ABSTRACT
Monkey Island; Washington, DC in 2277; Jackson Square, New Orleans; Tatooine—other than puzzle genres (scrabble, crosswords, chess, etc.), most video games are dependent for story, context, action, and adventure on some design of constructed place. That is, some element of a virtual or representational geographic or conceptual location. It may be the highly bounded imaginary or representational location of an auto racing arena (Grand Prix; F1 Race Stars; Super Mario Kart) or sports game (Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!; Space Jam; NBA 2K13), carefully reconstructed representations of real physical places such as Jackson Square (Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers) or Florence during the Renaissance (Assassin’s Creed II); reimagined physical places that are altered by time and circumstance such as Washington, DC in 2277 (Fallout 3); imagined places in an otherwise real geographic locations such as Monkey Island in the Caribbean (The Secret of Monkey Island) or places that exist only in the imaginations of the game writers and designers such as Tatooine (Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic).
