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Digital Game Spaces
Although games have been played in real-world spaces for millennia, the appearance of electronic and digital games in the last few decades have provided new kinds of game spaces: playgrounds that exist only on the screens of computer monitors and televisions. These game spaces take a multitude of forms, from blocky 2D grids to expansive 3D worlds. One useful taxonomy for describing the range of these digital spaces comes from Mark J. P. Wolf, in his essay "Space in the Video Game." Wolf lists eleven ways that video games operate to structure and represent space. We paraphrase these categories below, with examples from Wolf's essay:
Text-only space: text adventure games such as Zork and Planetfall
One contained screen: Pong, Space Invaders, Breakout
One screen with wraparound: Asteroids, Pac-Man (with teleporter wraparound)
Scrolling on one axis: Defender, Atari's Football arcade game
Scrolling on two axes: Gauntlet, Sim City
Adjacent spaces displayed one room at a time: Berzerk, Atari's Adventure
Scrolling with separate background layers: Zaxxon, Double Dragon
Limited 3D space: Tempest, Night Driver
Two spaces on one screen or two separate screens: Spy vs. Spy, Dactyl Nightmare
Full 3D spaces: Battlezone, DOOM, Tomb Raider
"Mapped" Spaces: Defender, Myst (both have a separate radar or map display) [9]
Wolf 's categories are not without some conceptual problems. For example, there is a fundamental difference between a "two-and-a-half" dimensional space like DOOM and a more fully 3D space like Tomb Raider (in DOOM the player can only move in two dimensions and the objects are completely flat). Additionally, some of his categories, such as separate background scrolling layers and "mapped" spaces, seem to be fuzzier designations (most of the categories he lists could also incorporate a "map" element). Wolf's typology is certainly not the only way to conceptualize digital game spaces, but his categories are useful in pointing out the wealth of forms they take.
Zork: Text-only space
The structure of a digital game space always grows directly from the formal system that defines the game. However, the space that a player experiences is also a function of representation (how the space is displayed to the player) and interaction (how a player navigates through the space). These three ele-ments—formal structure, structure of display, and interactive structure—together constitute the experience of a digital game space. All three of them need to be designed in concert to achieve proper narrative effect in your game.
For example, the feeling of zero-G drift in Asteroids is linked directly to the design of the game space. Rather than bouncing off the screen wall like a Pong ball, the player's ship moves right on through to the other side, evoking the illusion of endless movement through the darkness of space. The game's style of movement, emphasizing inertial drift and retro-rocket maneuvers, also heightens the feeling of space travel. Although the player's ship never leaves the screen, at the beginning of each wave, asteroids drift in from the edges. Once they appear, these asteroids follow the same wraparound logic as the player's ship. Other objects, such as the UFO saucers, don't ever wrap around, and simply disappear once they reach the edge of the screen. Curiously, these inconsistencies never break the game's spatial continuity. The fact that some objects remain constantly on screen (the player's ship and existing asteroids) whereas others seem to drift in from parts unknown (new asteroids and UFOs), adds up to a rich and multi-layered narrative of cosmic exploration and survival. Space creates narrative in all senses of Miller's definition: space helps define the "characters"(the game objects); space is the context in which narrative events occur; and space patterns narrative experience over time for the player.
Asteroids: One screen with wraparound
Tempest: Limited 3D space
Tomb Raider: Full 3D space
Double Dragon: Scrolling with separate background layers
Spy vs. Spy: Two spaces on one screen
Defender: "Mapped" space
The design of a game space creates a context for narrative interaction, by structuring events in patterns of space, time, and causality. As Marsha Kinder notes in Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games, " Narrative creates a context for interpreting all perceptions. Narrative maps the world and its inhabitants, including one's own position within that grid."[10] The narrative play of games is always connected to an underlying grid of possibility, to goals and conflict, to uncertainty and the moment-to-moment action of the core mechanic. The space of a game is quite literally its space of play.
In a fighting game such as Tekken, the space is tightly constrained, crowding the two fighters up against each other. There is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. All you can do is fight your opponent, an action the design of the space explicitly encourages and facilitates. In contrast, the corridors and rooms of a Quake deathmatch space create a narrative of stealthy maneuvers, mad dashes to grab power-ups, and the surprise of sudden death. Tekken has no hidden spatial information. But in Quake, walls block players from seeing each other, dark lighting makes hiding in shadows possible, and the periodically appearing power-ups create uncertainty about when and where they can be found. In both Tekken and Quake, a player's "position on the grid," as Kinder puts it, is simultaneously a location in the space of the game and a position within the space of the game narrative. The formal, represented, and interactive spaces of games are also narrative spaces, contexts for interpreting the experience of a game as a story.
When we frame experience as narrative, the events and actions of game play take on form and meaning within the game's representational universe. The dynamic properties of the space of Tekken and Quake are important in creating emergent narratives of conflict. But the spaces contain embedded narrative qualities as well. In Quake, the spaces embody the sets, props, and characters of pulp sci-fi horror. In Tekken, as with most fighting games, each arena is thematically linked to one of the game's characters. Space can therefore be used to express information about a character's persona or backstory, or to create narratives about defending one's home turf or invading an enemy's territory.
[9]Mark J. P. Wolf, "Space in the Video Game." In The Medium of the Video Game, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), p.53-70
[10]MarshaKinder, Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), p. 2.
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