ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how videogames frame spaces – and how, in the process, they position players. It focuses on three games that use innovative or unusual graphical techniques to draw attention to this positioning process: Killer 7, Fez and Pokémon GO. These games show how rapidly and radically digital interfaces have transformed our experience of space while also demonstrating how videogames can use spatial metaphors and optical illusions to articulate novel ‘points of view’ on digital subjecthood. Killer 7 speaks to the emergence of the network diagram as a dominant mode of mapping not just spaces but also social relationships, globalized economies and geopolitical dispositifs; Fez flips between ‘retro’ 2D graphics and modern 3D to interrogate gamer culture’s nostalgic bent while showing how digital imaging technologies trouble distinctions between seeming and being; the ‘augmented reality’ game Pokémon GO, meanwhile, extends digital play into everyday environments. As much a platform for photographic identity work as it is a game, GO suggests how portable digital technologies can promote anomie and historical myopia, but also hints at how videogames can help players to apprehend the forces that shape networked spaces.
