Phantasmal Spaces

Archetypical Venues in Computer Games

Mathias Fuchs

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781501376269
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501332937
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

Recognizable, recurring spatial settings in video games serve not only as points of reference and signposts for orientation, but also as implicit sources of content. These spatial archetypes denote more than real-world objects or settings: they suggest and bring forward emotional states, historical context, atmospheric "attunement," in the words of Massumi, and aesthetic programs that go beyond plain semiotic reference.

In each chapter, Mathias Fuchs brings to the fore an archetype commonly found in old and new digital games: The Ruin, The Cave, The Cloud, The Portal, The Road, The Forest, and The Island are each analysed at length, through the perspectives of aesthetics, games technology, psychoanalysis, and intertextuality. Gridding these seven tropes together with these four analytical lenses provides the reader with a systematic framework to understand the various complex considerations at play in evocative game design.

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

This 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.

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).

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 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]’.

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 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Phantasmal Spaces
• 1 The Road
• 2 The Ruin
• 3 The Cave
• 4 The Cloud
• 5 The Cliff
• 6 The Forest
• 7 The Portal
• 8 The Island
• Conclusion: Atmospheric Spaces
• Notes
• References
• Ludography
• Index of names
• Index of games
• Copyright