images that surround spatial archetypes should undergo some form of ‘topo-­ analysis’ (Bachelard [1957] 1964: xxiv). Obviously alluding to psycho analysis Bachelard’s topo-­analysis is more than a Freudian view on a topos. Bachelard acknowledges the relevance of the psychologist’s viewpoint and the psychoanalyst’s method, but he suggests that phenomenology introduces a new quality of resonating with the investigated spatial object. This resonance leads to a form of understanding that goes beyond knowledge. ‘Knowing must be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. Non-­knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge’ (Bachelard [1957] 1964: xxviii–xxix). For Bachelard topo-­analysis is the method of his choice to step from knowledge about the space to a form of intimacy with space. The philosopher states that he would not describe objectively geometrical and

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physical problems and that he would even go beyond the limitations of memory. ‘My research,’ he states, ‘is devoted to the domain of intimacy, to the domain in which psychic weight is dominant’ (Bachelard [1957] 1964: 12). The intention of this book is to deconstruct some of the clichés we have much too willingly accepted when dealing with archetypical spaces. I do not want to get rid of knowledge about spatial archetypes or to disconnect from the history of poetic, scientific or technological reasoning about space. On the contrary, I intend to relate observations from art history with innovations for computer games technology and to create cross-­references between findings from psychology and psychoanalysis with claims from media studies. The network of references suggested here is supposed to install a precise view on crucial details of the whole. With no attempt to cover the totality of spatial archetypes the method of a topo-­analysis that is based upon a multimodal approach hopes to provide a glimpse or even a close view on spaces of intimacy. ‘All the spaces of intimacy are designated by an attraction. Their being is well-­being. In these conditions, topoanalysis bears the stamp of a topophilia, and shelters and rooms will be studied in the sense of this valorization’ (Bachelard [1957] 1964: 12). A topophile project like this book is certainly subjective and the reason for selecting spatial archetypes like the ruin, the cave, the forest and the road amongst others can hardly be defended other than by stating bluntly: I detect a particular radiation that these spaces emit that is intense, lasting and rich in connotations. Other authors might have selected different spaces and actually this book could be substantially extended by adding further spatial archetypes, e.g. the ocean, the moon, the desert or many more. I hope, however, that many readers will sense a sonority that they have experienced as private and remote voices. The book shall also help in discovering that many of the private voices and ‘radiations’ are not as private as we think they are. There are certainly spatial dispositives that are related to ‘archetypes’ that C. G. Jung wants to trace back to what he calls ‘collective subconscious’. Bachelard warns from subscribing to the psychologist’s obsession of getting lost ‘in the inextricable chaos of psychological antecedents’ and uses C. G. Jung’s own words here (Bachelard [1957] 1964: xxviii) but he differs from Jung, when he states that we ‘must go beyond the problem of description – whether this description be objective or subjective, that is, whether it gives facts or impressions’ (Bachelard [1957] 1964: 4). The psychoanalyst’s method of making the unconscious conscious diverts the observer from seizing the specific reality of a spatial arrangement. Bachelard admits that the approach of the psychologist, the psychoanalyst and the phenomenologist all contribute to an understanding of the object of inquiry, but it is the ‘under’ in ‘understanding’ that he is suspicious of. For the psychoanalyst ‘sublimation . . . is nothing but a vertical

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Introduction: Phantasmal Spaces

compensation, a flight upwards, exactly in the same way that compensation is a lateral flight. And right away, the psychoanalyst will abandon ontological investigation of the image to dig into the past of man’ (Bachelard [1957] 1964: xxvi). In other words, the psychoanalyst cannot appreciate what is, but needs to see what lies underneath. Bob Dylan phrased the attempt to free one’s mind from what lies underneath immediate sensory perception in his song ‘Gates of Eden’ when he says: At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams With no attempts to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means DYLAN 1965 For both Dylan and Bachelard the reserve against depth of analysis does not keep them from acknowledging that there is something ‘in the ditch’. Bachelard concedes that ‘we encounter a co-­operation between psychoanalysis and phenomenology which must be stressed if we are to dominate the human phenomenon. As a matter of fact, the image has to be understood phenomenologically in order to give it psychoanalytical efficacy. The phenomenologist, in this case, will accept the psychoanalyst’s image in a spirit of shared trepidation’ (Bachelard [1957] 1964: 19). Yet, both the psychoanalyst and the phenomenologist cannot stop at that point. ‘The psychoanalyst cannot cling to the superficiality of metaphors and comparisons, and the phenomenologist has to pursue every image to the very end.’ In a surprising thought experiment Bachelard finally sees the psychoanalyst and the phenomenologist reading Poe’s Tales (c. 1832–45) together and imagines them understanding what each of them can achieve from the co-­operation. Edgar Allan Poe is indeed a key reference for what I will call Phantasmal Spaces. Poe’s tales of mystery create spaces that are imaginative and owe much more to the power of imagination than to the persuasiveness of similarity to what we consider to be real. A phantasm can turn a hut into a palace, but this does not mean that a palace has been created for real. Bachelard phrases this with the words: ‘It would be quite superfluous for such images to be true. They exist’ (Bachelard [1957] 1964: 178). The images are mental images and such mental images constitute phantasms when combined with ideas. Fox Harrell suggests a very wide definition of what a phantasm is, when he states: ‘A phantasm is the result of human imaginative cognition’ (Harrell 2013: 3). Being aware of the relevance of material and immaterial determinants and of respective mediatic transformations Harrell insists that phantasms cannot be reduced to neurobiological processes only, but rather are ‘a combination of imagery (mental or sensory) and ideas’ (Harrell 2013: 4).

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This is to say that it would be reductionist and idealistic to speak of phantasms as creatures of the mind. Phantasms have a significant real-­world impact and in this regard they differ from daydreams. The way phantasms are articulated, is based on worldviews that contribute to an epistemic domain. Depending on the worldview the observer subscribes to, the images that are combined with the ideas can be quite different. Let us again take the example of the hut and the palace. A citizen of the Democratic Republic of Germany who views the world from a socialist perspective might consult images of the Palace of the Republic at Berlin’s former Marx-Engels-Platz to match those with his concept of working-­class palaces. A captive fan of Tolkien’s fiction will grab different images to come to terms with his phantasm of palaces. Visitors of the Royal Palace in Final Fantasy XII’s Rabanastre will again refer to another set of sensory images that they encounter when walking through the halls of the palace which is decorated in a voluptuous, orientalistic computer game style. It seems that worldviews overlap in the case of phantasmal spaces. Is the underlying worldview of the Rabanastre Palace inspired by orientalism, computer game design or some Hollywood costume drama staged in the Middle Ages (as one would assume from the music and game character voices)? Obviously we have a mix of worldviews here: a few of the audio-­visual elements are coloured by romantic European ideas of the East, others by concepts of how a computer game should look like and still others by costume movies of the Kirk Douglas type. Fox Harrell calls mixed worldview phantasms ‘revealed phantasms’ and I will argue that phantasmal spaces are usually built upon more than just one single worldview. To draw from one of the examples that I will talk about later, the phantasmal space of the ruin is built upon different worldviews like ancient Greek mysticism, German romanticism, Hollywood action movies, the apocalyptic prophecies from the Book of Daniel, and many more. When I talk about Phantasmal Spaces, I also assume that these conceptual constructs are constituted from a multitude of spatial images that are rooted in different worldviews. It has to be noted here that the notion of phantasmal spaces differs from Harrell’s ‘phantasm space’ (Harrell 2013: 11) that he uses synonymous to ‘phantasm’. In a first attempt to define what phantasmal spaces are, I suggest to think of them as topological archetypes that combine mental and sensory images with ideas that stem from different worldviews – and not a combination of ideas and images that are embedded within one single worldview. It is difficult, if not impossible, to dissect the conglomerate of systems of reference that we unconsciously rely upon when making sense of something. We refer to a concept of Viennese cuisine when talking about a certain type of food and discover that most of the ingredients of this cuisine

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are Bohemian, Hungarian, Polish, Jewish, French or Italian. But even if we were to separate the dishes that have strong Hungarian kitchen-­historical influences like the goulash from others that we call ‘typical Austrian’, like the Bohemian dumplings that have been introduced by female cooks from the neighbouring Northern country in the nineteenth century, we cannot assign the ‘Hungarian’ dishes to one frame of reference. We have to acknowledge that goulash is called Pörkölt in Hungary and that the Szekler-­goulash that most Austrians consider a national dish has not gotten its name from the Székelys, (also referred to as Szeklers, a Hungarian minority now living in Romania). We need to understand that a registrar with the name József Székely ordered a combination of Pörkölt and sauerkraut in his favourite restaurant in Budapest in 1846. What he called ‘Kraut à la Székely’ thereafter became well known as Szegedinergulasch in Austria. I am not trying to teach Viennese cooking here, but I want to point out how systems of reference are inextricably interwoven and often hard to dissect. Fox Harrell uses another example to show how irevealed phantasms can be ‘immediately understood and uncontroversial in meaning in their native cultural settings’ (Harrell 2013: 10). It sounds convincing when he points out that the sensory images for the notion of ‘woman’ differ in the cultural contexts of Western countries, India and Oman. Harrell explains that three different worldviews tend to connect images of a stylized figure of a woman when indicating that a room is a ladies’ room. Obviously the iconic signs showing a black and white figure wearing a skirt is clearly different to the figure wearing a sari and the latter can with little effort be differentiated from the figure with Muslim-­style clothes. Harrell is also right in stating that the worldviews that generated the images can be traced back – or be ‘revealed’ as he likes to call it. The fact that the process of inscribing meaning and detecting the cultural backgrounds of meaning making in each of the three particular cases is immediate and uncontroversial is, however, due to the fact that the images are iconic, prototypical and unequivocal. That’s just what icons are. If Harrell had extended the range of visual objects from being black and white to coloured, or from being graphic symbols to photographs, Harrell would have had to admit that signification is not always unambiguous. A photograph of a Scotsman in traditional kilt displays the shape of a person with a garment of trapezoidal shape, but it does not necessarily denote womanhood. The phantasm connected to such an image could as well be the phantasm of the Scottish Highlands. It could also be, depending on the kilt’s pattern, the phantasm of London-­based fashion in the stylistic registers of Burberry or Vivienne Westwood’s autumn/winter collection from 1993/4. The kilt obviously goes with worldviews as disparate as those of traditional Scotsmanship, Punk or the fashion industry. My first objection against Harrell’s understanding of

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phantasms is therefore that phantasms can never be ‘immediately understood and uncontroversial in meaning’, as he states on page 10 of his brilliant book Phantasmal Media (2013). Harrell has to be credited for acknowledging that the sari–skirt differentiation is not as simple as it looks at first sight when he observes that: ‘many women in other countries such as Bangladesh, Mauritius and the United States also wear saris’ (Harrell 2013: 8). My second objection is that the interpreting community is never as homogenous as Harrell thinks it could be. The phantasms that he hopes to be able to detect in ‘their native cultural settings’ (Harrell 2013: 8) are set in cultural, historic and political contexts that are far from being stable and that are heterogeneous to a high degree for most modern societies. If revealing a phantasm means ‘making conscious the awareness of the cultural worldview from which the phantasm is drawn’, then I am afraid that revealing a phantasm is an impossible task. The worldview is not a shared belief of a group of sign-­ makers and of meaning-­makers. One could attempt to argue that a phantasm that is created by an individual via a novel, a musical composition or painting has a single native source, but the collective creation of phantasms that this book is about are not based on one single worldview or one single person’s worldview, but rather on a conglomerate of different worldviews. The fragments of viewing the world are sometimes melded together into what looks like a common spirit, an overarching programme or a conceptual framework, but when looked at in detail, the fragments disassemble quickly. Is the West Coast lifestyle somebody’s native cultural setting? Or is it the spirit of tolerance in the melting pot of New York? Or would we rather have to look at the pieces that make up the Californian phantasm, and differentiate between a Hispanic fast food employee in San Jose and a Berkeley professor? Is the phantasm of New York anything else than ‘anything goes’? Or is there just a phantasmal space that is currently labelled New York City and contains a kaleidoscope of ideas, concepts, images and worldviews? I will in this book argue that phantasmal spaces are made up from components, fragments and singularities that imbue colours, atmospheric content and a multitude of stories and connotations. I will for this reason not differentiate between revealed phantasms and unrevealed ones and use the notion of phantasmal spaces to conduct a topo-­ analysis of spatial archetypes. The topo-­analysis could be seen as a method that assembles the observations from different disciplines, worldviews and individuals to arrive at a panorama of phantasms that hover above a spatial archetype. When I say ‘space’ here, I need to add that I will most of the time not be talking about ‘continuous, unbound, or unlimited extent in every direction’, i.e. an abstract and ‘pure’ space (Vella 2013: 2). Daniel Vella is right, when he demands a differentiation between space, as an abstract quality, and ‘place’

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as inhabited space. A place is a venue we have already stepped into and where we have experienced moving around, seeing objects, hearing sounds and having had contact with others (humans, monsters, animals, robots, AIs). As Yi-Fu Tuan phrases it, we have changed ‘amorphous space into articulated geography’ (Tuan 1977: 72). It seems to me that Yi-Fu Tuan and Daniel Vella both assume that we can start from a void, an abstract spatial a priori that has to be filled with meaning via physical movement and time-­consuming cognitive exploration. This will then, Vella tells us, actuate ‘both an actual, physical traversal and an exploratory shift’ (Vella 2013: 3). This sounds plausible to me, as long as we start exploring space in an unknown environment. As a rather random example let’s take a young student from Pine Bluff, who has never in his or her life left Arkansas. This student decides to take a trip to Venice in Europe. The only possibility to develop a feeling of place there is to explore the amorphous space of the city of Venice: take a walk from Piazza San Marco to the Rialto Bridge and then try to find the Palazzo CavalliFranchetti. Later take a vaporetto and visit Burano. It will take some time to get acquainted with this location and finally become familiar with it. Everything is different than what it was in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Not even Venice, Arkansas helps our traveller because the latter has not the slightest resemblance to the European Venice. The main requirements for the discovery of the ‘personality of the place’ (Tuan 1977) are time and movement to be spent and performed in the unfamiliar, new place. But then again, let’s think of another traveller. This person is a learned scholar on Italian history and an expert on Renaissance and Baroque architecture with a research focus on North Italian art and architecture. She has frequently been to Florence, Milan, Siena, Venice, Padua and Trieste. Drop this person in any of these cities and the ‘personality of the place’, the historic context and the aesthetic particularities of each of these cities will pop up within a tenth of a second. The scholar does not have to move, she does not even have to spend a lot of time there. She can just run her internal cinema of images, sounds and smells to dive deep into the place. In her case the place-­experience does not follow the spatial exploration, it precedes space. If you are prepared to accept my observations about the place-­space dynamics as plausible then I would like to ask whether similar mechanisms are imaginable in games. Is it not true that a newbie in Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) has to spend hours to turn the undifferentiated landscape into something that makes sense? And does it not even take longer than that to arrive at a feeling of place in and around Hyrule castle? In so far I can follow the hypothesis of Vella (2013) and Tuan (1977). But when it comes to routine Zelda players and adepts of the Zelda universe, things look different. A player who is more familiar with the valleys, rivers and mountains of the country of Hyrule than

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with the streets and places of his own physical urban environment, might start the console with Zelda and feel the place at once. He might later on explore new spaces in Nintendo’s ‘Open Air’1 game, but the whole world is his place from the beginning on. In the case of those at home at Hyrule the game starts on native grounds. It starts place-­bound and then expands spatially. That is why I am opposing Tuan’s topo-­chronology. Tuan says: ‘What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value’ (Tuan 1977: 6). I would like to add: there are cases where place is the point of origin. Then space travelling commences and wider grounds are incorporated. Due to the variety of space-­place dialectics and the complex dynamics of experienced, undifferentiated, pure, inhabited, inherited and personalized spaces, I will stick to the simple term space when talking about what the main topic of this book is: Phantasmal Spaces. Phantasmal spaces belong to the aesthetic regime. As we will see later, the phantasms are independent of a specific materiality, even though they will be looked at from the viewpoint of a new-­materialist discourse. Colours, shapes, textures and tones contribute to a special phantasm, yet, none of those can define a phantasm. The reason for that is the process of exchange with sister materialities and brother media. As Daniel Martin Feige observes, ‘the computer game has to be unveiled in the light of its exchange processes with other aesthetic media’ (Feige 2015: 23). So have spatial phantasms. We will never understand what the phantasm of the forest is if we look at oil paintings of woods only. We will never understand what the space of the road in computer games comprises of, if we miss out on road movies, photography of the road, novels and stories about the roads. This book is therefore an exploration of spatial phantasms of digital games but it relies on looking at media other than digital games. The book has a subchapter on intermedial exchange and transmedial transfer for each of the large explorations into The Road, The Ruin, The Cave, The Cloud, The Cliff, The Forest, The Portal and The Island. Readers who are mainly interested in transmediality and want to understand what is going on in between media might develop a reading strategy that traverses the book via the subchapters 1.4, 2.4, 3.4, 4.4, 5.4, 6.4, 7.4 and 8.4. In this way, they will leap from one medium to another, as the title within The Cliff – Leaping from One Medium to Another suggests. Other readers might be interested in the psychological analysis of games or a psychoanalysis of the players of games. For those readers, another shortcut is possible. Start with 1.3 – Psychology of Driving, and continue with the third subchapters of each of the large topical chapters, i.e. 2.3, 3.3, 4.3, until you arrive at 5.3, Psychology of Risk Taking. Then proceed with 6.3, to read about Freud’s conception of the Uncanny, continue with 7.3 about Rites of Passage and finish with 8.3 about the

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psychology of loneliness. There are other ways to create non-­linear reading strategies for those who have a strong interest in games technology or for readers whose affection is directed to art history. I hope that readers who follow my invitation will in the end have grown some appetite to read the whole book, but this is up to the reader. How is this book structured? The book is structured in sections that deal with the topoi of The Road, The Ruin, The Cave, The Cloud, The Cliff, The Forest, The Portal and The Island. Each of these topoi will be looked at and critically analysed with regard to aesthetics, games technology, psychoanalysis and intertextuality. Let’s call these approaches methods.2 This structural grid of seven topoi and four methods provides the reader with a systematic framework to understand a complex phenomenon and to pick and choose favourite aspects, topoi and approaches (and thereby read the book in a non-­linear way). Think of the book as a matrix. You have eight rows (the chapters or the respective topoi) and four columns (the methods). Within this matrix you can move like a rook chess piece. You could progress vertically from one topoi to another, or you could move horizontally from one method to another. But no one stops you from moving like a knight, a pawn, a king or whatever you like. Nelson Goodman found a fitting description for such a manner of creative non-­ linear reading when he recommends reading a book of his in a particular fashion: This book does not run a straight course from beginning to end. It hunts; and in the hunting it sometimes worries the same racoon in different trees, or different racoons in the same tree, or even what turns out to be no racoon in any tree. GOODMAN 1978: ix This structure of the book offers freedom, but it also asks for readiness to cope with swift changes in regard to method and topic. Chapters and subchapters are, however, held together by spatial settings in computer games that serve as points of reference, as signposts for orientation, and as evocative sources for historical, emotive and phantasmal content. Ruins, forests, islands and clouds do not only denote real-­world objects: they also suggest and bring forward emotional states, historical context, atmospheric ‘attunement’ (Massumi 2014) and aesthetic programmes that go beyond direct semiotic reference. The author of this book invites you to tune in with rocks, trees and clouds. We will look at The Road, The Ruin, The Cave, The Cloud, The Cliff, The Forest, The Portal and The Island through the looking glass of games and try to see what these phantasmal spaces do to us and what they do to computer games.

1 The Road

Well we know where we’re goin’ But we don’t know where we’ve been And we know what we’re knowin’ But we can’t say what we’ve seen TALKING HEADS: ROAD TO NOWHERE 1985

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his chapter is about roads. We will look into roads in games, roads in movies, roads that have been sung about, painted roads and narrated roads. The objective is to unveil some of what Talking Heads describe as a lack of knowledge about ‘where we’ve been’. Coincidently we will have to accept that we do not always ‘know where we’re going’. The method of investigation into the phantasmal space of the road is fourfold. In section 1.1 we will look into selected pieces from the history of painting, photography, cinematic art and computer games. Section  1.2 has a closer look at the interfaces for driving race tracks, roads and highways in computer game simulations. Focusing on yet another aspect of racing games section  1.3 intends to concentrate on the psychology of driving. Without saying too much at this point a proposal by German phenomenologist Hans-Georg Gadamer is helpful. Gadamer observes that ‘the ordering and shaping of the movement of the game itself’ is more important than ‘the solution of the task’ (Gadamer 1989: 97). In section 1.4 we will investigate transmedia road phantasms. It is interesting to see that such diverse mediatic statements like Edward Hopper’s Gas painting (1940), Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider movie (1969) and Rockstar Games’ GTA5 (2013) do not only share a repository of signs and symbols, but also seem to draw from a joint atmosphere and a spirit of being on the road that goes beyond the boundaries of media, cultures and times.

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1.1 Road phantasms Novels, paintings, photos and movies told us stories about the road long before computer games introduced the road as an archetypical traverse: a line in space that points towards a venue at an unreachable destination. The road has waysides and deviations, yet, in its essence the road is the never-­ending progression towards some point at which we will never arrive. But arrival is not the issue here. As Robert Louis Stevenson put it: ‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive’ (Stevenson 1883). The phantasmal space of the road is different to what a road is on Google Maps or on traditional roadmaps. The road in the latter cases is the connection of two points A and B, that have no meaning other than that a number of lines have to be drawn that tell the traveller how best to get from A to B. The directions that we receive do not account for the beauty of the roads that we might use and they do not account for the dangers, the hardship and the feeling of despair on our way. Roads in computer games do often lack the point of departure, because all that matters is the destination. ‘We don’t know where we’ve been’ (Talking Heads 1985) describes the perspective of a player in a computer game like Outrun (1986). The player has no rear view mirror and what he or she needs to do is to press the gas pedal and move forward.

FIGURE 1.1  Screenshot from GTA5 (Rockstar Games 2013).

the road

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Even if we do not know what the place is like that we are supposed to reach, we keep rolling. The waysides consist of a monotonous and arbitrary selection of items that have no other function than to demonstrate that we are actually moving. It does not matter whether these objects are palm trees, houses, rocks or large advertisements. Our mission is to drive even though we know that we will never arrive. This feeling has its parallels in literature, movies and photographs and has been portrayed by Jack Kerouac in On the Road (1957), Walker Evans’ Roadside Stories of the 1930s, or Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958). Frank’s series of unpopulated roads is a celebration of the vanishing point of the street and of the landscape that is almost invisible in his photographs, but can be deciphered as empty, hostile and inhuman. The roads that we see on the photographs show no sign of settledness. Even the cars that are visible in some of his works – like the one in Automobile on US 285, New Mexico (Frank 1955) feel unmanned. The car is too distant to reveal the identity of drivers, passengers or provide clues to the owners of the car. The cold colours of the gelatin prints emphasize the fact that we are in no-­man’s-­land with no chance to stay and little hope to arrive somewhere else. Frank has been called the inventor of road photography (Honnef 2001), because the subject of his photos is neither the traveller on the road nor is it the beauty of the landscape next to the road. The photos also do not focus on the picturesque composition of wayside buildings, as those that Walker Evans told his visual stories about. The subject of Frank’s road images is the road itself. The photographer’s eye is implanted in a post-­human de-­individualized environment. The vanishing point at the horizon is the point where the sides of the road finally meet and it is also the point where humans vanish into nothingness. Jack Kerouac wrote about The Americans in his foreword to Frank’s book of the same name and observed that the photographer has captured ‘the humour, the sadness, The EVERYTHING-ness and the American-­ness’ (Kerouac 1957: 6). The Swiss-­born American photographer became interested in the movie as another medium that became obsessed with the road. When, on 28 September 1960 Robert Frank signed the manifesto of ‘New American Cinema’, together with John Cassavetes, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas and Peter Bogdanovich, cinematography had already explored the topos of the road. It Happened One Night (1934), Gun Crazy (1949) or The Road to Morocco (1942) introduced the new genre of road movies that later became iconic with Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). The genre of road movies that constitutes a key element of collective media consciousness, has originally been set up on the backdrop of the ‘American Dream’ and ‘Go West’ fantasies, but European, Australian and Asian road movies followed with their own specific nuance and even African cinematic

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productions picked up the emotional depth of the road phantasm. Devin Anthony Orgeron called the image of the road a ‘mythological space’ for ‘working out American problems’ (Orgeron 2000: v). Edward Hopper, another American artist, tells us about the mythological space of the road, by painting petrol stations and the people running these stations. In Gas (Hopper 1940) and in Four Lane Road (Hopper 1956) the painter uses characters that game designers would call non-­playing characters (NPC) to tell us about the loneliness and the remoteness of roads in the Midwest. Hopper actually shows very little of the roads that he deals with. In Four Lane Road two monochromic grey stripes convey a monochromic green stripe in a part of the painting that most viewers would consider to be part of the background of the painting. Yet, in a narratological sense the road is central to the work of art. Nature and people freeze and leave the promise of mobility to the real actor of this painting: the road. The lack of detail in the visual presentation renders space for detail in the phantasmal landscape. Hopper’s monochromic stripes serve the same purpose as the ‘graues Band’ metaphor in Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. Wir fahr’n fahr’n auf der Autobahn Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal Die Sonne scheint mit Glitzerstrahl Die Fahrbahn ist ein graues Band Weisse Streifen, grüner Rand We are drivin’, drivin’, drivin’ on the highway In front of us a wide valley The sun is shining with glittering rays The pavement is a grey ribbon White stripes, green edge. (transl. by the author) KRAFTWERK 1974 The cover of the long play record that features the 22:43” brilliantly monotonous Autobahn displays the grey ribbon with white stripes that is sung about in the synth-­pop song. On purpose there is little said about the highway, the material and the texture of the road, of traffic jams, of the different cars that drive on the road, or of traffic signs and motorway services. The text is as minimalistic as the tune and underlines the narrative of the monotony of driving on the highway: ‘We are driving, driving, driving on the highway [Repeat 6x]’.

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Kraftwerk’s masterpiece became a hit song not only in Germany but scored high in the US and British charts, and became well known all over Europe and in parts of Asia. The reason for the song being able to be understood and enjoyed in different cultural settings is the fact that the driving experience became a global phenomenon. Even with two German cars, a white Volkswagen and a black Mercedes Benz, on the record cover the message remained universal: this is what roads of our civilization look like and how it feels to drive on these very roads. One might also say that the German avant-­garde electro group from Düsseldorf has captured a phantasm that extends beyond national borders and beyond mediatic specificities. The problems of self-­discovery or the quest for national identity might have been central for US society, but these problems are of such a universal kind that road fantasies, road songs and road films captivate audiences from different national, ethnic or gender backgrounds. Thelma & Louise (1991) had been conceived, produced and marketed in the US, but Finnish, German or Chinese audiences will understand what it expresses. Roads are ubiquitous and even when watching a Kaurismäki movie (Leningrad Cowboys Go America 1989), a story about two runaway boys in Eastern Germany by German director of Turkish descent, Fatih Akin (Tschick 2016) or a Wong Kar Wai film the international audience takes the road for what it is: a phantasmal space that leads from somewhere to nowhere, or from nowhere to a place we still do not know. Computer games appropriate the poetics of the road by consciously or unconsciously taking from the iconography, audio aesthetics and the spatiality of painting and pop music. In the game Virginia (2016) we see a petrol station that is strongly reminiscent of Hopper’s Gas (1940) station. A filling station in GTA5 (Rockstar Games 2013) shares the look and feel of the ‘Sacred Mountain’ gas station from the movie Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper/Columbia Pictures 1969). One might imagine the game designers having been sitting in the studio with a big Gas reproduction hung on the wall. But the purpose here is not to accuse Rockstar Games or the creators of Virginia, the Variable State designers, of plagiarism. The designers might as well have been inspired by Robert Frank’s photographs, by the petrol station in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) or any of a multitude of cultural references from film, photography, music, painting and literature. The phantasm of the road does unfold in the most convincing way in walking simulator games and in open world games. These two genres that do not necessarily force the player to fight against opponents allows for submerging into the intimate space of the road. Not every driving game is a racing game, as Yu Suzuki famously commented in regard to his classic driving game Outrun (1986). There are even driving games that do not feature roads

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FIGURE 1.2  Left: Detail from the painting Gas (Edward Hopper 1940). Centre and Right: Stills from the movie Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper/Columbia Pictures 1969). Montage by the author.

and still capitalize on the road phantasm. The Indian Train Simulator (2016) is such a game, a casual game for the smartphone that provides almost no interaction and treats the player with a meditative voyage from one Indian railway station to another.1 In my eyes it makes no big difference for the playing experience whether one travels from Chennai Central to Bengaluru City, or from Mumbai Central to Ahmedabad Junction, as the vanishing point of the rails always keeps your eyes in a forward directed position and the hypnotic track sounds keeps your mind in a state of trance. Equally uncompetitive is the Coach Bus Simulator by Ovidiu Pop (2016). The players/drivers are supposed to steer an incredibly slow vehicle through monotonous landscapes that are for the most time completely depopulated. The game is recommended for adults and children from the age of zero years on, because there is hardly any bloodshed or damage that could be imagined on the safe roads of a virtual Europe. The company’s statement announcing the simulator is: ‘Open world map, incredible vehicles, wonderful interiors will make you feel a realistic coach bus driving experience!’ Everyone who ever travelled on a long-­distance bus knows that this experience is far from exciting. It is therefore quite surprising why people spend hours to drive a virtual bus from Warsaw to Bordeaux or from Frankfurt to Cluj in Romania. Even more surprising is why players upload Let’s Play videos to show other people what they experienced – or rather did not experience – during long hours of driving. Different to what might happen in GTA5, the environment of the Coach Bus Simulator is deprived of surprise. There is one thing, however, that is always there and that creates a topological continuity with a high power of suggestion: the road.

1.2 Driving games and driving game interfaces For the American phantasm of the road and for most of the racing computer games there is only one legal actor on the road: the car. Obviously, there are

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exceptions like Easy Rider and there are computer games that feature motorcycles instead of automobiles, but the majority of road movies are stories about people driving cars and the majority of racing games are car-­ racing games. Outrun (1986), Gran Tourismo (1997), the early Grand Theft Auto (1997), Need for Speed (2002), Real Racing 3 (2013) or Asphalt 8: Airborne (2013), to mention just a few, all rely on the car and on cars being driven by the player. Yu Suzuki, the designer of Outrun famously stated that the latter is ‘not a racing game but a driving game’. Precise control of the in-­ game vehicle is difficult with a mouse or with cursor keys. That is why racing games (or driving games) have given rise to the development of special interfaces for driving applications. This started with 1980s consoles that had steering wheels and gas pedals for the players and brought forward a variety of PC steering wheel controllers, force feedback units, shift paddles, foot pedals, Formula One-­style cockpits, gas pedal input devices and wireless wheels with rumble capability for increased realism. Racing games are the genre that can list the highest number of non-­standard input devices and there seems to be no limit to the inventiveness of HCI designers, when it comes to steering interfaces. Prices range from $30 to $1,000 and manufacturers praise the material qualities of the interface that is supposed to deliver perfect control of the immaterial car. The introduction of leather-­ wrapped rims, steel pedals and push-­down gear shifters seems like the material world’s revenge for the triumph of virtuality over reality. Whether sliding sideways around a gravely curve, or screaming through the streets of Monaco, with the Logitech G27 Racing Wheel, the world’s greatest circuits feel closer than ever. Designed to deliver the definitive sim racing experience for the PC and PLAYSTATION3, the Logitech G27 Racing Wheel features a powerful, dual-­motor force feedback mechanism that smoothly and accurately simulates traction loss, weight shift, and road feel; plus an exceptionally quiet helical gear system that virtually eliminates steering noise. And then there are the six-­speed shifter with push-­down reverse gear; RPM/shift indicator LEDs; 11-inch leather-­wrapped rim; steel gas, brake, and clutch pedals. LOGITECH 2017 Racing games (and musical games) are the genre where interface technology propelled the development of gaming software in the most apparent way. The amalgamation of driver and car, or of the car and the road can only be accomplished via extensions of man – or woman. This is the conceptual basis the interfaces of Logitech and other companies are built upon. The trans-­ human delineation that starts with the player, continues with the hands

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holding the racing wheel, proceeds with the leather-­wrapped rim – half organic and half machinic – and terminates in the simulated car and the road that is rendered in real-­time by the games engine. ‘Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel’ (The Doors 1970) implores the magic union of the bodily existence of the driver with the distant and non-­corporal driving environment outside of the windscreen. The dialectics of inside and outside, that are often in place with spatial phantasms, are mediated via the interface: racing wheels, gear systems and gas pedals serve as the extension of organs. These devices make me run faster and they make me reach, touch and destroy what I could not have reached without them. Force feedback controllers and the video-­screen are doors of perception in between outside and inside. Such a space cannot be observed in a distanced and objective way. We have to accept that this space is what Bachelard calls an ‘affective space’ (Bachelard [1957] 1964: 201). Rilke reminds us, that ‘Space, outside ourselves, invades and ravishes things’ (Rilke 1924).2 Gaston Bachelard interprets Rilke’s line as investing into the limitations of outside space (Bachelard [1957] 1964: 200). ‘The two kinds of spaces, intimate space and exterior space, keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth’ (Bachelard [1957] 1964: 201). This seems to be a valid observation for poetic experiences like the one Jim Morrison communicates with the ‘eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel’. The intimate space of our visual apparatus augments and expands beyond limits when our eyes fix the vanishing point of the road. In a counter-­directed movement the exterior space intrudes our body. But are those two, the intimate interior space and the exterior space, two separate spatial containers that should not be confused? Gilles Deleuze does not think so: ‘The interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior, a projected interior.’ (Deleuze 1988: 125). When the player of a racing game keeps his or her eyes on the road, the ocular globes still stay in the cranium. But the eyes are ‘on’ the road as the glance is transcending the inside/outside barrier. The dialectics of interior space and of exterior space cannot be set aside via ludic interface devices, but these interfaces keep the dialectic process in play. The steering wheels and the force feedback devices do not cheat on us when they pretend that ‘the world’s greatest circuits feel closer than ever’ (Logitech 2017). The circuits, however, only feel closer. They do not come closer to us. Imagine a visitor at a game hall in front of a 1986 SEGA Outrun arcade cabinet or a more recent PC player on his home computer with a steering wheel controller. Both might feel that they encounter the real thing: a car race. The steering wheel is right at the borderline in between body and virtual projection and it is therefore probably the most ambiguous part of the dialectical relationship. There is little doubt that the interface device is real in the sense of being a physical object that allows us to change direction. Yet, the

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wheel is an object of exterior space and an extension of the games software. It assumes the transience of the virtual. We should not see the ludic interface as a distinct object or tool, but rather conceptualize it as an integral part of a media environment. I have elsewhere (Fuchs 2010b) developed a list of properties distinguishing ‘ludic interfaces’ from what I called ‘straight interfaces’: I call an interface ludic, if it is playful, rich in its haptic experience, rich in connotative power and surprise, custom-­built and inviting for co-­ creativity (Fuchs 2010b: 54). This is not what the keyboard and mouse interfaces have to offer. The ‘straight’ interfaces like an ASCII keyboard are powerful in regard to their universal applicability. You can write texts, edit spreadsheets and produce your tax declaration on them. You can even play racing games in a rather clumsy way. With a ludic interface like a leather-­ wrapped steering wheel you might not succeed in writing your tax declaration, but you might experience something that is much more intense than that.

1.3  Psychology of driving When we drive a car and when we play driving a car we assume an affective state that differs from the state when swimming in a river or jumping from a cliff. But do we really drive the car? D. J. Van Lennep tells us that ‘First of all we must note that the work-­object of the driver is not his car, but the road.’ (Van Lennep 1987: 217). Jim Morrison’s incantation in Roadhouse Blues points in a similar direction when he sings that you should ‘keep the eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel’ (The Doors 1970). The eyes are much closer to our perceived centre of identity than our hands or the wheel. The focus of driving is therefore the road and not the car. From the viewpoint of a phenomenological psychology Van Lennep suggests to investigate the psychology of driving from this point of departure: ‘But the question we should be concerned with first is the following: what does a “road” mean, that is to say, how must we define the “road” if one talks of it in a psychological context?’ Van Lennep’s understanding of the road is more of a phenomenological than of a psychological nature, because he thinks: If we speak here of ‘road’ we mean not only that long stretch of hardened, brickpaved or cemented earth surface, but the total road situation with its trees, crossroads, pedestrians, bicycles, drivers, curves, traffic signs, and so on. This total road situation, this ever changing and varying, never completely predictable complex constitutes the world of the driver. The ‘world’ has a special meaning for the psychologist. He understands by the ‘world’ a meaningful whole which man himself – in this case the driver – is

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present in a very special way, and with which he is indissolubly connected in a very special manner. VAN LENNEP 1987: 217 This notion of ‘world’ is based on Heidegger’s In-­der-Welt-Sein. Frederik Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk, a phenomenologist, anthropologist and game scholar who worked closely with Helmuth Plessner and influenced Van Lennep can be considered one of the influential figures of the Utrecht School of Phenomenological Psychology. It is clear to see that the Psychology of Driving (Van Lennep 1987) subscribes to anthropological and philosophical concepts that Buytendijk already developed in the 1930s and in a more elaborated theory in the 1950s. We intend to understand man from his relation to the ‘world’, i.e. a meaningful structure of the totality that consists of situations, events, cultural values, thoughts and experience; in other words the world within which man exists. BUYTENDIJK, in Persoon en Wereld (1953), quoted from Orth 1980: 148 It is interesting to see that Van Lennep used the same conceptual considerations to theorize on driving that Buytendijk found useful for theorizing on games (Buytendijk 1932). The latter talks about games, play and movement and prepares a discourse of whether driving and playing might be closer related than we would think at first sight. Driving and playing are voluntary actions, they are rule-­based and they make the player/driver encounter a state of otherness. Play is different from ordinary life. At least this is what Johan Huizinga told us in homo ludens (1949). Playing is not only problem solving in an engineering fashion. Hans-Georg Gadamer has persuasively argued that ‘the purpose of the game is not really the solution of the task, but the ordering and shaping of the movement of the game itself’ (Gadamer 1989: 97). The ‘shaping of the movement’ is what driving games are about as well. Driving – if we understand it in the emphatic sense of cruising, sporty driving, aimless motoring or milling about – is about the ordering and shaping of the movement. Arriving is of secondary importance. The psychological basis for driving seems to be deeply engrained in the pleasure of undergoing the experience of a total road situation with constraints and frustration on one hand and the flow and joy of movement on the other hand. We experience the drive as something that is not completely in our control, but rather ‘draws us in’ (Gadamer 1989: 97) and drives us. The artist Cory Arcangel has commented on this phenomenon with his work of game art F1 (2004). In this videogame modification Arcangel removed

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all of the cars, spectators and buildings that usually populate racing games and left only the road with its white central stripes for us to see. From what we see we must assume that we are moving, because the animated sequence on the screen presents a perpetual movement of white stripes coming towards us on the grey asphalt road. But we are not moving at all. The road is moving towards us. Arcangel demonstrates how we can think that we are playing and moving, when in fact we are played. This is not a game in the traditional sense of the word and all of the euphemisms of interaction, activity, agency and control prove futile. If we want to call F1 a game, we might want to call it an ‘inaction game’ (Fuchs 2018) and question the tautological notion of action games. The player’s stasis is in the focus of attention when games present a movement that is not a result of our actions. The player is intentionally enchained by the software and he or she assumes a state of inertia that art critic Christiane Paul calls ‘meditative inaction’ (Paul 2006: 28). Paradoxically the inertia that

FIGURE 1.3  Cory Arcangel. F1 Racer Mod (aka Japanese Driving Game), 2004. Handmade hacked Nintendo FamiCom game cartridge, Nintendo FamiCom, artist software. © Cory Arcangel. Image courtesy of the artist.

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we adopt when we observe visuals of high speed movements is a motoric emergency breaking that keeps our thoughts going. This happens when we look at Luigi Russolo’s painting Dinamismo di un’automobile (1912–13), at Tullio Crali’s Le forze della curva (1930) or at contemporary games such as Gran Tourismo (1997), Need for Speed (2002) or Asphalt 8: Airborne (2013). A painting like Dinamismo di un’automobile makes speed comprehensible as it freezes time and lets us take a breath. If we were forced to follow the automobile at full velocity we would be much too concerned with handling speed as to understand it. The same holds true for Asphalt 8: Airborne. Driving the McLaren MP4 at 1,876 km/h on city roads is only enjoyable if the roads are virtual. The driving experience is what Sigmund Freud would call an ‘act of sublimation’. By not having to deal with the ‘real’ thing driving becomes a cultural practice. In very much the same way as beholding a Futurist painting of a car, playing a car in a computer game is our cultural technique of dealing with the horror and joy of extreme speed.

1.4  Transmedia road phantasms For the modern phantasm of driving the petrol station is a key ingredient of the ‘world’ of the road. The petrol station is contradictory to moving on, as the driver has to stop. But he only stops to move on. The station is not a terminal point, it rather reminds us that driving is an infinite activity. The filling station attendants are people whom we hardly talk to and whom we forget as soon as we leave the station. The archetypical form of a gas station has been evoked by Edward Hopper, by other painters and photographers in the 1940s and has been rendered in hundreds of advertisements, movies and book illustrations to achieve the status of a culturally coded icon and a phantasmal space that is closely related to the phantasmal space of the road. The gas station phantasm offers a stop and a change from the monotony of the road. It also poses the threat of unpleasant surprise. A crime might happen, a stranger might show up and create troubles, or – even worse – something might be wrong with the petrol supplies and make the continuation of our journey impossible. The collective unconscious of the American petrol station is built upon a simple, single-­floor building that is usually painted white. Hopper’s 1940 painting displays a white wooden building, the infamous ‘Sacred Mountain’ petrol station in Easy Rider (1969) is a white brick building, and the mediatic incarnation of Grand Theft Auto’s TEXACO station is once more white. In Final Fantasy XV (2016) the Hammerhead gas station displays old-­fashioned petrol pumps. The fuel dispensers, oil patches on the floor and greasy mechanics might feel a bit inappropriate for Final Fantasy’s futuristic

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flying car that is going to be filled up here, but it definitely contributes to the atmosphere. Edward Hopper uses the Mobilgas brand to refer to the real world and popular culture and to create a clear distinction of unbranded nature on the side of the road and the built environment of consumer society on the other. For director Dennis Hopper ENCO plays the most viable choice of a brand as it reminds the viewer of mainstream America, big business and the established society that acts as the permanent counterweight to the motorcyclists’ attempt to find what they call freedom. In Rockstar Games’ GTA5 (2013) we find the star from the TEXACO brand that towers above the location. The star here is as well indicative of the rebellious spirit of the GTA game as of the game producers’ own identity as ‘Rockstar’. What we see here, is the fuzziness of a visual archetype that can well meander through different brands, decades and media and still stay consistent as the connecting link in between functions, historic manifestations and geographic variations. Painting, film and videogame share the element of the gas station sign, but the letters on the signs differ. It is also noteworthy that the archetypical visual representation seems to be colour-­coded in a surprisingly narrow way: red and white. The petrol station buildings are always white or at least in a dirty greyish white tone and the sign for the station uses brand icons in red. No matter whether it is the Mobilgas pegasus, the letters of the ENCO logo or the red TEXACO star, red is the colour that these signs show predominantly. The petrol pumps are usually in red as well, and they are in most of the cases of an old-­fashioned rounded and small shape that the bulky square dispensers of modern ‘service stations’ do not have any longer. But visual archetypes are not regularly updated. In Thelma & Louise we see the same old-­fashioned round petrol pump, even if only shortly, when Louise, played by Susan Sarandon, tells the petrol pump attendant: ‘Fill her up!’

FIGURE 1.4  Details from Easy Rider (Hopper/Columbia Pictures 1969) and GTA5 (Rockstar Games 2013). Montage by the author.

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(Thelma & Louise 1991: c. 1:11”). GTA5, staged in Los Santos of the year 2013, uses the same old pump, as we saw earlier, and other games like Resistance 2 (2008) also subscribe to the classical round and red dispensers. The phantasm of the gas station is embedded in the road phantasm and vice versa. Archetypical images of petrol stations often display roads, like in Edward Hopper’s paintings Gas (1940) and Four Lane Road (1956). The image of the gas station actually wants to tell us about the road, the roadside and the people living next to the road. In many depictions the gas station is shown from a perspective that suggests that the observer’s eye is on the road (and not in the road fork towards the station). Road phantasm and the phantasm of the gas station are integrated within epistemic spaces that create what Fox Harrell calls a ‘compound phantasm’ (Harrell 2013: 11–12). A compound phantasm is a phantasmal space that contains more than one archetypical venue. The compound phantasm that we are talking about here is the one that contains ‘the road’ and ‘the filling station’. Hopper’s paintings stage other compound phantasms. In Compartment C, Car 193 (1938) and in Railroad Crossing (c. 1922–3) we recognize ‘the road’ and ‘the rails’. Wim Wenders’ movie Im Lauf der Zeit (1976) benefits from the same compound. For the international market the film has been distributed with the title Kings of the Road. There is a sequence in this film that lasts for a total of 1 minute and 40 seconds with four cuts only (1:57:20”–1:59:00”). This sequence contains an incredibly intense set of scenes that all draw from the compound phantasm of ‘road’ and ‘rail’. Bruno Winter and Robert Lander, played by Rüdiger Vogler and Hanns Zischler, drive their BMW motorcycle with sidecar from bright daylight to late night. During this sequence we see a train running in parallel with the motorcycle: first in daylight and later in the dark of the night.3 The compound phantasm that the scenes evoke is a visual interpretation of the word ‘rail-­roads’. The sequence communicates the joy of driving, the perceived endlessness of the road and the night, and the structural similarities of film material moving from feed reel to the take-­up reel as the cars move by the road. Director Werner Herzog draws the analogy of filming and driving and elaborates on it in the fictional parts of the movie and the interspersed interviews. Need for Speed, the movie (2014), can be seen as a rather unsuccessful transmedia project – at least in regard to cinematic quality.4 The movie that was intended to cash in on the tremendously long lasting success of the Need for Speed racing game series (1994–2015) did not please audience or critics. On Rotten Tomatoes the film received an approval rating of 23 per cent only and the critical consensus reads: ‘With stock characters and a preposterous plot, this noisily diverting video game adaptation fulfils a Need for Speed and little else.’5 Transmedia storytelling is not a risk-­free undertaking

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and what the gaming community liked about the videogame could not be accomplished in the movie theatres or on DVD. The lack of interactivity that a film has compared to a video game can of course be compensated by drama, good acting, the atmosphere of the cinema, or the size of the screen, but with bad actors, silly dialogues, a highly implausible story and average music the result of the transmediation is unlikely to be a masterpiece. An additional question has to be asked here: can we really talk about transmedia ‘storytelling’ (Jenkins 2003) when we analyse the transfer of visual concepts, character stereotypes, navigation commonalities and car industry paratext? It is probably more of a transmedia ‘visuality’. What one Need for Speed (the movie 2014) borrowed from the other ones (the racing games 1994–2015) were icons, logos, shapes, visual effects, road signs and road architecture, but not much of a story. Racing games like Need for Speed (1994–2015), Asphalt 8 (2013) or Gran Tourismo (1997) are best defined by their dromological nature, not by their story. Paul Virilio describes dromocracy as the politics of speed (Virilio 2006: 49–50) and explains how military operations have always been dependant on the speed of communication. For Virilio the politics of speed are anchored in the demand for arriving faster than the enemy. This was the objective for the ‘dromocratic expansion’ of ancient Greece (87), for Marquis de Vauban, Louis XIV’s chief military engineer of fortification (11), for Clausewitz and Goebbels (30) and for Colonel Delair who stated that the general law of the world would have to be: ‘stasis is death’ (38). But dromocracy is not exclusively oriented towards military goals. The desire for speed is driving technological innovation, urban development and political confrontation. ‘Dromocratic intelligence is not exercised against a more or less determined military adversary, but as a permanent assault on the world, and through it, on human nature’ (Virilio 2006: 86). Joseph Goebbels knew about that, when in 1931, during the National Socialists’ struggle against Marxist parties in Berlin, he notes, ‘Whoever can conquer the streets also conquers the State!’ Goebbels was aware of what the German proverb ‘Stillstand ist Rückschritt’ (German for: stagnation is regression) meant for the army. But he also knew how to use and how to abuse the dynamics of the roads for the manipulation of the masses. The Volkswagen car, Autobahn highways, mobilization of a nation and finally total mobilization lead to the ‘permanent assault on the world’ (Virilio 2006: 86) Virilio is talking about. For the French philosopher, the road is almost programmatic for a dromocratic regime. That is why he wonders: ‘Can asphalt be a political territory? Is the bourgeois State and its power the street, or in the street? Are its potential force and expanse in the places of intense circulation, on the path of rapid transportation?’ (Virilio 2006: 30). Virilio talks about the asphalt here and certainly does not refer to the computer

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game Asphalt 8. The question with racing games like Asphalt 8 is, however, close to the questions the philosopher of dromology asks vis-à-vis concrete roads of tarmac and asphalt. Can we suggest here, that racing games are political in so far as they promote a state of restlessness and that they train and oblige the players to a vectorial state of translation and beyond that to permanent acceleration? We are not talking about the historic urban streets and boulevards that invite the flaneur and contemplative idlers to stroll through the city, but the asphalt of the road, the fast lane and the highways. The gamer of a dromocratic type cannot be described by the place that he wants to arrive at, but by the need for speed, a desire to move and to always move faster. At the moment when the mind of the player does not recognize speed as exceptional from stasis and when the body ceases to sense acceleration, the game has transformed the player into a ‘traveller, who does not even know that he travels’ (Rageot 1928: 113). Gabriele d’Annunzio, a mentor and admirer of Futurists like Marinetti, proposed that speed enables us to finally not think of anything (Virilio 1986: 113). The individual’s movement has turned into ‘[s]peed as a pure idea without content’ (Virilio 2006: 68). Demonstrations of extreme speed are often staged in circular tracks like the stadium’s running track, the racecourses (Florida’s Sebring or the German Nürburgring are called ‘rings’) or on the ultimate circular track, the orbit around the planet. When on 10 July 1938 Howard Hughes departed Floyd Bennett Field in Long Island and flew around the world in a Lockheed 14 Lodestar Monoplane he arrived 91 hours later at the very same spot he started from. The progress in speed that has been demonstrated manifested itself in a non-­progress in location. The airplane came to a standstill at exactly the same location at the airfield from where it took off initially. Paul Virilio states about the American pilot-­millionaire, that Hughes was looking for a way of travelling without getting any further (Virilio 1986: 27–30). This could be said for the player/drivers of Need for Speed or Asphalt 8: all the world’s driving skills and acceleration techniques will only result in them travelling without getting somewhere else. These drivers are really ‘voyageurs immobiles’ (Masse 2010: 217), travellers without a movement. The players of racing games stay in their seats and they try to conquer the asphalt in order to escape the anthropological necessity of spatial progress.

2 The Ruin

S

ome of the most interesting of recent computer games celebrate the beauty of ruins and invite us to get immersed into landscapes of ruins from antiquity to the space age.1 The ruins are set in post-­nuclear war environments Metro 2033 (2013), sites of archaeological excavations and discovery (Tomb Raider 1996), technological disaster areas (Fallout 2008; S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2007), medieval environments (Assassin’s Creed 2007–18), industrial wreckage (UnrealTournament 1999), mythological places that are known for the buildings they once contained (Ruins 2011), or even completely fictional places (Journey 2012). There is a rich body of research in art history about the meaning and form of ruins, e.g. Ginsberg 2004; Böhme 1989. In Game Studies however, only a few papers on the topic have been published (Fraser 2015; Vella 2010; Martin 2001). Ruins are mentioned in Hans Joachim Backe’s and Espen Aarseth’s text on zombeitism (Backe and Aarseth 2013: 4) and in Tanya Krzywinska’s Zombies in Gamespace that she published in a book with the uncanny title ‘Autopsies of the living dead in videogames’ (Krzywinska 2008). Both aforementioned texts discuss ruins as some kind of staging for dramatic or ludic content and do not credit ruins as a central object of the game – or even propose that the ruins could at times carry more importance than player characters or rule systems. Emma Fraser’s critical approach draws on Walter Benjamin’s reflections and tries to attribute the power of ruins to critically ‘unsettle, even to haunt the dream worlds of contemporary capitalism’ (Fraser 2005). Daniel Vella thoroughly points out spatial features of representations of ruins and connotates those with the player experience. As far as I know little has been published about the aspect of ‘longing for decay’ and of the mediatic and game-­historic aspects of ruins in ludic 3D environments. One might speak of a longing for decay to describe a phenomenon that consists of a strong affective tie to disintegrating objects. Alluding to German romanticism and in particular to a specific style of painting

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FIGURE 2.1  Detail from a promotional screenshot from Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft 2014).

that has been made popular by Caspar David Friedrich, the appropriate term would be ‘Ruinensehnsucht’. The German word ‘Sehnsucht’ is hard to translate. ‘Sehnsucht’ is different from ‘desire’ as it is less directed towards gratification, and it is not identical with ‘longing’ as it carries a melancholic connotation that longing need not have. The notion of ‘Sucht’ or addiction is contained within ‘Sehnsucht’.2 We can obviously get used to or even be addicted by this particular longing. If there was a place and time of perfection, where neither rust nor moss, no decay or disasters, and no demolition or ruin was ever seen, this would have to be a fictional world – in our decade probably a computer simulation of a perfect world. There is no technical or conceptual reason that would make designers of such a world implement decay. There would be no reason for metal to rust, for stone to break and crumble, and for wood to moulder away. Yet if we look at contemporary games we will find an abundance of ruins, of cracks in concrete walls and of corrosion on metal. It would be too easy to explain this fact by stating that decay just looks realistic in virtual environments, because some of these environments clearly feature more decay than reality could ever produce. There must be a longing of the designers and of the players to

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immerse themselves within an environment of disintegrating, decaying objects, full of dust, fog, rubble and acid rain. It is obviously not only the locations and the sites that these computer games are staged at, but also the player’s viewpoint, atmospheric lighting, dust and a preference for a certain type of landscape, vegetation, textures and material that constitute an aesthetic framework for ‘Ruinensehnsucht’, the longing for decay. Such a longing, if expressed in an artistic medium like games, painting, architecture or poetry can be described as the aesthetic form of a longing for ruins. Hartmut Böhme, a German philosopher and cultural studies researcher uses this notion when he speculates about the dialectics of our fascination with the decline of cities and the decay of historical buildings. In his publication Die Ästhetik der Ruinen (Böhme 1989) he dates the starting point for reasoning about the aesthetics of ruins back to the year 1337.3 That is when Petrarca, walking on Mont Ventoux with a friend, got involved in the conversation about ‘tempi passati’, times gone. Petrarca described the landscape of ruins that he was looking down upon as a ‘book of memories’ and noted that it is by writing about the ruins that he could counter the permanent decay of these buildings in disintegration. The text, or more generally the artwork provides us with hope for ‘renevatio’, the reconstitution of heroic times. Poetry from this point in time on would play with ruins as signifiers for renevatio, but also use them as a theatre of memories and point towards power, eternity, deity and indestructibility. In the sixteenth century the arts of painting and architecture discovered ruins for their purposes. Ruin painting (e.g. Giorgione) and the construction of artificial ruins became a means to demonstrate historical knowledge and humanistic education. The first artificial ruin is said to have been erected in 1530 in the Pesaro palace gardens. Hartmut Böhme points out that building a ruin next to a functional building cannot be interpreted as mere contemplation about transience and eternity, but needs to be seen as a statement of power. The ruin next to the functional palace of a sovereign is clearly demonstrating power and presence ex negativo. Ruins might signify momentariness, and they can signify the opposite of that: eternity. ‘This other form to refer ruins to temporal stability consists of building ruins,’ says Böhme. ‘The grottas, artificial ruins or paintings of ruins, that used to be integrated into the dukes’ palaces and into the spectacular garden landscapes, lend themselves to a discourse of power – not of melancholia’ (Böhme 1989: 297).4 It is no surprise then that Albert Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect and planner discovered and described the ‘value of ruins’5 (Speer 2005) in what he called a theory. Speer suggested that a good building could become even better, once it has fallen apart. It would then remind the successors of the builders of the glory the perished buildings once had. Böhme’s suspicion that

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‘German imitations of Italian Renaissance palaces are hardly a memento mori, but a conscious and illusionistic staging of ruins, that is contrasted by the obvious power of the ruling sovereign’ (Böhme 1989: 302) needs to be seen in the light of more recent ruin buildings. The most recent and technologically most advanced construction of artificial ruins happens in the realm of computer games. I suggest to explore four different threads to investigate what makes ruins in today’s computer games so attractive. These lines of investigation are informed by i) the history of painting ruins, ii) visualization technologies for rust, dust and decay in computer games, iii) psychoanalytic theories of the longing for decay, and iv) transmedial ruination.

2.1  Painting decay There have been times when the depiction of ruins became common painterly practice. French and Italian Rococo were such periods, German Romanticism definitely was, and the twenty-­first century seems to have entered a similar phase with computer games like Fallout, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Half-Life or Metro 2033 – to name just a few. Ruins in Rococo, Romanticism and Pre-Raphaelite painting could stay side by side with recent visualizations of ruins in computer games in regard to the level of sophistication of lighting, perspective, metaphor and allegory. On the one hand there is this level of metaphor and meaning, but there are also formal aspects: the composition of the work of art, perspective, position of the viewer, position of the observer relative to the ruin in the image, colours, shadows and light. Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings introduced an observer’s perspective that looks at the object of the painting across the shoulders of a person in the painting. This mode of looking at an object with the viewer’s avatar in the painting has rightly been called a ‘Third Person Shooter Perspective’.6 The avatars Friedrich introduces, like the ‘wanderer’ in Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (c. 1818) or himself in Auf dem Segler (1818–19) pull the observer into the painting and create at the same time a strange distance to the depicted landscape. There is also – very much like in computer games – a separating, enforced discontinuity in between foreground and background. In computer games it is the skybox that separates a remote background that cannot be entered by the players of the game. The skybox is a spatially detached area that creates a perfect space of illusion. In Friedrich’s paintings it is valleys, mountain ridges

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FIGURE 2.2  Left: Screenshot from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (GSC Gameworld 2007). Right: Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Caspar David Friedrich c. 1818, 74.8 × 94.8 cm, Hamburger Kunsthalle). Montage by the author.

or forests that create a perceptual barrier in between perfect nature and the human observing this perfection. The buildings that turned into ruins are always idealized and not at all realistic depictions of buildings that broke down. They contain certain elements of ruins like columns and arches, but these elements are arbitrarily repeated and intentionally isolated from the less appealing aspects of decay. In Westfassade der Ruine Eldena mit Backhaus und Scheune (1806) Caspar David Friedrich depicts his favourite ruin, the ruin of Eldena as an idealized structure of gothic arches. These arches reappear in Friedrich’s paintings of natural monuments, like the Rügen chalk cliffs, where the cliffs are presented to us in an arch-­ shaped form. Again, computer games pick up this preference for aesthetically idealized forms of ruins and have us enjoy the arches and the columns and pillars as if we were watching nineteenth-­century romantic paintings. Assassin’s Creed is a romantic computer game by virtue of its formal arrangement of ruins, but also in regard to the context: knights and swords have been the company romantic painters would have liked to mingle with. Today’s computer game designers and players of such games esteem swords and knights as well. The spatial set-up of players vis-à-vis ruined buildings suggest an involvement and an attunement to a situation, that Steffen P. Walz describes as ‘aesthetic and sensual experiences triggered by atmospheres. [. . . T]his category also includes gazing at landscapes’ (Walz 2010: 31). One of the iconic screenshots from a game celebrating the gaze on the landscape is from Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017). In a promotional screenshot we see Link

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standing on a rock gazing at the fog-­patched valley beneath him and the mountains in the distance. This image is almost a visual incarnation of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (c. 1818). It demonstrates how persistent viral images can be. It is not only the Third Person perspective, but also the lighting, the weather, the time of the day, the posture of the avatar and the shadow/light balance, that all contribute to the architecture of a phantasmal space setting. Steffen Walz is completely right, when he demands that a theory of space in architecture and spatial considerations in game design would have to be considered as interacting factors ‘[t]oward a Ludic Architecture’ (Walz 2010).

2.2 Digital dust In early computer games the visuals were restricted by technological limitations like screen resolution, memory space and processing power of the consoles. As a consequence the display of visually complex objects like animals, humans or spaceships had to reduce complexity to a high degree. Spacewar!’s spaceships were displayed as triangles and Pac-Man monsters consisted of 16-by-16 pixels with a colour selected from a 256 colour palette. This left little space for textural detail or atmospheric backgrounds and would make the display of reflections, ‘imperfections’ in geometry or processes of decay almost impossible.7 The resulting aesthetics of coarse pixilation and glossy, naïve squareness was rather a product of technical constraints than a deliberate artistic decision. So much more surprising it is that even after the constraints were removed, a look and feel of Lego Worlds persisted, with a few modern games like The Sims (2000) or Minecraft (2009). These games represent a messy world as a clean virtual environment. Idealized objects are rendered noise-­free to the screens. The general trend however was an increase in visual and aural artefacts that could be named ‘digital dust’. It took games history some thirty years to proceed from the simplicity of early 1960s games to the games of fog, rust and dust of the twenty-­first century. By comparing versions of games that had undergone the evolution from a first version to a series of more advanced versions (Unreal Tournament, UT2003, UT2004, Unreal3 or the like) one often finds an increase in special effects and procedural dust that make the games of the more recent past look ‘older’ and more worn out than the earlier versions. The tendency is also visible in avatar skins, haircuts and dresses. Tomb Raider (1996, 1997, etc. until 2012 cont.) is an example of such a transformation. Whereas the early Lara Croft looked like a soft-­skinned doll in a clean toy shop, the more recent one comes with a considerable number of bruises, scars, skin impurities and

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an unkempt ‘out of bed’ hairstyle. T-shirts of avatars that once looked as if they were nicely ironed, nowadays have to be covered with mud, bloodstains and sweat. Even ludic nature became more corroded than it once was. Trees have to have moss on the bark, the feet on the ground have to trace dust tracks and the air needs to be filled with fog and smoke. The technical reason for this transformation lies in the fact that fog is render-­intensive and dust or pollution effects require a higher processing power than a clean and perfect world rendering. Only with advanced video cards did it become possible to generate hyper-­realistic fog in the distance, to blur the view when diving in muddy water or to create smoke trails and realistic rain. It may sound paradoxical, but in order to create an imperfect world you need to have a perfect computer. A perfect world is easy to be generated. My point here is that it is due to technological advances and to progress in graphics cards performance that nature could take over a role as an active part of the game and that ruins enlivened by natural processes of decay could turn into actors of gameplay. ‘The landscape is not only something seen and read,’ observes Paul Martin. ‘Landscape . . . is therefore an element of the game that is capable of doing work in relation to the game’s story in the same way that we conventionally think of characters doing work. However, while characters work in the representational mode of stories and messages, landscape works primarily through embodiment and interaction’ (Martin 2001: 4). Paul Martin seems to see the ability of landscape to work as a feature that is enabled by a particular design approach, like the one of Todd Howard, Ken Rolston and Mark Nelson, game designers of Bethesda Softworks’ The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006). I would add that designers, like the ones mentioned, draw from a portfolio of industry standards and graphic card innovations that allow them to transform landscape in a way that Paul Martin describes so fittingly: ‘Landscape, in other words, is not a backdrop but the main attraction. The hero is a necessary means of interpreting the landscape’ (Martin 2001: 4). In the same lines one might say that advanced games technology enables ruins to become the main attraction. In many contemporary post-­apocalyptic games the hero is a necessary means of interpreting ruins.

2.3  Sigmund Freud’s death drive and the opponents thereof Freud’s notion of death drive seems to be a key concept in understanding why we long for ruins and why we cannot be satisfied with constructive processes or rock-­solid perennial objects – in life and in computer games.

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Freud’s introduction of the notion of a death drive (‘Todestrieb’) in his 1920s publication ‘Jenseits des Lustprinzips’ introduces the drive as an anthropological constant that turns us from peaceful and constructive to destructive. The proposition that the death drive opposes eros did not go down undisputed in the psychoanalytical community of these days. Wilhelm Reich amongst others would have preferred to analyse destructive behaviour as led by a corrupted form of life drive and not by a proposed death drive that could explain fascination with war, death or ruins. The attempt of Reich to prove that Freud was wrong led to serious confrontation in the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPV) and culminated in Reich’s expulsion from the association in 1934. Freud’s concept of the death drive was based on a proposed antagonism between organic growth and development on one hand and static regression on the other. ‘The death drive,’ said Freud, ‘strives towards a reestablishment of the anorganic state of livelessness, of stasis and death’ (Freud 1975: 213). He concluded that neurotic behaviour and repetition-­compulsion would have to be understood as governed by the death drive. In 1938 Freud published Das Unbehagen in der Kultur where he insisted on holding the death drive responsible for mass destruction and war. Freud’s opponents once more warned of assuming that such a drive would be an integral part of the psyche, yet twenty years later some form of a death drive, then labelled thanatos or death instinct, was once more discussed as a possibility. Melanie Klein as well as Jacques Lacan reinstalled the notion of a death drive. ‘Those who try to exclude the death drive from their theories, misunderstand psychoanalysis,’ states the philosopher and psychotherapist (Lacan 1991: 185). He corrects Freud however in positioning death drives in the symbolic. ‘It is not a question of biology,’ he says and distinguishes the drive clearly from biologically based instincts that would – according to Freud – aim to direct living, organic structures towards an inanimate state. Slavoj Žižek follows Lacan in proposing that the death drive does not refer to literal death, but to death within the symbolic order instead. ‘We reject language, conceptualization and categorization, but the subject still persists’ (Žižek 2006: 61). He calls an existence under such conditions ‘living death’ and those who continue living after refuting the symbolic order ‘the undead’. The repetitiveness of the process of killing elements of the symbolic order was actually something that Freud already pointed out. Freud observed how repetition is a method of dealing with traumatic experiences, and his description of the ‘Fort-Da’ game his grandson used to play became crucial for the psychological understanding of the dialectics of destruction and creation. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them. One day I made an observation

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which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared . . . FREUD 1975: 2258 We know from the practice of playing computer games that repetition is essential to gaming. Some argue that players identify avatars with real people and that they imitate life, both physically and psychologically, with computer games. Computer games could then be a way of dealing with trauma. It could well be that one of the psychological aspects of playing with ruins is what Sigmund Freud’s theory describes as the trauma of repeatedly reliving creation and destruction via play to get relief from this circle.

2.4  S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Tarkovsky’s wastelands As in painting, ruins in computer games often originate from historical buildings or from mediated forms of ruins. Game designers might have been inspired by ruins from movies, paintings, drawings or stories that influenced the design of the in-­game ruins. In some cases there might be a direct reference to a non-­game object, like a historic ruin. In other cases the reference aims at a wider concept of ruins and decay. The ruin in the videogame would then pick up a ‘pathos formula’ (Warburg 2000) or it would refer to a ‘megatext’ (Segal 1986) and become an ‘element of the corpus [of a megatext]’ (Bateman 2011: 156). The megatext would in this case be constituted by an ensemble of paintings of ruins, stories about ruins, and music in attunement with decay and ruins. Reaching much further than what Charles Segal described in his account of the themes and tales of Greek myths, the longing-­for-decay megatext crosses the borders of various media and refers to a huge corpus of ruins in film, literature, poetry, music and games. To borrow a phrase that Henry Jenkins used for transmedia objects, ruins have also formerly been ‘enshrined in stain glass windows or tapestries, told through printed words or sung by bards and poets’ (Jenkins 2003: 3). Today, one might add, the ruins have been ported to computer games as well. This process is somehow related to what Henry Jenkins calls transmedia storytelling. Let’s face it: we have entered an era of media convergence that makes the flow of content across multiple media channels almost inevitable. The move toward digital effects in film and the improved quality of video game

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graphics means that it is becoming much more realistic to lower production costs by sharing assets across media. JENKINS 2003: 3 It might however not only be for financial reasons that game designers ‘steal’ from other media. It seems to be a tradition in storytelling that is older than the economy of corporate franchises Jenkins refers to when talking about transmedia storytelling. Andrej Tarkovsky adapted the novel Roadside Picnic (1972), written by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. This story was strong enough to drive the making of Tarkovsky’s 1978 film classic Stalker, and it crossed media once more for a ludic reincarnation as the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. computer game (2007). The game’s ruins and its tristesse landscape are reminiscent of those of the film (as the latter are reminiscent of the novel’s) but they are not identical replicas. In using transmedia storytelling for the construction of ruins we are offered the possibility to refer to different systems of reference. The ruins in the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. might remind us of Tarkovsky’s film, they might also evoke memories and fear about nuclear disaster or they might make us think of game-­related features like sunbeam projection, edge detection algorithms and the like. I do not follow Henry Jenkins’ suggestion that an instance of a transmedia storytelling chain can be enjoyed without knowing about the other instances. Different to Jenkins I think that the full experience of transmedia storytelling lies in the multiplicity of connotations and that any work of art can be best enjoyed by accessing the full range of references. In regard to computer game ruins, I suggest that one will have the best experience of an in-­game ruin by contextualizing it to the history of artificial ruins in architecture, by contextualizing it to key work from the history of painting and by contextualizing them to a multitude of ruins in literature, film, television, sculpture, politics, etc. An attempt to name the process of appropriation, creative deconstruction and cross-­media transfer of ruins from one medium to another leads to the problem of properly describing this process. The notion of ‘transmedia storytelling’ has been introduced by Henry Jenkins (2003; 2008) with the idea of transmedia storytelling being able to open up one fictional world for multiple media within the same franchise. The multireferential nature of ruins in games is often not limited to one single franchise. Jenkins’ notion of transmedia storytelling would have to be interpreted broadly to still make sense in this context. ‘Intertextuality’ would be another label that describes the aspect of sharing elements amongst a number of texts when analysing it with the toolset of comparative literature studies. This notion, however, falls short in regard to the element of pathos that is at the core of transmedia ruin representations. Aby Warburg’s pathos formula (Warburg 2000) might help

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FIGURE 2.3  Left: Screenshot from Half-Life 2 (Valve Corporation 2004). Right: Das Eismeer (Die verunglückte Nordpolexpedition) (Caspar David Friedrich 1823–4, 96.7 × 126.9 cm, Hamburger Kunsthalle). Montage by the author. here, but once more does not capture all aspects of what I am trying to describe. The working suggestion that has been made here is to call the beast ‘transmedia megatext’ and position the process with one foot in Segal’s territory of the ‘megatext’ (Segal 1986; Bateman 2011) and with the other foot in Jenkins’ ‘transmedia storytelling’. This is obviously a fragile solution that needs to be worked on. A ruin is much more than just a certain type of building that has been put together from stones and bricks. Ruins are associated with cultural connotations, architectonic references, hopes and anxiety of a psychological nature, mediatic representations, myths and mysteries. Ruins in computer games carry all of those points of reference in the backpack. They often originate from memories and depictions of historical buildings or from mediated forms of architectonic decay. It is for the very reason of the multifaceted nature of ruins that a multimodal analysis of ruins and decay in computer games has been undertaken in this chapter of the book.

3 The Cave

Computer games are explorable pictorial spaces. They are the lucid dream of Blumenberg’s speleologist, a scientist who does not investigate the cave itself, but explores from the safe position of the cave the world as image. RAUTZENBERG 2015: 2601

3.1  Cave men

T

he history of painting offers a multitude of cave-­inspired paintings. From the seventeenth century on paintings like Rombout van Troyen’s Cave with Soldiers (1641), Joseph Wright of Derby’s Cave at Evening (1774), his Grotto by the Seaside in the Kingdom of Naples with Banditti (1778), Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg’s Ulysses fleeing the Cave (1812) and Théodore Rousseau’s famous Cave in a Cliff near Granville (1833) demonstrate the interest painters expressed in the phantasmal space of the cave and the light and ambience of caverns. Heinrich Füssli’s haunting hallucination of The Cave of Despair (1769) digs deep into the psychology, sexuality and the phantasms of the cave. Füssli was well informed about the history of painting and the mythology of cave spaces. The Cave of Despair and most of the paintings mentioned earlier adapt a perspective from within the cave looking outside. In many computer games, however, the escape line into a world outside the tunnels and corridors is not an option at all. You play and you stay. Once thrown into the subterranean labyrinths you can try to get out, but you can never leave. The players are doomed to live a life of moles. Hardly ever can they catch a glimpse of daylight. Markus Rautzenberg (2015: 249) observes that those few exceptions to the genre that actually provide with an escape route into open terrain are just creating a deception of exteriority that is

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completely misleading. As an illusionary technique the games make use of skyboxes, i.e. caves in their own right. These exterior caves are textured in a way that makes us believe that the cave is the sky. But the sky is a cave as Rautzenberg correctly observes. Opposed to what Flammarion’s ‘Wanderer am Weltrand’ experiences, the players of contemporary computer games cannot exit from the cave. However wide the landscape may appear, it is always staged within a so-­ called ‘skybox’. This impenetrable celestial sphere terminates for good any attempts of exploration. At least it does so in a theoretically final way. Think of skyboxes as polygonal domes or of walls with textures placed inside the geometrical structure. This effectively creates an illusion of sky and of horizon. All 3D computer games can therefore be thought of actually playing in caves. This is de facto true for TOMB RAIDER, HALF LIFE, NEED FOR SPEED or CALL OF DUTY.2 RAUTZENBERG 2015: 248–9

3.2  Boolean subtract There are two radically opposed concepts of how worlds can be built: ‘Hang the world on nothing’ (Job 26:7) – as the Bible says – or dig the world out as an archaeologist would do. The former one is suggesting that the world is built from scratch. In the beginning, there is nothing: a void, a vacuum, an empty space. World-­building is accordingly an additive process. To nothingness the creator adds the world, light, fish, fowl, men and further details. But in the beginning ‘The earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep.’ From this point of departure additive processes drive world-­building. ‘He stretches out the north over the empty place and hangs the earth on nothing’ (Job 26:7). Next comes light. Then water, land, plants, the sun, the moon, the stars, fish and fowl, land animals and finally humans. The second concept starts from a world that is filled with matter. In the beginning the world was full. World-­building is conceptualized as a subtractive process. Holes are drilled into the world. Corridors are dug out. Caves are (de-)constructed and connected to further corridors. This is a clandestine subterranean activity. It is how termites and moles create their habitats. It is also the way Tim Sweeney from EPIC Megagames conceived level-­building in his Unreal Editor from the late 1990s. In an auto-­ethnographic observation turned into an advice for level-­builders, Sweeney states that he always felt like a mole when building levels in Unreal and that corridors are much more important than buildings.

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Technically speaking we are looking at two different tools and the classes of objects created by these tools. In the terminology of the Unreal Editor these are called ‘Boolean add’ and ‘Boolean subtract’ respectively. Both tools enable the designer to create sets of objects and in the end both operations are equally powerful. They generate the same class of objects. At least they do so in mathematical terms. This is because in Boolean logic ¬ ¬ A = A. In other words: to subtract the Boolean subtraction of an object renders the same result as simply adding the object. The Unreal Editor subscribes to this concept even though it does not follow the logic. A sequential operation of two subtractions does not restore the original object, it just does what one single subtraction would do. Game designers Jason ‘Buzz’ Busby, Zak Parrish and Joel van Eenwyk describe the approach Unreal introduced and the problems solved by taking the road of subtractive design: older games were composed of levels that existed within a void of empty space. In essence, levels floated in an infinitely open volume. This is why, in some older games, it’s sometimes possible to ‘fall off the level’ and watch your character seem to fall forever as the game level recedes into the distance above your character. BUSBY, PARRISH AND VAN EENWYK 2005: 49 The dramatic advantage that phantasmal subtractive cave spaces benefit from is the relief from a human trauma that was most prominent in the preGalilean Middle Ages: What if I fall off the world? The world as a disc surrounded by infinite space is always a world where solid ground can come to an end, if only I walk far enough. How uncomfortable is this in comparison to being in a world-­womb: a safe environment that incorporates its inhabitants. I could be swallowed or suffocated, but I could never fall from a cave. The advent of Unreal changed all this by reversing the empty void situation. Instead of a game world that was an infinite vacuum, Unreal levels were created within a world of infinite solid mass. . . . This method has two distinct advantages over the additive approach. First, the speed of level creation increases dramatically. For instance, creating a simple cube-­ shaped room with the additive approach means the level designer would need to create six separate objects to serve as the floor, walls, and ceiling and make sure that all objects were perfectly aligned with each other. With Unreal’s new subtractive approach, you could create the same cube-­ shaped room in a single step by subtracting a single cube from the game world, without worrying about how the sides are aligned. The second

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advantage is the reduced risk of the HOM effect because walls require no alignment to work as a level. BUSBY, PARRISH AND VAN EENWYK 2005: 49 What Busby, Parrish and van Eenwyk refer to as the ‘HOM effect’ is an effect known as the ‘Hall of Mirrors’ effect. This is a display anomaly caused by ‘holes’ in the geometry of world objects. When the game engine renders the level to the screen, it draws solid object information into a buffer, i.e. an area of memory. During gameplay, the previous frame’s content in the buffer is superimposed by consecutive frames’ content. This is fine as long as the camera remains scanning an enclosed environment. If the camera can, however, ‘look’ through a hole in the walls, we have a problem. There are no walls to draw outside the level geometry, and as a consequence the render engine superimposes nothing. Instead, the previous contents of the buffer are displayed, and create an effect of recursive images that resemble the impression of being in a hall of mirrors.

3.3  Claustrophobia The cave is a place where one seeks comfort and where one does not necessarily want to be.3 Speleologists know of the neurotic oscillation of the desire to climb into the womb of earth and to be scared to death by claustrophobic attacks. In Das Trauma der Geburt ([1927] 1998) Viennese psychoanalyst Otto Rank, Sigmund Freud’s closest collaborator in Vienna and later the therapist for Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin in Paris, theorized on the prenatal condition we want to re-­establish, at least according to his suggestions. Rank describes the prenatal condition as a unity of the individual with the cosmos and he points out that the confines of space and the proximity, or rather enclosedness in matter creates a feeling of comfort that we will never be able to re-­establish once we are born. Rank writes: The individual psychological root of this sense of unity I discovered (at the time of writing The Trauma of Birth, 1924) in the prenatal condition, which the individual in his yearning for immortality strives to restore. Already, in that earliest stage of individualization, the child is not only factually one with the mother but beyond that, one with the world, with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapors in which present, past, and future are dissolved. The individual urge to restore this lost unity is (as I have formerly pointed out) an essential factor in the production of human cultural values. RANK [1932] 1989: 113

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Cave phantasies carry some of these promises of immortality, cosmic union and de-­individualization. The phantasmal space of the cave is on one hand a space of comfort and limitless joy, but it is on the other hand a place of trauma and claustrophobia. Getting caught in a small hole, due to cave-­ins or suddenly encountering dangerous animals, monsters or natural forces is what frightens us to death. We become aware that we are unable to defend ourselves or to retreat, because the cave is the only place to be. If the cave is the cosmos then there is no world outside. Leaving the cave is just as unconceivable for the caveman and the cave-­woman as is leaving mother’s womb for the prenatal child. The phantasmal space of the cave is a space of cosmic union and of insurmountable difference to the world outside. It seems that the cultural coding of the phantasmal cave space is deeply inscribed into our collective power of imagination. This is the reason for many cave spaces in computer games resembling each other so strikingly. Take an image of a cave from Never Alone (2014) and compare it to one from Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017). The shapes, the lighting the dimensions and even the ‘mystic vapors’ (Rank [1932] 1989: 113) are as alike as two peas in a pod. The reason for that is not some form of imitation or a lack of fantasy. It is rather the strength of phantasmal coding and the far-­reaching penetrating power of the spatial phantasm. The designers of Horizon: Zero Dawn had been sketching their ideas about how a cage looks like in Amsterdam in the Netherlands during the years of 2012 to 2014. Pretty much at the same time caves had been designed in Anchorage/Alaska by indigenous-­owned video game company Upper One Games. It is very unlikely that the Dutch designers saw concept drafts from their Alaskan colleagues, and the Anchorage-­based designers state that their influences come from Native Iñupiaq culture. I propose that a phantasmal space is in the same visual vein, almost regardless of cultural specificities and geographic differences.

FIGURE 3.1  Left: Screenshot from Horizon: Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment 2017). Right: Screenshot from Never Alone (Upper One Games 2014). Montage by the author.

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Kleinian psychoanalysts have observed the problem of withdrawal from the world into a system of tunnels and corridors. In On Identification (Klein 1955), Melanie Klein quotes John Milton from his poem Samson Agonistes, because the English poet aptly put in words how an inner cage can correspond to external objects of incarceration. Thou art become (O worst imprisonment!) The dungeon of thyself. MILTON [1671] 1998: lines 155–6 Melanie Klein picks up the lines of Milton’s poem and proceeds with the observation that certain schizoid patients are confined by the dangerous twin sources of entrapment in one’s object and entrapment in one’s own body (Klein 1955: 324). For Klein ‘projective identification’ (Klein 1946) is the key to understanding how parts of the self can be forced into another person.4 Klein proposes that part of the self can be projected upon someone else. A patient could project his fear into another person to feel less frightened himself. Going one step further, a patient could also project upon non-­human objects: the fire is angry with me. The wind is afraid of the lightning. Klein also states that this happens via unconscious fantasies. Donald Meltzer explains how these fantasies and psychological mechanisms work for some of his patients. He describes the psychotic delusions of a patient who kept fleeing the hospital. The patient ‘disappeared down into the sewers, because this patient who kept disappearing also from one mental hospital to another, illustrated in a most extraordinary way the different compartments inside the object’ (Meltzer 1990, transcript c. 15:20”). What is meant with the object here is the set of hospitals the patient had to attend. Meltzer explains further: ‘His first mental hospital he experienced really as a kind of concentration camp, the second hospital that he was taken to after escaping from the first he experienced really as a kind of brothel, and the third he experienced as a heavenly place of rest and safety and essential delight’ (Meltzer 1990, transcript c. 22:33”). For Meltzer ‘concentration camp’, ‘brothel’ and ‘heavenly place’ are what he calls ‘compartments of the object’. Meltzer is close to John Milton’s ‘dungeon of thyself’ concept as the object is always understood as an external object (hospitals) and an internal object (self). The instance that bridges in between external and internal is Melanie Klein’s ‘projective identification’. Melanie Klein’s and Meltzer’s conception of ‘projective identification’ and ‘compartments of the object’ are both very valuable for the analysis of cave spaces in computer games. First of all, the internal compartments of horror, erotic desire and peaceful harmony might be the underlying structure of the

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external object of the computer game’s cave. When we follow Lara Croft in our unconscious fantasies there is of course more than just one compartment available. That is what makes the cave experience so seductive and interesting. Secondly the way we identify with the avatar is projective identification. We try to force parts of ourselves into the projection target. The psychoanalyst will call this a psychotic state of mind or a reception neurosis. In any case ‘the claustrum’ is diagnosed as unhealthy. British psychoanalyst Roger Willoughby quotes Bertram Lewin, Raymond Gehl and Lucie Jessner to blame the claustrum for addiction, depression, indecision and all kinds of psychosomatic conditions (Willoughby 2001: 923). In his own words the claustrum is best described as a ‘pathological container’. The main interest of psychoanalysis is obviously to see what went wrong and how to cure it. The games scholar is less interested in therapeutical efforts and just judges it as common ludic attitude. So much for life as we live it in this still primitive century, not very far after the caves as it were. The claustrum, like in projective identification, has a great similarity but also a very, very great difference from the adaptational life of the carapace life, faced outward toward the community. MELTZER 1990, c. 22:33” Cave games appeal to a readiness of at the same time wanting to escape and of realizing that escape is not a desirable goal. Spanish linguist and art historian von Nacher Malvaioli refers to the young Michelangelo expressing his feelings about the ‘miraculous thing’ of the cavern: I reached the entrance of a big cavern, in front of which I remained amazed and ignorant of such thing . . . immediately I felt two things: fear and desire, fear for the menacing and dark cavern, desire to see if there was some miraculous thing. VON NACHER MALVAIOLI 1992 Is this not what we feel when we enter the miraculous caves of computer games? Yet, nothing can stop players playing those games. The fear is secondary to the temptation to cope with the menace. Even more so fear is secondary to desire. In some way the player of a cave game could be qualified as a person who acts in the spirit of Sartre’s ‘mauvaise foi’ (Sartre [1943] 1976). For Sartre bad faith is a way of acting without acknowledging the contradiction between opportunistic behaviour and an objective requirement to distance oneself from such behaviour. The ‘mauvaise foi’ is not so much a misjudgement of a situation or a lack of understanding, but a lie we perform against ourselves. For the sake of an opportunistic comfort we betray

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ourselves. This is what Sartre calls ‘mensonge à soi’, a delusion of oneself (Sartre [1943] 1976: 84). What is the psychological foundation of such a surprisingly contradictory behaviour? In the wider picture of Sartre’s existentialism the reason is cowardice, fear and a disillusioned mode of consciousness that has already accepted that honesty and a clear Kantian enlightened view of truth is bound to fail.5 Erving Goffman describes Sartre’s concept of the ‘mauvaise foi’ as ‘neither consenting nor resisting – a thing’ (Goffman 1972: 248). For an existentialist thinker this is obviously not an honest thing to do. It is how a coward behaves. The gamer is not a coward in regard to a lack of bravery to withstand the challenges of his or her enclosedness in the subterranean corridors, caves and labyrinths. His cowardice is rather the weakness to fully comprehend and react against his admission of a situation where escape is just an illusion. I have to clarify here that when using such words as cowardice or opportunism I do not intend to impose any moral value judgements. I use Sartre’s terms to point out a philosophical problem, not an ethical one.6 The cave problem as described here is a special case of a general problem of gaming: why do we engage in artificial environments and spend blood, sweat and tears in situations that we could easily discard as non-­realistic and non-­relevant? Do we not all know that the deadly threads of Spelunky (2008) and of Rick Dangerous (1989) are no danger to us – the players? Why do we then pretend to be afraid and affected? Do we re-­enact the memory of an affective state rather than truly experiencing it? The suggestion that mediatic feelings are feelings of another kind has been discussed in media studies and in musicology before games became a popular medium. Peter Kivy talks about ‘imaginary identification’ (Kivy 2002: 16) in order to explain why we can feel sympathy, happiness and sorrow with non-­sentient actors of an artistic medium. When we shed tears, or feel hate in a movie, we identify with fictional characters. There would be no rational reason to lament the victims of a sunken ship in a fantasy movie or a tragic opera. The actors of the Titanic (1997) movie are fine and the sopranos on the opera stage just pretend to suffer. We know that. The same applies for a cave game. There is no reason for fear of suffocation in a 3D cave simulation. When we feel fear for Lara Croft, we identify fictionally. Paul Hindemith suggested that musical feelings are just memories of what Davies calls ‘true feelings’ (Davies 1994: 223). In his essay on ‘Feeling in Music’ Hindemith points out that what we feel when listening to music are memories of feelings we once had. He talks about images of feelings (Hindemith 1952). The composer has been criticized widely on this theory and authors like Cooke (1959) and Levinson mocked Hindemith comparing his concept of feelings to a gallery stroll amongst musical memorabilia.7 For affects in gaming experience the theory of memories is obviously problematic

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when it comes to feelings we never felt in real life. Who would deny that in playing digital games we are facing situations that we would never have dreamt of. We also encounter situations that we would not have anticipated in our worst nightmares. Do we not also feel feelings that we never felt before? If this is the case then ludic feelings cannot just be memories of ‘true’ feelings. They must be true on their own. Olli Leino investigates the problem in respect to the feeling of love in computer games (Leino 2015). He differentiates between ‘fictional love’ (Leino 2015: 165), ‘vicarious love’ (Leino 2015:166) and love in bad faith (Leino 2015:170–4). A fictional feeling has been described as the real feeling towards a fictional character. This situation is conceivable under the circumstances that the owner of the feeling is aware of the fictionality of the target of his or her feeling. I can probably arrive in a state of mind when watching a 1920s movie that makes me feel in love with the main actress. But I am completely aware that the black and white characters are just moving images projected from celluloid film material. Vicarious feelings use a fictional subject that substitutes for the performance of feeling. I feel empathy for an avatar in a game, but I delegate the performance of feeling to this avatar. Feelings in bad faith are the third possibility of conceptualizing feelings. We avoid making a decision about whether the object of the feeling is real or not. This is the mode Olli Leino finds himself in in regard to his love for the computer game character Rose of Sharon Cassidy, a woman also known as Cass. In the phantasmal gamespaces of caves and dungeons, we are deeply affected and we develop feelings that resonate with real-­world claustrophobia. What is the nature of a ludic feeling? Do we develop empathy for the avatars who are threatened to be locked in? Do we find a substitute for ourselves in the virtual world and why do we want to delegate feelings to our substitutes? For some of us playing cave games might be an act of ‘mauvaise foi’, a situation with a contradictory set of objectives: we want to be thrilled by the mysterious and dangerous opacity of a subterranean world and we want to be successful in leaving this world. It seems to me that a topo-­analysis (Bachelard [1957] 1964: xxiv) of the cave will be most successful if it does not only reflect upon the relationship of the cave and the caged avatar, but rather the triadic relationship of cave interior, world exterior and cave (wo)man. The history of painting has a record of visualization attempts to capture this triadic relationship by offering a glimpse of sunshine and external worldliness with a depiction of the caged person in between light and darkness. Computer games often lack such an aspect of transcendence beyond the rocky walls of the dungeon. Instead they offer a complex relationship of the player, the screen and the avatar. The player is not in the cave. The avatar obviously is. But how come that the player can then dive

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into ‘imaginary identification’ with the situation of being locked up? The key to an answer to this question might be the observation that it is quite satisfying to be half-­caged.8 In the very same way that it can be fun to listen to sad music, it can be deliberating to be locked up in a game. Kendall Walton argues that the feeling of fear we experience in a fictional situation is ‘quasi -fear’ rather than real fear and he proposes that there is a ‘psychologically transparent barrier’ against the remote fictional world (Walton 1978: 5). This barrier allows us to generate quasi-fear, or ‘quasi-pity’ (ibid) with the game’s characters, whilst remaining a remote spectator. Stephen Davies’ famous question ‘Why listen to sad music if it makes us sad?’ (Davies 1997: 243) has a lot of corresponding questions in the world of digital games and computer gaming: why play horror games if they make us feel scared? Why play First Person Shooters when we know we will be killed in the end? Why play That Dragon, Cancer (2016), when we know we will lose the fight for survival? I have tried to show elsewhere that the answer to these questions is related to what different authors called i) ‘half-­belief’ (Huizinga 1949: 23), ii) ‘delegated enjoyment’ (Pfaller 2000: 62–82), iii) ‘half-­real’ (Juul 2005), or iv) ‘mourning for fun’ (Davies 1997: 252).

Each of these strategies provides culturally coded tools to cope with complicated situations. They are based on cultural techniques and resemble each other in acknowledging the difference between ordinary action and playful action. There are family resemblances amongst the four, but they also differ slightly in what they imply (Fuchs 2010a: 206–11).9 It seems that we can enjoy being encaged in cave games, because we only half-­believe in the inescapability of the situation. We are quite aware of the dungeon being half-­ real. We delegate our enjoyment of having killed somebody to an avatar and we mourn just for fun, when we realize that we are stuck in the caves forever and will die a certain death.

3.4  C-movies I cannot remember any decent movie staged in a cave. But there are hundreds of B-movies about the horrors of caves. Let’s call them C-movies, and this is short for C(ave)-movies, to phrase it politely. Sanctum (2011), a 3D action-­ thriller by director Alister Grierson and producer James Cameron, is an

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example of the celebration of shallow delight in claustrophobic fear. Cameron triple-­exploits Tomb Raider games (1996), the Lara Croft movie (2001) and his own Titanic (1997) production by introducing dripping water, dam bursts, submersion and suffocation into the cave scenario. Equally bad is The Descent (2005), with more blood and less 3D special effects than Sanctum. The main characters are six women who enter an unmapped cave system, become trapped and are hunted by flesh-­eating subterranean humanoids. The female actors can be seen in Lara Croft-­style tank tops and the way they jump, cling to rocks and demonstrate instant unconsidered action is strongly reminiscent of the Tomb Raider game series. A more direct appropriation of the famous game is Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), with Angelina Jolie as Lara.10 A more recent incarnation of Lara Croft sees Swedish actress Alicia Vikander (2018) cloning Angelina Jolie who herself once was the perfect clone of the games character. Transmedial desire for expansion breaks through all conceivable mediatic borders and teleports the phantasmal space of Lara, the archaeologist, into the realm of advertising. The Lara Croft – Lucozade Commercials (2000) produced by Ogilvy and Mather draw from Lara Croft’s image as an energetic, active and clever woman. In one of the adverts an ordinary London teenager acts out fantasies of female rebellion, strength and determinism with a little help of the GlaxoSmithKline energy drink. The actress for the commercial resembles Angelina Jolie on a rather low level of sophistication. She has a similar haircut to the famous actress, but lacks the grandeur of the Hollywood star. Her stunts are not always successful, but even in stumbling and falling she suggests to potential energy drink consumers that everyone could be a little bit like Angelina. In the background of transmedial manoeuvres like the ones mentioned there is always the phantasmal space of the cave as a framing of narratives and as a repertoire of signs and concepts (Harrell 2013: 10). In order to work as efficient glue amongst mediatic mouldings there is no need to share what Fox Harrell calls ‘world-­views’. The ‘concepts’ in common are sufficient to create coherence. We remember that Harrell sees ‘world-­views’ as systems of reference in the epistemic domain. This system is built upon ‘beliefs and knowledge about a subdivision of the world’ (Harrell 2013: 12). ‘Concepts,’ however, are ‘possible epistemic spaces’ (Harrell 2013: 12). For a phantasmal space the aspect of possibility is much more relevant than the resemblance to a subdivision of the world. Phantasmal spaces can contradict logic coherence with no hassle, comfortably transcend the laws of physics, or conflict with historic truth. Phantasmal spaces are also not bound to rhetoric regimes. The transmediality of spaces such as cave spaces goes unhindered beyond genre framing, dramatic mode and socio-­political context. The environment of a dungeon works equally well for ludic comedies and tragedies. It also suits satirical or epic modes. This is

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the power of the phantasmal spaces. Rick Dangerous (1989) demonstrates how the cave concept permeates historic context, temporal and spatial coherence and still works very well: spaceships, Egyptians, cavemen, the Barfian Empire from outer space, the jewel of Ankhel and ‘later that week’ the notorious Schwarzendumpf Castle. The game designer Simon Phipps has to be praised for his stylistic skills and creative ingenuity to patch such disparate chunks together in such a convincing manner. French comic book artist and game designer Éric Chahi created Another World (1991) in the style of a bande dessinée story in his parents’ apartment. A friend from school composed the soundtrack. Obviously influenced by comic book aesthetics Chahi’s cave game shows close-­ups of characters alternating with the nocturnal scenes where a young man is chased by a black leonine creature, birds, worms and aliens. Chahi’s method of switching between close-­ups and wide angle was not only extremely unconventional for games design of the early 1990s, it also paved the way for a high level of identification of the player with the avatars. More recent digital games, Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017), Hell Blade: Senua’s Sacrifice (2017), Red Dead Redemption (2010) and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (2016) all use filmic close-­ups in a shot/countershot manner to create a feeling of presence and closeness. Éric Chahi’s 1990s creation of Another World directs the game engine’s camera much closer than what is usual today. One can almost track the transmedial roots in both of the cases. Another World owes its style to comic books with a tradition of the depiction of facial details, whereas Horizon: Zero Dawn and Senua’s Sacrifice clearly subscribe to the aesthetics of Hollywood’s sci-­fi and fantastic film history. Transmediality, it seems, need not work like Henry Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling (Jenkins 2003), it will often be some sort of transmedia spacetelling, or a topo-­formation across media and media histories. The transmediality of cave games can even be observed from this genre’s day one onwards. In 1975 Will Crowther, a speleologist and programmer, developed a text adventure game he named Colossal Cave. The cave adventure was originally programmed for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The FORTRAN code for this program contained not more than 700 lines of instructions and another 700 lines of data. Two years later the game was expanded upon, with help from Don Woods. Other programmers created variations of the game in the following years. In Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), the player controls a character via text commands to explore a cave that is said to contain treasures. Players earn predetermined points for acquiring treasure and escaping the cave alive. The concept for the game stems from Crowther’s background as a caving enthusiast, and there are claims that the Colossal Cave geometry has been loosely structured around the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. Crowther and his wife were amongst

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the speleologists who worked on the cartography of Bedquilt Cave, a huge cavern connected to Mammoth Cave. Crowther used the computer where he worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman to store topographic data. Periodically, he went to Kentucky to join amateur spelunkers in exploring Bedquilt Cave. In an email to Dennis Jerz, the code translator Jim Gilogly reports: In-­game elements such as the small house at the start of the game and grates separating some rooms represented features that had been in place by the Park Service but since removed. Other natural elements such as a narrow cobble-­strewn crawlway leading from the Bedquilt Cave to the Colossal Cave also matched consistency with the in-­game locations. GILOGLY quoted by JERZ 2000 The transmediality here is one that ports cartographic information into a games map. Once more we can talk of an operation of transmedia spacetelling, even if the space in this case is actually rendered verbally, and not as a visual map. The exploration of the cave space worked through sequences of text input by the player: DEC PDP-10 CRT Display  Somewhere nearby here is Colossal Cave, where others have found fortunes in treasure and gold, though it is rumoured that some who enter are never seen again. Magic is said to work in the cave (. . .) You are in a 20-foot depression floored with bare dirt. A dry streambed leads into the depression. Player on ASCII keyboard  GO DOWN Computer  You are crawling over cobbles in a low passage. There is a dim light at the east end of the passage. Player  GO WEST Computer  It is now pitch dark. If you proceed you will likely fall into a pit. Player  GO NORTH Computer  You are in a splendid chamber thirty feet high. The walls are frozen rivers of orange stone. An awkward canyon and a good passage exit from east and west sides of the chamber. A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing. This description of the intricate cave system in Colossal Cave is obviously written by a devotee. The spatial analysis is much richer than a Google map.

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FIGURE 3.2  Screenshot from The Last Guardian (SIE Japan Studio, genDESIGN/ Sony Interactive Entertainment 2016).

It is a poetic topo-­analysis and it completely acknowledges what Bachelard carefully describes as the method of developing ‘the poetics of space’ (Bachelard [1957] 1964). The Colossal Cave Adventure is much more than an agonistic game with the mere goal of arriving at a certain point in a certain time. It renders spaces of possibilities. In his book Höhlenausgänge German philosopher Hans Blumenberg praises the cave for its ‘perfection of recovery and comfort’11 (Blumenberg 1989: 26) and proclaims ‘the birth of fantasy’ which turns the human being into a ‘dreaming animal’12 (Blumenberg 1989: 29). Deep sleep, dreams and fantasy are owed to the protective retreat of the cave. Blumenberg argues that the caverns’ liberation from permanent wariness started poetic creation. In the deep forests and in the wide savannahs danger could come from any direction. An eagle could attack from above, a tiger could sneak up from behind or a snake could bite from below. In a cave attention need only be directed to one single spot: the exit. This, according to Blumenberg’s wild speculations,13 created space for storytelling, for cave-­ painting, for the oracles and for the origins of culture.

4 The Cloud

‘I can only live in a cloud – and I have to.’ RICHARD WAGNER [1865]1988: 421

‘Realistic CG clouds are not an easy nut to crack.’ SCHNEIDER AND VOS 2015

4.1  The beauty of clouds and industrial steam

T

imothy Cavendish, one of the protagonists in David Mitchell’s novel The Cloud Atlas (2004), muses: ‘What wouldn’t I give now for a never-­changing map of the ever-­constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds’ (Mitchell 2004: 389). The paradoxical desire to catch a moment of the ineffable and to archive or visualize the continuously changing form of the clouds is a joint dream of novelists, painters and game designers. The phantasm of the cloud has been attempted to be materialized in oil on canvas by Joseph Mallord William Turner, by John Constable, Johan Christian Dahl, Caspar David Friedrich and others. It has been tried to be caught in words by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Paul Eluard, Philipp Otto Runge and others. Today computer graphics and in particular digital games are trying to come to terms with the elegance and the volatility of clouds. Luke Howard, an English chemist, set out to classify clouds in the late eighteenth century. The project drew praise from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who said that Howard was ‘the first to hold fast conceptually the airy and always changing form of clouds, to limit and fasten down the indefinite, the intangible and unattainable and give them appropriate names’ (Goethe [1821] 1949: preface to the poems). Goethe admired and praised Howard and forged his admiration for the British pharmacist and researcher into the form of a poem, when he rhymed:

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Er aber, Howard, gibt mit reinem Sinn Uns neuer Lehre herrlichsten Gewinn. Was sich nicht halten, nicht erreichen läßt, Er faßt es an, er hält zuerst es fest; [551] Bestimmt das Unbestimmte, schränkt es ein, Benennt es treffend! – Sei die Ehre dein! But Howard gives us with his clearer mind The gain of lessons new to all mankind; That which no hand can reach, no hand can clasp, He first has gain’d, first held with mental grasp. Defin’d the doubtful, fix’d its limit-­line, And named it fitly. – Be the honour thine! GOETHE [1821] 1949 Goethe became a captive fan and promoter of Howard and tried to commission a cloud atlas from Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich refused because ‘to force the free and airy clouds into a rigid order and classification’ would damage their expressive potential and even ‘undermine the whole foundation of landscape painting’ (Mattern 2016). I guess that Caspar David Friedrich over-­assessed Goethe’s rigidness when he refused to produce the cloud atlas. It was Howard who might have been interested in a rigid order and classification, but Goethe just played the scientist when he appropriated the classification scheme of the British meteorologist. Goethe who considered scientific disciplines like mineralogy ‘scientific games’2 (Kayser 1967) followed Howard and was propelled by ludic attitude and poetic instinct. Whilst Howard spoke of the stratus clouds as ‘a widely extended, continuous, horizontal sheet, increasing from below’ (Howard [1803] 1884: 5), and then further explained that this ‘is the lowest of clouds, since its inferior surface commonly rests on the earth or water’ (Howard [1803] 1884: 8), Goethe mixed scientific observation with poetic enthusiasm when he said about the very same stratus clouds: Anything might be called by this name that is either a foggy stretch of humidity, that rises from the swamps or the moist meadows . . . or the strips of clouds and layers that hover on the sides of mountains or even the highest peaks of the mountains. GOETHE [1833] 1970: 1943 It becomes evident from such a loose handling of a taxonomic framework that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ran a project that was concerned with phantasmal spaces and not with the creation of objective knowledge.

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Howard’s findings can be verified or falsified via observation and he proposes categories that hold true for any person, location and time. Goethe’s observations stem from one person’s viewpoint at a particular time in a limited area of observations. The poet was mainly inspired by clouds he saw during his trips to the Swiss Alps and to Marienbad. It might sound sarcastic, but it is not completely wrong when Ertel talks about Goethe’s approach towards meteorological phenomena as ‘Dichtung ohne Wahrheit’ – poetry without truth – and refers with this wording to Goethe’s oeuvre called ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’ – poetry and truth. Ertel convincingly points out that Goethe draws from German speculative philosophy of nature much more than he did from the sciences of physics, mathematics and chemistry (Ertel 1953: 19). It is not only poets who are inspired by the various forms of clouds. The Italian painter, pilot and Futurist Tullio Crali followed Marinetti’s quest for ‘the lyrical obsession of matter’ (Marinetti [1912] 1972) and his private obsession with aviation when he painted the Tramonto di luci ad Ostia (1930) and the self-­portrait from 1935. The former shows clouds from a perspective that only a pilot could imagine, the latter places his own head in the clouds. Crali anticipated an in-­the-clouds viewpoint to visualize clouds that computer games would take up once more in games like War Thunder (2012) or in Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017). Architecture usually deals with constructions that rest firmly on the ground. But recently some architects played with and developed the use of non-­solid substances. Inflatables have been introduced in the 1960s by art groups like Ant Farm. Others conceived static constructions that appear to be weightless. The New Rome/EUR Convention Centre by Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas (2016) contains a huge built cloud that could have been set up by game designers. Architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro conceived and built the Blur Building in 2002, a spatial construction that could not differ more from how common sense thinks of a ‘house’ and that could not come any closer to a real-­world rendering of Richard Wagner’s aphorism of ‘I can only live in a cloud . . .’ (Wagner [1865] 1988: 42). A metaphor turned into games reality is what computer games often exemplify, when rocks take the shape of faces, animals behave like humans or clouds are placed in perfect harmony with the landscape, the purpose of the mission and the topography of the virtual location. The Blur Building is a metaphor turned architecture. The building is a media pavilion for Swiss EXPO 2002 at the base of Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-­les-Bains, Switzerland. A tensegrity system of struts and rods cantilevers out over the lake fed by water from pipes under the surface of the lake. Ramps and walkways lead through the tensegrity system, some of them providing a counterweight for the structure. The pavilion is not made from bricks and mortar, but made of filtered lake water shot into the air

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FIGURE 4.1   Blur Building (Diller Scofidio + Renfro 2002). Photography by Beat Widmer, courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

as a fine mist. This is accomplished by 13,000 fog nozzles creating an artificial cloud with a length of 300 feet, 200 feet width and a height of 65 feet. A built-­ in weather station controls fog output in response to shifting climatic conditions such as temperature, humidity, wind speed and wind direction. One would completely miss the point by criticizing the building for its lack of sustainability, energy efficiency or habitable qualities. In almost the same manner the ‘Solitude Towers’ of SKYRIM (2011) cannot be judged by their functionality as proper buildings. With all the fog and clouds they are covered in, they represent ideas rather than buildings. The clouds paradoxically help in making the image sharper. They do not really blur perception. The Blur Building and the solitude towers are phantasmal spaces. They are wake dreams that exist in a very concrete manner. They can be located with high accuracy and they can be measured with pixel precision. Like Macbeth’s dagger in his dream4 the phantasmal objects are not palpable and of an intimate immensity that supersedes real clouds, real houses and real daggers.

4.2  Cloud rendering The clouds we saw in 1985 when playing Nintendo’s Super Mario did not look like real clouds. The pixelated white objects with single pixel width black linings, that were positioned motionless on a monochromatic blue background

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became famous as ‘Super Mario Clouds’ when Cory Arcangel presented his game modification with the same name in 2002. The hardware hack Cory Arcangel used to create his stunning art piece consisted of modifying a Nintendo Super Mario cartridge by de-­soldering the pins of the NES-NROM-01 chip, taking it out and replacing it with an integrated circuit called 27C256, a 32k EEPROM. Arcangel hacked his way into the hardware to exhibit in minimalistic style and in perfect beauty what mattered most to the artist (and least to the players): the clouds hovering above Mario, his friends and opponents. The 1985 clouds that Arcangel exhibited in 2002 refer to an art historical discourse about foreground and background, a frequently discussed topic since Da Vinci painted La Gioconda between 1503 and 1506. Much interest has been devoted to finding out about why two different backgrounds have been painted to the left and the right of the face and the upper part of the body of Lisa Gherardini.5 In both cases, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Nintendo’s Super Mario, the background is in an instable oscillation of representation and fiction. The game clouds suggest celestial phenomena, but the black linings on the clouds and their unrealistic stasis oppose the referential stability. The landscapes in the background of Da Vinci’s painting have also been said to be referential of a particular place in the Montefeltro region, as Olivia Nesci and Rosetta Borchia (2012) propose, but at the same time we see two different views of a location that do not match together. It seems that the intentionally unrealistic depiction of nature leads the way for the viewer/player to suspend herself to disbelief about the reality of the main portrayed characters: Mario and the Gioconda. The representation of clouds in games gained some sophistication around 1999, when UnrealTournament allowed a glimpse at skybox-­rendered celestial environments in maps like DM-Pyramid. Even though most of the fighting in UnrealTournament took place in subterranean spaces, the few moments when one could see the skies raised hopes that the constraints of small corridors with a few flickering lights could be overcome and that we might be released into vast landscapes with immense skies. Game designers soon found out that only a few layers of transparent cloud images created perceptional depth and came close to real clouds in the sky, if one didn’t look at them for too long a time. For a First Person Shooter cloud gazing is not a priority anyway. Skyboxes have consequently been replaced by skydomes and in most of the cases these would serve the purpose, but flight simulators or open world games soon required more complex cloud simulation methods. Ubisoft convincingly demonstrated how dynamic clouds could contribute to the atmospheric intensity of a game. In Assassin’s Creed: Unity (2014) the clouds casting dynamic shadows on the ground contributed largely to the feeling of unrest and change. Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (2015) does not

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feature dynamic cloud shadows, but with a combination of industrial smoke, epic cloud formations, dynamic lighting and weather the effect is amazing. Even better than that, and currently state of the art in cloud simulation is Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017). Guerrilla Games, the developer of Horizon, had earlier on experimented with non-texture-based cloud simulations in the game Killzone (2004). Clouds have then been implemented as volumetric assets, i.e. not as two-­dimensional images that have been montaged and overlaid on a skybox or a skydome, but rather as three-­dimenensional objects that could be transformed, rotated, scaled and dynamically lit by the game engine, very much like characters or animated objects can. These clouds looked realistic, but they were extremely demanding in processing power and shadows had to be baked into the level textures, because a real-­time dynamic shadow reception was not possible with the available technology. For the development of Horizon Guerrilla Games set themselves goals that would make clouds ‘thematic devices in storytelling’ (Schneider and Vos 2015: 5). The main objective was to create dynamic weather situations with a day/night circle, epic clouds that often make up half of the screen, multiple cloud types and the possibility for the clouds to be edited and be directable by the artists. The idea behind that was, that the asset of ‘a cloud’ formerly understood to be a background element, would turn into a fully animated atmospheric non-­ playing character that would tell stories, direct the player, be an obstacle or supportive and change its character permanently. Technical specifications had to be met as well. The clouds and weather had to be rendered in real-­time and should, in order to keep a satisfactory frame rate, not cost more than 2 milliseconds of render time per frame and not take up more than 20 megabytes

FIGURE 4.2   Screenshot from Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (Ubisoft 2015).

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of RAM. Guerrilla Games initially tried to solve the difficult task by modelling the clouds from three-­dimensional shapes, voxeling them and feeding them into a generative algorithm called a fluid solver6 – before a lighting model could finally scatter the light within the simulated clouds. This is to say that the designers initially built three-­dimensional shapes by hand using 3D-modelling software. The second step was carried through by a program – not a human – to achieve the impression of fluidity amongst the geometric structures. As this did not look sufficiently dramatic, a third step was introduced: a complex system of reflections and refractions within the aerial objects created the typical diffuse shininess of clouds on a sunny day. The designers experimented with anisotropic scattering phase functions7 for this purpose. The method ‘sort of worked’ (Schneider and Vos 2015: 5), but the cloudscapes did not evolve over time. The company could obviously not stick to technological solutions that were fine for still images or for special effects in film, but had to develop new software that would meet computer game requirements. The research team therefore adopted a standard ray-­march sampler framework,8 but they built the clouds with two levels of detail, a low frequency cloud shape and a representation of high frequency detail and distortion. It is common practice in cloud simulation to use noise for the generation of clouds. Perlin noise is often used for good results (cf. Mukhina and Bezgodov 2015). Perlin noise generates procedural textures used as a visual effect to increase the appearance of realism in computer graphics. Ken Perlin developed the algorithms for the generation of this type of noise in 1982 when working on Disney’s animated sci-­fi movie Tron (1982). The function is based on a pseudo-­ random process that is highly controllable in various parameters and therefore looks natural and non-­repetitive. Perlin noise is often used in computer graphics for object surfaces such as fire, stone, smoke or clouds. Guerrilla Games made a pragmatic and unconventional choice in using different noise types for the simulation. They were not taken away by academic disputes about what noise is the most appropriate noise for a particular simulation but simply found a pragmatic solution for the question of which one to choose: let’s take all of them! The starting point for their computations is custom noise made from Worley noise (Worley 1996), Perlin noise and Curl noise. Additionally, they use a set of presets for each cloud type to control density over height and cloud coverage. I propose that Guerrilla Games could only develop an efficient solution to the cloud simulation problem because they conceived clouds as epic phenomena rather than physical objects and handled the objects in a completely pragmatic manner. The computation they use is an eclectic mix of methods that has no causal physical pattern as a generative reference. Worley states that the textures created by his type of noise are

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useful to generate images resembling ‘organic crusty skin, crumpled paper, ice, rock, mountain ranges, and craters’ (Worley 1996: 291). If such a procedure is used to create clouds the results are obviously not objects that have been built with the physics of real clouds in mind. Epic clouds are different to real, meteorological clouds. They look all right, but they are in no way true to nature. For physicists, this method is inappropriate. Mathematicians Ksenia Mukhina and Alexey Bezgodov propose that ‘[i]n broad meteorological terms, a cloud can be defined as a visible mass of liquid droplets or crystals of ice suspended in atmosphere above the ground’ (Mukhina and Bezgodov 2015: 699). Such premises positions them in another paradigmatic space and will consequently lead to other methods and other results than those the game designers make use of. Beyond the technically sophisticated challenge of number-­crunching cloud simulation algorithms the developers are nowadays interested in creating realistic skies that represent both high altitude cirrus clouds and major low-­ level cloud types, including thick billowy cumulus clouds. These clouds need to light correctly according to the time of day and other cloud-­specific lighting conditions. Obviously, this is light years apart from Super Mario’s naïve white clouds of the 1980s. The developers from the War Thunder (2012) project state that ‘sky in the Dagor Engine 4 is astronomically correct which means that both the sun and the stars are correctly positioned in the sky according to latitude, time and the date (including polar nights and days)’.9 Contextualized in such an ‘astronomically correct’ manner, clouds are definitely more than just decorative elements that make us believe that a blue surface is supposed to be the sky. Clouds are now navigational instruments and they contribute to what Immanuel Kant described as ‘orientation’ in his essay entitled What does it mean: to orient oneself? To orient oneself means, properly: out of a given world region (in the four of which we divide the horizon) to find the other, namely, the place of rising (sunrise). If I look at the sun in the heaven at this instant and know that it is noon, so I know how to find the south, west, north and east. But I need in support of this throughout the feeling of a difference in my own subject, namely, my right and left hands. I name it a feeling . . . KANT [1786] 1963, 8:134 What Kant describes as a feeling is often experienced as an intuition or an affect of magnetic pull towards a direction. It seems as if the subject-­position would have been cast into the mapped environment. For computer games, we can talk as well of the subject-­position being cast into gamespace. Daniel Vella speaks of the ‘sense of inhabitation’ a player can grow when playing10

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and refers to Heidegger when he continues ‘. . . of being-­there’ (Vella 2013: 5). Vella quotes Gordon Calleja, mentioning a sense of ‘incorporation’ and Vella proposes that ‘The subject-­position that the player inhabits, then, is internal to the virtual environment’ (Vella 2013: 5). How can this be possible? How can the subject-­position in a ghostly manner leave the physical body of the subject? It is made possible by the aforementioned process of incorporation. How else could the subject be internalized by the external space of a game? Gordon Calleja explains: ‘incorporation, the absorption of a virtual environment into consciousness, yield[s] a sense of habitation, which is supported by the systematically upheld embodiment of the player in a single location, as represented by the avatar’ (Calleja 2011: 169). I would like to add that the player is not only held embodied in the location of the avatar, but locked into gamespace itself. This leads to a strong spatial identification, because there is now more free roaming. There is just one body, the avatar’s, and there is just one location, the games level. A move in a certain direction, one might conclude, is not a move of the avatar only. It is also a move of my subject-­ position: a magnetic pull of me having to follow the directions from the avatar’s space. Affective game design accounts for this by laying tracks that the player might subconsciously read. Orientation becomes a bodily experience and differs substantially from the sort of cerebral orientation that we know from text-­based games like ZORK (1980). From the Torch room, go South, then East and get the coffin. Return West, then continue South to the Altar. GAMEBOOMERS GUIDEBOOK for ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire11 Technology plays an important role in regard to how spatial phantasms are communicated or cannot be communicated. Games technology of the 1980s had a way to evoke ideas of orientation and also of celestial objects like clouds that was tied to verbal communication: ‘It will most likely take more than one attempt, so keep at it, and eventually he will disappear in a cloud’ (Gameboomers 1999). ‘Cloud’ is a five-­letter word here. In War Thunder (2012), in David O’Reilly’s The Mountain (2014) or in Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017) a cloud is an aesthetic artefact, a pathfinder or a warning sign. Clouds can also be subtexts to narratives of war, love or discovery. But this is only possible via a games-­technological dispositive that is built upon render engines, fluid solvers and voxel shaders. It is for this reason that it is worthwhile to look into the history of cloud generation software and of cloud simulation technologies. The technologies do not create the phantasms on their own, but they provide containers for what Bachelard calls ‘intimate immensity’ (Bachelard [1957] 1964: 183–210). The drama of

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images that are technically constructed, perceived in a media environment and connected to historical points of reference promotes Bachelard’s intimate immensity and prepares for phantasmal spaces that ride on the back of technological spaces.

4.3  Head in the clouds: daydreaming The ever-­constant ineffable of the clouds has a corresponding set of processes in our brains: daydreams, sometimes referred to as wake dreams or mind-­ wandering. The ever-­critical Descartes already suspected dreams and play to be companions in the process of deluding us. Descartes’ ludificationes somniorum, the playful tricks of dreams (Descartes 1647), have to be distrusted if we want to avoid being trapped by credulity and the consequences thereof. Of the evil demons who insidias credulitati meae tetendit, the demons who want to lure me into an ambush by making me struggle with my good faith (Descartes 1647), Descartes warns us emphatically. With a strong resemblance to dreams clouds are, after all, fluid clusters in motion, they float in the sky, rise and disperse, mix and mingle with other clouds and appear as unpredictable, streams of matter that are too volatile to ever be grasped and caught. That is how we experience thought processes during wake dreams. Jonathan Schooler et al. propose an analogy of dreams and liquids: Consciousness not only flows like a stream (James, 1890/1950), continuously moving with ever-­changing content, but also ebbs like a breaking wave, outwardly expanding and then inwardly retreating. This perennial rhythm of the mind—extracting information from the external world, withdrawing to inner musings, and then returning to the outer realm—defines mental life. SCHOOLER, MRAZEK ET AL. 2014: 2 When the authors refer to William James’ The Principles of Psychology (1890) they also refer to a then popular space of metaphors that narrated the human metabolism in terms of liquid substances. Body fluids, the stream of consciousness, or the deep sea of the unconsciousness all contribute to a paradigmatic story of the self and the body, that are just rhetoric and yet, become part of the system of knowledge. Such systems of reference assist communication in the scientific community. The metaphors are so strong that they start replacing abstraction and after some time the metaphors are undisputedly taken for the structural backbone of a scientific field or a whole discipline. It is often technological progress that suggests new stories to be told: the fluid system is replaced by the landscape of electrical engineering.

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Now neural activities are conceptualized as currents. The brain transforms inputs into output and bodily units can discharge like a condenser does on a circuit board. A few decades later, with the ascent of computer technology, the brain is said to reveal features that resemble a RAM chip, the body is structured as containing processing and memory units12 and the spine and nervous system turn into a ‘bus’. Such metaphors and the corresponding systems of reference facilitate communication in the scientific community, but they also prepare for accepting a priori assumptions about continuity, discreteness or synchronicity/asynchronicity. William James, the founding father of American psychology states in Chapter IX Stream of Thought in 1890: ‘We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world’ (James 1890: 288–9). What James calls the real world here is already a construction of worldliness that has been infected by swarms and clouds. Once more, in Chapter XVI about Memory the cloud is used to explain the phenomenon of a fuzzy and unspecific form of recognition: If a phenomenon is met with, however, too often, and with too great a variety of contexts, although its image is retained and reproduced with correspondingly great facility, it fails to come up with any one particular setting . . . We recognize but do not remember it – its associates form too confused a cloud. JAMES 1890: 673 The landscape of metaphors pulls in phantasmal content. If daydreams are labelled ‘cloudy thinking’ a door has been opened that allows the collective subconscious of cloud stories, cloud atlases, songs and poetry on clouds, the history of painting skies and the wide range of myths, fables and tales about clouds to enter the room. So, what is so cloudy about wake dreams? Studies and speculations by Schooler et al. (2014: 13–17) suggest that brain recruitment associated with daydreaming is most pronounced in the absence of meta-­ awareness, and that thoughts in the state of mind-­wandering resemble the movement of clouds in the sky. In an article in the Frontiers of Perception Schooler together with his co-­authors talks about the ‘silver lining of a mind in the clouds’ (Franklin et al. 2013). This is a beautiful picture and obviously the dynamics of thoughts can in a loose phrasing be called ‘movements of thoughts’. So why not take the next step and propose that the dynamic morphology of thoughts could be compared to the dynamism of clouds. Daydreaming that is described as ‘off-­task thinking’ is characterized by a lack of meta-­awareness. Like the clouds in the sky the wandering thoughts are

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said to roam around with no extrinsic directives, no meta-­awareness and no masterplan. Stimulus-­independent thought is said to float and hover, and don’t the clouds do so as well? No, they don’t. The complexity of the meteorological parameters like wind, humidity, air pressure and temperature make the individual clouds appear to wander aimlessly, but there are clear extrinsic forces that make the clouds wander. These forces account for the direction, speed, variability of the vectorial transformations. Let’s face the facts: clouds do not wander, they are pulled and dragged, stopped and destroyed. There is no free movement in the motion of clouds, whatever the poets want to tell us. The cloudy thinking of our wake dreams has not always been attributed the virtues of ‘enhanced creativity’ (Schooler et al. 2014: 18) and ‘prospective planning and mental simulation of future events’ (Schooler et  al. 2014: 17). Quite on the contrary. Sigmund Freud was suspicious that daydreams might be ‘the closest preliminary stages for symptoms of hysteria’13 (Freud [1908] 1960: Chapter  32) and he even insists that ‘[e]ach and every hysterical outbreak that I have investigated has proven to be such an involuntary irruption of a daydream’14 (Freud [1908] 1960: Chapter 32). The contemporary turn in appreciation of daydreams is, however, not a complete reversal. The new neo-­liberal interpretation of mind-­wandering as a creativity booster or as a positive kickstarter towards future planning skills is worried about the ‘costs’ of mind-­wandering. The above-­mentioned psychologists and brain scientists tell us that daydreams contribute to decrease performance, and high ‘[c]osts for working memory and general aptitude’ (Schooler et  al. 2014: 8) They recommend to find the ‘right balance’ (Schooler et al. 2014: 25–8), and thereby follow one of the basic demands of capitalistic economy: maximize the profits and minimize the costs.

4.4  Transmedia cloud formations When Claude Monet observed and painted the smoke from the locomotives in La Gare Saint-Lazare (1877) he must have thought that he would paint clouds. Having just moved from Argenteuil to Paris, he staged the smoke-­ clouds under the triangular roof structure of Saint-Lazare. The triangular roof looks like a cathedral roof. The smoke is much too puffy and much too contiguous to represent the steam coming from an engine, but for Monet the revelation of manmade clouds coming from manmade machines was an aesthetic challenge as much as a techno-­blasphemic statement about urban cultures at the turn of the century. And is Saint-Lazare not more of a saint than a railway station? Monet could not stop mingling industrial smoke, natural clouds, steam and vapour within one scene. In Waterloo Bridge, Grey Weather

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(1903)15 he demonstrated how hue, colour and saturation all follow an artist’s directives and still look atmospherically true. In the famous Impression, soleil levant (1872) he anticipates a sunrise scenario that Ubisoft would refer to more than 150 years later in the computer game Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (2015). Both the painter’s red sun that is almost covered by steam and smoke and still casts its rays on a red and grey sky, and the game company’s pale white sun, that is visibly hidden behind the fog of the city of London, are engaged in a spiel of colour, light, dust, clouds, fog and water. It does not matter whether Ubisoft designers had a reproduction of Impression, soleil levant on their desks when they designed the environments for Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, if they sat in the Musée Marmottan, the place where Soleil levant is currently displayed, in order to get inspired, or if they never saw a single brushstroke of Monet. What is interesting here, is the trajectory from one rendering of a phantasmal space into another one. Spatial phantasms are not short-­lived. They change when technological dispositifs change or when the pace of quotidian rhythms change, but they do not change rapidly. Fallout 4: Far Harbor (2016) features a fictional ‘fog condenser’, a tool that would be extremely useful in highly polluted environments. The condenser removes all poisonous particles and looks like a dream come true for nineteenth-­century industrial England, the very one that Claude Monet got his inspirations from. A few steps further from Monet, but still in the spirit of what the painter experienced in the Saint-Lazare station or at the Waterloo Bridge of the late nineteenth century is Dishonored (2012). The foggy Victorian streets of London and Edinburgh have been remodelled in the steam-­punk game Dishonored that looks back into the future of an industrialization that changed a world blessed with blue skies into a threatening dark cloud front. This layer of grey is ubiquitous and encompassing. Clouds turn into an omnipresent cloudiness – not interrupted by silver linings, spots of blue or sheep-­shaped fluffy whites. Alan Warburton, a Scottish artist, takes up this depressive tone of dystopian games like Dishonored in a video art piece called ‘Z’ (2012). ‘Z ’ is a walkthrough in a coastal landscape of industrial buildings, tanks, cranes, scaffolding and ships, which are all covered in what looks like fog. The piece is composed entirely of z-­depth images – also known as ‘luminance depth’ or ‘depth map’ images. Z-depth is a numerical representation of the distance that objects adopt in relation to the camera position. It is a format native to computer graphics animation and to computer games. The function of the z-­depth image is similar to radar or the MRI scan. It interprets objects within a scene according to distance: the objects closest to the camera are coloured in black, those furthest away in white. Warburton does with technology what Monet has experimented with in the medium of oil paint: changing the colour, resolution, blurriness or

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contrast can deconstruct information about depth within a landscape or a scene. For Monet, the series comprising of the ‘Grey Day’, Jour gris (1903), and others was his answer to the challenge of sacrificing representational visual detail in order to win on the front of atmospheric intensity.16 But the total of forty-­one Waterloo-­bridges Monet created, demonstrates something else: a reduction of visual parameters does not necessarily reduce the information about the objects as conveyed by the medium. Paradoxically the choice of fewer colours can make an image look more colourful. Equally surprising, it is also true that the colours used for a painting can be interpreted by the viewer’s eye (and brain) as completely different colours. The bridge of Jour gris is painted in red, blue and brown shades with pink colour details and yet, it feels like a bridge on a grey day. Another painting from the series, the Pont de Waterloo that is now in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (1903) is painted in the friendliest of conceivable light blue tones, a colour that is sometimes called ‘baby blue’ because of its innocence. Yet the perception of the bridge is that of a stone bridge in bad and rainy weather. When we propose here, that Claude Monet’s technique, his aesthetic programme and even certain subjects have been passed on to computer games, we need to also ask what has changed since 1872. There is no doubt that the technology of cloud simulation has undergone massive progress. Clouds can be created much faster, much closer to reality and also in a dynamic way that could not have been dreamt of by Monet. But what is more interesting is the mediatic transformation. Ludic clouds are highly responsive to changes in gameplay, to the history of the gaming session being played and to multiplayer behaviour. Game designers Schneider and Vos tell us that clouds will be ‘used to tell us where we are, when we are, and they can also be used as thematic devices in storytelling’ (Schneider and Vos 2015). With big data technologies and visible or hidden data-­mining, the synthetic clouds of our days might as well be a product of consumer preferences and smart responses to the tracks we leave on webpages, on geographic locations or in various digital devices. Monet’s clouds were projections of his dreamscapes into the skies on his canvases. The affective states of the painter’s brain became deterritorialized and they materialized as coloured brushstrokes on the painting. Modern clouds could be the repercussion of such an exterritorialization. User profiles that are correlated to complex patterns of consumption, travelling habits, social activities, professional enterprises create data in the cloud. We are not talking about cirrus, cumulus, stratus and nimbus here, but about another set of objects. Shannon Mattern observes that we are today engaged in a computational ‘cloud-­rendering enterprise, although we look not to the skies but to the fog of data, the algorithmic atmosphere, the hazy geography of digital intelligence. This is our Cloud’ (Mattern 2016).

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Computational clouds are competing in size and complexity with the clusters of condensed water above our heads, but other than in meteorology there are no clear skies, when it comes to ‘ubiquitous . . . on-­demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage applications and services)’ (Mell and Grance 2011). This is how the National Institute of Standards and Technology defines cloud computing. We find ourselves in a world of new clouds that is always overcast. Blue skies have gone. Our current cloudscapes are as dense as a cumulus and they cover the whole planet. Caspar David Friedrich had a vision of such skies when working on The Monk by the Sea (Friedrich 1808–10). Computer games convey the feeling of a super-­terranean environment that is always dark, filthy and gloomy in an even more radical manner. Blade Runner (1997), Silent Hill (1999), Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (2015) and Dishonored (2012) tell us how bad it can get, when the sun is permanently eclipsed by clouds and fog.17 Working with artificial clouds Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang pulls the darkness of Syndicate, Dishonored and Blade Runner back into our physical world. In 2006 he created a black cloud that would hover over the roof terrace of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and float silently across Central Park (Guo-Qiang 2006). The cloud looked like an artefact from a dystopian game. With intended connotations to 9/11, warfare and war games this cloud performed a fantastic piece of transmedial space configuration.

5 The Cliff

5.1 Running and falling

T

his is a sequence from a dream: You are standing on a cliff and are pulled towards the abyss. However hard you try, you just cannot counteract the forces that drag you into the vortex. You fall. And then you run again, only to discover that another bottomless gap will catch you. The nightmare never stops. This is also a sequence from many computer games. The cliff, the abyss, holes in the ground and the depth of space constitute obstacles that keep the player in constant endangerment. Games that present cliffs and platforms as the tectonic basis for ludic missions have been called ‘platform jumpers’, but I would like to propose here that they should be called ‘cliff tumblers’, because what keeps these games absorbing us is not the joy of jumping, but rather the fear of falling. Platform games emerged in the early 1980s with games such as Crazy Climber (1980), Donkey Kong (1981), Jump Bug (1981), Super Mario Bros. (1985) and Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) – or to mention an even earlier game, that Chris Crawford honoured to be ‘the granddaddy of all platform games’ (Crawford 2003): Space Panic from 1980. All of these games involve guiding a character to jump between suspended platforms and to overcome obstacles. The player controls the jumps and tries to avoid letting the character fall from cliffs, roofs or platforms. Beginning with Space Panic, a genre of games emerged characterized by a front view and a game field consisting of a number of tiers connected by ladders. These games include Donkey Kong and Crazy Climber. Scrolling graphics introduced the typical look of what we now call side-­scrollers. Jump Bug from 1981 was probably the first scrolling platform game and Super Mario Bros. (1985) became the ultimate bestselling ‘platformer’ so far. With more than 40 million copies sold by the year 1999, Super Mario Bros. demonstrates the enormous popularity that platform games once had. The Metroid series (1986–2016) by Nintendo is another

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example of a game of this kind that sold tens of millions of copies. The market share of platform games is said to have been 15 per cent of the total of videogames in 1998.1 In the late 1980s platform games became mobile with new hardware like the Gameboy (1989) or Game Gear (1990) and later the Nintendo DS. At the same time platform games grew up and turned from flat 2D simulations to complex 3D worlds hosting the jump and run missions. As early as 1990 French developer Infogrames published an abstract 3D-world platform game for the Amiga and Atari ST hardware. The game with the title Alpha Waves (1990) was a full-­screen 3D game with flat-­shaded 3D objects and three-­dimensional object interaction, like bouncing on a platform or jumping from a cliff. Alpha Waves is an abstract game with an artistic and almost psychedelic presentation. Players could choose to play in ‘Action Mode’ or in ‘Emotion Mode’. The original implementation on an Atari computer had to cope with performing processorintensive operations like depth-­of-field clipping on a simple hardware that had no graphics card support in the form of a GPU. The complete task of rendering the geometry, computing the gameplay actions and displaying interface information had to be done on the CPU alone. This pushed the performance of the machine so much to the limit that the developers had to do away with sound. Only in later ports to the Amiga and to DOS systems equipped with SoundBlaster cards, could audio be added. This was in 1990, but even today, the concept of a player character who has to cope with cliffs, long jumps and parkour performance, is still persuasive. Mirror’s Edge (2008) ported the old 2D concept to a vibrant 3D environment with the sporty and youthful female avatar, Faith. The story designer Rhianna Pratchett developed a narrative that proposes an agreeable alternative to the male-­dominated videogames industry. The sisters Faith and Kate become runners in order to fight the dystopian and conformist regime of a future city. The Swedish studio DICE developed the Jump ’n’ Run adventure and first presented it to the public in 2008. Still Alive, the title song for Mirror’s Edge, is sung by female Swedish artist Lisa Miskovsky. This consolidation of female agenda in regard to storytelling, avatars and musical interpretation took place within the phantasmal space of the cliff. My guess here is that this could not have happened within racing games or war games. The cliff is such a delicate place to be at, that falling and failing, jumping and escape have all to be carried through with a mix of courage, bodily skills and a timing that is different to the one required for First Person Shooters. Mirror’s Edge’s Faith is not Gordon Freeman from Half-Life and she is not some zombie look-­alike with the name of Boris Kurgan from Unreal. She is a healthy young woman with a sense of politics and the skills to get what she wants. The phantasmal space of the cliff is a dangerous place and a highly unstable location. Everything might go upside down. Winners can turn into losers and

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FIGURE 5.1  Book illustration for Karl May’s Der Schut ([1888] 1909) (Claus Bergen 1907).

underdogs can turn into top dogs. It is often just one step or one tiny movement that changes the situation completely. Death and survival are not so much a question of power, but of skill. It is nuance, the control of fragile and microscopic infra-­stabilities that decides about who will stumble and who will remain on her feet. The most frightening aspect of the cliff is that I could be the one who takes the wrong step. I am not so much afraid of being pushed, but rather of the possibility of self-­destruction. The cliff is where suicidal personalities face the final question: shall I stay or shall I drop myself down? Bridges, high towers, rocks and cliffs in the mountains are notorious suicide spots. Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) comes to mind and the fall of Manach el Barscha in Karl May’s Der Schut ([1888] 1909). But the most impressive leap from a cliff is the epic jump of Thelma & Louise (1991) in their car. The image of the blue 1966 Ford Thunderbird convertible speeding up towards the cliff and gliding into the blue skies above the canyon is firmly inscribed into the collective unconscious.

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The phantasmal content of the cliff as a point of no return has been promoted via computer games, that now have a higher persuasive power than Sylvester Stallone and his Hollywood colleagues could ever have in movies such as Cliffhanger (1993). Lara Croft is the new Stallone when she elegantly clings to rocks, grabs trees’ branches or jumps across ditches (Tomb Raider 1996). Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad outperforms any conceivable movie actor with his climbing and jumping stunts that we are told happened in the year of 1191 (Assassin’s Creed 2007).

5.2  Physics engines Objects in a computer game world do not fall, if they are not told to fall. A simulated environment does not necessarily contain properties of a physical environment – like gravity – and objects stay where they are unless the programs define a set of behaviours for translations, accelerations and rotations that make the objects move. Such a rule set is called the physics of a game and the program that performs the calculations for the movements is called a physics engine. A physics engine could make an apple drop like in a Newtonian universe, but it could also make an apple rise and make clouds descend. Today the Havok engine and the PhysX engine are widely used to simulate real-­world physical behaviour of scripted objects in computer games. The Havok engine has been used in more than 150 games titles, such as Unreal Tournament (1999), StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010), Company of Heroes (2006), Assassin’s Creed (2014; 2015), and Super Smash Bros. (1999), a series of games that need fast and sophisticated physics in order to allow for the virtuoso stunts of the players. The company has a product portfolio that not only includes physics for the creation of the movement of objects, it also features a cloth engine and – as a Faustian turn à la Mephistopheles – a destruction engine. The software that is called ‘Havok Destruction’ is a toolset and runtime SDK designed for game artists who want to create destructible assets and worlds. The company tells us that this would be adding a new dimension to structural mechanics, visual effects and game level design. The company does not tell us what it means to computer games, and to the players of such, to implement the potential of everything being corrodible. In Goethe’s Faust we hear the devil saying that ‘Everything that is created/ is worth of being destroyed’ (Goethe 1808: v.1339–1340, German orig.: ‘denn alles was entsteht / Ist werth daß es zu Grunde geht’). Mephistopheles’ conclusion is radical. He suggests: ‘Drum besser wär’s daß nichts entstünde’ – ‘it would therefore be better to not create at all’ (1341). Obviously this is a piece of advice that the videogames industry would not like to follow.

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The second industry-­standard physics engine is aptly called PhysX and was originally developed by a spin-­off company from the Technical University of Zürich, before graphics card producer Nvidia bought it. This engine provides advanced possibilities to not only simulate the physics of solid bodies, but also for the real-­time generation of fog, the dynamic movement of water, or for leaves, feathers and paper that are blown by the wind. It is used in games like Metro 2033 (2013), Mafia 2 (2010), Fallout 4 (2016) and Far Cry 4 (2014). Physics engines are not new to computing technology. The ENIAC mainframe computer already calculated ballistics tables to help the US military estimate where artillery shells of various mass would land when fired at specific angles. This was as early as 1946. Claus Pias points out that computer games of the 1950s ‘were not quite making sense as games but rather first of all as diagnostic programs’ (Pias [2002] 2017: 91), and he continues: ‘Spacewar was subsequently distributed not as a game but rather as a diagnostic tool along with the PDP-1.207’ (Pias [2002] 2017: 91). Ralf Baer,2 a former player of William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two (1958), started as a television engineer. From 1955 on Baer worked for Sanders Associates, a defence contractor in New Hampshire. Being trained in television technology and involved in classified military projects, his experience with the physics of ballistics merged with his curiosity about games and entertainment technologies (Pias [2002] 2017:110). Baer developed an entertainment system, that connected gaming hardware to a conventional television set. This invention paved the way for the famous Odyssey videogame system (1972) by the consumer-­electronics company Magnavox. When platform games started presenting barrel-­dropping gorillas and hedgehog acrobatics the demand for plausible simulation of flight paths became apparent. It has been said that Donkey Kong (1981) ‘had no physics’, because objects and the player character Jumpman or Donkey Kong himself moved in a linear, non-­accelerated manner. But still these objects and the giant gorilla moved and therefore had physics of some kind. When the first Sonic game was released in 1991, developers became extremely creative with console hardware. While we take physics for granted in games now, it was a tricky business then making objects jump, fall or otherwise move. The programmers of Sonic the Hedgehog used ‘height masks’ to differentiate heights. The Sonic character has two input variables, A and B, called ‘sensors’ which were linked to his left and right side respectively. For Sonic to fall, both sensors had to report a situation of having no contact to a tile he could stand upon. By using two sensors, the developers could also detect when Sonic wasn’t on flat ground and compute the direction of the inclination of the tile based on the height difference the sensors reported. One should not underestimate the role that a given physics engine has on what we believe to

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be design decisions. Technological affordances often shape the form of a game more than stylistic choice or aesthetic strife. In the case of Sonic the Hedgehog the gameplay originated from a tech demo by Yuki Naka, a programmer who developed an algorithm allowing a sprite to move smoothly on a curve by determining its position with a dot matrix. Naka’s prototype was a platform game with a fast-­moving character rolling in a ball through a winding tube. We can see today that the rolling ball must have been the inspirational source for an animal that can curl up like the hedgehog, and not the other way round. Technological progress and programming creativity are often accountable for what might look like designers’ dexterity. With side-­scrolling platform games moving from consoles to the PC, graphics problems arose due to the low performance of CGA (colour graphics adapter) cards. Introduced in the early 1980s these cards would not have been able to display games such as Commander Keen (1990) on standard home computers. The new generation of graphics adapters, the EGA (enhanced graphics adapter), was a technology designed for IBM PC computers and provided features to implement a technique called ‘adaptive tile refresh’. John Carmack, a game programmer and virtual reality engineer, found a way to use the buffer size of EGA cards, which was larger than the screen’s size. His software used a buffer that was 64 pixels wider than the screen, leaving room for one extra column of tiles in the buffer off the edge of the screen. He used the offset capabilities of the card to let the screen slide through the buffer for smooth scrolling by pulling columns of pixels from the formerly invisible section of the buffer. The technique of ‘adaptive tile refresh’ could thereby introduce side-­scrolling games to the PC world. The impact on the world of computer games was such that David Kushner famously stated, Carmack and his colleague John Romero ‘created an empire and transformed pop culture’ (Kushner 2003). The transformation of pop culture might – at least in the case of the cliff jumping and platform scrolling games – be attributed to inventive engineering: physics engines and side-­scrolling software. The phantasmal space of the cliff had not been created in the 1990s, but it definitely was fuelled, transformed and renewed then. Cliff jumping as a ubiquitous cultural practice has found its medial container in PC games of the genre of platform jumpers.

5.3  Psychology of risk taking It is surprising that humans risk their limbs and necks, when driving on little wooden boards with four wheels attached to them and call this risky business ‘skateboarding’. Others jump from bridges with only an elastic rope connecting the body to the bridge: bungee jumping. Others again jump over fences when

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they could walk through the gate, or they drive two-­wheeled vehicles equipped with massive engines that could push forward a truck, instead of taking the local bus: motorcycling. With nuclear power plants, A-bombs and H-bombs, toxic contamination of the land and the sea, and the Damocles sword of climate change hanging above our heads, we have to concede that we are a risk-­taking species, no matter if we contributed to the cause for these risks as individuals or as a society. These risks are self-­inflicted. The majority of the dangers we are facing as a society appears to be inevitable. But why then do we add additional risks to our health, wellbeing and comfort? We seem to have a desire for risk taking. This is completely irrational. Nobody tells us to jump from a cliff into the ocean some 30 metres below, and yet there are people who do so. In his quest of find out why we voluntarily undertake actions that are bound to make us sad, vulnerable or desperate, Stephen Davies develops a theory of risk taking and satisfaction (Davies 1997: 307–20).3 Davies proposes that the motivation for irrational behaviour is rooted in a fascination that focuses on the hazardous activity rather than on the results of the activity. People race in cars at speed, crawl through mud and water in narrow tunnels at the bowels of the earth, wrestle with intellectual problems posed by chess, crosswords, and the like, throw themselves off bridges with bits of elastic tied to their ankles, attempt time and again to improve their ability to hit a small ball into a slightly larger hole a quarter of a mile away, and so on, and so forth. They do such things not always for money, or esteem, or fame, or glory, . . . but also, and mainly, out of love of the activity. These activities are engaged in for fun! DAVIES 1997: 318 Risk taking is a method of ‘taking charge of our lives’ (Davies 1997: 319) and it is the stimulatory affect accompanying the risk-­taking process that makes us forget about potential harm for a moment. In a similar way that we can experience sorrow, pain, sadness or the excitement of a hazardous situation in music, we can ‘rehearse’ to be sad and wounded, or experience the thrill of a hazardous threat in a computer game. The risk being taken is not threatening our bodily existence. Risk taking in a game plays with virtual damage, but the experience of the threat is by no ways virtual. It is a real experience of real fear. In this regard the psychology of risk taking in real life is the same one that is responsible for risk taking in game worlds. If Davies is right, it is the drive to take ‘charge of our lives’ that makes us take risks. Whether these ‘lives’ are carbon based or simulated in silicon chips makes little difference for the drive to take charge of them.

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We have to admit, however, that risk taking in real life might produce effects that risk taking in games will never yield. A bullet shot in the Bronx has another impact then one shot in the Empire Bay of Mafia II (2010), and a ‘leap of death’ from the church-­tower in Arce is not as deadly as a fall from the fifth floor of a suburban tower block. Does this make a difference to the drives and affects that promote our activities? The research area of affective gaming is still in its nascence. Most of the research on affect and digital games investigates the supposed connection of playing and aggression. Two remarks have to be made here. First, aggressivity is not an affective state. In Cartesian terms there is no basic effect of aggression. Descartes’ ‘hate’ comes closest to the disposition of committing aggressive actions. Aggressiveness is rather a container for affects that mould behaviour according to social conventions. In order to study any conceivable causalities between gaming and aggressive behaviour one would have to conduct sociological research and not engage in affect studies. Secondly most of the scholarly contributions to the discussion about the relation between affect in games and affective acting in real life present numerical correlations (Funk et  al. 2004; Markey and Markey 2010; Zendle et al. 2018; von Salisch et al. 2011) and neither investigate the politics of aggressivity nor the politics of affect. Is a high level of risk tolerance socially pre-­configured? Is it an acquired skill that could be learned by playing videogames? Is a huge risk appetite a ‘corrupted’ form of vertigo in Roger Caillois’s sense of the word (Caillois [1958] 2001). Brian Massumi speculates about ‘affective politics’ in his Keywords (2014): Bodies can be induced into, or attuned to, certain regions of tendency, futurity, and potential. They can be induced into inhabiting the same affective environment, even if there is no assurance they will act alike in that environment. A good example is an alarm, a sign of threat or danger. Even if you conclude in the next instant that it’s a false alarm, you will have come to this conclusion in an environment that is still effectively one of threat. MASSUMI 2014: 108 The phantasmal space of the cliff works as such an alarm that we know as having no real-­world relevance. We have seen the cliff in the game, or a hint of it, and we know that we will as a physical person not fall from the cliff. We are completely aware that we are not Lara Croft that has just mastered to jump across the cliffs, and that the shock experience of having been faced with a fatal leap was a false alarm. Yet, we are as a player ‘in an environment that is still effectively one of threat’ (Massumi 2014: 108). The game designers have managed to create a phantasmal intensity that keeps the threat alive even

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when it is out of reach. The effect of fear has been attuned ‘on many levels and at many rhythms of bodily priming’ (Massumi 2014: 109) to ensure the intended effect. For the game designer such levels can be colour, vegetation, sunlight, shadows, sound, terrain geometry, narration, physics and many more. Massumi suggests that the rhythms of bodily priming are crucial for the process of attuning to the affect. Level designers know about the power of repetition and of rhythmical structures within games levels. They rarely place a phantasmal item just once. A texture has to be reused, a sound should reappear to remind us of a former affective experience and elements like rocks and trees come in multiple variants and repetitions to create a feeling of consistency, and to be effective in attuning the player to an affective substrate. Tom Apperley refers to Henri Levebvre, when he states: ‘For the games’ rhythm, and the rhythm of the body to resonate in each other, the rhythms must enter into a metastable condition that Lefebvre describes as “eurythmia”.’ 4 (Apperley 2010: 39). Without subscribing to the cosmological baggage that Levebvre’s eurythmia notion (Lefebvre 2004: 16) carries, it is plausible that a gaming situation will become highly persuasive, when multiple rhythms that stem from bodily periodicity, from design patterns and from peritextual framing are integrated, and enmeshed in a larger rhythmical complex. One only has to watch Super Mario players jump across skewers, boulders and spikes to see that the rhythms of finger movements on the Nintendo DS, the sonic patterns and the movement of Mario on the screen synchronize to feed into a super-­rhythm that drives the game and the players. The cliffs, the obstacles and the platforms build the structural grid that propels gaming rhythms and creates a unity of player and game that is staged and contextualized in between the cliffs’ space. In this chapter of the book, the phantasmal space of the cliff is on watch, in relation to danger, audacity and risk. The term ‘risk’ can be traced back to classical Greek ριζα, meaning root, later used for cliff in Latin (Skjong 2005). Homer already used the term in the Odyssey when he tells us about ‘Sirens, Scylla, Charybdee and the bulls of Helios’. Odysseus tried to save himself from Charybdee at the cliffs of Scylla, where his ship was destroyed by heavy seas generated by Zeus as a punishment for his crew killing the bulls of Helios. There are illustrations of the Odyssey where Odysseus is riding a turtle that happened to be on the cliffs. The notion of risk is closely connected to the cliff in the text, the illustration and the phantasmal space of the cliff as a dangerous spot. The Latin and vulgar Latin words resicum, risicum and riscus are the etymological roots of the English word cliff, the French récif and the German word Klippe. Risicum is the direct formal origin for Italian risico, risco, rischio and the French word risque. All of these words stem from the Greek navigation

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term of rhizikon or rhiza which meant ‘root, stone, cut of the firm land’ and was a metaphor for the difficulty to avoid colliding with cliffs when travelling in the sea (Skjong 2005). When we talk about the psychology of the cliff and focus on platform games we should never forget that the collective unconscious lying ‘beneath’ the platforms that Sonic and Mario have to jump across, is older than videogames. The cliff as a space of danger and risk has been sung about in the Odyssey, has been transformed into paintings of steep mountains and deep valleys and has been passed through different media before it could materialize in a Gameboy’s code sequence.

5.4 Leaping from one medium to another The ‘pathos formula’ (Warburg 1980) of a man or woman hanging from a cliff is a transmedial phantasm. Images of Sylvester Stallone cliff-­hanging in the 1999 movie Cliffhanger, of Lara Croft in the videogame of the same name or of Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and many commercially or privately taken photographs of freestyle climbers endlessly repeat the same posture: one arm up to grab the cliff’s edge, one arm down to keep the balance and a more or less elegant torsion of the body that is suspended from the upper arm. Aby Warburg described pathos formulas as ‘pre-­coined expressive

FIGURE 5.2  Details (left to right) from the movie Cliffhanger (1999), the videogame Tomb Raider (1996) and a photograph of a freestyle climber (dreamstime stock photos 2018). Montage by the author.

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values’ (Warburg [1928] 2009) and points out that it is often the marks of pain and suffering that are firmly embodied in a pathos formula. The pain survives in a formalistic bodily gesture and is handed from generation to generation via images, sculptures, stories and media. For Warburg pathos formulas transcended historical periods, social borders and the separation of high and low culture. That is why computer games do not have to refer to objects from the world of videogames alone. They can connote to works from art history or mythology that the typical player might never have seen or heard of. The traces from Medea, the mythological figure that Warburg frequently refers to, might show up in the disguise of a games character that has a different name and a different appearance. The player who encounters the character might never have heard of Euripides and might not know what Medea did to her children. What he or she could get, however, is a formula of grief that is embodied in a particular way of dressing, attaining a body posture and of moving around. This connotation that some can identify as a reincarnation of an ancient Greek character appears to be a unique, completely novel and fascinating form of design creativity for most of the recipients. Of course this does not mean that we need to know about the chain of references that a pathos formula is made up of. We might well think that Lara Croft was the first woman ever to do majestic leaps and hold on to a cliff, or that the actor Sylvester Stallone invented one-­armed climbing postures. But this is an illusion. The phantasmal space of the cliff keeps all of the known and unknown images of peril and rescue, of rocky cliffs and platforms, of men and women at the edge of the abyss and beyond the cliff’s edge. The phantasmal space holds a constantly growing repertoire of human conditions at cliffs. The phantasmal space also holds a repertoire of sounds, of images and of emotions about cliffs. It is the cliffness in its full cultural, historic and poetic richness that turns common stones into ‘The Cliff’. What Warburg would not have anticipated in the 1920s is today’s explosion of new media that can all provide space for more images, more sounds and more stories to be told about the cliff. We not only draw from paintings and sculptures, we watch movies, play games, enjoy Let’s Play videos or explore comics and photo collections. We find millions of images of cliffs on the internet and we can reduplicate, modify and re-­disseminate them in an instant. The phantasmal space that in former times might have looked like a treasure box of excellent exemplifications of a phantasm has turned into a huge heap of references, parodies, perfect fakes, cheap imitations and creative advancements. Transmedia phantasms are not at all well-­crafted master pieces, they are filled with ‘cultural debris’ (Jacke et  al. 2006) that provide with a huge repertoire for the recycling of pathos.

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There is a second and a third pathos formula that is related to the phantasmal space of the cliff: standing at the edge of the cliff and diving into the air from the edge. The former has been illustrated in a painting of Dame Laura Knight with the very same title ‘Standing at the Edge of the Cliff’ (1917). The posture of a person looking down from a cliff with the ambiguous intentions of contemplating the depth and considering a deathly leap, has been picked up by many media. The short moment of truth before a faith jump might turn into a death jump has been staged in the computer game Assassin’s Creed and then replicated and transformed in the Hollywood movie Assassin’s Creed (2016). Played by Michael Fassbender the character Aguilar de Nerha, predecessor and alter ego of Callum Lynch, can be seen standing on the steeple of a sixteenth-­century Spanish church before he decides to jump. In a transhistoric intramedia transfer of a posture, Callum Lynch will later in the same movie jump from the roof of a house in London that is next to the River Thames. The posture, the formula and the phantasmal space of the cliff are, however, not only replicated within the medium of the film, they travel transmediatically. Posture and pathos formula have originally been set up for the computer game Assassin’s Creed (2007) and promoted worldwide by Ubisoft for the original game and each of the episodes following up. Within the context of Assassin’s Creed: Unity (2014) Arno Victor Dorian stands on a plank extending from the roof of Notre Dame and we find ourselves virtually in the year 1792. A different name and a different time then the ones the movie is set up at, but the pathos formula remains the same. We also see a different church in a different city in the movie as opposed to the game, but both media share one phantasmal space: Arno Victor Dorian and Aguilar de Nerha both jump from a cliff-­space. Many more cliffs have been jumped off in the different episodes of the Assassin’s Creed series, when Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad did his leap of faith in Damascus, Ezio performed a leap from a tower in San Gimignano and the pirate Edward Kenway jumped faithfully in the eighteenth century. The transmedial process of porting a way of jumping from a cliff through time and space is not a transmedia storytelling phenomenon in the sense of how Henry Jenkins (2003) describes it. It is rather a circulation of a phantasmal space in the costume and form of a pathos formula. The advertising business of an Austrian soft drink company took up the formulas that have been made popular by Ubisoft and Twentieth Century Fox and created a cliff-­diving craze for strictly commercial purposes. Attracted and misled by the company’s slogan ‘Giving Wings to People’ young amateurs jumped from cliffs with little understanding of what a 27-metre leap could do to their bodies. Impressed by high diving stunts that superstar Orlando Duque from the Republic of Colombia performed at the 200 metres rock formation Falkensteinwand in Austria during the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series,

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Austrian student Max was just one of many young men that thought they could do what the extreme sports platform divers did: jump from a cliff and receive enthusiastic applause. What Max received instead were triple fractures on his legs when he submersed in the lake’s water with an estimated speed of some 90 kilometres per hour (Müller 2013). The soft drinks company is not worried about such accidents, keeps promoting risk taking and announced plans to establish high diving as an Olympic discipline (Müller 2013). It is not a mere coincidence that risk taking is at the same time a pervasive marketing topic, a game design guideline and an alleged political virtue. Ubisoft’s Steep (2016) glorifies skiing, snowboarding, paragliding and wing diving under extreme conditions. Driving fast is one mission that the player can try to accomplish, but jumping and falling is the ultimate goal. The game is advertised as an alpine sports simulator to please parent customers and to hide away the more sinister and seductive motivation for playing the game of steep declines. Steep offers a glimpse into the abyss of suicidal leaps into the void. Steep is a game of vertigo (Caillois [1958] 2001) and what the player is challenged by, is her inner chasms and his desire to fall too low to ever get on their feet again. You do not successfully sell a computer game to caring parents with a sales slogan of ‘Sweat Suicidal Dreams’ or ‘Playing Death Drive’. That is why a ludo-­capitalistic ‘Consume Alpinism in Expensive Skiing Resorts’ goes down much better. But underneath the marketing argument of agôn and consumerism we find a deep and profound layer of ilinx and self-­destruction. Caillois’s taxonomy helps little here, because we will not find a way to put Steep into one of the drawers of agôn, alea, mimicry or ilinx without losing out on aspects of the others. The game works on a libidinal economy where each of the categories Caillois calls the ‘rubrics’ do not work on their own. It is the antagonistic simultaneity of ilinx, mimicry and agôn, with a few pinches of alea added to them, which account for the affective economy the game sets in motion. The player is partaking in a carnivalesque travesty in the format of a dress-­up party and also finds mimicry here with the mountains and slopes trying to be what famous skiing resorts look like. At the same time the player enjoys deathly leaps that are often beyond his or her control and becomes immersed in the disorientating feeling of vertigo. Speaking in Caillois’s terms the ‘tumultuous and exuberant’ (Caillois [1958] 2001: 31) nature of paidia is ‘disciplined’ by ludus in the game Steep, when gameplay rules tell you to focus on how quickly you can ride downhill. Caillois observes that in many cases the player finds himself in a situation when diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety is dominant. It manifests a kind of uncontrolled fantasy that can be designated by the term paidia. At the opposite extreme, this frolicsome and impulsive

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exuberance is almost entirely absorbed or disciplined by a complementary, and in some respects inverse, tendency to its anarchic and capricious nature: there is a growing tendency to bind it with arbitrary, imperative, and purposely tedious conventions, . . . CAILLOIS [1958] 2001: 13 I would like to follow Caillois in so far as he concedes that the opposing ‘principles’ of paidia and ludus are both constitutive for games. I do, however, not think that there is a general dominance for ‘carefree gaiety’ discernible.5 On the contrary, I would like to propose that it is exactly the lack of a dominant principle for free improvisation that restricts the potential of play. Games like Steep ask for improvisation, but what is permitted here is a combination of micro-­activities within a coded set of gestures. This is hardly free improvisation. I wish there was a dominant affective ‘attunement’ (Massumi 2014) that turns playing into an activity that goes beyond rule compliance. The phantasmal space of the cliff is a most productive setting for the ambiguous mission of mastering challenges and taking risks. The cliff with its double-­faced materiality of solidity and instability is a ludic container where hazardous impulsiveness seduces ratio, when taking control would be the more reasonable action. What I want to suggest here is that a materiality of the phantasmal space essentially drives playing experience. Materiality is not physicality or hyper-­realistic representation. Materiality is the embodied experience of the potential of things behaving in this way or another. The cliff’s materiality consists of the equally probable results of breaking or remaining. The rocks of the cliff are not just decorative background for human success or failure. It is the rocks that by their materiality make the game for humans or human avatars that step on them. Manuel deLanda writes in his Geology of Morals. A Neo-Materialist Interpretation that he advocates a philosophical stance which rejects ideas of progress not only in human history but in natural history as well. Living creatures, according to this stance, are in no way ‘better’ than rocks. Indeed in a nonlinear world in which the same basic processes of self-­organization take place in the mineral, organic and cultural spheres, perhaps rocks hold some of the keys to understand sedimentary humanity, ingenious humanity and all their mixtures. DELANDA 1996 Materiality is more than the physicality of objects. When we talk about the materiality of the cliff this goes beyond mass, size, specific weight and volume. The materiality of the cliff points towards environmental affordances

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and it confronts overcome boundaries and limitations like the dualism of nature and culture or human and inhuman. The cliff as savage architecture or domesticated nature is what Donna Haraway refers to as ‘natureculture’ (Haraway 2003). This is neither some kind of philanthropy for stones and pebbles, nor is it a retrograde romanticization promoting the beauty of nature. The new-­materialist stance looks for the materiality of such formations like the cliff and it searches for the atmospheric impact that stems from the phantasmal space of cliffs and cliff structures. On a semantic level the cliff is the sign for possible decay or stability. It is on a gameplay level the point of distinction between success and failure. On a ludo-­sociological level it is the point of a choice of individualization versus reintegration into tribe, family or group. In any of these cases the cliff is the topos for a choice to be made and an indicator of risk. Ulrich Beck proposes in his book Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Beck [1986] 1992) that the logic of the distribution of wealth has in a post-­ industrial society been replaced by the logic of the distribution of risk (Beck [1986] 1992: 25). In his eyes we socially produce risk and we distribute risk according to power structures. Beck’s book was published in the very same year the Chernobyl disaster happened. Beck states in the foreword to the second edition that what his book describes as a possibility has now become a flat description of reality. Vis-à-vis the nuclear meltdown he acknowledges ‘the ignorance about potential danger, restricted access to knowledge about risks and the super-­national impact of risks’ (Beck [1986] 1992). Beck would probably come to a similar diagnosis if he analysed today’s climate change politics and the impacts of global warming. If it is true that we live in a risk society, then media will have to reflect risk production and mirror or even propose risk-­taking strategies, risk expulsion and risk transmission. According to Beck the new form of modernity is characterized by ‘surges of technological rationalization and changes in work and organization, but beyond that includes much more: the change in societal characteristics and normal biographies, changes in lifestyle’ (Beck [1986] 1992: 50). Computer games seem to be at the forefront of such a project. Computer games change our lifestyle, our subjective biographies and our identities. Players that got used to jumping from cliffs (Tomb Raider 1996), pushing each other from platforms (Super Smash Bros. Melee 1999) or climbing up church towers just to drop into the void (Assassin’s Creed 2014) will have learned courage and motor skills but they will also have become persistently familiarized with the idea that risk is an integral part of our society. They will have received a lesson or rather hundreds of lessons in ‘Either you push your closest ones from the cliff or they will push you.’

6 The Forest

Habitants délicats des forêts de nous-­mêmes. Sensitive inhabitants of the forests of ourselves. JULES SUPERVIELLE 19251

6.1 Nibelungen forests

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n Richard Wagner’s opera Siegfried (Wagner 1876) the first scene of Act 1 is staged in a forest, as are most of the scenes in Der Ring der Nibelungen.2 The foreground of the scene represents a cave in the rocks, where Mime, Siegfried’s teacher and foster-­father, works on a sword with the name of Notung. Two entrances lead from the main stage to the forest, that we are made aware of as being a dangerous place, when Siegfried enters with a wild bear kept on a leash. Mime, naturally, is frightened to death. In Scene 3 Mime remembers an old augury containing the words: ‘One who has never learnt to fear, he makes Notung new’ (Wagner 1876, Act 1 Scene 3). Mime realizes that he will not be the one who can complete re-­forging the sword. That is when Siegfried, the young hero, who overhears Mime’s confused musing asks his teacher, what fear is. Mime thinks of a way of explaining fear to somebody who never experienced the feeling of being afraid and arrives at the conclusion that the forest is the epitome of fear. He asks Siegfried: Have you not felt within the woods, as darkness fell in dusky glades, a dreadful whisper, hum and hiss, savage, growling

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sounds draw near? Dazzling flashes wildly flicker; howling, roaring assail your ears. Have you not felt mysterious horrors that threaten to harm you? Shivering and shaking, quivering and quaking, while your heart trembles and faints, wildly hammers and leaps? Till you have felt these things then fear to you is unknown. WAGNER 1876, Act 1 Scene 3 The phantasmal space of the forest is introduced here with a poetic description of sounds, of affective bodily states and of shades of light and darkness. The horror of the forest consists not in the concrete threats of wolves, bats, birds of prey or of snakes but of the spectres of the night: invisible projections of our private inner fears. We will later see why Sigmund Freud follows this path in his analysis of the Uncanny. The forest is a space that has inspired composers and poets before it became an atmospheric topic for film directors and game designers. Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz was commented on by Wagner as presenting the ‘demonic power of nature’ (Hurttig 2013:112). The paintings Waldinneres by Ernst Ferdinand Oehme (1821–2), Caspar Wolf’s Romantische Waldlandschaft mit Liebespaar (1769), Two Men Contemplating the Moon by Caspar David Friedrich (1835), Philipp Otto Runge’s Well and Poet (1805) and Moritz von Schwind’s Im Walde (1848) capture the phantasmal space of the magic forest that became immensely popular when Wagner composed Siegfried. At about the same time von Weber celebrated the success of his Freischütz – first in Paris and in the whole of Europe thereafter. In Runge’s pen-­ and-ink drawing (1805) we see a poet who has just entered a clearing in a dark oak and beach forest. The poetics of space in the forest are personalized by a person with a laurel wreath on his head. The poet sheds light into the darkness of the woods and at the same time the poetics of the phantasmal space need the gloomy environment just as much as the bright light. Gustav Klimt’s Beech Forest (1902) and his Birch Forest (1902) were turn-of-the-century renditions of Austrian forests and many pieces by the Canadian Group of Seven focused on natural settings in the woods. Even though forests have been painted worldwide there is a peculiar concentration of mystic forests by German

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painters.3 This has been attributed to German romanticism. If we compare the sunny forests by painters Paul Cézanne and Gustave Courbet with the depressingly dark and dense German forests of Oehme, Runge and Friedrich, we come to the conclusion that the phantasmal German fairy-­tale woods belong to another family of plant artefacts then their francophone counterparts. The Western forests of Cézanne and Courbet contain an enormous amount of light, optimism and civilized elegance. Not so the German forests: they are dark, melancholic and brutal ‘by nature’, it seems. In the collective subconscious the German forest is the place where the Germanic cheiftain Arminius won the strategically important battle against Publius Quinctilius Varus in the year 9 ce . Also known as Clades Variana (the Varian Disaster) by Roman historians the battle of the Teutoburg Forest became symbolic for the resistance of Germanic tribes. The strategic use of the woods for unexpected ambush against a superior army has been reported since as the underdog’s spatial tactics against territorial hegemony. The story told in this spatial phantasm connects with Khmer Rouge victories in the Cambodian jungle and with Sioux attacks in the North American forests. Inglourious Basterds (2009) by Quentin Tarantino and The Revenant (2015) by Alejandro González Iñárritu both use the phantasm of the forest as backdrop and place for surprise and for merciless attacks. For the oppressors, no matter whether it is the Roman military, the North American settlers or the Nazis in France the forest is characterized by contingency. The forest narrative, if we want to call it a narrative here, is non-­consistent as there are huge leaps in what is told and how the stories are told. We encounter a cluster of ‘ “medially unspecified” phenomena and . . . representational or, more generally, aesthetic strategies’ (Thon 2016: 12). These strategies, micro-­ narrations and historical events are interwoven and appear as cohesive, but they cohere just by the power of the phantasm and not by the logic of the system. The phantasmal space of the forest is not created and disseminated with one single event like a battle lost or won. It is rather a continuation of events, stories, images, pathos formulas and sonic artefacts that all refer to the same space. What I am proposing here is the necessity of reiteration for spatial phantasms in order to arrive at a stage of firm rooting within a cultural framework and ubiquitous presentness. The pathos of the Teutoburg Forest had to be further deepened and darkened by the Grimm brothers’ tales, by Runge’s and Friedrich’s paintings of Northern woods, by Wagner’s Nibelungen and by reterritorialized forest phantasms of the Cambodian jungle4 and the Revenant’s boreal forests, to arrive at a phantasmal setting of high suggestiveness and wide acceptability. As a consequence, a strictly semiotic analysis of a venue will never be able to capture what the space is about. A semiotic analysis of a Southeast Asian jungle will hardly arrive at the conclusion that palm trees

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denote coniferous trees. Only a topo-­analysis (Bachelard [1957] 1964: xxiv) can connect the palm tree to the jungle and the jungle to the forest. The forests of North-European territories at the time of the Roman Empire point to Teutoburg Forest events. In other words: the semiotic meaning of flora in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is different from the phantasmal meaning of the very same trees and plants, when looked at from the viewpoint of a German or Scandinavian viewer. It also stands to reason that truth is not something that topo-­analysis is concerned about. In this respect Bachelard’s analysis of spaces comes close to the programmatic declarations of semioticians, when it comes to the importance of truth. Umberto Eco frequently warned of expecting semiotics to give insight into truth or falsehood of statements. On the contrary, he prominently stated: ‘I believe that an understanding as “theory of lies” would make quite a comprehensive programme for a general semiotics’ (Eco 1991: 26). In a related way topo-­analysis is not primarily concerned about truth. When Hermann Göring falsely stated: ‘Eternal forest and eternal people belong to each other’ (Jung-Kaiser 2007: 36), he proclaimed a politically necessary and at the same time false unity of the German nation and the German forests. Apart from the fact that nations and forests are not eternal, as every schoolkid knows, Göring added to and took benefit from the affective power of the phantasmal space of the forest. The Nazi-­movie Ewiger Wald (Eternal Forest 1936) was an ideological attempt to germanize the forest and to blame his opponents of trying to cut down trees. Phantasmal spaces are not immune to abuse and they are indifferent towards truth. I am not trying to write a political history of forest metaphors here, but it might be interesting to see how such a topos as the wood wanders from historical reports and deformations via fairy-­tale telling to Wagnerian operas and finally then to Nazi-­ movies such as the Eternal Forest.

6.2  Tree-generators In early 2D computer games objects have been displayed as sprites superimposed upon a background image. If two objects of the same type had to be displayed, the same sprite would have to be placed on the drawing canvas and if 1,000 objects had to be drawn, the operation of adding the matrix of sprite pixels would have been repeated 1,000 times. That is why forests looked so boring then and why dense forests consisting of individual trees were extremely processor intensive. In Outrun (1986) the palm trees on both sides of the road are completely identical except for a scaling factor. For a racing game this is quite useful, because the monotony of the waysides does not distract from the challenge of staying on the road and the size of the

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palm trees is indicating progress on the road. The atmospheric effect, however, is close to zero. In order to create a real forest feeling irregularity, variations in size and form, different colours and different branch densities have to be accomplished. One way of achieving this would be to manually design a variety of trees. It is amazing how well human perception works in recognizing identical replication. Even if the designers would create ten, twenty or fifty different trees the player would most likely discover that the eleventh, twenty-­ first or fifty-­first tree is once more the first one she saw. That is why automatic tree generation is so important for atmospheric game worlds. A tree-­generator is a programme for the generation of plants according to a small set of rules and the feature to vary the results based on random numbers. I will add a few lines of code below to show how simple such a programme can be. The programme is a modification of an open source tree-­generator by ‘John’ from the Khan Academy Team. (Code documentation added by MF.) // The number of branches each branch splits into is controlled by .    // the variable branching factor var branchingFactor = random(2, 3);  // branches may ramify into 2 or 3 smaller                   // branches // The angle between the branches in degrees var angleBetweenBranches = random(15, 30);    // they will ramify randomly .                     // deflected between 15 and 30 degrees .                     // from parent branch’s orientation .    // Controls how much smaller each iteration of the tree gets var scaleFactor = 0.7; .    // The number of iterations of the tree drawn var numLevels = random(4, 6);     // trees vary from 4 levels to 6 levels                     // of complexity .    // The length of the branches var baseBranchLength = 80; var forward = function(distance) {             // the forward function draws a straight line   line(0, 0, 0, -distance);   translate(0, -distance); }; var back = function(distance) {         // this function returns the ‘pen’ to the .                     // position before the line was drawn

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  forward(-distance); }; var right = function(angle) {   rotate(angle * PI / 180); }; var left = function(angle) {   right(-angle); }; var drawTree = function(depth, length) {   if (depth === 0) {   return;   }   var totalAngle = angleBetweenBranches * (branchingFactor - 1);   strokeWeight(depth / 2);   forward(length);   right(totalAngle / 2.0);   for (var i = 0; i < branchingFactor; i += 1) {    drawTree(depth - 1, length * scaleFactor);    left(angleBetweenBranches);   }   right(totalAngle / 2.0 + angleBetweenBranches);   back(length); }; resetMatrix(); background(234, 244, 247);      // this creates an empty canvas to draw upon drawTree(numLevels, baseBranchLength);   // . . . and now the tree is drawn

With only twenty-­nine lines of code this program performs tree generation with a random differentiation of the objects. Naturally, the trees from this program are simple stick-­figure trees, but in regard to the functionality it does all that is required to generate forests automatically. The above program is written in JavaScript and ProcessingJS. There are many more tree-­generators available as standalone software, plug-­ins or complete code segments integrated into game design packages. One such example, the tree-­generator for Unity3D, helps in defining plant structures as a basis for huge and varied forests. The basic structure consists of a trunk, branches, sub-­branches and leaves, each of them

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with a corresponding material. The huge number of individual trees computed from that consists of endless variations of the generic tree. This is accomplished by setting the properties of the individual tree object. Properties describe the ‘Distribution’ of the multitude of trees, the ‘Geometry’ of the individual trees, the ‘Shape’ and a dynamic deformation of the elements called ‘Wind’. Based on these four property categories, there are some twenty variables influencing the properties of distribution, geometry, shape and deformation. ‘Shape’ for example has the floating-­point variable ‘Crinkliness’ attached to it with a range from 0 to 1. A value of 0.0 for the crinkliness generates a straight pole whereas a value of 1.0 generates a winding structure reminiscent of bonsai trees. The variable ‘Seek Sun’ generates shapes of trees with branches pointing upwards – whether there is a sun there or not. The variables ‘Noise Scale U’ and ‘Noise Scale V’ introduce irregularities in the thickness of the stem and branches. ‘Break Chance’ is the last example for one of the numerous variables I want to mention here. ‘Break Chance’ specifies the probability for trees to be broken at a certain height above the ground. The Unity3D tree editor has an intuitive interface that can be used by non-­programmers and allows creating the base material for completely different woods. With a few changes in the variable settings the vegetative structure might change from a well-­ordered arboretum to primeval forest. Unity designers use the terrain editor to ‘paint’ 3D forests on their landscapes. Using the plant structures designed in the tree editor, the terrain editor allows for manual seeding of high numbers of varying trees that follow the land elevations. There is only one step to be taken from a human designer ‘painting’ trees on the ground and a computer program generating forests all on its own. The latter is also described as procedural content creation. This is what has become popular with games such as No Man’s Sky (2016). The forests players encounter at any of the millions of planets in this game have not been handmade. The trees of these forests stem from automated tree generation and from automated terrain generation. Tree-­generators are therefore not only to be looked at as design tools, they are also micro engines for the co-­evolution of an artificial second nature. We understand what Neil Evernden foresaw when he proposed that we now can become ‘creators of nature’ (Evernden 1992: 123). The tools to accomplish that go beyond poetic writing methods. They are programming environments with functions for tree-­creation, terrain-­building, grass and wind automation.

6.3  The uncanny In his essay on The ‘Uncanny’ (Freud 1919, quotation marks by Freud’s translator James Strachey)5 Sigmund Freud remarks that ‘[I]t is only rarely that

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a psychologist feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty, but the theory of the qualities of feeling’6 (Freud 1919: 1). Freud acknowledges that ‘in some particular province’ of aesthetics issues are rooted that are of relevance for our ‘mental life’ (Freud 1919: 1), and as a consequence also relevant for the field of psychoanalysis. He proceeds: The subject of the ‘uncanny’ is a province of this kind. It undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible – to all that arouses dread and creeping horror, it is equally certain too, that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread. FREUD 1919: 1 Freud starts with an etymological investigation into the notions of heimlich (familiar) and unheimlich (uncanny). Freud explains: The German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning ‘familiar’, ‘native’, ‘belonging to the home’, and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. FREUD 1919: 2, italics and quotation marks by Strachey7 But we seem to arrive at this conclusion too quickly. With the background of psychoanalytical practice Freud observes that the uncanny is often related to experiences that are all too familiar. ‘I will say at once,’ Freud proposes, ‘that both courses lead to the same result: the “uncanny” is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us’ (Freud 1919: 2). He continues to challenge the reader and asks how we can explain the double nature of the uncanny as something unfamiliar and something familiar. Freud argues close to cases he takes from Greek mythology, psychoanalytic practice and literature. He arrives at the conclusion that the uncanny is produced by any of these four factors, or by a combination thereof: i) the omnipotence of thoughts, which finds its expression in animism,

witchcraft and magic, ii) man’s attitude to death, epileptic seizures and the manifestation of

insanity, iii) involuntary repetition, i.e. repetition-­compulsion, and iv) the castration complex.

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Freud’s ‘factors’ of the uncanny can be mapped into corresponding topoi of phantasmal spaces of the woods and forests. We approach trees in dense vegetation with the animistic fear of them being alive. Branches look like snakes and leaves oscillate between flora and fauna. Are there not many animals in the forest that do something that points in the opposite direction: vegetalism instead of animalism? Insects disguise as leaves or sticks of wood. The chameleon becomes a tree-­double. Owls and other nocturnal animals take on camouflage to achieve indistinguishability from stems and barks. The forest seems to be the perfect place to revive old and all too familiar savage thinking. Sigmund Freud quotes Ernst Jentsch, who reasons about ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate’ (Jentsch 1906) and puts forward the example of the fascination for dolls and automata (Freud 1919: 5). I think that computer simulations of forests draw their uncanniness from the fact that we perceive a second nature there that is on a representational level naturalistic and on a mechanical level automated. I have tried to demonstrate in the tree-­generators section of this book how the algorithms implemented in level editors and game engines provide with the potential of trees to react on environmental influencing factors. The possibility to have ‘Wind’ as a parameter for the plant’s geometry promotes an ambiguous state in between static and dynamic behaviour – or between death and life. The second ‘factor’ of the uncanny is the potential of a person or of the forest for completely contingent self-­destruction. In E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann ([1817] 1984) we are never quite sure whether it is madness, unpredicted fire or machinic autonomy that bewitches Olimpia, Coppelius and Nathanael. Damocles’ sword of annihilation hangs above the scene, the actors and the readers as well. Similarly, the computer game Firewatch (2016) keeps us in permanent doubt if we have to be more afraid of a big fire, of an insane person behind the scenes, or of a gameplay mechanism that is programmed to create disaster. The phantasmal space of the forest shares the ambiguity of the psychological landscape. Fire could be a sign for perversion and madness might result in a huge fire. The machinic layer could be responsible for what we are mistaken to believe as genuinely human. But also humans could – as we can see in Olimpia’s case – be disguised, doubled or detected as a robot. The paranoid fear of being killed, mutilated or destined to die is a key influence on the affective economy of the phantasmal space of the forest. In Sanders’ Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (1860) we can find an interesting remark on what is not any longer heimlich, friendly and homelike in the woods. Freud quotes Sanders in asking: ‘Is it still heimlich to you in your country where strangers are felling your woods?’ (Freud 1991: 3). Felling a wood is of course

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killing a wood. But the attraction and fear of felling a tree is in Freud’s terms an act of castration and an expression of the death drive. Sigmund Freud analyses our denial to interpret repetitive events as happening by mere chance as the third ‘factor’ for the uncanny. He tells us that a person who first gets a cloakroom ticket with the number of 62, then discovers that different things that have to do with numbers, like years of age of a person, compartments in railway trains, street numbers, hotel-­rooms always have the same number 62, will believe that there is a hidden law or meaning behind the repetition. Not only a neurotic person, but most of us, will adhere to the repetition-­compulsion principle. Freud suggests that this principle is based upon instinctive behaviour and that this principle might even ‘overrule the pleasure-­principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character’ (Freud 1919: 11). An example from the phantasmal space of the forest illustrates what Freud has in mind. He speculates about a ‘feeling of helplessness and of something uncanny’, for instance, when one is lost in a forest in high altitudes, caught, we will suppose, by the mountain mist, and when every endeavour to find the marked or familiar path ends again in a return to one and the same spot, recognizable by some particular landmark. FREUD 1919: 11 Once more we can see that it is the familiar and not the unfamiliar that creates the effect of uncanniness. The forest is enchanted and magical when it is endless. Of course we know that there is an end to every forest on the planet, but our tolerating the feeling of compulsive repetitiveness turns a finite number of trees into an endless forest. The fourth factor of the uncanny is rooted in what has been written about in the myth of Oedipus. Freud uses the tragic ending, when Oedipus blinds himself as an analytic link between the dread of blindness and the castration complex. From psychoanalytic experience, but also from a close reading of Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann ([1817] 1984) Freud detects the uncanny in bodily mutilation. Is the forest not also a place where darkness might easily be fearfully confused with blindness and where the threat of injury is present at any time? We might fall into a trap or a hole in the ground. We might be attacked by wild animals or we might have a branch of a tree stab us in the face. Who has not experienced such fears in dark and dense forests when we try to make our way in between small corridors of coniferous trees? Freud’s essay on the uncanny is of such high importance for understanding the phantasmal space of the forest as it introduces a theory of aesthetics of affect for the understanding of the phantasmal. The Viennese psychoanalyst

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does in his text not merely rely on cases he had to deal with on the couch in his Berggasse practice, but he refers to mythological narratives, literature and pathological cases in order to establish what Foucault would label ‘discursive formation’ and indeed Freud is what Foucault describes as the ‘founding subject of discourse’.

6.4  Tale of Tale of Tales ‘Once upon a time there were three neighbouring kingdoms each with a magnificent castle, from which ruled kings and queens, princes and princesses.’ This sentence introducing the movie Tale of Tales (2015) is a description not only of a film setting or a political structure of the protagonists of the movie, it is also a statement about various ‘transmedial worlds’, that is to say about ‘abstract content systems from which a repertoire of fictional stories and characters can be actualized or derived across a variety of media forms’ (Klastrup and Tosca 2004). The fairy tale that we are told in the film is therefore not just a tale. Director Matteo Garrone tells us that Tale of Tales (2015) is based upon Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti (1634) from the seventeenth century. Garrone’s cinematic tale is a tale of a tale. There have been other tales of the tale: in the nineteenth century French writer Charles Perrault adapted stories he learned from Basile. The brothers Grimm adapted and expanded the texts they must have known through Basile or Perrault. Two hundred years after Grimms Märchen Belgian game art designers Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn adapted Little Red Riding Hood for their art game The Path (2009). Little Red Riding Hood by Charles Perrault, Little Red Riding Hood by the brothers Grimm and The Path by Harvey and Samyn belong to the same transmedial world. Harvey and Samyns’ nom de plume is programmatic: they call themselves Tale of Tales. Samyn and Harvey know that they do not invent stories, but that they partake in a complex transmedial undertaking of world-­building. There have been tales and there will be tales built in different media based upon what was at disposition at the time of the creative act. There will be tales of tales and there will be tales of the tale of the tale. This is how transmedial worlds unfold. In his book on the aesthetics of computer games Daniel Martin Feige (2015) declares intertextuality and transmediality as necessary factors for an understanding of digital games. If we were disregardful of how games draw from structures, atmosphere and content from other media, we would not understand them completely. ‘The digital game has to be located within the circles of film, photography, music, literature, painting etc.’ (Feige 2015: 19). The philosopher warns us that this concept seems to be contradictory to the

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fact that computer games have a mediatic specificity. How can we understand what the uniqueness of games is if we observe the object of our interest in regard to objects of different media? He arrives at the conclusion ‘that we can only theorize about an aesthetic medium in the light of its various relations to other aesthetic media’ (Feige 2015: 20). He continues his argument in pointing out that this is not meant to propose that we can understand the medium of computer games by identifying the differences in between media. We have to acknowledge ‘that aesthetic media are renegotiated on a permanent basis in the light of exchange processes with other media and of demarcation lines against them’ (Feige 2015: 20). This elaborates what I want to do when traversing the borders of different media. It is not to say that the phantasmal space of the forest can be found everywhere and that it is equally represented in film, music, the visual arts and games. On the contrary: by migrating from one medium to another the forest phantasm dresses up and disguises in a masquerade of many media. By doing so the phantasmal space of the forest becomes instrumental in adding value to our understanding of media – in particular of the medium of computer games. The fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood is one of the transmedial narratives staged in the forest with more than one single author, an indeterminable time of first publication and hundreds of places of origin. The story has been attributed to Perrault, to the brothers Grimm and to many other writers, but there is not a specific author that could convincingly be credited for having created the tale. The list of adaptions and extensions of the core narrative is long. Donald Hasse mentions Perrault and the brothers Grimm and adds Anthony Schmitz’s Darkest Desire: The Wolf’s own Tale (1998), Cyber Kaperucita (2003), Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan (1990) by Carmen Martin Gaite, an autobiographical Swedish novel with the title of Rödluvan, a satirical retelling by Ronald Dahl (1982) and Manlio Argueta’s Little Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District (1988) as a few examples from literature that draw from the fairy tale and add to the transmedial world (Haase 2008: 586). Beyond the borders of textual media there is Tale of Tales’ The Path (2009), the Mafa browser game Red Riding Hood Adventures (2014) where we can learn how to shop for the right ingredients and bake a delicious cake for grandmother or Difference Games’ puzzle Little Red Riding Hood (2015) unfittingly labelled ‘post-­apocalyptic adventure’ when it actually is a spot-­the-difference puzzle. In music we find a musical based on Ronald Dahl’s Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, composed by Matthew White and Ana Sanderson (2005). The musical is said to be ‘howlingly hilarious’. François-Adrien Boieldieu composed the opera Le petit chaperon rouge in 1818 and in painting and design we find numerous works that deal with the content of the little girl with the red hood: Gustave Doré famously illustrated Perrault’s Contes (1862) and Albert Anker

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painted Rotkäppchen (1883) in ‘realistic’ manner as an ordinary German schoolgirl with a loaf of bread and a marmalade jar in her arms. The list could be extended endlessly. The transmediality of world-­building did not leave out stamp design, comics, film, theatre and representational graphic design for coins. One has to pose the question here, if stories, music and images that differ so much can still be held together as one singular topos or if one would have to follow Wittgenstein’s remarks on games when he proposes to talk about ‘family resemblances’ (Wittgenstein [1953] 1971: PU 67, 57–8). Some of the texts deal with childhood and coming of age, some explicitly refer to sexuality and seduction, others focus on orientation and the risks of getting lost. I think that the strongest link in between the narrations is the phantasmal space of the forest. Even with remotely connected texts like the one of Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan (1990) the wood is present all the time. The dense verticality of New York’s skyscrapers is strongly suggestive of The Endless Forest (2006) and of the fears, invisible threats, hidden predators and desire for escape we connect with the woods. ‘Großstadtdschungel’ is the German catchword that literally translates to ‘jungle of the big city’. The forest as a phantasmal space can indeed be found where there is little or no vegetation to be found. The phantasmal space could be found in a science fiction setting with vertical wires hanging from the ceilings of the main computer facilities. The phantasmal space could find its incarnation in a slaughterhouse with the bodies of dead pigs hanging from the ceiling or deep in the ocean in a field of seaweed. The range of materialities for the forest as a phantasmal space is almost unlimited. If it is true, that phantasmal spaces are not assigned to one particular materiality8 and not bound to remain within one particular medium, then we can also expect the phantasmal forests to enter the mediatic realm of computer games. And they do. The forest of Little Red Riding Hood reappears in games like Akazukin no Ookami (2013), dark and gritty Woolfe – The Red Hood Diaries (2015), the childish browser game Red Riding Hood Adventures (2015) with its innocent cake-­cooking mission, sleek platform jumper Twisted Adventures: Little Red Riding Hood (2017) or The Path by Tale of Tales (2009). The content, structures and moral of the original fairy tale have been changed in The Path, but the phantasmal space of the artists’ game is consistent with its roots. There is a wolf and Little Red Riding Hood is replaced by six sisters whom the player can choose from: Robin, Ginger, Rose, Ruby, Carmen and Scarlet. Depending on the player’s choice, the avatar girl in the red dress meets a different wolf and encounters different challenges, different special places and experiences. Robin meets her wolf at a graveyard in the woods and can jump on his back to proceed with her journey. Carmen meets a

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wolf-­woodman who is cutting down trees and turns out to be much older than her. Scarlet’s wolf is a male piano instructor. Each of these wolves confronts the young girl with a different set of charms, chances, seduction and threat. According to game designer Michaël Samyn we are supposed to learn from the story that things can be dangerous when you are growing up. The game is a coming-­of-age narrative and it performs a brilliant job in telling us that everything can be dangerous but not everything will kill us. It also tells us that what looks innocent can be more dangerous than what looks frightening. On an affective level fear is almost omnipresent. The phantasmal space of the forest contributes essentially to promoting the frightening sentiment. Even places of a different nature turn into a threat when placed next to the deep dark forest. Depending on the avatar chosen we will encounter a rusty playground (Ruby), a field of flowers (Ginger) or a misty lake (Rose). These places are relevant for each girl’s individual path, but they are experienced as secondary spaces. They are secondary spaces as the main spatial phantasm of the forest emanates beyond the limits of wood and leaves and penetrates special places with its affective intensity of fear, an attunement towards audacity, an aura of seduction and a high potential for rapid change. The Path and most of the Little Red Riding Hood adaptions are uncanny in the way Sigmund Freud uses the notion. They exemplify the uncanny as a ‘class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us’ (Freud 1919: 2). What we discover in games like The Path is the secret of ourselves rather than terra incognita of the world around us. The in-­game forests demonstrate what the poet Jules Supervielle phrased in such a concise way: We are ‘[s]ensitive inhabitants of the forests of ourselves’ (Supervielle [1925] 1966). Computer games do best when they forget about representation of the physical forests around us and when they lead us back to our dark and secret inner forests. Supervielle was right: we are not afraid of the forests out there in the peripheries of our cities and homes. We are afraid of the darkness inside ourselves, we are ‘[s]ensitive inhabitants of the forests of ourselves’ (Supervielle [1925] 1966).

7 The Portal

There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors. THE DOORS 19671

D

oors and portals connect spaces. They are interfaces and they are interspacial passageways. Nobody stays in a doorway, because we know that we have to ‘Break on Through to the Other Side’ (The Doors 1967), as Jim Morrison famously stated. The name of the band carries doors as a reference to Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception ([1954] 2009) and to William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790). Blake states: If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. BLAKE 1790 The ‘narrow chinks of his cavern’ are what a player of a computer game often encounters (see the Cave chapter of this book). Even in the wide and open worlds of Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017) or of GTA5 (2013), there are things unseen and things unknown. Earlier games like UnrealTournament (1999) or Wolfenstein 3D (1992) allowed for not much more than a viewing range of some 10 to 20 metres. But then there were doors. The doors catapulted us from the things known to the things unknown. The doors were a passage from ignorance to partial knowledge about the space we inhabited. This space, however, soon became a limited space. A space full of questions about what lay behind the walls of our narrow cavern. The doors were liminal spaces or tiny non-­spaces with a microscopic temporality of the loading process for the world behind the

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doors. In this chapter I will develop a few hypotheses on the interspacial venue of the portal. Gaston Bachelard talks about the ‘cosmos of the Half-open’ and envisions doors as devices for daydreams: But how many daydreams we should have to analyze under the simple heading of the Doors! For the door is an entire cosmos of the Half-­open. In fact, it is one of its primal images, the very origin of daydream that accumulates desires and temptations: the temptation to open up the ultimate depths of being, and the desire to conquer all reticent beings. BACHELARD [1957] 1964: 222 The topo-­analysis of the doorway acknowledges the Half-­open of the door and discovers the connotation to the Half-­asleep of the daydream, and the ‘Half-­ belief’ (Huizinga 1949: 13) when playing games. The door is a liminal space and as such it structurally duplicates the game that it is contained within: we can enter and we can leave. We can be in the game and can be outside the Magic Circle. We can trade the things known against things unknown.

7.1 Doors, gateways, passages Is it true that the first appearance of passageways in computer games is text-­ based ‘tunnels’ in Hunt the Wumpus (1975) and that the first game based on the task of opening doors is Maniac Mansion (1987)? Maniac Mansion has at least to be credited for having the doors as a beautifully designed core gameplay element. The console game Elevator Action (1983) by Taito features the story of Agent 17, also known as ‘Otto’ who has to make his way out of a thirty-storied building. Elevators are his main escape devices, but doors also play a prominent role in the low-­resolution action game (256 × 224 pixel). Blue doors will open and release spies who are in the way of Otto. Red doors have to be entered to find secret documents. Since the early BASIC program of Gregory Yob’s Hunt the Wumpus a lot of programming has been done to connect rooms with gateways, doors and portals. The incredible power of creating and passing through portals is the key gameplay element and the seductive incentive of Portal (2007). The existentialist choice between two doors keeps the suspension in The Stanley Parable (2011). Maniac Mansion’s limited set of instructions to interact with doors consisted of GO TO DOOR and OPEN DOOR. Much later in time Narbacular Drop (2005) suggests a sense of agency on the material environment when you have

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to navigate a dungeon using an innovative portal system and a portal gun. Players use interconnected portals that can be placed on any non-­metallic surface in this game. The student project Narbacular Drop actually preceded and inspired Portal (2007). The main antagonists of the latter are Chell, a woman, and GLaDOS, the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System. GLaDOS is much more than an operating system, as it has a will to perform certain tasks and could rather be seen as an artificially intelligent computer system with bad intents. The portals are completely fictional, but they work according to a rule system not unlike Newtonian physics. This is a setting Jesper Juul calls ‘half-­real’ (Juul 2005): factual rules control fictional objects following these ‘real’ rules. Portal and Portal2 demonstrate how portals became sophisticated dynamic assets in games and confront designers with much more complex tasks than just to design the door and assign basic states of OPEN and CLOSED to the object. Liz England from Ubisoft describes what she calls ‘The Door Problem’ in her blog (England 2014). She starts from the situation of having to design a game. What she and her colleagues have to consider then are these issues: Are there doors in your game? Can the player open them? Can the player open every door in the game? Or are some doors for decoration? How does the player know the difference? Are doors you can open green and ones you can’t red? Is there trash piled up in front of doors you can’t use? Did you just remove the doorknobs and call it a day? Can doors be locked and unlocked? What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open? Does a player know how to unlock a door? Do they need a key? To hack a console? To solve a puzzle? To wait until a story moment passes? Are there doors that can open but the player can never enter them? Where do enemies come from? Do they run in from doors? Do those doors lock afterwards? How does the player open a door? Do they just walk up to it and it slides open? Does it swing open? Does the player have to press a button to open it? Do doors lock behind the player? What happens if there are two players? Does it only lock after both players pass through the door?

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What if the level is REALLY BIG and can’t all exist at the same time? If one player stays behind, the floor might disappear from under them. What do you do? Do you stop one player from progressing any further until both are together in the same room? Do you teleport the player that stayed behind? What size is a door? Does it have to be big enough for a player to get through? What about co-­op players? What if player 1 is standing in the doorway – does that block player 2? What about allies following you? How many of them need to get through the door without getting stuck? What about enemies? Do mini-­bosses that are larger than a person also need to fit through the door? ENGLAND 2014 One can see from the impressive list the designer managed to generate that door-­making is quite a complicated business and that a door in a game can mean a lot of different things for gameplay.

7.2  Warp zones Fans of the television series Star Trek (1966–9) will remember that there is a way of getting to remote places in an instant and to escape from a tricky situation at an incredible speed: the so-­called ‘warp drive’. The warp drive is a facility allowing Captain Kirk and his crew to arrive at far-­away places in the Milky Way galaxy at a speed that recoil rocket drives could never accomplish. So, how is it possible that the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) hops from one end of the universe to another at such breath-­taking speed? The answer to that is: the Enterprise does not move in space. Space bends around the Enterprise and allows for a re-­entry into undistorted space at another point than the one from where it entered the warped space. The warp drive creates a ‘space bubble’ or rather a moving ripple in the fabric of space. This at least is the theory of the fictitious faster-­than-light spacecraft propulsion, the warp drive. The scientific basis for inventing fictitious propulsion techniques like the ones from Star Trek is Albert Einstein’s General Relativity Theory (1915) proposing that the curvature of spacetime due to gravity can be non-­ negligible. The spatial phantasm of a time–space reference system that is not as straight and stable as the Euclidian square room we are sitting in, has been ‘warped’ by Einstein’s theories and by popular fiction. It has also

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been transformed by computer games and by the way computer games play with space. The editor for Unreal (1999) includes zone building tools for spaces of different behaviour. These subspaces are called zones and they are contained within ‘brushes’2 and connected to each other via ‘zone-­portals’. All of these spaces and zones can be seen and played in the various levels Unreal contains. There are water zones and sky zones, lava zones, kill zones, slime zones and warp zones. The warp zone has an interesting concept. It is not a teleporter, like the zones they call warp zones in Super Mario (1985). In the platform jumper Mario can arrive at spaces that are labelled warp zones, and by entering he will be teleported somewhere else. This happens in levels 2-2 and 4-2 and is sometimes talked about as a hidden feature. In Unreal (1999) however, warp zones are much more interesting. In some way, they resemble the Star Trek warp drive physics. They set up in pairs and allow players to look into the other zone and to go there and back again. In regard to the spatial concept one could talk of nested recursive spaces. Players sometimes refer to them as ‘endless tunnels’. I once used the irritating effect of warp zones for a game called Expositur (2001) in a level of the game dealing with Sigmund Freud and his cyclamen dream. This dream, also known as the ‘Dream of the Botanical Monograph’ helped Freud to develop a hypothesis that dreams are always connected to real experiences of the day before the dream took place. Freud describes his dream: ‘I had written a monograph on a certain plant. The book lay before me and I was at the moment turning over a folded coloured plate. Bound up in each copy there was a dried specimen of the plant, as though it had been taken from a herbarium’ (Freud [1899] 2010: 193). Freud concludes that he must have dreamt about the cyclamen flowers. He remembers that he saw a monograph The Genus Cyclamen in a shopping window of Vienna’s Am Graben street. In the self-­analysis Freud performed after he woke up, he tells us about the flower reminding him of his wife Martha. Cyclamen were Martha’s favourite flowers and Freud recognizes that he had forgotten to give these flowers to her for a long time. But Freud also connects the toxicity of the cyclamen roots to cocaine and his experiments with the drug. Freud wanted to use cocaine as an anaesthetic for eye operations, and never got over the disappointment that Dr Karl Koller from Berlin published about the pharmaceutical effects of cocaine, before he could do so. Freud was angry with himself for not having been faster, but he was also jealous of Dr Koller for having successfully published. The monograph from Freud’s dream is therefore also a sign of Freud’s unresolved problem with the publication of his colleague. In the Expositur level I built in 2001, I used the possibility of nested warp zones to throw the player back into from what he had hoped to escape from.

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I consider this to be a fitting architectural set-up for the illustration of Freud’s dreams. The zones demonstrate via spatial construction the recursivity of dreams. Warp zones are phantasmal spaces of endless movement without any topographic progress. They show how space can be nested and how space travel can discharge into an endless loop. Technically speaking a WarpZone in Unreal (1999) consists of two distinct rooms, each of them equipped with a ZonePortal and a WarpZoneInfo actor. The portal is a window to another zone. The player looks ‘through’ the portal and sees what is in the other zone. The WarpZoneInfo allows for the designer to set properties of the zone. There is an object called ‘Destination’ and this object contains two string variables, called ‘OtherSideURL’ and ‘ThisTag’. The latter is an alphanumeric name for the respective WarpZone. The former is the teleport destination. It tells Unreal where to teleport to, once the portal of zone

FIGURE 7.1   Details from the ‘cyclamen’ warp zone in the Sigmund Freud section of the game Expositur (fuchs-­eckerman 2001). Left: First Person View of the warp zone with Martha Freud. Right: Construction of the nested structure of warp zones in the game editor UnrealEd (1999).

FIGURE 7.2   Details from the ‘cocaine’ warp zones in Expositur (fuchs-­eckerman 2001).

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‘ThisTag’ has been touched. This property can be set to a local name or even to the URL of a game in the multiplayer universe. In the case of the Sigmund Freud WarpZone one of my zones was called ‘cyclamenspace’ and the other one was called the ‘cocainespace’. The two zones have been cross-­referenced so that the cyclamenspace looked as if it was contained within the cocainespace and the cocainespace conversely looked as if it was contained within the cyclamenspace. Naturally there was no easy escape from this dream. If a player approached the cocaine portal that presented a view into cyclamenspace he or she was teleported to cyclamenspace only to find herself caught and trapped looking at cocainespace. (In order to not frustrate the players completely I implemented a little trigger in the form of a tiny plant on the floor that worked as a secret escape mechanism from the endless spatial loop.)

7.3 Rites of passage Computer game portals are transformative spaces leading from one state to another. They are liminal spaces (Turner 1964) in the sense that they do not only connect one room to another, but that they often generate a transition. In computer games portals might lead from life to death, from apprenticeship to masterhood, from tribal sociality to techno-­futuristic groupings or from agnosia to knowledge. Think of the doors in What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), the Soma (2015) theta entrance, Fallout 4’s (2016) automated doors or Final Fantasy XV’s (2016) door to Pitioss Dungeon. Like in a fairy tale the rite of passage to the ruins of Pitioss is facilitated by a door that only opens at a certain time in the night. The initial statement of this game positions it clearly in the world of archetypical salvation narratives. ‘In a time unknown only a prophecy keeps hope alive in people’s hearts: “When darkness veils the world, the King of Light shall come.” ’ We immediately understand that Prince Noctis Lucis Caelum – what a beautiful fairy-­tale name – is the protagonist of the transgression to be undertaken. The heavens of the nocturnal light, noctis lucis caelum, are in between salvation and darkness, in between day and night and in between the poles of possible outcomes of the story we are told in the game. When ‘Noct’ as his friends call the Prince, arrives in daylight at the gates of Pitioss, the players understand that the castle’s name suggests something or someone should have ‘pity on us’. The Prince has begun with the first step of the liminal process: he has to wait and keep his patience until 8 o’clock in the evening gameplay time. Only then, in complete darkness, can he separate from his old identity and enter the state of passage. Now the Prince and his companions are really ‘Betwixt and Between’ (Turner 1964). Turner calls mediatic coming-­of-age narratives ‘liminoid’ and what we

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experience when playing Final Fantasy XV is a ludic rite of passage with strong references to puberty and adolescence. Prince Noctis and his gang are not quite grown up, which is pointed out by the old man at the petrol station, Cid Sophiar (the wise one), and by half-­girl/half-­woman ‘Cindy – Cid’s grease-­ monkey granddaughter’ (Final Fantasy XV 2016). The four boys, hovering in between boyhood and adolescence, try to talk like adult movie actors at certain times and act and sound as naïve as ten-­year-­olds at other occasions. When Cindy asks Prince Noctis about his wedding, he replies he has ‘not [been] hitched just yet’. Trying to remain a child and trying even harder to become grown up is the biographical background story of Noct, Gladio, Prompto and Ignis. It is well conceived by the designers of Final Fantasy to not rely on one single character having his coming-­of-age experience, but to use four friends going through the process together. In this way Prompto can play out the fearfulness and spontaneity of a small child, Gladio can take the role of the muscular gladiator and Noct and Ignis can just oscillate in between. On an auditory level we encounter the vocal ambiguities of voices sounding like children’s voices (Prompto) and hypermasculine voices (Gladio). The audio designers and voice-­acting performers did a convincing job of having the full spectrum of young men talking in the air without having to go through the embarrassing physicality of puberty vocal change. The boys group substitutes for one single boy in the passage from childhood to adolescence and the computer game is the technologically mediated rite of passage. Games like this are what Paul Sterner calls ‘liminal media for affective transformation’ (Sterner 2017). His argument is very convincing: The rites of passage that we know from antiquity and from modernity use media of different kinds to facilitate affective transformations. For ancient Greece theatre at the times of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides the theatre of Dionysus, the chorus and masks were the apparatus for affective transformation. Much later cinema, radio and television became liminal media and today we see computer games as the most successful medium for such transformations.

7.4  Portals in transmedia spacetelling The popular computer games Portal (2007) and Portal 2 (2011) by Valve Corporation triggered such an intense interest in the concept and the fictional apparatus of space travelling with portal guns, that an avalanche of Portal fan films, short films, comedies, beer adverts and bedroom video parodies have been produced during the years following the publication of the digital game. In the very year the second episode of the computer game was published director and producer Dan Trachtenberg came up with his seven-­minute short

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film Portal: No Escape (2011). Also in 2011 Aperture: A Triumph of Science, a sci-­fi conspiracy theory movie by directors Nick Celentano and Ryan Anthony was released. A short film about baking a cake with the help of portal guns showed what pragmatic use of sci-­fi technology could look like (Outside Aperture 2011). The main character Chell suffers from post-­traumatic stress disorder in this film and decides to use the gun for the purpose of baking a cake. Two years later the live-­action short Portal: Survive! (2013) by Colin and Connor McGuire saw the light of day and Portal: Origins (2013) by Michael McMullan and Zakk Martin dug deep into the potential history before Aperture Labs started building the infamous ‘Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device’. Further fantasies and transmedia ports of the Portal games had the form of student comedies (Corrupted 2015, a film made entirely by students of DeSales University), of parodies (Aperture Flashbacks 2015, made to fulfil the CAS requirements of the International Baccalaureate Program) or of television commercials (Heineken’s The Portal 2017). The last production mentioned3 is based on the unlikely event of beer-­drinking youngsters in Vancouver wanting to drink the very same beer in an almost identical bar in Montreal. One cannot congratulate Heineken Canada for having come up with a story restricting human imagination of global teleportation to two beer-­bars at the west and east of Canada, but this is what seems to happen when the commercial sector appropriates creative concepts. The concepts have to be boiled down to the smallest conceivable thought able to connect a funny idea and a product. At least the beer manufacturer has demonstrated that pushing an idea from one medium into another medium need not to be concerned about stories told. The transmediation can also be executed on the line of objects, visuals or spatial concepts. I want to suggest that what goes on in between the Portal comedies, parodies, tragedies, action flicks and beer promotion films is not ‘transmedia storytelling’ (Jenkins 2003), but rather transmedia spacetelling. The spatial phantasm of the warp zone, of a door to another city or a portal to distant locations is the cohesive power in between the medial containers. Baking a cake (2011), fighting a conspiracy (2011) and enjoying beer drinking (2017) have not very much in common. The media artefacts, however, still have a strong cohesion by referring to the portal gun. It is the phantasmal space and not the narrative space that produces a fantasy.

8 The Island

I am a rock, I am an island. PAUL SIMON 1965

8.1  You are alone!

I

solation, the quest to find one’s identity, survival and the loss of mental health are topics that are dealt with on islands such as the tropical Rook Island of Far Cry 3 (2012), Mêlée Island from The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), Gemea from Yonder (2017),1 and in games like Myst (1993), Proteus (2013), Stranded Deep (2015) or The Witness (2016). The phantasmal space of the island has been played with in literature, when authors like H. G. Wells fantasized about vivisection, evolution and insular separation in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) or, even earlier, Daniel Defoe and his Robinson Crusoe (Defoe 1719).2 Robinson Crusoe’s Más a Tierra is a Pacific island, just as Moreau’s island is. Rook Island, another exotic destination in the Pacific Ocean is the place where Jason Brody has to overcome his troubles with pirates. Myst, Proteus, The Witness and Far Cry are set on islands and have been described as open world games (Bonner 2016: 2) and it is definitely true that the player encounters an open environment with almost no limitations to go wherever he or she likes to – except for leaving the island. The island games are therefore as open as a lion’s enclosure in the zoo is. By virtue of this enclosed openness the phantasmal space of the island is filled with tension. There are such limitless possibilities, but there is a final border that can never be crossed. An open universe like the one of No Man’s Sky (2016) is finite in a mathematical sense, but it feels limitless. Open world islands in contrast feel spatially constrained even if the terrain they cover is huge. It is often the first glance that implants a feeling of freedom or captivity. Arnold

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Böcklin’s Island of the Dead painting series (1880–6) is a model case for such an enclosedness-­at-first-­sight experience. The paintings’ islands are rich with possibilities for discovery, adventure or meditation: a chapel, boulders, cypress trees, rock tombs, people and a boat. But the first impression is: this is an island, and not an inhabited landscape. The topos of the island is surrounded by the utopos of water and sky. In the first version, the so-­called Urversion of the painting (1880) and in the second slightly smaller version from the same year the ocean is almost black and the sky is of a dark blue with almost no clouds at all. It seems that Böcklin tried to demonstrate that the island is surrounded by a non-­space, an utopos, by pulling sky and water to the background and almost eliminating it from the image by painting them black. For the third version of the Island of the Dead (1883) Böcklin changed his visual strategy. The water at the edge of the isle reflects the island. The sea becomes utopos by being nothing but the mirror image of the island. Even the sky is instrumental for expanding the non-­space of the sea as it fades into the ocean with just a faint hint of where a conceivable horizon could be. We find the visual strategy of isolating an island in contemporary computer games as well. For the purpose of exposing the land and camouflaging the sea game designers frequently use hyper-­realistic reflections of land in the ocean and artificially idealized mirror images. In Dear Esther (2012) we start at a Hebridean island. Distant views towards the island show the landmass reflected in the sea. In Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) reflections of mountains seen from across the bay are visible on the surface of the water. The sea in The Witness (2016) displays reflections of the land as well. In a surreal swap of what we would expect in regard to resolution and realism the land is flat-­ shaded and the sea surface is rendered with a complex shader. What we expect to carry meaning looks flat on the surface and what we assume as being meaningless seems shiny, reflective and sophisticated. The perceived

FIGURE 8.1   Left: Detail from the game Dear Esther (Thechineseroom 2012). Right: Toteninsel III (Arnold Böcklin 1883, 80 cm × 150 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin). Montage by the author.

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sophistication is of course just a reflection of the enigmatic complexity of the island’s mystery and the carrier of this reflection could not be flatter: a mirror, nothing but a mirror. Another stylistic feature that Zelda, The Witness and Arnold Böcklin’s paintings share is the use of shadows on water surfaces. The almost completely desemantized non-­space of the sea is further deprived of meaning by having to display imagery from the non-­sea. The character’s shadow in Zelda can be seen on the water to signify the water is about the island, not the sea. Actually, water is not an indispensable requisite of an isle to be such. A patch of land in the orbit can be an island as well.3 A boulder floating in the air might be an island. In No Man’s Sky (2016) and in EVE online (2003) we travel through the universe. When we arrive at a new planet we feel like Sindbad of the seventeenth-­century Middle-Eastern tale Sinbad the Sailor (Burton [1637] 1885). The sailor felt hope and anticipated bounty when discovering new islands. The planets in EVE’s universe have the same value in use as the islands Sindbad is landing on at his second voyage. They are the territory on which intergalactic trade can take place. Sindbad’s voyage to the valley of diamonds takes place for benefits from the exploitation of the island and not for the beauty of the jewels. The modern seafarers’ assessment of a new planet is therefore the exchange value of the commodities that can be found on it. The planets in EVE online could be islands as well. Ludo-­colonial exploitation is not concerned with the beauty of the planet-­islands, it is focused on the gross profit contribution of the particular isle. The game The Mountain (2014) by David O’Reilly is a game that could as well be called The Island. What we experience playing the game is the view of a slowly changing conical piece of land suspended in air. The cone has plants and grass growing on it and if we play sufficiently long, the leaves will change colour, fall down and snow will start to fall. It does not matter whether we call the heap of matter floating in space a mountain or an island, but one might well dispute whether the piece can be called a ‘game’. The procedural 3D environment displays a landscape that resembles a mountain and accounts for changes in weather, season and vegetation. The player cannot do anything but observe and contemplate.4 With these constraints the player resembles a shipwrecked person on an island watching the waves roll by, the sunrise and the setting of the sun, and the clouds moving from the left to the right. You can hardly call this kind of activity ‘action’. I have in another publication called this type of game ‘Inaction Games’ (Fuchs 2018). The Mountain is an inaction game for a meditative audience. It promises to take care of the tedious tasks of navigating, saving the game, having to provide resources for the progression of the game and for worrying about temporal constraints. In the case of The Mountain inaction is neither a

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joke nor a sarcastic statement of opposition to ludic stereotypes. Inaction is a meditative practice here and possibly a way to develop a new relationship with nature. The player sees a mountain change over the course of time. The game developer proudly proclaims that the game features: ‘automatic save . . . time moves forward . . . things grow and things die . . . nature expresses itself’ (O’Reilly 2014: n.p.). Like with the real world the player/recipient can experience the seasonal changes, surprise in the weather and a nature that pretty much does what it always did without human actors. This might be a big relief in the Anthropocene that we believe to live in: a time when everything is declared to be a result of human action. Is it not us who have changed climate, who are responsible for hurricanes, for the rise of the sea levels, for the existence and non-­existence of thousands of different species? And are we not about to make our own species extinct very soon? We have arrived at a paralysis grown out of human hyper-­activity disorders. If this is the symptom then inaction might be a first step towards a cure. Inaction is an attempt to break out from the managerial confidence that every situation on the planet can be tackled with discipline, rational thinking and optimization strategies. Daniel Defoe wrote his book about a man on an island in a time when economic discipline and strategic planning started to replace the aristocratic attitude of excess, spontaneity and luxurious extravagance. Defoe’s character Crusoe is a homo economicus, an economic man who symbolizes the new outlook of individualism in view of the scarcity of resources. If you are shipwrecked like Robinson Crusoe, you make plans, organize your day, monitor your activities in a diary, build a house, systematically kill animals, harvest and store and you even create a social network with whomever you meet on your way. If you play god in The Universim game of planetary simulation (2017) you do pretty much the same. You exploit the planet, you create shelter, you harvest and store and you are always acting economically sane. The behavioural script for the mentality of The Universim (2017), a planetary SimCity (1989), for Stranded Deep (2015) and Rokh (2015) is unlimited optimism in one single man’s power to build a world – plus the ludic continuation of the ‘Go West’ ideology. No matter whether the games’ terrain is the Earth, planet Mars or an island like in Lost in Nature (2017) and Stranded Deep (2015), the phantasmal space is always insular. In the Rokh launch trailer we are told three words only. These words are written in large letters on the screen: ‘You are alone’. Twenty seconds later another message is displayed: ‘Really alone’.5 This is the mantra of the phantasmal space of the island: You are alone! The mission statement of the island is: Survive!

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8.2  Chiselling mountains – fetching pretty sunrises An increasing number of islands in computer games are nowadays built procedurally. This is to say that islands or isolated planets we find in digital worlds are computed by software and have not seen the personal caretaking of a designer/craftsman. The rocks and mountains of these worlds have not been chiselled by hand. They have rather been generated algorithmically. Procedures for computer-­aided terra-­formation can be found in No Man’s Sky (2016) and Badiya (2017), with its promotional slogan ‘Explore an infinite world’, or playful simulations like Proteus (2013), The Mountain (2014), The Universim (2017), etc. These games apply different forms of automated world-­building. World-­building is more than bricklaying in a rule-­based environment. World-­ building in persuasive computer games always involves some ‘imaginative world and poetic phantasm construction’ (Harrell 2013: 74). In some of the cases algorithmic assistance is employed to change the terrain, in others flora and fauna and in others again weather conditions, seasonal change or natural disasters. Stefan Ekman’s and Audrey Isabel Taylor’s ‘Notes Toward a Critical Approach to Worlds and World-Building’ (Ekman and Taylor 2016) introduce a very useful distinction between the world-­building processes that authors, readers and critics get involved within, when they work creatively with text. But Ekman and Taylor do not tell us about world-­building by machines. The types of games6 that Ekman and Taylor talk about are generated, received and critically analysed by humans, or some ‘person’ (Ekman and Taylor 2016: 16). For them world-­building seems to be a strictly human affair, even an individual process, and how could that not be so. Moles, bees and ants might build their own worlds, but these are really not of any importance to us, as we don’t inhabit them. But what if a machine builds environments that we live in? Such happens – to provide with a non-­literature example of world-­building7 – in the computer game No Man’s Sky (2016). Sean Murray, the director and lead concept developer of the game, reports about how it feels to prowl around on a planet that has been created by ‘no man’. Even he seems to be surprised about the very world his algorithms created. I was flying around the universe, trying to take some screenshots. I neared the surface of a planet and suddenly it started to rain. As I was touching down I scared some deer who broke through the woods, dodging in and out of trees. Now this was jaw-­dropping to me, because I’ve never seen any of these systems before, but also it felt like this was a real place I’d

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discovered. No one had been there before, and I didn’t know whether to shout excitedly, or just keep it to myself. MURRAY 2016 What Murray describes here is not a social encounter. Murray describes the experience of surprise as a sudden break from perceived reality. Murray’s ‘jaw-­dropping’ experience is similar to the Robinson Crusoe moment of spying a creature somewhere in the bush. The creature does not drop from blue skies. Robinson’s ‘Friday’ and Murray’s deer have always been in a space of possibilities and suddenly they appear in real space. This real space is the in-­game environment of No Man’s Sky. It might sound strange that we have to describe gamespace as ‘real’ space and not as a zone of virtualities or phantasies. In digital cultures, however, the point of reference about what is real and what is not, is itself of a digital nature. It is therefore no surprise that phantasmal creatures are not assessed vis-à-vis organic species from the animal kingdom, but in the light of procedural environments, 3D jungles and artificial light sources. Science-­fictional fantasy is at the core of the procedural game. Key elements of its 18 quintillion planets have to be unpredictable, surprising and clearly identifiable as imaginary, but at the same time most of these elements have to be somehow related to common reality. A No Man’s Sky creature could resemble a bear with a crocodile skin, it could be a subaquatic mosquito, but it would not fulfil its function if it had no connotations to existing or extinct animals on planet earth. This open world game has found a huge number of followers recently. The procedural universe of No Man’s Sky has had at least a million visitors and if the popularity won’t drop, some 3,000 will be wandering around there at the time when you read this book.8 The players of the game are human to a large part, I assume, but the creatures of the universe are not only non-­human – non-­humans have built them as well. No Man’s Sky is no isolated extravaganza, there is an increasing number of other games where the network of human and non-­human actors has a strong bias towards those without flesh and blood: the Prometheus project (2016), Proteus (2013), The Mountain (2014), The Universim (2017) and many more. There are good reasons to believe that procedural world-­ formation will cover a huge sector of digital games development in the near future. The recent success of No Man’s Sky, the computer game that algorithmically spawns 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets in a giant universe, points in the direction of what we are going to expect from non-­ human world-­building. So far we are used to an all-­too-familiar process of human world-­creation. We know the studios and sometimes we know individuals who build worlds that we are happy to ‘read’ and to ‘criticize’ (Ekman and Taylor 2016). But

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FIGURE 8.2   Screenshot showing procedural plants and animals from No Man’s Sky (Hello Games 2016).

what happens if the creation of the world is turned into a procedural event, that needs no human artist or designer dirtying his hands? What changes can we expect to happen to writers, readers and critics of worlds?

1.  In our scenario of procedural world-­formation the author is kind of dead. The only way of looking at world-­building with a focus on what once was the author, is software analysis. We could try to understand for what reason certain ‘design’ decisions resulted from code sections driving the generative algorithms. A possible argument against the death of the author might be that the author is only half-­dead. In an email from 13 September 2017 Stefan Ekman asks, ‘where the designed computer-­game world ends and the procedural one begins’.9 This is a valid point, because some of the games that boast of having created universes from a few lines of code have actually only decorated handmade worlds with random stones, grass, a few animals and assets like that. Let us assume that the human author constructs the ‘world-­architecture’ (Ekman and Taylor 2016: 12), and the procedural components would only be held responsible for interior decoration, not much more than the wallpapers on the buildings we inhabit in ‘the real world’. Under such conditions we might as well dismiss the claim that the software plays an important part in world-­building. But is the role of automated design really that limited? And will it be in the future?

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I suspect that game development will not stop at that point. It is obvious that there are strong economic incentives to reduce the range of design decisions that authors/game artists are allowed to make in future commercial game development. Placement of assets in large levels is one thing that software can accomplish, but there are other conceivable generative processes. The recently published Update 1.3 for No Man’s Sky features massive terra-­formation possibilities. The update with the promising and presumptuous title Atlas Rises (2017) allows for the game engine to change the surface of the planets and it announces a procedural mission system in other words: storytelling that is at least partly automated. It is not hard to imagine how much game producers would like to minimize production costs by having major parts of the storytelling expenses reduced via automation.10 What is still left to the author? Audio? No way! If an algorithm can vary the size and the shape of beasts in a video world then the algorithm might as well compute new footstep sounds and animal outcries depending on the size, weight and physics of the creatures. A procedural beast might howl, purr or quack and the reader/player will think that this is integral to the ‘personality’ of the species. The ‘personality of the place’ (Tuan 1977) will also be taken care of by software. Projects like The Universim (2017), based on the Prometheus InGame Engine (2016), simulate various environmental conditions and changes on the planet. The navigable locations differ considerably based on the season, geographic peculiarities, civilizational influences and the history of the place. ‘Trees will be linked directly to the oxygen level on the planet. Without them, your people will not be able to survive! Every tree will generate a certain amount of oxygen based on the planetary conditions’ (Crytivo Games Team 2017). As a result of this the reader/player will encounter virtual biomes of high plausibility, because precipitation, temperature, wind and snow are input variables to generative processes. The player will also experience biomes of high variety. ‘You will encounter many planets with alien wildlife that you have never seen before!’ (Crytivo Games Team 2017). Yet, the alien wildlife is created in consideration of a fictional history, a virtual climate and a virtual environment contributing to the creation. The creatures are not completely random and they are not what earthlings are used to seeing, but they follow a systematic logic of environmental interdependencies. It is hard to deny that these environments do own ‘personality’ in Yi-Fu Tuan’s sense of the word. The investment of meaning and personality in a place derives from the human ability to have a sense of place. Insentient objects, like clouds, forests or islands can evoke such a sense of place and it does not matter at all whether the clouds are droplets of water in the sky or sophisticated renderings on a screen. It does not matter whether the mountains are ‘made’ out of rock or of polygons.

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2.  What changes occur from procedural world-­building for the reader of the text, or the player of the game? Can a reader see and understand the differences of intentionally laid out elements in a world and procedurally generated elements? In most cases the reader will not be able to see the difference. I looked at promotional material from the company that advertises procedural games and I had a very hard time in distinguishing potentially handcrafted plants and animals that the company put into the world and automatically created ones. The question is actually a Turing test en miniature: has the creature I see in front of me been built by a man or woman, or has it been built by a computer? In the situation I explored in my auto-­ethnographic investigation, I could not tell. This is, however, of little relevance for the players of the game. They can just enjoy the scenery, be it procedurally generated or not. 3.  When we look at the worlds these games provide us with from a critic’s point of view, we can still engage in asking the questions Ekman and Taylor find relevant on a ‘most fundamental level’: ‘What does a particular element do? . . . How does it do it? . . . What is the effect of this element?’ (Ekman and Taylor 2016: 12). It has to be noted that these questions focus on function and effect and do not differentiate between phenomena created by human designers of the elements and by robots that might have done so. The questions remain relevant even if no author has set or suggested the function, operational mode and effect of the elements. From a critic’s standpoint the function, operation and effect are not depending on being intended or just occurring randomly. To put it bluntly: if you step on a mine, you’re dead, no matter whether a level designer carefully placed the explosive or whether the place was selected algorithmically. There is however something new to the role of the critic: the game analyst could be the only one who accounts for differences in human world-­building and automatic world-­building. If the reader cannot see the differences and if the author is not a human under full control of the design process, then the critic might be the last one who can assess differences in the function, operational mode and effect of the elements of a game. ‘Critical world-­building’ (Ekman and Taylor 2016: 12) requires a new sensitivity to make sense of politics, economic implications and changes on an affective level of play under the terms of procedural generation. What I want to propose here, is a chance for critical world-­building when non-­intentional world-­building is about to take over what once was a godly and later then a human privilege. The critic, I suggest, need not resign, now that efficient world-­building actors have replaced humans as authors. Critique is more relevant than ever. Critical world-­building can support readerly world-­building by the former’s ability to look across the

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fence. The games critic is probably the last instance of world-­builders that cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence because of its role and responsibility to differentiate between human intelligence and computerized intelligence. For a system theoretical reason the observer can interpret the system, but the observer cannot observe the observer. I was tempted to suggest an extension of Stefan Ekman and Audrey Isabel Taylor’s triplet of world-­builders. They proposed that world-­building is either a rather personal ‘authorial world-­building’, ‘readerly world-­building’ or ‘critical world-­building’ (Ekman and Taylor 2016: 10–11). My addition to that was a fourth category of ‘non-­intentional world-­building’, that is to say creation of worlds by machines.11 I hesitate to stick to this suggestion, because I think that non-­intentional world-­building can still be conceptualized as authorial world-­building, no matter if it is undertaken by man or machine. This will however call for an extended role of the critic, who is challenged to scrutinize authorial world-­building in regard to the source of authorship. The critic will also have to rebuild the worlds he examines in regard to the apparatuses that promote and facilitate procedural generation. This will include issues of power and ideology that materialize and manifest themselves in digital games and the worlds built from that (cf. Fuchs 2014: 153–57). Phantasmal spaces are drivers and products of world-­building. When we look at the phantasmal space of the island, we will have to take into account that this space is not any longer the exclusive product of individual poets and painters. Design teams and man–machine conglomerates claim terrain in the processes of world-­forming, world-­making and world-­building. The new actors effect changes in how we experience phantasmal spaces. One of the new questions we pose when getting immersed in these spaces is whether the elements we are dealing with are procedural, handcrafted or hybrid. Painting, music and other traditional media usually had a clear assignment of who built the world and how the elements of the world have been produced. Gustav Klimt’s Beech Forest was painted in 1902 with oil colours on canvas in a forest near the village of Litzlberg at Upper Austria’s Attersee. We don’t mistake the beech trees on the painting for real trees and we know how they have been painted and who painted them. Our confidence in the medial framework is at stake with procedurally generated spaces though. An in-­game statement from the loading screen of The Universim (2017) mocks: ‘If you look closely enough, you may begin to realize that this isn’t reality.’ The ironic text continues and plays sarcastically with our dreams, expectations and illusions when watching this phantasmal game-space:

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Creating primordial soup Polishing stars Chiselling mountains Carving trees Counting mammoth hair Fetching pretty sunrises Thinking THE UNIVERSIM 2017, excerpt from the loading screen These short phrases in the form of a poem ridicule our belief that we can ‘use the middle mouse button to find the full list of godly powers at our disposal’ (The Universim 2017). We are not gods in The Universim. We also have no seventh day to think about our creation, because we are asked to carry on and administer the planet efficiently to avoid extinction of mankind. We are just involved in the operation of a piece of computational software, an ecosystem that turns out to be more concerned with the economy than the ecology of the planet. Even though water is acknowledged to be of importance for the inhabitants of the simulated planet, key variables display availability of oil, gas and electricity. What we learn from this game is to protect our ‘nuggets’, that is how the humanoids are described,12 but what we have to understand is that the rationale behind the world-­building processes is deeply rooted in the way Standard Oil or Exon Mobil understand wellbeing and prosperity. Everything is a resource and a resource only. We are told that a child of the game-­age of 30 seconds and a phantasmal age of some six or seven years is still ‘too young to work’. We are not chiselling mountains and we are not carving trees. The generative software does so and we watch the program carving and chiselling.

8.3 Really alone!!! One of the affective features of the phantasmal space of the island is loneliness. We are reminded of this condition by numerous jokes: bearded men who have not seen a single soul for years. We also remember the fear and desperation Robinson Crusoe experienced on his island. Loneliness can be a frightening experience, but it need not be one. Solitude is often regarded as joyful. This ambiguity of separation from the crowd as desirable and terrifying adds a lot to the phantasmal space of the island. It creates a permanent oscillation in between ‘everything can happen’ and ‘all is lost’. In Chapter 4: First Weeks on the Island, Robinson contemplates about how his situation can be properly assessed and he arrives at this ambiguous conclusion:

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Evil:  I am cast upon a horrible, desolate island, void of all hope of recovery. Good:  But I am alive; and not drowned, as all my ship’s company were. Evil:  I am singled out and separated, as it were, from all the world, to be miserable. Good:  But I am singled out, too, from all the ship’s crew, to be spared from death; and He that miraculously saved me from death can deliver me from this condition. DEFOE 1719: Chapter 4 The accountant’s logic of pros and cons, good and evil, benefits and losses presents a worldview of the enlightened Englishman’s entrepreneurial spirit. The novel was written at a point in history when the Baroque state of sovereignty was about to be replaced by the ‘state of administration’ (Foucault 1978: 417). Defoe, himself a salesman, who traded wine and tobacco from America, promoted the ideal of self-­organization. To Defoe self-­organization meant the complete commodification of the environment for the purpose of maximizing individual benefits. Tobacco grew for the single reason of being harvested and being exported to England as a luxury asset. Wine was not a Dionysian potion for the stimulation of dance and exaltation, but rather the resource for a profitable business. Daniel Vella reminds us that industrialized technology looks at nature as a ‘standing-­reserve’ (Vella 2013: 7) and has an argument in mind Heidegger makes in The Question Concerning Technology: ‘The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit’ (Heidegger [1954] 1977: 14). I agree partly with Vella, when he suggests that games like the computer game Minecraft (2009/2014) work within the same ideological framing, in Heidegger’s terms ‘enframing’ (in German: Gestell). In Minecraft, Vella proposes, nature is but a set of bricks the players have to cleverly use in order to extract value from the gaming universe. Every entity that can be perceived in the world is a potential resource, to be gathered, processed, and put to use in crafting. Trees can be chopped down for wood. Rock can be quarried for building material or mined in search of coal, iron or rarer minerals. Sheep are a source of wool; cows, of leather; pigs of meat. VELLA 2013: 8 This is at least one aspect of the gaming reality of Minecraft (2009/2014) and the main driving force on the islands of The Universim (2017) and Portal Knights (2016). Even in games that are announced as being motivated by action, sportsmen’s spirit, resistance or tribal resurrection, exploitation of man and nature is more than a side quest. In the computer game Horizon: Zero Dawn we

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find wild boar, fox and racoon to complete the almost romantic setting of a picturesque landscape. Yet the animals serve but one purpose: They are the linear resource for repetitive crafting and upgrading of the various inventories. The flowers as well and the branches we find everywhere on this wide playground are there to be harvested, to be made into medicine, anti-­dotes or arrows for the bow.13 BONNER 2018: 15 The gamers’ mantra is: Take whatever you come across and turn it into a utility object! This is also the guideline for Defoe’s Robinson, and it has been the political maxim since for the ruthless exploitation and domestication of man, animal and nature.14 One could argue that the gains in control and manipulation such a resource-­centred standpoint returns, is counterbalanced by a loss of emotional closeness to the world around us. No space left for the overwhelming Cartesian effects of joy, sorrow, desire, love, admiration and hatred. Situations have to be properly evaluated and analysed in regard to their positive and negative implications. Defoe’s Crusoe comes to the conclusion that there is not such a thing like plain despair – not even on a desert island after a foundering: ‘Upon the whole, here was an undoubted testimony that there was scarce any condition in the world so miserable but there was something negative or something positive to be thankful for in it’ (Defoe 1719: Chapter 4). Robinson’s or rather Defoe’s strategy to see something negative and something positive in anything that happens seems to have been a more successful strategy for survival than an emotional roller coaster of deep despair and sky-­high enthusiasm. At least the temperance served as an affective business plan for the emerging bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century and Robinson demonstrated how a proper utilitarian perspective might look like under extreme situations. In the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation ([1789] 2009) Jeremy Bentham systematized what Daniel Defoe felt and expressed in a literary form some seventy years earlier. Bentham’s long treatise on the pains, pleasures and the punishment of acts and morals arrives at a point where he attempts to come to terms with the ‘[Value] of a lot of Pleasure or Pain how to be measured’ (Bentham 1789: xxvi–xxviii, brackets by Bentham). The author very much follows Defoe’s suggestion that you can account for something composed of negative and positive factors and proposed a hedonistic calculus, i.e. a method to compute wellbeing or frustration from a superimposition of affects. Bentham displays that the value of a particular pleasure or pain can be measured according to its intensity, certainty, duration and propinquity or remoteness respectively. In addition, he finds it necessary to consider ‘the

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tendency of any act by which it is produced’ (Bentham 1789: xxvi–xxviii) and, therefore, to take account of the act’s chance it has of being followed by sensations of the same kind. Bentham calls this ‘fecundancy’. ‘Purity’, that is the feature of not being followed by sensations of the opposite kind, is another parameter in the hedonistic calculus. The hedonistic calculus is built upon a concept about the human body, which Giorgio Baglivi considered ‘nothing else but a complex of chymico-­ mechanical motions, depending upon such principles as purely mathematical’ (Baglivi 1696). This thought again, can be traced back to René Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (Descartes 1649). The latter’s ‘esprits animaux’ turned into ‘chymico-­mechanical motions’ of the former. The concept of a mechanical or even mathematical psychology became popular by the end of the seventeenth century. During the eighteenth century the time had come to think of economy, human rational behaviour and utilitarian logic as guided by principles purely mathematical. These were the days of Jeremy Bentham and Daniel Defoe. For Defoe reflecting upon one’s feelings did not only resemble economic calculations, it was identical to those. Robinson Crusoe observes that ‘I stated very impartially, like debtor and creditor, the comforts I enjoyed against the miseries I suffered’ (Defoe 1719: Chapter 4). Every fleeting affect and every conceivable emotion have been described as a product of positive and negative influencing factors. Loneliness on an island has neither been expressed as a romantic feeling nor was it the sign of a devastating state of the psyche: loneliness became a result of a multitude of influencing factors. One of these contributing factors was the island with its strong phantasms. It is, however, possible that the phantasmal space of the island is rather characterized by a performance of loneliness than by loneliness proper? Being on a Pacific island is not too bad, if you are equipped with fresh water, exotic fruits, a house on the beach and luscious vegetation. Compared to eighteenth-­ century York, the city where Robinson Crusoe started off, there were few threats to health and safety in the Pacific South. The main threat was possibly boredom. Is the company of parrots, monkeys, a dog and other non-­human animals not much more enjoyable than the company of dull villagers, drunken sailors and various gradations of fraud, theft and charging in York at the River Ouse? On 17 June Robinson tells us about one of his meals: ‘. . . I spent in cooking the turtle. I found in her three-­score eggs; and her flesh was to me, at that time, the most savoury and pleasant that ever I tasted in my life’ (Defoe 1719: Chapter 6). The connoisseur found a way to live his life pleasantly. His frequent lament about his situation seems to be directed towards his readers much more than expressing deep-felt emotions. When on 30 September the sailor tells us: ‘I, poor miserable Robinson Crusoe, being shipwrecked during a dreadful storm’ (Defoe 1719: Chapter  5) it does not take him very long to

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progress to more positive reports. Like in computer games the loneliness of the island is always told vis-à-vis an audience. The phantasmal space of the island is a stage. Nobody in an island narrative can be really alone, because he is surrounded by readers or by players. In an island game, I am not at all lonely – I only play loneliness. Not only does the player create his feeling of loneliness, he or she also creates the island itself by playing it. This is an act of ‘écopoétique’ as Bouvet and Posthumus (2016) describe it. The notion of an eco-­poetics has probably been first proposed by Jonathan Bate in 2000. Bate suggests that we could recreate nature in a poetic process and he praises the advantages of dealing with recreated worlds as opposed to ‘real ones’, i.e. first order physical worlds. In a Heideggerian style Bate speaks of the ‘the poeming of the dwelling’ (Bate 2000: 75) and he remarks in regard to imaginary islands: ‘To go there in imagination is to rediscover enchantment without having to pay the price of destroying the ecosystem of real islands . . .’ (Bate 2000: 75). Bate is not talking about computer games here, but could we not think of island games as eco-­ poetic islands and enjoy the fact that we do not destroy them by living on them? The players in company with the game designers become creators of nature. In his book about the ‘The Social Creation of Nature’ (1992) Neil Evernden anticipates what the vision of contemporary designer/players might be, when he analyses what the ‘artists of the past’ accomplished: If . . . it required the inspired vision of artists of the past to constitute the ‘things’ which occupy the ordered domain of Nature, it will surely require a similar level of inspiration to reconstitute them. The so-­called environmental crisis demands not the inventing of solutions, but the re-­creation of the things themselves. . . . The language of technological experts cannot accommodate the radical novelty of wildness: indeed, that is just what it has been fashioned to deny. EVERNDEN 1992: 123 Recreation of the things themselves, playing the island and using the tools and things of the island becomes indeed a ‘poeming of the dwelling’ (Bate 2000: 75) of such insular spaces.

8.4 Robinson Crusoes The story of the man from York by Daniel Defoe is most likely based on the adventures of Scottish sailing master Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years in solitude at Juan Fernández island near the coast of Chile (Wessel 1998).

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The story of Robinson has been appropriated, made fun of, criticized satirically or amended by many authors. Elements of the original story (that was actually not quite the original) can be found in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Treasure Island (1883) by Robert Louis Stevenson and in Friday, or, The Other Island by Michel Tournier (1967). This novel with the French title Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique creates a new ending for the story as Robinson, when finally found by his saviours, refuses to leave the island. The novel’s content also wandered transmedially and adapted the form of opéra comique (Offenbach 1867), pantomime, silent film, action film and film comedy. Walt Disney explored the latter genre in the comic movie Lt. Robin Crusoe USN (1966), an entertaining story of a U.S. Navy pilot who becomes a castaway on a tropical island and runs into another human being: a woman with the name of ‘Wednesday’. Of even lesser importance are the science fiction and porn film adaptions Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) and Robinson Crusoe on Sin Island (2005). At least these examples demonstrate the penetrative transmedial power of a phantasm. Almost any medium seems to be fit to pick up on the content of shipwrecked Robinson and to adjust to the specifics of the medium. The tagline for Robinson Crusoe on Mars is: ‘A lone U.S. astronaut pitted against all the odds beyond this earth!’ Similarly, and more recently, a movie by Ridley Scott picks up the topic of an astronaut left on his own, million miles from earth. The Martian (2015) features Matt Damon as the lonesome survivor Mark Watney, whose ingenious methods of saving himself are evocative of Robinson Crusoe’s ordeal.15 Even if different in regard to details of the story, to the aesthetics of the production and to the psychology of the main ‘Robinsons’, Lt. Robin Crusoe USN, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Robinson Crusoe on Sin Island and The Martian all draw strength from and contribute to the same phantasmal space: the island. The medium of computer games provides space for numerous adaptions of the island theme. The island appears to be frightening in Far Cry 3 (2012), peaceful and non-­violent in The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), a 3D puzzle in The Witness (2016) and a suitable container for detective work in the search for hints, objects and tools in Stranded Deep (2015). It is amazing how dense the network of references amongst game titles, movies and novels is. Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean is said to have inspired Ron Gilbert for the environmental design of Monkey Island (1990). The Lucasfilm imperium was influential for many references to Indiana Jones (1981) and to Star Wars (1977). When opening a treasure chest on LeChuck’s ghost ship the title song from Indiana Jones will be played. The same song, composed by John Williams for Indiana Jones can be heard in the second part when swinging a grappling hook. The references to Lucasfilm’s Star Wars become evident when Guybrush is asked by LeChuck to take off his facial mask. Very much in

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a Darth Vader tone he utters: ‘I am your brother’. Such transmedial manoeuvres and jokes come close to what Henry Jenkins calls transmedia storytelling (Jenkins 2003), even if only on a microscopic scale. The background for the selection of references is obviously the Lucasfilm and the LucasArts media franchise. The motivation to tell microstories through different media is commercially motivated. The transmedial process is not concerned with spatial consistency or creative spatial transformations, it just wants to tell the player/reader/viewer: here is another bit by the great George Lucas. Naturally this book is much more interested in the transmediality of spatial phantasms. Such happens when an island, designed by Daniel Defoe, is transformed into a computer games environment. There is no monetary incentive for the designers of Stranded Deep (2015) to promote a book that was written 300 years ago. What they are interested in is to evoke an atmosphere of Robinsonesque exploration without having to tell the whole Robinson Crusoe story. This works so well as the phantasm of the Robinson island is widely understood, inter-­ culturally disseminated and consolidated via use in various media at different times. We have seen the island in paintings, we have heard the story on the radio, we have been watching films and theatre performances. The mechanism of unfolding a whole universe of associations, references, narratives and images by introducing an archetypical space is well known by film directors. Show the audience a dusty road in front of a wooden building with a setting sun that colours everything in a brownish yellow and have the wind blow a few dry plants across the road and every audience on the planet will understand that they are in the Wild West now. They will assume that some kind of aggressive tone is soon to be experienced, maybe violence. They will know that the preferred means of transportation are horses, that they are most likely set in the nineteenth century and that a six-­shot revolver is the weapon of choice. All this is facilitated by a single shot of a space that might not take more than a fraction of a second. Game designers can draw from the same magic. If a game starts with a view on a Pacific island and presents a man whose head is covered by a chequered towel and if this man has one eye covered with a black patch, then all is set and nothing has to be said. The transmedial fluidity allows for the phantasmal space to infiltrate any conceivable medium.

Conclusion: Atmospheric Spaces

An atmosphere is the joint reality of perceiver and the perceived. This perception grasps the object by the power of its presence and it creates reality of the perceiver as he senses an atmosphere as what makes him bodily present. BÖHME 2007: 2981

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hantasmal spaces contain much more than a set of semiotic references. They are rich with atmospheric content. It is as if we could sense the presence of the trees when we enter the phantasmal space of the forest. It is as if we could feel the wind when we watch the clouds. This makes atmospheric experience a very corporeal process.2 In the spaces we encounter the presence of nature: stone, wood, mist, grass and trees. We also encounter our own bodily presence. That is why the atmospheres of the spaces under consideration cannot always be laid out straightforwardly, but keep some secret of the person experiencing them. Gernot Böhme’s attempt to conceive a new aesthetic theory (Böhme 1997; 2001) based on the notion of ‘atmosphere’ is his project to overcome Kantian aesthetic judgement (1790), and to think the relationship of space and the aesthetic in a new way. That is why Böhme’s theory is of interest for our investigation into phantasmal spaces for computer games. For Böhme spaces are tuned in a mood or atmosphere. This mood is not the mood we are in when we enter atmospheric spaces. We are ‘caught’ in the mood. Almost literally reading the Greek origin of the word atmosphere, Böhme suggests that a ball or globe (σφαῖρα) contains atmospheric content like vapour (ἀτμός). By entering the atmospheric space the subject, in our case the player of the game, is faced with the experience of discrepancy and ingression. The player

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notes that her mood differs from the atmosphere of the space she just entered and she is attuned3 to the atmosphere. Obviously, there is not much Kantian judgement involved at this point. Böhme explains: Atmosphere is tuned space, that is to say: what we experience is mood. But this is not my mood, it is a touch of mood that I am able to perceive just because I am getting attuned to it. We can see that atmospheres are indefinitely dispersed mood in space and that they are quasi-­objective.4 BÖHME 2001: 47 Böhme proposes, and this is one more reason to read and analyse him in regard to phantasmal spaces, that atmospheres can be created. Böhme speaks of ‘aesthetic production’ and mentions ‘aesthetic professions like stage designers, beauticians, designers and the assistant jobs in media, film, television and radio’ (Böhme 2001: 49). These professions, according to Böhme, are ‘making atmospheres’ (Böhme 2013). This sounds surprising if we consider an atmosphere to be a phenomenon of quasi-­autonomous character attached to non-­tangible spatial configurations. Böhme himself wonders how this can be: ‘our general theme’ he says, Making atmospheres, has a provocative character. It sounds slightly perverse, even paradoxical. Making – does that not have to do with something tangible? With the world of concrete things and apparatuses? And atmosphere – is that not something airy, indefinite, something which is simply there and comes over us? How is one supposed to make atmospheres? Well there is one sphere in which that has been going on for a long time: the art of the stage set. In it we have a paradigm which not only encourages us in our enterprise but endows the idea of making atmospheres with objective reality. BÖHME 2013 It is very likely that Böhme would have to have taken game design into account and presented it as a paradigmatic reference more influential than stage design, if he had written his book ten years later. At least we can continue in the line of his thinking by having a close look at ‘atmospheric games’, such as Firewatch (2016), Dear Esther (2012) or Myst (1993). There have been other suggestions of what the most atmospheric games could be and these rank The Long Dark (2014), Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture (2015), L.A. Noire (2011) and Blade Runner (1997) high.5 Atmospheres are not created in each of

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these cases by realistically depicting physical environments, but rather by the designers’ mastery in ‘environmental storytelling’ (Jenkins 2004). In Blade Runner (the movie 1982, the game 1997) the rain-­soaked streets of 2019 Los Angeles tell us more about the desperate situation of the inhabitants than the scarce dialogues. Andy Kelly refers to The Long Dark (2014), by describing the environment – not the story: ‘When you trudge through the snow, you can almost feel the cold. And sheltering from a howling blizzard by a crackling fire is incredibly atmospheric’ (Kelly 2015). The journalist’s description paraphrases very well what Gernot Böhme theorizes about. The ‘stage design’ of the computer game is evocative of moods and atmosphere. We neither interact with the crackling fire nor do we have any gameplay provision with the howling blizzard, yet wind and fire contribute to the ‘tuned space’ (Böhme 2001: 47). These environmental assets do more to us than playing and non-­playing characters of the game might do. For Böhme the determining factor for atmospheric qualities is light. He quotes Kümmerlen, who states: The space to be contemplated is given its brightness by the lighting; stage performances are only made visible by light. The first function of lighting, the simple provision of light, creates with the brightness, what might be called the atmosphere in which space exists. KÜMMERLEN 1929: 36, quoted from BÖHME 2013 I think that both Böhme and Kümmerlen underestimate the importance of sound, when they declare light as the main atmospheric ‘generator’ (Böhme 2013; Kümmerlen 1929). This is quite understandable as both scholars start their deliberations from traditional forms of theatre of the spoken word. For contemporary theatre, performance, film and digital games the primacy of light does not hold. Sound and light both contribute in an eminent way to the atmospheric and to ‘the atmosphere in which space exists’ (Kümmerlen 1929: 36). Phantasmal spaces are tuned spaces filled to the brim with atmosphere. They are framed within cultural legacy and anchored on deep historic roots. I can imagine games that are void of atmosphere, but I cannot picture a phantasmal space without ambiance, vibe or mood. It is the lonely feel of the island that makes the phantasmal space more than just sand in the sea. It is the atmosphere of ruins and the flair of the clouds we have been looking at in this book. We encountered the uncanniness of the forest and the ‘perfection of recovery and comfort’ in the caves (Blumenberg 1989: 26). In the preceding chapters elaborating on the phantasmal spaces of The Road, The Ruin, The Cave, The Cloud, The Cliff, The Forest, The Portal and The Island I have tried to turn some of the mysterious places of the most

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mesmerizing computer games into ‘revealed phantasms’ (Harrell 2013: 10). At least some aspect of the spaces we visited together might have been demystified and brought to the light of day. But this is a process that can never be completely successful. With every unmasking step forward there will be two or three steps backward into obscurity, because the nature of the phantasm is not like ‘onion skins’ of partial truth with the final truth sitting in the centre of the object. The phantasmal spaces are rhizomes of memories, conventions, cultural techniques and material history in permanent change. Once we have discovered some relationship between Edward Hopper’s Gas painting (1940), Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider movie (1969) and Rockstar Games’ GTA5 (2013) new rhizomatic roots and shoots emerge from the nodes. Maybe another GTA game will be out. Maybe a recently curated show on Edward Hopper paintings suggests references between Hopper’s streets and the roads depicted by other American painters. It could also be that a television commercial for whatever product injects new meaning into the space of the petrol station. It is very likely that current socio-­political transformations change the space of the filling station from a formerly heroic place of twentieth-­century automobilism into a rather dystopian and sad locus of ruination and despair. Such is the over-­connectedness of spatial phantasms that one tiny element can never be unaffected by the whole. If the myth of petrol engine and diesel driven mobility begins to shake in the foundations then the paraphernalia become unsolid as well. There is therefore no solid ground for a permanent and archetypical meaning. Spatial denotations and spatial connotations are always on the move. What we still want to hold up here is a collection of snapshots taken from selected phantasmal spaces. The viewpoint is based on the cultural history of these spaces, but it is also based on a highly topical topo-­analysis or an ‘écocritique and écopoétique’ (Bouvet and Posthumus 2016) of cutting edge media. The Road is a space of non-­targeted mobility. It is a space of amnesia in regard to possible destinations. It is also a narrative source about the joy of movement. The temporality of the road is eternity. The dimensionality of the road is strictest two-­dimensionality. The Ruin resides in the space of longing. It is about the memento mori, the necrophile fascination with decay and the acceptance of objects that can be out of reach and palpable at the same moment. The Cave reminds us of the trauma of birth. Caverns, dungeons and caves make us aware of the loss of a cosmic union with the planet, nature and with the mother. The cave embraces us and at the same time constrains us from full spatial sovereignty. The Cloud is diametrically opposed to the Cave. Thoughts and sentiments go up. The physicality of the cloud space is based on micro-­weight, if not on

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weightlessness altogether. The Cloud is the least opaque of all spaces covered here. This does not necessarily mean that it is transparent. There is some magnetic transcendence in the clouds that refracts the light and makes the mind-­wandering. The Cliff is dangerous. You can jump but you might fall. The phantasmal space of the cliff is filled with heroes and heroines: Ulysses, Lara Croft, Karl May’s super-­villains, Sylvester Stallone, Red Bull daredevils and many more. The Forest is an uncanny place and it is a magic space as well. It is where animism, witchcraft and sorcery dwell. Sigmund Freud tells us that the uncanny is home to ‘all that is terrible’ (Freud 1919: 1).6 The uncanniness of the forest is owed to camouflaged familiarity with what we are afraid of. It is the very familiar that frightens us most when unveiled. The Portal connects the ‘things known and things unknown’ (The Doors 1967). Doors are veritable doors of perception as they extend the artificial sensible of the players. The Island, finally, is the space of loneliness, of isolation of separation and of seclusion. This is not necessarily a sad retreat or one of ‘narcissistic withdrawal’7 (Freud 1991: 76). The island is also the space of splendid isolation and of a restoration of confidence. It is very tempting at this point to display the properties of phantasmal spaces in a simple table, however reductive this might seem.

The Road

non-­targeted mobility; space of amnesia; narrative source describing the joy of pure movement; non-­finite

The Ruin

space of longing; memento mori; sublimation of necrophile fascination with history

The Cave

trauma of birth; loss of a cosmic union with the planet, nature and with the mother

The Cloud

uplifting; magnetic transcendence; makes the mind-­wandering

The Cliff

a dangerous place; you can jump but you might fall; a space inhabited by heroes and heroines

The Forest

an uncanny place and a magic space as well; home to ‘all that is terrible’

The Portal

interface between in and out; a space of transgression and passage

The Island

loneliness, isolation, separation and seclusion; a meditative space; splendid isolation and restoration of confidence

a cliff

remember Thelma & Louise, North by Northwest, Groundhog Day and Jurassic Park 3? double danger!

Blumenberg’s ‘Inselhöhle’ (1989: 450–64) – the insular cavern as discovered by Baltasar Gracián’s Critilo (1651)

with all horizontality and earthiness of the forest we have a bright sign that transcends the dark woods

some kind of human stability within the uncanny of wild nature

a surprise, we have not been the first one on this lost spot of land

A cloud on/in

the forest

an element of hope in confinement; non-­directed flightlines; there might be vehicles on the island and also other humans

A cave on/in

a magician’s door like in The Witcher 2 (2011)

island

A ruin on/in

a portal

an

A road on/in not everything is at sea level here; could the cliff be a landing spot for helpers or a highboard for escape?

A cliff on/in

A forest on/in

the warp zone

the basic narrative of Portal Knights (2016)

A portal to/on

An island on/in

the road

a ruin

the cave

the cloud

surrealistic and potentially deceptive; the cloud could be smoke from fire

this could be the foundation for a dream castle

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Now that we set up a basis for some kind of structuralist analytics, let’s go one step further. What if we had compound phantasms? What would the meaning and impact of a road in the forest be? Or of a cliff in the clouds? Obviously, some of the table elements do not make much sense, what would a road on a road be? (One could speculate, however, that a cave in a cave could have another quality than a cave in a mountain. Think of the recursivity such a construction could hold. Also, a portal leading to another portal is exactly what I have described in the section about warp zones.) Yet, in any case we are still left with 8*(8-1), i.e. 56 compound spaces made up of different subspaces. I have not made suggestions for each of the 56 combinations, but a few hints can be found in the table of compound phantasmal spaces. Starting with the most banal and stereotypical form of an island, we would expect the sea, a sandy beach, a few palm trees and bushes. Games like Far Cry 3 (2012) add a jungle and a few buildings to increase the complexity of the scenario and to offer gameplay possibilities. It is, however, conceivable that elements of a different nature are introduced into the island cliché. A cliff would be an unexpected item. The cliff structure adds a whole new spatial dimension to the site: verticality. The cliff also adds a mode of movement: jumping, climbing, falling down. Marc Bonner (2018: 6) reminds us that we change from the status of ‘refuge’ to the exposed locus of ‘prospect’, when climbing mountains and looking down from a cliff. The refuge/prospect theory he refers to states that there are at least three non-­exclusive categories of space, and authors like anthropologist Jay Appleton trace these categories back to the aesthetic infrastructure of spatial perception from the times of early hunting and gathering. Appleton proposes that our ancestors categorized space in regard to its function as ‘refuge’, ‘prospect’ and ‘hazard’ (Appleton 1975: 97–100). In former times, Appleton speculates, such a categorization would have been vital for survival. In a computer game our survival is just vicarious, but the affective programming from some million years ago might still be running somewhere in the background. Our main motivation to explore landscape in a computer game can be called aesthetic desire. I think it makes sense to assume that this desire is modulated by spatial phantasms. If a cliff evokes ‘prospect’ and ‘hazard’ and the island’s shore ‘refuge’ then that must influence our experience – no matter whether homines erecti from the Palaeolithic age had comparable feelings connected to the spatial categories – or not. Hans Blumenberg’s book Höhlenausgänge, with a title vaguely to be translated into ‘denouement from the cave’,8 contains one full chapter of a specific compound phantasm: ‘Die Inselhöhle’ (Blumenberg 1989: 450–64), a cave on an island. Blumenberg observes that the first thing Robinson Crusoe

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starts building at his desperate island, is a cave. In Chapter 12: A Cave Retreat (Defoe 1719) Robinson actually tells us about not just one cave-­like construction, but even of three of that kind. His ‘circle’, Robinson says, consists of ‘my three plantations – viz. my castle, my country seat (which I called my bower), and my enclosure in the woods’ (Defoe 1719: Chapter 12). The creative act of building cave retreats on an island combines two eighteenth-­century phantasms: the island, Blumenberg says, was the ‘preferred location for mental constructions of the early modern era, for utopias and for Robinson as their demiurge’9 (Blumenberg 1989: 450). Robinson’s retreat into the cave is necessarily complementary to that, as the cavern is the space of autonomous self-­perpetuation of the individual. Blumenberg also notes that the cave is a world of tools and accessories. Blumenberg concludes: ‘Island and cave belong together as the island is the exemplified representation of nativeness, and the cave is a refuge from nature and from history’10 (Blumenberg 1989: 450). There are quite a few computer games featuring the double-­faced nature of the island-­cave. The island is representative for the potential of building and crafting, the cave is protective of what might go wrong in the process of natural forces let gone free. Robinson’s ‘aversion which nature’ (Defoe 1719: Chapter 12) has to be dealt with by a protective mechanism of self-­defence via individual retreat. The opposite direction is also possible. Whereas Robinson tries to escape the island’s nature by hiding in the cave, Baltasar Gracián’s character Andrenio (Gracián 1651) has been born in a cave, raised by animals and struggles hard to escape from the darkness to discover light, knowledge and imagination. In Gracián’s novel El Criticón two young men meet and compare their respective fate and desire. Andrenio, driven by curiosity, enthusiasm and a hedonistic longing for intensity, learns how to use the human language, bows out from his foster-­parents, the animals, who fed him and encounters the world of light and opulent nature. Critilo, who got shipwrecked on the island, longs for contemplation and self-­reflective isolation. Critilo tells Andrenio: ‘Lucky you are, having been raised by beasts! But, alas, how miserable am I who has grown up amongst humans. Homo homini lupem, every man is a wolf to another, but humanity is even worse than being animal’ (Gracián 1651: 4). In the constellation of cave and island we learn from Gracián, the island phantasm is antagonistic to the phantasm of the cave. The island-­cave holds the tension of an oscillation of worldliness and self-­contained Cartesian reflexivity. Our speculations need not stop here. What about a three-­dimensional matrix of spaces? A road on a cliff in the clouds? A cloud above a forest on an island? A ruin by a road in the clouds? These combinations, we arrive at a cardinality of 8*(8-1)*(8-2), that is 392 possible triple compounds, are not theoretical. We know from computer games that roads in the clouds are no

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conceptual unthinkability. I leave it for game designers to explore this field. For the topo-­analyst there is just one thing to propose. Compound phantasmal spaces are not the simple sum of spatial phantasms. They follow the line of an écopoétique empowered by semiotic surplus values which we do not find in the raw material of ‘simple’ spaces. There is nothing peculiar about clouds in the sky. There is also nothing surreal about a common cave. But when we see a cloud in a cave the phantasm tilts. Surrealism and a feeling of something not quite in order creeps into the all-­too-familiar cave space. A new phantasmal space is born: the cloud-­cave. And here is another possible combination, a quadruplet of phantasmal spaces: Avoid paths in the dream that lead to mist. Follow your companion into the locked cave door, and stay behind him . . . THE WITCHER 2011 A road takes us into mist (clouds) and the player arrives at a door to a cave. The warning expressed in the Assassins of Kings game from the Witcher series combines phantasms and forges them into a new complex cauldron of mistiness, uncertainty, seductions and secrets. With every phantasm we have revealed, there seem to be new compounds emerging of complex, mysterious and imaginative nature. The atmospheric generators and the poetic machines never stop: new phantasmal spaces burst into bloom.

Notes Introduction: Phantasmal Spaces 1 Nintendo seems to call Open World Games ‘Open Air’ games. 2 The notion of ‘methods’ is a simplification as we will see later. The epistemic domains or research areas of aesthetics, games technology, psychoanalysis and intertextuality are sufficiently complex as to contain a whole set of methods for each of them.

1.  The Road 1 Having said this, I must admit that the train simulator features roads, yet if only in the etymological sense of the word ‘railroads’. Railroads are the tracks that locomotives move on. In German we have a similar vicinity of Eisenbahn and Autobahn: paths made of iron for the former and paths for the car for the latter. 2 Transl. in (Bachelard [1957] 1964: 200). German orig.: ‘Raum greift aus uns und übersetzt die Dinge’ (Rilke [1924] 1927). 3 In 1:54’ and again in 1:57’ the pervasive TEXACO dispenser that we already know from GTA5, Easy Rider and from many American Road movies mysteriously reappears in a 1970s German countryside setting. It seems that Wenders wants to show us that he is not unaware of how American cinema has referred to the gas station phantasm. 4 In regard to financial success the opposite can be said: The film is said to have grosssed $203.3 million at the worldwide box office. 5 From: Need for Speed (2014) at Rotten Tomatoes. URL: https://www. rottentomatoes.com/m/need_for_speed/ (retrieved 20 June 2016).

2.  The Ruin 1 This chapter is a revised and enlarged version of a paper I published earlier (Fuchs 2016). 2 I owe Joseph P. Lawrence thanks for a hint on the etymology of ‘Sehnsucht’ that he made me aware of at the Apocalypse conference in Oxford in 2013.

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3 Cynthia Finlayson corrected me in erroneously believing Hartmut Böhme that the first pictorial representations of ruins date back to the sixteenth century. She convincingly pointed out that both Böhme and I were wrong. Pictures of ruins actually date back to antique Rome. 4 Transl. by the author. German original in Böhme (1989) ‘Die Ästhetik der Ruinen’. 5 Transl. by the author. In the German original text it says ‘Ruinenwert Theorie’. 6 Cf. David Hancock’s ‘Romanticism and Computer Games’ (PhD dissertation University of Salford). 7 My colleague Chris Bateman has a point when he states that there have been ruins before high-­end graphic cards have been introduced. I have to admit, that there are ‘. . . numerous examples of ruins from the 8-bit era. For a start, Mike Singleton’s Tolkien-­inspired The Lords of Midnight (Beyond 1984) has ruins dotted around the landscape, and is one of the first videogames to do so. There is also potentially an argument for Gift from the Gods (Denton Designs 1984) qualifying: although the catacombs in this game are lacking in “digital dust”. I suspect only because of the technical limitations, and there is a definite sense of ruin about them. There’s also Paul O’Malley’s Arac (Addictive 1986), also known as Spiderbot in some territories, which has a hi-­tech zone within an overgrown outer area that suggests something of the new within the ancient, although it is not necessarily a world that fits into your general case here. But most clearly there is Sacred Armour of Antiriad (Palace 1986), which is a post-­apocalyptic game in which the ruins of the older civilisation lie among verdant locations, in the same manner as Arac. Whereas in Arac, some interpretation is needed, Antirad is unequivocally an example that fits your pattern. The longing for ruins goes back right to the dawn of the videogame industry!’ (Chris Bateman in an email dated 13 April 2016). The punctuation and italicization has been changed by the author. 8 Transl. by the author.

3.  The Cave 1 German orig.: ‘Computerspiele als explorierbare Bildräume sind sozusagen der Luzidtraum des Blumenbergschen Höhlenforschers, der nicht die Höhle selbst, sondern aus der relativen Sicherheit der Höhle heraus die Welt als Bild erforscht’ (Rautzenberg 2015: 260). 2 German orig.: ‘Denn im Gegensatz zu Flammarions Wanderer am Weltrand ist es heutigen Computerspielern nach wie vor nicht möglich, der Höhle wirklich zu entgehen, findet doch jede noch so weitläufig wirkende Landschaft im Computerspiel bis heute unter einer sogenannten Skybox statt, die als undurchdringliche Himmelsphäre allen Explorationsversuchen eine zumindest theoretisch letztgültige Grenze setzt. Skyboxen kann man sich als polygonale Kuppeln oder Wände vorstellen, auf deren Innenseiten Texturen angebracht werden, um die Illusion von Himmel und Horizont zu

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erzeugen. De facto spielen also alle dreidimensionalen Computerspiele, egal ob TOMB RAIDER, HALF LIFE (Sierra Entertainment 1998, O: Valve), NEED FOR SPEED (Electronic Arts 1994–013, O: Electronic Arts) oder CALL OF DUTY (Activision 2003–13, O: Infinity Ward) in Höhlen’ (Rautzenberg 2015: 248–9). For the translation into English I omitted the in-­text references for better reading. 3 For the complex dynamics of wanting to get in and out again, also see the Conclusion chapter of this book and the remarks on El Criticón by Baltasar Gracián (1651). 4 The other person is often the mother, but it can also be the therapist or another person the patient identifies with strongly. 5 In Sartre’s words: ‘La mauvaise foi n’est possible que parce que la sincérité est consciente de manquer son but par nature’ (Sartre [1943] 1976: 103). 6 This is not a proposition in accordance with the ethics of Jean-Paul Sartre. When embedding the concept of mauvaise foi in a philosophical and more specifically in a phenomenological context, he would have considered mauvaise foi an ethical problem and even more so a political problem, if I read him correctly. He has a point there. 7 ‘. . . listening to music becomes an occasion for a selective tour of one’s gallery of emotional remembrances, with some sonata or symphony functioning as guide’ (Levinson 1997: 217). 8 I use this notion of being half-­caged in reference to Jesper Juul’s notion of the ‘half-­real’ (2005). 9 Huizinga’s half-­belief works ‘quite consciously outside “ordinary” life’ (Huizinga 1949: 13), i.e. inside the magic circle, but Pfaller understands the cultural technique of half-­believing as a common practice in ordinary life (Pfaller 2000: 62–8). ‘Delegated enjoyment’ is possible through the power of the ambivalence of desire (Pfaller 2000: 78). The other side of the coin is Davies’ ‘mourning for fun’ (Davies 1997: 252). Such behaviour is not paradoxical, it is logically consistent with the ambiguity of the economy of desire. 10 Marcus Rautzenberg is right, when he comments on the reasons for Tomb Raiders’ massive success: ‘TOMB RAIDER is in a line of ancestors stretching back to the very beginnings of the digital age – not only the roots of video games, but also those that are deeply anchored in a dimension of media-­ anthropology’ (Rautzenberg 2015: 246). 11 German orig.: ‘Vollkommenheit von Bergung und Behagen’. 12 Blumenberg speculates about the anthropological beginnings of deep sleep. He believes that humans who left the open space of the savannahs or the three-­dimensional habitat of the jungle and decided to stay in caverns in the night, were privileged to sleep deeply for the first time. The reason for that is a reduction of dimensionalty in attention. We might or might not follow Blumenberg in his hypothesis about the pacified rest in a cave, where just the exit of the cave and not the space around the cavemen required attention. The philosopher concludes then that humans were from then on and only

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notes from then on free to sleep deeply. He also fantasizes about this being the sufficient condition for having dreams. I hesitate to follow him that far, but I am even more sceptical when he wants to attribute the gift of dreaming to domesticated animals in caves as well (cf. Blumenberg 1989: 29).

13 It has to be said, that Blumenberg is self-­critical about his assumptions about cavemen’s life, sleep and dreams. He concedes that ‘[p]hilosophy is the epitome of statements that can be neither proven nor rebutted’ (German orig.: ‘Philosophie ist der Inbegriff von unbewiesenen und unwiderlegbaren Behauptungen’, Blumenberg 1989: 22). Fair enough then for a philosopher, to fantasize about prehistoric dreaming.

4.  The Cloud 1 Transl. by the author. German original in Richard Wagner’s diaries (18 August 1865): ‘Ich kann und muss nur in einer Art von Wolke Leben.’ 2 Transl. by the author, German orig.: ‘wissenschaftliche Spiele wie die Mineralogie’ in: Johan Wolfgang von Goethe’s autobiographical raisonnement called ‘From my Life: Poetry and Truth’ (German original: Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit) was written between 1808 and 1831. It is said to be a reflection on Goethe’s life in the 1750s to 1770s. The phrase about ‘scientific games’ is quoted from Kayser (1967). 3 Transl. by the author. German orig.: ‘Von dem Nebelstreif an, der sich vom Sumpf oder feuchten Wiesen erhebt . . . bis zu den Streifen und Schichten welche teils die Seiten der Berge, teils ihre Gipfel bedecken, kann alles mit diesem Namen bezeichnet werden.’ 4 In Act II Scene I, Macbeth hallucinates the dagger in his hand and says: I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-­oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable. 5 Or Pacifica Brandani, as the art historian Roberto Zapperi suggests. 6 A fluid solver is an algorithm that simulates the behaviour of liquids and gases as a function of temperature, viscosity, mass, density and other influencing factors. 7 Anisotropic scattering of light is a feature of the spherical geometry of the planet’s atmosphere. When light hits on particles that are the same size or larger than the wavelength of the light, the light will be scattered. Aerosol and ice particles and water droplets in haze or clouds have this property. 8 A ray march is a process where light rays are simulated as passing through a cloud of particles.

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9 Anonymous developer at the Warthunder Blog (2016), ‘New photorealistic technology for sky and cloud rendering in Dagor Engine 4’. 28 March 2016, https://warthunder.com/en/devblog/current/891/ 10 In The Wanderer in the Wilderness (2013) Daniel Vella describes a situation of ‘standing on the summit of a hill, looking out over forested valley as the sun sets on the distant sea’ (Vella 2013: 1). Only after two paragraphs of this rich emotional perception of the world around him, he reveals that the description is based upon an experience in the virtual landscape of Minecraft. This is surprising, but it is also interesting that Vella describes his attempt to orient himself with reference to the sun, just as Immanuel Kant did in What does it mean: to orient oneself? Kant says: ‘If I look at the sun in the heaven at this instant and know that it is noon, so I know how to find the south, west, north and east’ (Kant [1786] 1963). Vella states for his experimental orientation experience in a computer game of the 2010s: ‘To the south – I am orienting myself by the setting sun – lie the meadows.’ 11 Gameboomers 1999. 12 Schooler talks about ‘working memory capacity (WMC)’ (Schooler et al. 2014: 8). 13 Transl. by the author. German orig.: ‘Für eine ganze Reihe von hysterischen Symptomen sind solcher Art die unbewußten Phantasien die nächsten psychischen Vorstufen.’ 14 Transl. by the author. German orig.: ‘Alle hysterischen Anfälle, die ich bisher untersuchen konnte, erwiesen sich nun als solche unwillkürlich hereinbrechende Tagträume.’ 15 The painting Pont de Waterloo, jour gris (1903) is one of a series that shows Waterloo Bridge in London at different times of the day and in different meteorological and lighting situations. The ‘grey weather’ leaves room and a perfect backdrop for rose industrial smoke. Pont de Waterloo, au crépuscule from the same year has the bridge covered with a thick white fog that almost completely hides the depicted object. Pont de Waterloo, soleil à travers le brouillard presents a red sun that is vaguely visible in the blurry skies. 16 Edward Hopper can be mentioned as someone who learned the lessons from Monet quickly and exemplified how the colour of grey and the formation of clouds can be appropriated for such different mood-­settings as solitude (Hopper 1907), peacefulness, joy, danger (1909), boredom or anticipation in the exercises he did during his European trips between 1906 and 1910 and later in his career (1940; 1956). 17 Not all computer games playing in cloudy environments are as sinister as the games mentioned. Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles (2017) is an example for friendly cloud representations. We encounter a world of fluffy animals, cosy villages and good weather skies here. It is remarkable that the realtionship of clouds, seasons and dreams is turned into a gameplay mechanism here. Animals like the Groffle, the Squomble and the Jungle Fox all have their season they are active in and are specified in detail in regard to their sleep patterns. We are told that Groffles can sleep standing up, but they can only dream lying down.

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5.  The Cliff 1 Estimate by Boutros (2006). 2 I follow Claus Pias’ spelling of Baer’s first name. Most sources used to call the inventor ‘Ralph Baer’. 3 The title of the paragraph in Davies’ sixth chapter of ‘Musical Meaning and Expression’ is: ‘Why would we listen to music if it makes us feel sad?’ (Davies 1997). 4 In Apperley’s book it says ‘eurhythmia’. I corrected the typo. 5 Not only does Caillois suggest that ludus is dominant in our society over paidia. He also suggests that games always have a dominant tendency in regard to his four ‘rubrics’. He states: ‘After examining different possibilities, I am proposing a division into four main rubrics, depending upon whether, in the games under consideration, the role of competition, chance, simulation, or vertigo is dominant’ (Caillois [1958] 2001: 12).

6.  The Forest 1 The lines are from Jules Supervielle quoted from Bachelard [1957] 1964: 187. 2 Most of the Ring’s thirty-­six scenes are set in or near a forest. 3 Quite a few paintings by Finnish and Russian artists have to be mentioned here that are close to the mystic-­romantic line of the German dark forests from the nineteenth century. Iwan Iwanowitsch Schischkin is one of the Russian artists, Akseli Gallen-Kallela the most famous Finnish one. 4 The allegedly ‘Cambodian’ vegetation we see in Coppola’s film has actually been shot to a large part in the Philippines. 5 In Sigmund Freud’s original text Das Unheimliche, the word uncanny is not in quotation marks. 6 For the translation of Freud’s German text I use the English version by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. 7 In Sigmund Freud’s original text there are no italics in the section. The German text reads: Das deutsche Wort »unheimlich« ist offenbar der Gegensatz zu heimlich, heimisch, vertraut und der Schluß liegt nahe . . . (quoted here from the translation by Strachey). 8 This is not to say that phantasmal spaces are immaterial. They occupy material frameworks and they become a ‘parasite’ (Serres 2007) to materials. The forest phantasm becomes a parasite to physical trees, to leaves and branches and absorbs the sonic, visual and haptic materiality of the woods.

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7.  The Portal 1 It is not completely clear whether the famous statement about the Doors has been coined by Jim Morrison or by Ray Manzarek. In her Master of Arts thesis, Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith notes that the 25-year-old Manzarek in an interview with Newsweek explained: ‘There are things you know about, and things you don’t, the known and the unknown, and in between are the doors – that’s us. We’re saying that you’re not only spirit, you’re also this very sensuous being. That’s not evil, that’s a really beautiful thing. Hell appears so much more fascinating and bizarre than heaven. You have to “break on through to the other side” to become the whole being’ (Goldsmith 2007). It is quite possible that Jim Morrison compressed Manzarek’s statement later on and forged the poetic line ‘There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors.’ 2 In UnrealEd a brush is a primitive tool to carve out space for a game level. (Cf. Boolean subtractions in Chapter 3.) 3 There are many more attempts to appropriate the Portal concept for comic books, student films, gadgets, short film productions and for other media. Portal 2: Lab Rat (2011) is a graphic novel released in April of 2011 to bridge the narrative gap in between the first Portal game (2007) and Portal 2 (2011).

8.  The Island 1 Gemea is the island where the game Yonder takes place. The islands consist of many different biomes the player can explore. There are many different areas, ranging from a beach to a grassland. 2 The original title of Daniel Defoe’s novel was: ‘The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-­inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.’ 3 In No Man’s Sky, for example, each of the millions of planets are celestial bodies, but to be on one of those feels like being on an island. 4 There is a possibility for players to zoom in or zoom out on the mountain, but this action is not required and if not done by the player it is executed automatically. 5 Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=28&v= PJSQtPwAChU 6 Ekman and Taylor talk about ‘texts’ in a wider sense that would include computer games as well. 7 Ekman and Taylor invite for such an expansion of their theoretical approach: ‘The authors base their discussion on textual, secondary fantasy worlds but

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notes invite applications of critical world-­building to other genres and media’ (Ekman and Taylor 2006: 7).

8 According to Steam statistics from September 2017 the game has been sold about 1 million times. Source: http://steamspy.com/app/275850 This sounds like a lot, but I was told by industry expert and games scholar Chris Bateman, that ‘1 million would be a flop for a contemporary AAA game.’ (email from 9 Jan. 2019) Thanks for having corrected my assessment about the financial success of the game. 9 Email from Stefan Ekman, dated 13 September 2017: ‘My initial reaction, however, is that although Audrey and I suggested three world-­building roles, we are open for there being others as well. I have begun to include the fan kind of world-­building, and from what you have written below, there is probably something associated with computer-­generation of worlds as well. One things that strikes me is where the designed computer-­game world ends and the procedural one begins; Many games generate a “geography” and the behavior of its inhabitants from a limited set of algorithms . . .’ 10 The announced next version, No Man’s Sky: NEXT (2018) is said to have more: ‘Frigates are sent on procedurally generated missions’, the announcement tells us, and: ‘Freighters are also home to the new procedurally-­generated multiplayer quest system’ (Wales 2018). URL: https://www.eurogamer.net/amp/2018-07-20-no-­mans-skys-­big-next-­updateis-­big 11 I had a chance to discuss this proposal with Stefan Ekman and Audrey Taylor during the GFF 2017 conference: Realities and World Building in Vienna. Thanks to Stefan and Audrey Isabel for the open discussion on 20 September 2017 that made rethink my original proposal. 12 We seem to have to get used to not being the crowning of creation any longer. They call us ‘nuggets’ in The Universim (2017), ‘Anomaly’, or as Sean Murray phrased it for No Man’s Sky (2016) in an interview with The Guardian: ‘a tiny speck in an infinite universe’ (MacDonald and Murray 2018). With procedural world-­creation the three big humiliations to human self-­esteem (Copernican revolution, Darwinism and psychoanalysis) are enhanced by the humiliation of being a slave in an artefact. Humans created digital games, but our role there is no longer a heroic one. In many games we are a cog in the machine and have to cooperate with AIs and ‘other races’. In a No Man’s Sky userforum, an amateur philosopher comments on that: ‘You are a biped or multiped that moves with a jetpack, small enough to fit in these ships, and you are at eye sight with Korvax, Gek and Vy’keens, so approx. the same high. Also you are not insectoid because your breath is audible, so you are a mammal with lungs. Still possible you are not humanoid, but for sure you are refered to be a “traveller” caught in a simulation. Simulation or not doesn’t change your situation because the reality is like the philosopher Descartes said: “Je pense, donc je suis.” (Cogito ergo sum). Because such a reality can fit for an ape, a rat or a diplodocus, it doesn’t matter what “race” you are. In space everything is “alien” .’ (japp_02 2017). 13 Transl. by the author, German orig.: ‘Tiere wie Wildschweine, Füchse oder Waschbären, dienen . . . als lineare Resourcen dem zyklischen Craften und

notes

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Upgraden der verschiedenen Inventare. Auch die etlichen Blumenarten und Zweige, die sich über die gesamte Spielwelt verteilen, dienen dem Abernten, um Medizin, Gegenmittel oder Pfeile herzustellen’ (Bonner 2018: 15). 14 Ernst Bloch, famously called it the ‘exploiter’s and animal tamer’s stance’ (German orig. ‘Ausbeuter- und Tierbändigerstandpunkt’ (Bloch 1959: 813). 15 I owe copy editor Paul King thanks for having directed my attention to the Ridley Scott movie.

Conclusion: Atmospheric Spaces 1 Transl. by the author, German orig.: ‘Die Atmosphäre ist die gemeinsame Wirklichkeit des Wahrnehmenden und des Wahrgenommenen. Sie ist die Wirklichkeit des Wahrgenommenen als Sphäre seiner Anwesenheit und die Wirklichkeit des Wahrnehmenden, insofern er, die Atmosphäre spürend, in bestimmter Weise leiblich anwesend ist’ (Böhme 2007: 298). 2 Gernot Böhme mocks Umberto Eco’s denial of multi-­sensory perception and quotes him from the Introduction into Semiotics (1972), where Eco reflects upon the process of watching a beer advertisment. ‘When I see the glass of beer I perceive beer, glass and the cool temperature . . . but I do not feel them. What I feel are visual stimuli, colours, spatial relationships, the refraction of light etc.’ (Eco 1972: 201–2). Böhme criticizes this viewpoint and holds up against it that ‘a physiology of the senses obviously spoils the phenomenology of perception’ (Böhme 2007: 290). He proposes that the effect of advertising can only be understood if the customer feels the cold. It would never be sufficient for the customer to receive ‘a perceived structure for thinking about ice-­cold beer in a glass’ (Böhme 2007: 290). 3 I use Massumi’s term ‘attune’ here, Böhme does not mention Massumi, though. 4 Transl. by the author, German orig.: ‘Die Atmosphäre ist ferner gestimmter Raum, d.h. was einen da anmutet ist eine Stimmung. Und zwar gerade zunächst nicht als meine Stimmung, sondern als Anflug von Stimmung, etwas, das ich wahrnehme gerade dadurch, daß ich beginne, in einen Stimmung zu geraten. Damit haben wir bezüglich der Atmosphäre ein weiteres wichtiges Charakteristikum gefunden, nämlich daß sie unbestimmt räumlich ausgebreitete Stimmungen sind, quasi objektiv’ (Böhme 2001: 47). 5 A list of the ‘most atmospheric games’ by Andy Kelly in PC Gamer magazine. The complete selection also includes Firewatch (2016), S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (2007), Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013), Soma (2015), The Witcher 3 (2015) and a few more. URL: https://www.pcgamer.com/pcs-­most-atmospheric-­ games/ 6 I am aware of the possibility of interpreting certain woods completely differently. For some readers a bright, sunlit birch forest with soft green grass on the ground might evoke a Disneyesque idyll of an innocent Bambi

146

notes (1942) peacefulness. Fair enough, but then: remember what happened to the baby doe: Fire, thunderstorm and cloudbursts, vicious hunting dogs, evil human hunters, the death of the mother . . .

7 In On Metapsychology Freud speaks about this ‘withdrawal of the positions of the libido on to the subject’s own self’ (Freud 1991: 76). 8 The German word ‘Ausgänge’ is in plural form, though, and it means ‘denouement’ as well as ‘exit’. It also has to be menitoned here that German grammar does not tell us whether ‘Höhlenausgänge’ is the various exits from one single cave or the many exits from caves in general. 9 Transl. by the author, German orig.: ‘Die Insel war und wurde für die gedanklichen Konstruktionen der Neuzeit ein Vorzugsplatz, für die Utopien ebenso wie für ihren Demiurgen Robinson. Dieser wird durch Defoe 1719 zum Prototyp eines Bewußtseins, das sich seiner Welt als keinem sonst verdankten zu vergewissern sucht, und dies am ehesten in Artefakten zu können glaubt’ (Blumenberg 1989: 450). 10 Transl. by the author, German orig.: ‘Insel und Höhle geraten zusammen, indem die Insel die exemplarische Darstellung von Ursprünglichkeit ergibt, die Höhle auf ihr das Refugium von der Natur, wie von der Geschichte . . .’ (Blumenberg 1989: 450).

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Vella, Daniel (2013), ‘The Wanderer in the Wilderness: Being in the Virtual Landscape in Minecraft and Proteus’, in: The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Bergen 2013. URL: http://gamephilosophy.org/download/. philosophy_of_computer_games_conference_2013/Vella%202013%20-the-­ wanderer-in-­the-wilderness.pdf [27.08.2017]. Virilio, Paul (1986), Ästhetik des Verschwindens. Berlin: merve Verlag. Virilio, Paul (2006), Speed and Politics. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Wagner, Richard ([1865] 1988), ‘Tagebuchaufzeichnungen’, in: Joachim Bergfeld (ed.), Das Braune Buch. Tagebuchaufzeichnungen 1865 bis 1882. München: R. Piper. Wales, Matt (2018), ‘No Man’s Sky’s NEXT Update is Big. All the Details From Next Week’s Huge Overhaul’, eurogamer, 20 July 2018. Walton, Kendall (1978) ‘Fearing Fictions’, in: The Journal of Philosophy LXXV, No 1 1978: 5-27. Walz, Steffen P. (2010), Toward a Ludic Architecture: The Space of Play and Games. Pittsburgh: ETC Press. Warburg, Aby (1980), Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, ed. Dieter Wuttke. Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner. Warburg, Aby (2000), Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, eds M. Warnke and C. Brink. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Warburg, Aby ([1928] 2009), ‘The Absorption of the Expressive Values of the Past’, trans. by Matthew Rampley, in: Art in Translation, Vol. 1 (2), University of Edinburgh: 273–83. Wessel, Günther (1998), ‘Auf einer chilenischen Insel, lebte das Vorbild für Daniel Defoes Romanhelden Robinson Crusoe’, Die Zeit, 23 April 1998. URL: http://www.zeit.de/1998/18/robinson.txt.19980423.xml. Willoughby, Roger (2001), ‘ “The Dungeon of Thyself”: The Claustrum as Pathological Container’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2001) 82: 917–31. Winnicott, Donald W. (1964), The Child, the Family, and the Outside World. London: Penguin Books. Wittgenstein, Ludwig ([1953] 1971), Philosophische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Worley, Steven (1996), ‘A Cellular Texture Basis Function’, in: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques: 291–4. Zendle, David, Daniel Kudenko and Paul Cairns (2018), ‘Behavioural Realism and the Activation of Aggressive Concepts in Violent Video Games’, Entertainment Computing 24: 21–9. Žižek, Slavoj (2006), Parallaxe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Ludography Akazukin no Ookami (2013), Charon Alpha Waves (1990), Christophe de Dinechin/Infogrames Another World (1991), Éric Chahi/Delphine Software International Arac (1986), Paul O’Malley/Addictive Asphalt 8: Airborne (2013), Gameloft Assassin’s Creed (2007), Ubisoft Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013), Ubisoft Assassin’s Creed: Unity (2014), Ubisoft Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (2015), Ubisoft Atlas Rises (2017), update for No Man’s Sky (2016), Hello Games Blade Runner (1997), Westwood Studios Call of Duty (2003–13), series of games by Activision Coach Bus Simulator (2016), Ovidiu Pop/Ovilex Software Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), William Crowther and Don Woods Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons (1990), John Carmack, John Romero/id Software Company of Heroes (2006), Relic Entertainment Crazy Climber (1980), Nichibutsu Dear Esther (2012), Thechineseroom Limited Dishonored (2012), Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks Elevator Action (1983), Taito EVE Online (2003), CCP Games Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture (2015), The Chinese Room Limited, SCE Santa Monica Studio Expositur (2001), Mathias Fuchs and Sylvia Eckermann/a project by Christoph Steinbrenner for ten Viennese Museums Fallout 3 (2008), Bethesda Softworks Fallout 4: Far Harbor (2016), Bethesda Softworks Far Cry 3 (2012), Ubisoft Far Cry 4 (2014), Ubisoft Final Fantasy XII (2006), Square Enix Final Fantasy XV (2016), Square Enix Firewatch (2016), Campo Santo F1 (2004), Cory Arcangel Gift From the Gods (1984), Denton Designs Grand Theft Auto (1997), Rockstar Games GTA5 (2013), Leslie Benzies/Rockstar Games Gran Tourismo (1997), Sony Interactive Entertainment Half-Life 2 (2004), Valve Corporation

158

Ludography

Hell Blade: Senua’s Sacrifice (2017), Ninja Theory Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017), Guerrilla Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment Hunt the Wumpus (1975), Gregory Yob Indian Train Simulator (2016), Highbrow Interactive Journey (2012), Thatgamecompany/SONY Jump Bug (1981), Alpha Denshi/SEGA Killzone (2004), Guerrilla Games L.A. Noire (2011), Team Bondi/Rockstar Games Little Red Riding Hood (2015), Difference Games LLC Lords of Midnight (1984), Mike Singleton/Beyond Lost in Nature (2017), Moongate Digital Mafia II (2010), 2K Games Maniac Mansion (1987), Lucasfilm Games Mekorama (2016), Martin Magni/Ratalaika Games Metro 2033 (2013), Deep Silver Metroid (1986–2016), series of games by Nintendo Minecraft (2009/2014), Markus Persson/Mojang, since 2014 Microsoft Mirror’s Edge (2008), DICE/Electronic Arts Monkey Island (1990), Ron Gilbert/Lucasfilm Games Myst (1993), Rand Miller and Robin Miller/Cyan Worlds Narbacular Drop (2005), Nuclear Monkey Software Need for Speed (2002), Electronic Arts Never Alone (2014), Upper One Games, E-Line Media No Man’s Sky (2016), Hello Games Odyssey (1972), Magnavox Outrun (1986), Sega Pac-Man (1980), Namco Portal (2007), Valve Corporation Portal 2 (2011), Valve Corporation Portal Knights (2016), Keen Games Prometheus (2016), In-Game Engine by Alex Koshelkov/Crytivo Games Proteus (2013), Ed Key and David Kanaga/Curve Digital Real Racing 3 (2013), Firemonkeys Studios/Electronic Arts Red Dead Redemption (2010), Rockstar San Diego Red Riding Hood Adventures (2014), Mafa Games Resistance 2 (2008), Ted Price/Insomniac Games/SONY Computer Entertainment Rick Dangerous (1989), Simon Phipps/Core Design Ruins (2011), Jake Elliott/Cardboard Computer Rokh (2015), Nvizzio Creations/Darewise Entertainment Sacred Armour of Antiriad (1986), Palace Silent Hill (1999), Konami Computer Entertainment SimCity (1989), Will Wright/Electronic Arts SKYRIM (2011), Bethesda Game Studios Soma (2015), Frictional Games Sonic the Hedgehog (1995), Hirokazu Yasuhara/Sonic Team/SEGA Space Panic (1980), Universal Spacewar! (1962), Steve Russell

Ludography

159

Spelunky (2008), Mossmouth S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (2007), GSC Game World StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010), Blizzard Entertainment Steep (2016), Ubisoft Stranded Deep (2015), Beam Team Games Super Mario (1985), Nintendo Super Mario Clouds (2002), Cory Arcangel Super Smash Bros. (1999), HAL Laboratory, Inc./Nintendo Tennis for Two (1958), William Higinbotham That Dragon, Cancer (2016), Numinous Games The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), Todd Howard, Ken Rolston and Mark Nelson/Bethesda Softworks The Endless Forest (2006), Tale of Tales The Last Guardian (2016), SIE Japan Studio genDESIGN/Sony Interactive Entertainment The Long Dark (2014), Hinterland Studio The Mountain (2014), David O’Reilly The Path (2009), Tale of Tales The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), Ron Gilbert/LucasArts The Sims (2000), Maxis Entertainment The Stanley Parable (2011), Davey Wreden The Universim (2017), Alex Koshelkov/Crytivo Games The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (2011), CD Projekt The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), CD Projekt The Witness (2016), Jonathan Blow/Thekla Inc. Tomb Raider (1996), Toby Gard/Eidos Interactive Twisted Adventures: Little Red Riding Hood (2017), AppGames.net Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (2016), Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment Unreal Tournament (1999), Epic Games/Digital Extremes Virginia (2016), Variable State/505 Games War Thunder (2012), Gaijin Entertainment What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), Giant Sparrow Wolfenstein 3D (1992), John Romero, Tom Hall/id Software Woolfe – The Red Hood Diaries (2015), GriN Gamestudio Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles (2017), Prideful Sloth Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), Nintendo ZORK (1980), Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling/Infocom

Film Alice in den Städten (1974), Wim Wenders, Germany. Apocalypse Now (1979), Francis Ford Coppola, USA, Omni Zoetrope/United Artists. Assassin’s Creed (2016), Justin Kurzel, featuring Michael Fassbender, USA, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

160

Ludography

Badlands (1973), Terrence Malick, USA, Warner Bros. Bambi (1942), David Hand, based on a story by Felix Salten, USA, Walt Disney Productions/RKO Radio Pictures. Blade Runner (1982), Ridley Scott, USA, Warner Brothers. Cliffhanger (1993), Renny Harlin, featuring Sylvester Stallone, USA, Tristar Pictures. Easy Rider (1969), Dennis Hopper, produced by Peter Fonda, USA, Columbia Pictures. Ewiger Wald (1936), Hanns Springer and Rolf von Sonjevski-Jamrowski, Nazi Germany, Albert Graf von Pestalozza. Groundhog Day (1993), Harold Ramis, USA, Columbia Pictures. Gun Crazy (1949), Joseph H. Lewis, USA. HWY: An American Pastoral (1969), Paul Ferrara, script by Jim Morrison, Babe Hill and Frank Lisciandro, USA. Im Lauf der Zeit (1976), Wim Wenders, Germany, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (US title: Kings of the Road). Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Steven Spielberg, story by George Lucas et al., USA, Paramount/Lucasfilm. Inglourious Basterds (2009), Quentin Tarantino, USA and Germany, Tarantino and Bender/Universal Pictures. It Happened One Night (1934), Frank Capra, USA. Jurassic Park 3 (2001), Joe Johnston, USA, Universal. Lara Croft: Lucozade Commercials (2000), UK, Ogilvy and Mather. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Simon West, featuring Angelina Jolie, USA, Paramount Pictures. Lt. Robin Crusoe USN (1966), Walt Disney, USA. Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989), Aki Kaurismäki, Finland. Lost Highway (1997), David Lynch, USA, Columbia Pictures. My Private Idaho (1971), Gus Van Sant, USA, New Line Cinema. Need for Speed (2014), Scott Waugh, USA, DreamWorks Pictures, Walt Disney Studios. North by Northwest (1959), Alfred Hitchcock, featuring Cary Grant, USA, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Road to Morocco (1942), David Butler, USA, Paramount. Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), Byron Haskin, USA, Aubrey Schenck Productions. Robinson Crusoe on Sin Island (2005), Alessandro Del Mar/Private Media Group. Sanctum (2011), Alister Grierson, Australia and USA, Universal Pictures. Stalker (1979), Andrei Arsenjewitsch Tarkovsky, USSR. Star Wars (1977), George Lucas, USA, Lucasfilm/Twentieth Century Fox. Tale of Tales (2015), Matteo Garrone, Italy, France and UK. The Beach (2000), Danny Boyle, UK and USA. The Descent (2005), Neil Marshall, UK, Celador Films, Northmen Productions. The Martian (2015), Ridley Scott, USA, Twentieth Century Fox. The Revenant (2015), Alejandro González Iñárritu, USA, Regency Enterprises. Thelma & Louise (1991), Ridley Scott, USA. Titanic (1997), James Cameron, USA. Tomb Raider (2018), Roar Uthaug, featuring Alicia Vikander, USA, Metro-GoldwynMayer/Square Enix/Warner Bros.

Ludography

161

Tron (1982), Steven Lisberger, USA, Disney Productions. Tschick (2016), Fatih Akin, Germany, Lago Films. Vertigo (1958), USA, Paramount Pictures. Wild at Heart. The Story of Sailor and Lula (1990), David Lynch, USA, Media Home Entertainment.

Painting, Photography, Music and other Media Böcklin, Arnold (1880–6), Island of the Dead [series of paintings, various dimensions]. Crali, Tullio (1930), Le forze della curva [oil on canvas]. Crali, Tullio (1930), Tramonto di luci ad Ostia [oil on canvas, 37 × 49.5 cm]. Crali, Tullio (1935), Autoritratto. Dylan, Bob (1965), The Gates of Eden [folk rock], Columbia. Eckersberg, Christoffer Wilhelm (1812), Ulysses fleeing the Cave of Polyphemus [oil on canvas, 80 cm × 63.5 cm]. Evans, Walker (1930s), Roadside Stories [photography]. Frank, Robert (1958), The Americans [photography]. Friedrich, Caspar David (1808–10), The Monk by the Sea [oil on canvas]. Friedrich, Caspar David (1835), Two Men Contemplating the Moon [oil on canvas, 34.9 × 43.8 cm]. Füssli, Johann Heinrich (1769), The Cave of Despair [pen and black ink, with brush and brown and grey wash and touches of red gouache, over graphite and touches of charcoal, on ivory laid paper, 33.1 × 50.4 cm]. Guo-Qiang, Cai (2006), Clear Sky, Black Cloud [sky art installation commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art]. Hopper, Edward (1907), Le Pont des Arts [oil on canvas, 58.7 × 71.3 cm]. Hopper, Edward (1909), The Louvre in a Thunderstorm [oil on canvas, 58.4 × 73 cm]. Hopper, Edward (c. 1922–3), Railroad Crossing [oil on canvas, 73.7 × 101 cm]. Hopper, Edward (1938), Compartment C, Car 193 [oil on canvas, 50.8 × 45.7 cm]. Hopper, Edward (1940), Gas [oil on canvas, 66.7 × 102.2 cm]. Hopper, Edward (1956), Four Lane Road [oil on canvas, 69.8 × 105.4 cm]. Klimt, Gustav (1902), Beech Forest [oil on canvas, 100 × 100 cm]. Knight, Laura (1917), At the Edge of the Cliff [oil on canvas]. Kraftwerk (1974), Autobahn [electro], Vertigo Records. Miskovsky, Lisa (2008), Still Alive [pop song, written by Kirk Franklin], Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. Monet, Claude (1872), Impression, soleil levant [oil on canvas, 48 × 63 cm]. Monet, Claude (1877), La Gare Saint-Lazare [oil on canvas, 203.2 × 248.9 cm]. Monet, Claude (1903), Pont de Waterloo, jour gris [oil on canvas, 65.4 × 92.6 cm, part of a series of paintings (1900–4) with dimensions from 65 × 93 cm to 86 × 121 cm]. Oehme, Ernst Ferdinand (1822), Waldinneres [oil on canvas, 48 × 40 cm]. Offenbach, Jacques (1867), Robinson Crusoé [opéra comique, libretto by Eugène Cormon and Hector-Jonathan Crémieux].

162

Ludography

Rousseau, Théodore (1833), The Cave in a Cliff near Granville [oil on paper 30.8 × 42.6 cm]. Runge, Philipp Otto (1805), Quelle und Dichter [black pen and grey ink, on pencil, 50.9 × 67.1 cm]. Russolo, Luigi (1912–13), Dinamismo di un’automobile [oil on canvas]. Schwind, Moritz von (1848), Im Walde (Des Knaben Wunderhorn) [oil on canvas, 49.5 × 39.4 cm]. Simon, Paul (1965), I am a Rock [folk rock], Columbia. Talking Heads (1985), Road to Nowhere [rock song, lyrics by David Byrne], Sire. The Doors (1967), The Doors [psychedelic Rock album, hard rock, lyrics by Jim Morrison], Elektra Records. The Doors (1970), Roadhouse Blues [rock song, lyrics by Jim Morrison], Elektra. Troyen, Rombout van (1641), A Cave with Soldiers Capturing a Woman [oil on panel, 34 × 53 cm]. Wagner, Richard (1876), Siegfried [opera, music and libretto by Richard Wagner, second day of the tetralogy Ring der Nibelungen]. Warburton, Alan (2012), Z [high definition computer-­generated animation]. Weber, Carl Maria von (1821), Der Freischütz [opera, libretto by Johann Friedrich Kind]. Wolf, Caspar (1769), Romantische Waldlandschaft mit Liebespaar auf einer Felsbank [oil on canvas, 63 × 53.5 cm]. Wright of Derby, Joseph (1774–8), Cave at Evening [series of the Grotto in the Gulf of Salerno, paintings and chalk drawings, various dimensions]. Wright of Derby, Joseph (1778), Grotto by the Seaside in the Kingdom of Naples with Banditti [oil canvas, 121.9 × 172.7 cm].

Index of names Aarseth, Espen 27 Aeschylus 106 Andrenio 135 Angerer, Marie-Luise vii Anker, Albert 96 Anthony, Ryan 107 Apperley, Thomas 85, 142 Appleton, Jay 134 Arcangel 20, 21, 57 Bachelard, Gaston 1, 2, 3, 18, 47, 52, 61, 62, 88, 100, 137, 142 Backe, Hans Joachim 27 Baer, Ralf 73, 142 Baglivi, Giorgio 122 Basile, Giambattista 95 Bate, Jonathan 123 Bateman, Chris vii, 35, 37, 138, 144 Beck, Ulrich 83 Bentham, Jeremy 121, 122 Bergen, Claus 71 Bezgodov, Alexey 59, 60 Blake, William 99 Bloch, Ernst 145 Blumenberg, Hans 39, 52, 129, 132, 134, 135, 138, 139, 140, 146 Böcklin, Arnold 110, 111 Bogdanovich, Peter 13 Böhme, Gernot 127, 128, 129, 145 Böhme, Hartmut 27, 29, 30, 138 Boieldieu, François-Adrien 96 Bonner, Marc 109, 121, 134, 145 Borchia, Rosetta 57 Boutros, Daniel 142 Bouvet, Rachel 123, 130 Brody, Rosetta 109 Busby, Jason 41, 42 Buytendijk, Frederik Jacobus Johannes 20

Caillois, Roger 76, 81, 82 Calleja, Gordon 61 Cameron, James 48, 49 Captain Kirk 102 Carmack, John 74 Cassavetes, John 13 Cavendish, Timothy 53 Celentano, Nick 107 Cézanne, Paul 87 Chahi, Éric 50 Clausewitz, Carl von 25 Constable, John 53 Cooke, Deryk 46 Coppelius 93 Coppola, Francis Ford 88, 142 Courbet, Gustave 87 Crali, Tullio 22, 55 Crawford, Chris 69 Critilo 132, 135 Croft, Lara 32, 45, 46, 49, 72, 76, 78, 79, 131 Crowther, Will 50, 51 Crusoe, Robinson 109, 112, 114, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 134, 143 Da Vinci, Leonardo 57 Dahl, Johan Christian 53 Dahl, Ronald 96 Damocles 75, 93 Darth Vader 125 Davies, Stephen 46, 48, 75, 139, 142 de Nerha, Aguilar 80 de Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre 25 Defoe, Daniel 109, 112, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 135, 143, 146 Delair, Charles 25 DeLanda, Manuel 82 Deleuze, Gilles 18 Descartes, René 62, 76, 122, 144

164

Index of names

Diller Scofidio + Renfro 55, 56 Dionysus 106 Disney, Walt 59, 124, 145 Doré, Gustave 96 Dorian, Arno Victor 80 Douglas, Kirk 4 Duque, Orlando 80 Dylan, Bob 3 Eckersberg, Christoffer Wilhelm 39 Eco, Umberto 88, 145 Eenwyk, Joel van 41, 42 Einstein, Albert 102 Ekman, Stefan 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 143, 144 Eluard, Paul 53 Engels, Friedrich 4 England, Liz 101, 102 Ertel, Hans 55 Euripides 79, 101 Evans, Walker 13 Evernden, Neil 91, 123 Faith 70 Fassbender, Michael 80 Faust 72 Feige, Daniel Martin 8, 95, 96 Flammarion, Camille 40, 138 Foucault, Michel 95, 120 Frank, Robert 13, 15 Franklin, Michael S. 63 Fraser, Emma 27 Freud, Sigmund 1, 8, 22, 33, 34, 35, 42, 64, 86, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98, 103, 104, 105, 131, 142, 145 Friedrich, Caspar David 28, 30, 31, 32, 37, 53, 54, 67, 86, 87 Fuchs, Mathias 19, 21, 48, 104, 111, 118, 137 Fuksas, Doriana 55 Funk, Jeanne 76 Füssli, Johann Heinrich 29 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 11, 20 Gaite, Carmen Martin 96 Gallen-Kallela, Akseli 142 Gehl, Raymond 45 Gilbert, Ron 124

Gilogly, Jim 51 Ginsberg, Robert 27 Gladio 106 Goebbels, Joseph 25 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 53, 54, 55, 72, 140 Goffman, Erving 46 Goldsmith, Melissa Ursula Dawn 143 Goodman, Nelson 9 Göring, Hermann 88 Gracián, Baltasar 132, 135, 136, 139 Grance, Timothy 67 Grierson, Alister 48 Grimm brothers 87, 95, 96 Guo-Qiang, Cai 67 Guybrush 124 Haase, Donald 96 Hancock, David 138 Haraway, Donna 83 Harrell, D. Fox 3, 4, 5, 6, 24, 49, 113, 130 Harvey, Auriea 95 Heidegger, Martin 20, 61, 120, 123 Higinbotham, William 73 Hindemith, Paul 46 Hitchcock, Alfred 71 Hitler, Adolf 29 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 93, 94 Homer 77 Honnef, Klaus 13 Hopper, Dennis 13, 15, 16, 23, 130 Hopper, Edward 11, 14, 16, 22, 23, 24, 130 Howard, Luke 53, 54, 55 Howard, Todd 33 Hughes, Howard 26 Huizinga, Johan 20, 48, 100, 139 Huxley, Aldous 99 Ibn-La’Ahad 72, 80 Iñárritu, Alejandro Gonzalez 87 Indiana Jones 124 Jacke, Christoph 79 James, William 62, 63 Jenkins, Henry 25, 35, 36, 37, 50, 80, 107, 125, 129

Index of names Jerz, Dennis 51 Jessner, Lucie 45 Jolie, Angelina 49, 78 Jung, Carl Gustav 2 Juul, Jesper 101, 139 Kant, Immanuel 46, 60, 127, 128, 141 Kayser, Wolfgang 54, 140 Kelly, Andy 129, 145 Kenway, Edward 80 Kerouac, Jack 13 Kivy, Peter 46 Klastrup, Lisbeth 95 Klein, Melanie 34, 44, 52 Klimt, Gustav 86, 118 Knight, Laura 80 Koller, Karl 103 Krzywinska, Tanja 27 Kümmerlen, Robert 129 Kurgan, Boris 70 Kushner, David 74 Lacan, Jacques 34 Lander, Robert 24 LeChuck 124 Leino, Olli 47 Levebvre, Henri 77 Lewin, Bertram 45 Lucas, George 125 Lynch, Callum 80 Lynch, David 13, 15 MacDonald, Kesa 144 Malick, Terrence 13 Manzarek, Ray 143 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 26, 55 Markey, Patrick 76 Markopoulos, Gregory 13 Martin, Paul 27, 33 Martin, Zakk 107 Marx, Karl 4 Masse, François 26 Massumi, Brian 9, 76, 77, 82, 145 Mattern, Shannon 54, 66 May, Karl 71, 131 McGuire, Connor 107 McMullan, Michael 107 Mekas, Jonas 13

165

Mell, Peter 67 Meltzer, Donald 44, 45 Mephistopheles 72 Miller, Henry 42 Milton, John 44 Mime 85, 86 Miskovsky, Lisa 70 Mitchell, David 53 Monet, Claude 64, 65, 66, 141 Moreau 109 Morrison, Jim 18, 19, 107, 143 Mrazek, C. L. Anderson 62 Mukhina, Ksenia 59, 60 Müller, Stefan 81 Murray, Sean 113, 114, 144 Naka, Yuki 72 Nathanael 93 Nelson, Mark 33 Nesci, Olivia 57 Nin, Anaïs 42 O’Reilly, David 61, 111, 112 Odysseus 77 Oehme, Ernst Ferdinand 86, 87 Offenbach, Jacques 124 Parrish, Zak 41, 42 Paul, Christiane 21 Perlin, Ken 59 Perrault, Charles 95, 96 Petrarca 29 Pfaller, Robert 48, 139 Phipps, Simon 50 Pias, Claus vii, 73, 142 Poe, Edgar Allan 3 Posthumus, Stephanie 123, 130 Pratchett, Rhianna 70 Prince Noctis Lucis Caelum 105, 106 Rageot, Gaston 26 Rank, Otto 42, 43 Rautzenberg, Markus vii, 39, 40, 138, 139 Reich, Wilhelm 34 Rilke, Rainer Maria 18, 137 Rolston, Ken 33 Romero, John 74

166

Index of names

Rose of Sharon Cassidy 47 Rousseau, Théodore 39 Runge, Philipp Otto 53, 86, 87 Russolo, Luigi 22

Tournier, Michel 124 Tuan, Yi-Fu 7, 8, 116 Turner, Victor 105 Turner, William 53

Samyn, Michaël 95, 98 Sanders Associates 93 Sanderson, Ana 96 Sartre, Jean-Paul 45, 46, 139 Schischkin, Iwan Iwanowitsch 142 Schmitz, Anthony 96 Schneider, Andrew 53, 58, 59, 66 Schooler, Jonathan 62, 63, 64, 141 Segal, Charles 35, 37 Selkirk, Alexander 123 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 53 Siegfried 85, 86 Sindbad 111 Skjong, Rolf 77, 78 Sophocles 106 Speer, Albert 29 Stallone, Sylvester 72, 78, 79, 131 Sterner, Paul 106 Stevenson, Robert Louis 12, 124 Strachey, James 91, 92, 142 Strouhal, Ernst vii Supervielle, Jules 85, 98, 142 Sweeney, Tim 40 Swift, Jonathan 124 Székely, József 5

Van Lennep, David Jacob 19, 20 van Troyen, Rombout 39 Varus 87 Vella, Daniel 6, 7, 27, 60, 61, 120, 141 Virilio, Paul 25, 26 Vogler, Rüdiger 24 von Nacher Malvaioli 45 von Salisch, M. 76 von Schwind, Moritz 86 von Weber, Maria 86 Vos, Nathan 53, 58, 59, 66

Talking Heads 11, 12 Tarantino, Quentin 87 Tarkovsky, Andrei Arsenjewitsch 35, 36 Taylor, Audrey Isabel 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 143 The Doors 18, 19, 99, 143, 131 Thon, Jan-Noël 87 Tosca, Susana 95

Wagner, Richard 53, 55, 85, 86, 87, 88, 140 Walz, Steffen P. 31, 32 Warburg, Aby 35, 36, 78, 79 Warburton, Alan 65 Warnke, Martin vii Wells, H. G. 109 Wenders, Wim 24, 137 Westwood, Vivianne 5 Willoughby, Roger 45 Winter, Bruno 24 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 97 Wolf, Caspar 86 Worley, Steven 59, 60 Wright of Derby, Joseph 39 Yob, Gregory 100 Zapperi, Roberto 140 Zendle, David 76 Zischler, Hanns 24 Žižek, Slavoj 34

Index of games Akazukin no Ookami 97 Alpha Waves 70 Another World 50 Arac 130 Asphalt 8: Airborne 17, 22 Assassin’s Creed 27, 28, 31, 57, 58, 65, 67, 72, 80, 83, 145 Atlas Rises 116

Horizon: Zero Dawn 43, 50, 55, 58, 61, 99, 120, 132 Hunt the Wumpus 100

Blade Runner 67, 128, 129

Killzone 58

Call of Duty 40, 139 Coach Bus Simulator 16 Colossal Cave Adventure 50, 52 Commander Keen 74 Company of Heroes 72 Crazy Climber 69

L.A. Noire 128 Little Red Riding Hood 95, 96, 97 Lords of Midnight 138 Lost in Nature 112

Dear Esther 110, 128 Dishonored 65, 67 Elevator Action 100 EVE online 111 Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture 128 Expositur 103, 104 F1 20, 21 Fallout 27, 30, 65, 73, 105 Far Cry 73, 109, 124, 134 Final Fantasy 4, 22, 105, 106 Firewatch 93, 128, 145 Gift from the Gods 138 Gran Tourismo 17, 22, 25 Grand Theft Auto 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 99, 130, 137 Half-Life 2 37 Hell Blade: Senua’s Sacrifice 50

Indian Train Simulator 16 Journey 27 Jump Bug 69

Mafia II 76 Maniac Mansion 100 Mekorama vii Metro 2033 27, 30, 73 Metroid 69 Minecraft 32, 120, 141 Mirror’s Edge 70 Monkey Island 109, 124 Myst 109, 128 Narbacular Drop 100, 101 Need for Speed 17, 22, 24, 25, 26, 40, 137, 139 Never Alone 43 No Man’s Sky 91, 109, 111, 113, 115, 116, 143, 144 Odyssey 73 Outrun 12, 15, 17, 18, 88 Pac-Man 32 Portal 100, 101, 106, 107, 120, 132

168

Index of games

Prometheus 114, 116 Proteus 109, 113, 114 Real Racing 3 17 Red Dead Redemption 50 Red Riding Hood Adventures 96, 97 Resistance 2 24 Rick Dangerous 46, 50 Rokh 112 Ruins 27 Sacred Armour of Antiriad 138 Silent Hill 67 SimCity 112 SKYRIM 56 Soma 105, 145 Sonic the Hedgehog 69, 73, 74 Space Panic 69 Spacewar! 32 Spelunky 46 Super Mario 56, 57, 60, 69, 77, 103 Super Mario Clouds 57 Super Smash Bros. 72, 83 StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty 72 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 27, 30, 31, 35, 36, 145 Steep 81, 82 Stranded Deep 109, 112, 124, 125 Tennis for Two 73 That Dragon, Cancer 48 The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion 33

The Endless Forest 97 The Last Guardian 52 The Long Dark 128, 129 The Mountain 61, 111, 113, 114 The Path 95, 96, 97, 98 The Secret of Monkey Island 109, 124 The Sims 32 The Stanley Parable 100 The Universim 112, 113, 114, 116, 119, 120, 144 The Witcher 132, 136, 145 The Witness 109, 110, 11, 124 Tomb Raider 27, 32, 40, 49, 72, 78, 83, 139 Twisted Adventures: Little Red Riding Hood 97 Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End 50 Unreal 32, 72, 99, 103, 104, 141 Virginia 15 War Thunder 55, 60, 61 What Remains of Edith Finch 105 Wolfenstein 3D 99 Woolfe – The Red Hood Diaries 97 Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles 141 Zelda: Breath of the Wild 7, 31, 110 ZORK 61