Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Recently, while doing laundry, I found myself in the unusual (for me) position of watching football. At one point, with only a few minutes remaining on the clock, a wide receiver leapt to catch, and did catch, a long pass. However, upon landing from his jump, he was ruled out of bounds by the referee. The receiver's coach challenged the ruling, and an ad break promptly ensued. When the broadcast returned to the game, the announcers were explaining the grounds of the call and its subsequent challenge: the edge of the field is demarcated by a thick white line, and all play to the inside of this line is in–bounds, while any play that touches on or crosses the line is out–of–bounds. However, it had been raining all day in the city hosting the game, and the line had become blurred and indistinct, thus making it questionable whether or not the receiver's left foot had landed inside or on top of the line. A close review of the video footage determined that he had in fact touched the line, the pass was out–of–bounds and therefore, for the purposes of the game, incomplete. Play continued where it had left off.

From this example, we can glean three insights. First, games delineate themselves as such by the creation of their particular space, complete with boundaries, inclusions, exclusions and the stipulations of ideal use. Second, this definitional space is not the game, but the space of the game; the game is the practice of this space, and includes the possibility of transgressions, in form of incompetence (stepping out of bounds), misrecognition (cheating), and extraneity (use of the game space for purposes outside the defined ends and means of the game). Finally, these boundaries are only conventional, and therefore open to question and ambiguation by human actors (the coach's challenge) and the contingencies imposed by the physical space that underlies the space of the game (the rain that blurred the painted boundary).

This paper takes these three insights into the space of gaming as the inspiration for an analysis of the production of space in digital games. I will be working within the theoretical framework for spatial analysis laid out by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (English translation, Blackwell, 1991) and elaborated by Edward Soja in Thirdspace (Blackwell, 1996). However, this framework needs modification in order to account for the fact that the space of a video game is inherently formalized and systematic, existing at in its most primal state as a set of rules for a computer to follow. This begs several questions: is video game space necessarily a functionalist, regimented one that harshly regulates spielraum? Or, like Michel de Certeau's walkers, does the actualization of the virtual space by the player's entry into it constitute a transgressive narrative that exceeds the limited possibilities afforded by the game's pre–figured map? Are all video game spaces homogenous? What I hope to show by using Lefebvre and Soja to approach these questions is that video games operate on the body to condition it rationalized modes of space, but at the same time, open up a new space that is fraught with desires and contestations of space. This space of contention, in turn, while currently underutilized for this purpose, can be turned against dominating conceptions and productions of space to provoke imaginative new kinds of spatiality, or counterspaces.

In order to constrain my tendency towards elaboration, expansion, and all–around biggerism, I will work on two primary game texts. The first and most familiar is Tetris (Pajitnov, 1987), because it makes no pretense to discourse; it is pure pattern, a game of almost entirely rarified geometry that also happens to be the best selling video game ever, when all of its incarnations are taken together. The second game, Myst (Miller, 2003), is almost diametrically opposed to Tetris in its formal construction, consisting of a staggered narrative progression through a series of landscapes with diegetically integrated puzzles that open new pathways when solved. Current literature on video games tends to look at them either as algorithmic simulations of space that need to be draped with representations to make them appealing (cf "The Anatomy of Games," Audrey Hesselgren, 2003) or as yet another mode of fulfilling the great human desire to tell stories, which just happens to be predicated on the representation of space (cf. Janet H. Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck). What it is necessary to see about video games is that they are both, and yet at the same time more than both. Video games are, or, more accurately, can give rise to, live and dynamic spaces when, and only when, they and their players interpenetrate one another in a struggle of desires and wills, patterns and play. Putting these two games next to and against one another will provide a useful, if artificial, arena in which to (re)examine the application of Lefebvre and Soja to video game spaces.

Any reader conversant with the history of video games will be asking at this point why I am dealing with Tetris and Myst as my examples of choice, and I am forced to admit the choice is wholly strategic. The strategic choice is predicated on the simple fact that, by the rapidly evolving standards of video games, both are primitive. However, their very simplicity is what will allow me to accomplish what I've set out to do, a tall and speculative enough order in its own right^[1]. I hope it will be clear that, if we are to take into account all the forms and permutations of video game space, an analysis of any single modern game would provide sufficient material for a lengthy study in its own right. Ultimately I should like to perform such in–depth, full–length studies, but first it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of space in video games.

As more and more scholarly attention is brought to bear on video games and video gaming, Lefebvre has not gone untapped as a resource for understanding how they work. However, in The Production of Space, Lefebvre is concerned almost exclusively with social spaces that exists materially. Video games participate in a significantly different kind of space, the imagined or simulated space that resides only on the other side of a representation and that comes into being only when entered into by the imaginatively extended body of a reader or viewer. These spaces of course exist within material and social space as representations of space, and as spaces in which representations reside. Yet their coming into being as spaces of their own at the application of the reader or viewer's imagination marks them off for special consideration. One of the youngest of these special spaces is the video game, which has been widely regarded as a space for the thoroughgoing recuperation of the player into functionalist and capitalist modes of thought and being. This mistrust or disapprobation springs from the fact video games do not merely represent space, but simulate it, distill, refine, abstract, and recreate it an rigidly structured lines. Let us then turn to Lefebvre to understand how we can analyse the production of space and perhaps lay hold of the moments of resistance to this oversimplified understanding.

In his analysis of material, social spaces, Henri Lefebvre asks (and answers):

In terms of games (video or otherwise), the conventionally demarcated space within which play occurs is the ideal space, one that regulates by logic and rules, and the real space is the playing of that game, its spatial practice. As we saw in the example of the contested completion, both are necessarily susceptible to factors that neither intends to include. Lefebvre divides these two spaces into "representations of space" and "spatial practice," which are pulled together and contested in a third kind of space, "spaces of representations, embodying complex symbolism, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art..." (ibid.). Spatial practice is just that, the way in which space is used by and uses its inhabitants. In an analysis of social space, it comprehends and is comprised of the built environment, the relations of production that built it, and actors (laborers and capitalists) who were mobilized and placed in its building. It corresponds to what is perceived in and about space, the part of space that makes itself available to the senses. The representation of space is the plan along which space is produced, as well as the abstractions built upon the perception of space; it is the product of conceptions about space, entails the formation of theories and generalized descriptions, and follows the dictates of rationality. The third of these spaces, the spaces of representation, are the slipperiest, as they are the realm of the intangible and "non–knowledge". In spaces of representation, the perception of space, having been ordered and dominated by conceptions of space, can slip loose, or at least become more than could have been intended. Spaces of representation are overdetermined with meanings, and flow out of and into gaps in the other spaces. They also place the solid, feeling body into space, not as a function or an object, but as an actor and subject. This is not say that spaces of representation are inherently revolutionary, but that they contain the possibility for imagining space differently than it is.

In order to apply Lefebvre's work to video games, and thus to fully appreciate the degree to which they are inherently spatial, we must first acknowledge a complication suggested by the fact that the space of a video game is a simulation of space, which can be re–stated as two seemingly contradictory propositions:

1. Video games do not exist in space. They are two dimensional representations on a screen.
2. Video games take place in space.

Video games happen inside a computer. They begin and end as a series of algorithms and abstract forms manipulated by the inflexible processing cycle of the PC (or Mac, Xbox, Gameboy, cellphone, what have you). The screen and the physical interface, be they joysticks, gamepads, or keyboard and mouse, are essentially absent from the game's internal simulation of space. They provide access to, movement in, and manipulation of, that space, but they always remain essentially absent from it. Furthermore, these spaces have perceptible contents, i.e. images, symbols, and textures, distinct from the conceptual form. However, while these contents demarcate the point of access to the game's space and are the province of perception, they no more constitute a spatial practice than does the form.

For this reason, Edward Soja's reinterpretation of Lefebvre's theory of spatial production is useful. Soja displaces Lefebvre's typology of spaces from the realm of extant space to the study and analysis of spaces by "redescribing" this triad of spatial types as the "trialectic" of space, comprised of Firstspace (practice/perceived), Secondspace (representations of space/conceived), and Thirdspace (spaces of representations/lived). Thought and analysis in Firstspace is "fixed mainly on the conrete materiality of spatial forms, on things that can be empirically mapped...," and Secondspace is "conceived in ideas about space, in thoughtful re–presentations of human spatiality in mental or cognitive forms," (Soja, 10). For Soja, then, Thirdspace is as much a conceptual space as it is a "lived" space, in response to Lefebvre's call that "...a lived sense [of space]... has to be raised intact to the conceptual level," (Lefebvre, 132). What is Soja's Thirdspace? "In its broadest sense, Thirdspace is a purposefully tentative and flexible term that attempts to capture what is actually a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings" (Soja, 2). Since Thirdspace corresponds to lived space, the space in which we experience ourselves, an analysis of any given space should incorporate First– and Secondspace investigations, but must have as its end, and be constantly checked against, a Thirdspace, "where all places are capable of being seen from every angle, each standing clear; but also a secret and conjectured object, filled with illusions and allusions, a space that is common to all of us yet never able to be completely seen and understood..." (56). In this light, we can defer the siting of spatial practice in video games while we examine the way First– and Secondspace are manifest in the games.

It could be argued that the Firstspace of a video game is coextensive with, or at least wholly contained by, its Secondspace, given that the contents of a video game's form take place in confines rigidly defined by the game's algorithmic simulation of spatial possibility. An analysis of Tetris demonstrates the potential of Secondspace to subsume Firstspace in video games. In Tetris, we have the representation of something like a Cartesian total space, in which an empty box fills up with objects distinguished and defined only by the regulations of their interconnections. The structural codes that comprise Tetris are exceedingly simple. One the one hand there is a set of seven pieces (each composed of a unique arrangement of five "units") functionally distinguished only by their shape (fig. 1), which descend vertically, one by one, in a random order and potentially infinite sequence across a rectangular field and exclude one another in their occupation of that space. On the other hand there is the player who is able to manipulate these pieces as they descend, moving them from side to side and rotating them in ninety–degree increments, as well as accelerating their descent (though never slowing it).

The operational code that regulates the articulation of these two structural codes can be defined as:

1. Start State: A blank rectangular field, twenty units tall by ten units wide
2. End State: Any column in the field occupied by more than twenty units
3. Goal: To indefinitely defer the end state
4. Means to Goal: When the pieces are arranged so that ten units form a horizontal line, that line disappears and all the units above it descend to fill its place.
5. Obstacle: For every ten lines completed, the rate at which pieces descend increases.

The player measures his or her competence at practicing this space primarily in terms of the amount of space left free and clear, and secondarily by the geometrical elegance of the space that has been filled (fig. 2 – 4). Most versions of the game also have a scoring system which awards X points for each line completed, multiplied by some amount for simultaneous completion of multiple lines, which serves to quantify the player's specific level of performance in the practice of Tetris space, not unlike the sign on the factory floor that proclaims the number of days passed without a significant injury.

However, few video games are as simple and intentionally abstract as Tetris; in fact, the vast majority of video game designers go to great lengths to cover the narrow rationality of the underlying simulation of their game's space with a surface of simulated places, people, and things. In other words, having formed a structural representation of space, they fill it with contents, intent on granting some meaning to the practice of this space beyond, or at least separate from, mastery of the space's rationality. It might seem at first glance that it is here that we will find the Thirdspace of video games, a space "filled with illusions and allusions" (Soja, op cit.) that "overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its object," (Lefebvre, 40). And yet we also find this in Lefebvre: "Wherever there is illusion, the optical and visual world plays an integral and integrative, active and passive, part in it. It fetishizes abstraction and imposes it as the norm. It detaches the pure form..." (97). We must remember that video games do not have physical spaces; they simulate them. Thus, "illusions" that are overlain on the algorithmic representation of space, serve, under our current working premise, to abstract the player from the inherently rationalized and controlled production of the game space. These illusions, i.e. images, symbols, visual and audial textures, "[detach] pure form," or the algorithms for simulating space, from the perception of the game space. By foregrounding them at the point of access to the game's space, the illusion hides the structural basis of spatial practice under a layer of "immaterial" content. Thus it is the site of the Firstspace of video games where, through the screen and input devices, we perceive those things that are in the space of the game and are empirically observable (as the code of the space is not). We shall return to the above quotation, which continues by defining the "impure contents" that are detached from "pure form," but let us first demonstrate the workings of Firstspace video games.

Myst is a game in which, according to the cover of the 10th Anniversary DVD Edition, "...you discover the secrets of the D'ni civilization, where books are portals into other worlds, and lessons of the past shape your future." The story begins in the included manual:

Before the game is even loaded, the player has been prepared for entry into a space of illusion, that space of imagination that resides on the other side, or perhaps in the imaginary reflection, of a book that contains a "superbly crafted description of an island world." When the game is loaded and the requisite studio and publisher logos come and gone, followed by the title floating on a black background, a movie plays, opening with a body falling through a rift in outer–space (fig. 5) and ends with a book floating against a field of stars (fig. 6).

As the movie plays (comprised mostly of a the book falling through a starfield) a deep male voice intones a story about his errant book, which has disappeared and is now beyond his control. At the end of the movie, a small hand appears on screen and can be moved about with the mouse. Clicking on the book as it lies there brings it closer (fig. 6), and clicking again opens it (fig. 7). In the book a small movie plays, a fly–by of the aforementioned "island world." Clicking on this produces a fade to black, a noise that seems to suggest a "warping" or distortion, and finally a fade–in on the final view from the movie that played in the book (fig. 8).

What follows is an exploration of the world that has opened before the player. This world is simultaneously profoundly empty and full to overflowing. Large vistas open upon the screen, laid out in linear perspective, with mist hiding what lies further on and enticing the player to find it out. Doors can open, buildings can be entered, and puzzles, scattered throughout and crafted to seem integral to a hidden logic of the island, can be solved by a combination of reason and intuition. The visuals are rich and colorful, and they are augmented by painstakingly detailed diegetic sound: the songs of birds, the hissing of the wind, the lap of the waves, all anchored in the appropriate place, fading and growing in volume and distinctiveness according to the player's distance from them. What's missing, and what the player "has no choice but to explore," is the logic of this world, the conception and code of its space. Why are these buildings here, ranging in style from neo–classical to space age, and, more importantly, who built them and to what end? These people are missing entirely, except in traces left (and, strangely, movies embedded) in the books in the library that the player will discover. Thus Myst attempts to establish itself as a Mysterious Firstspace, present, graspable, navigable, and, with careful observation and the proper practice, decipherable by the player's senses and sense of space.

It is obvious why Tetris can be used as an example of a video game that resides in Secondspace. It is not quite so obvious why Myst is not a game of Thirdspace. Briefly, it is because the material practice of Myst contradicts the apparent ambiguity, openness, and rich fluidity hinted at in the above description. As a video game, Myst cannot escape from the necessity of a rigidly binding, algorithmic plan of space that provides the place with the basis for all its glorious imagery. Looking from one view, the cursor, in the shape of a hand, changes to indicate all the possible directions of movement, which are the only possible directions of movement. Clicking on any one of these directional possibilities replaces the current view with another, not by movement, but by crossfades; the player does not advance through space, rather, spaces advance toward him. Furthermore, not every "object" seen in the world is in fact an object; only those that the designers have decided beforehand should be manipulable will respond to the player's click. The upshot of this is that Myst cannot be a "...space where all places are capable of being seen from every angle, each standing clear; but also a secret and conjectured object filled with illusions and allusions," because, opened up in Secondspace, the game is as mappable as a chessboard, with every location containing discreet and pre–determined objects, connecting discreetly and pre–determinedly to all (and only) adjacent locations. This structure is as rigid as Tetris, if not more so. The locations in the game are all structurally distinct from one another: one does not proceed as a walker, step by step, but as a reader of a picture book, page by page. The appearance of mystery and plenitude is cut into discrete and (only) structurally related elements. This space, at first so transparent and inviting to complete perceptibility is, on closer scrutiny, only available as a finite set of locations with finite interconnections.

Neither of these games belongs exclusively to a First– or Secondspace. Tetris is not as closed and determined as it seems. After all, given that it only ends with the filling up of space, and that the objects which fill that space proceed in random order, every game is an open–ended production, never resulting in the same end–state except by cosmic contingency. From our examination of Myst, we know that in video games Firstspace is a layer on top of Secondspace, yet it is the Firstspace that lies beyond the point of access, and is the cognitive basis for apprehending the spatiality of the game. Thus, though the conceptual realm shapes the possibilities of spatial practice, the perceptual realm makes it possible by providing access and informs it with symbols and images. There is a gap between them; neither exists except as possibilities until a player enters into them; there is no practice in these isolated, static, virtual spaces. The spatial practice of video games must occur in some other moment of their spatiality, one which has not entered our picture.

Which begs the question, "Where, then, can we find the video game Thirdspace?". Soja will not be sufficient, since we've demonstrated the inability of video games, in and of themselves as formal constructs, to provide a "space where all places are capable of being seen... but also... filled with illusions and allusions". Instead, let us look for a video game Thirdspace where Lefebvre has hinted it resides: in our bodies. The passage cited above, which posited the image's power to "[detach] the pure form" ends "...from its impure content – from lived time, everyday time, and from bodies with their opacity and solidity, their warmth, their life, their death," (Lefebvre, 97). Why is this content, the body in its temporality, "impure?" Because of its opacity and its solidity, because it is the site of reception, transformation and action, which cannot be accounted for by conceptual schemes or empirical, external observation. Without the body, there is no production of space. For this same reason, it is what the controlled production of space seeks to dominate under a conceptual regime. However, the body constitutes a barrier between the perception of space (which happens at the very limit of the body in space) and its subsequent practice (which may or may not bend to the constructed space as conceived). To understand the Thirdspace of video games, and thus complete the triad, we must attempt the impossible and try to speak for the body. The reader will necessarily notice a shift in the tone of what follows, for the obvious reason that I'm attempting in these accounts to break free of a critical or reflective language in order to write the lived experience of playing a video game^[2].

Tetris begins as an emptiness, clean, clear, free. This seems a safe space to enter. The eye scans it back and forth, up and down, and finds nothing there to interfere, nothing to prevent it from completely commanding this as its domain. But contained within this complete freedom from interference there is the kernel of a danger. Perhaps the emptiness that lies between the rectilinear bounds of this kingdom is too empty, sterile, void. The lack of texture: it suggests a meaninglessness, a stasis in which the body grows restless. Desire is mobilized the moment something foreign enters this space, desire to reach out to that object and to hold it to myself, to possess it and consume it, to order it as an extension of my own being in space. A thrill runs down my spine and my fingers tighten on the keyboard. The eye no longer rules this space, suddenly it is ruled, held fast to the red 'L' that slowly creeps down. The body's desire to take as its own the thing that rules the eye impels the fingers, and the spine inclined forward toward the screen but rigid with tension expresses the conflict between sight and its response.

Yet I am still in control, and snug the 'L' upside down in the corner, where it provides a neat, upward curve that invites its companions into my order. This happens again, and again, a cycle between the eye's belonging to the shapes and their accumulating form on the screen and the body's possession of them, its extension through them into the space, its own solidity and sense of cohesive selfhood justified by its ability to order and produce a cohesive form out of the endless and random flood of contingent obstacles. Each completion, the subjection of this incessant verticality to my own need for horizontal stability, punctuates the exercise. The pleasure of this mastery over myself is sweetened by the epiphanic moment of release achieved: the zone of spielraum expands and the eye can, at least momentarily, roam freer. Before long this cyclical affirmation of my own competence to be in this space before me is disrupted; the back and forth between eye and hand, between possession and control has become a rhythm, but my very success impels a shift in time, and the shapes come in more quickly to perturb me. I adjust.

Soon enough, however, a mistake is made. Tetris speeds up to challenge me, and the tension builds accordingly. But too long without the release of a line makes it unbearable, and an unasked for twitch, my muscles revolting against their tasking at the hands of a time that isn't their own sets something awry. The eye's outrage at imbalance is engaged, a glaring hole opens up in the space that I have made mine, and its impenetrability, the fact that it cannot be filled and made to conform with what has become a reflection of my own cohesion galls. Panic mounts. I attempt to recoordinate the work between my eyes and hands, but between the demands of speed and the denial by contingency of my desire for spatial coherence, mistakes compound and pile upon one another. Now the problem has an agency of its own, and my mastery sours into a subjugation. This brings with it a relief of its own, a break in the panic of correction and un–coordination. Resignation and a new kind of relaxation supplant the constant heightened pleasure of control. The room for play, the space of freedom that I own, that I built, and for awhile kept jealously ordered shrinks, shot through with interruptions and holes, and suddenly, it ends. My suspicion is confirmed: emptiness was more than could be maintained, texture inevitably usurped its place. I can return to it again, and though the repetition will completely different, the outcome will always be the same. And in that there is another comfort, the knowledge that is impossible to maintain control forever, that sooner or later, resignation is necessary. I can relax into myself again and draw my attention and extension back from the screen and the keyboard. I have learned a lesson about space: I can own it only temporarily. In the end, my body and my efforts belong to it and are shaped by it.

The same is true of Myst, though the details and structures differ so drastically. At the opening of Myst I see a book in space, a hand by it. This hand is mine. With it, I grasp at the book, and it comes towards me, grows larger, fills my field of vision, opens. It does it all with a stuttering quality. My hand is at work, but can't make itself manifest with the book it manipulates. It is there, and it isn't. Through the book there is a hole that takes me... elsewhere. Now I look along a dock, towards a hill mounted with giant gears. Next to me on one side, a door in an embankment, and, a little further on, a set of stairs carved into the earth. To my right, a ship, sunken so only its masts protrude, in clear water that lets me see to the submerged deck below. Nothing should unite these sights, yet they are undeniably, simultaneously present to me and to one another. I turn to the right and see far out over the water, turn again to face the door, and again, and find myself where I started.

I cannot at first believe the evidence before my eyes; this combination of sites has no reason to exist, no apparent logic to it, and yet there it is, presenting itself to me, offering my eye ways to follow, promising to bring these things closer so that they can be understood. I would like to look below the dock, confirm that depth operates as expected, verify at least the truth of my own body in navigating this place. With the hand before me, an icon, a caricature of my own, I reach down towards the planks of the dock. Nothing happens. My own hand refuses to respond, will not do as it is told. A profound disassociation comes over me, and I momentarily question my own cohesion. I lean into the screen in an attempt to orient myself, and find the image disintegrates into blocks of color with no apparent ordering principle. I need more distance, need to be farther away.

Re–oriented, my eye again finds the view before it inviting. What can I do but follow? In this, at least, I find my alter–hand responds, pointing before me, guessing my intention. I click the mouse, and another scene appears before my eyes. I did not move to it, it moved to me, impelled by my gesture. I'm now next to a staircase that leads up to my left; this I saw before, and now it is present at the edge of my vision, which I know to be the edge of my vision because beyond is only a strip of blackness. I am confronted before me with another staircase, and find my gaze divided, desirous of both these offered movements. I check my hand against them; both will admit me, but the incompleteness, the vagueness of what lies to the left, over the rise in the ground wins out over the open prospect. So, turning, I face these stairs and draw their top nearer to me with my hand.

It is disconcerting to have my body, my solid flesh with free range of motion, comforts and discomforts, so immobilized and distilled into the cartoon hand, but it begins to make a sense of this space. This is not a space for my body, but one addressed to my eye. It offers me (from the top of the staircase) views over the other side of the island, the water off and away in the distant, a winding path that leads back to me, a colonnade advancing down the slope to my left before giving way to a thicket of trees and two low, classical buildings to my right. This is a sort of Arcadia laid out for my eye's investigation, but at the same time teasing with the hints of other vistas, the forms half–seen but promising. And yet it is also a jealous space, a space that will make its demands then partially rescind its offers. I am offered it as my own, so long as I submit to its logic. In time, I discover that it contains books, and that these books contain stories of the people who made this place, but offer no explanation. This is a lonely space, a grieving place that does not know itself, that demands I not only explore but diagnose, dissect, and cure it. Time here is all my own, what views I uncover belong to me, but the space of Myst keeps itself.

Dynamics of presence and absence, desire and constraint arise in these experiential accounts of our exemplary games, and it is in these dynamics that we locate Thirdspace. Firstspace, the presentational space of the game, where what there is makes itself visible and available through perception, draws the player in, invites the player's eyes to enter through the screen, the player's hands through the physical interface. Yet when the player endeavors to effect his entrance, he discovers he has been tricked: what Firstspaces gives (freedom, desires fulfilled), Secondspace takes away. However, Secondspace is not merely a trick; it is a trap, a seduction. It gives back to the player just enough of what he wants that he will be mastered by it. A tug–of–war between these two spaces, between desire and possibility, takes place in the body of the player. It is in learning to channel desire expressly through the bodily responses the game permits that a spatial practice comes into being, and through the mastery of, or failure to master, a game's spatial practice that the space of the game is produced.

However, the space that is produced does not necessarily belong wholly to the game. The pullulation between absence and presence creates a radical ambiguity, "a third possibility or 'moment' that partakes of the original pairing but is not just a simple combination..." (Soja, 60). On the one hand, the player is absent from the game, separated by the screen, his body frustrated in its attempts to effect itself in that space, and the game is equally absent from player. It cannot completely transform him. He may stand up with sore thumbs and a back knotted from sitting hunched towards the screen, yet he will stand up, and always can. On the other hand, game and player are always present to one another, as in the example of Myst. The game demands that the player (re)construct his body in certain ways to produce the space of the game, yet it can only come into being when the player effects his will and makes something of inert virtuality. Entering the game, becoming a present body in that space, the player brings with himself a space of representations, a mesh of symbols and meanings and images that the game cannot possibly contain unchanged. It is through this mesh that a game must pass as it enters its Thirdspace, where it becomes subject to appropriation by the player's imagination.

There is an asymmetry in this. The game depends on the player, while the player does not depend on the game. However, it could also be said that the game has the potential for changing the player, while the player has little hope of changing the game, except as it perdures in his memory. It could even be said that the player has little hope of doing even that, as the game has made its mark by (even temporarily) dominating the player's body; the body, once shaped, is difficult, if not impossible, to contradict. This might lead us to the conclusion that video games are even more capable tools for dominating space than is architecture. After all, buildings can always be taken over and torn down. This is a potential that has not been lost on those with a vested interest in domination, as the recent travesty called America's Army will testify.

However, the examples used in this paper are, as noted, monumentally simple; most of the recent crop of games are built on exponentially more complex conceptions of space, and modern computers have increased the potential content of these spaces apace. At the same time, the proliferation of tools for making modifications to existing games, combined with the ability to distribute these modifications via the Internet, make for the possibility of creating effective counterspaces. The possibilities are far from endless, as they are nested within social space and subject to all of its materially effective constraints. However, video game space offers a previously unexamined mode of challenging not just the way that people play games, but the way that people perceive, conceive, and practice space.

Notes

[1] Let me quickly provide a (non–exhaustive) list of the things I won't address in this paper: the necessarily fraught territory of combat simulations, which make up the bulk of contemporary games (Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Battlefield: 1942); the links between genrefication and perspective in real–time strategy games (Command and Conquer, Warcraft I – III) versus first–person action/adventure games (Unreal, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom III) versus third person action/adventure games (Max Payne, Tombraider, MDK 1 & 2); the channeling of player agency through a collection of simultaneously abstract and embodied statistics in role–playing games (Baldur's Gate, the Final Fantasy series, Fallout 1 & 2); "emergent" play tactics (Deus Ex), and the even thornier emergent narratives (Grand Theft Auto 3, Morrowind); sports and racing simulators (NFL 2003, Grand Turismo, Microsoft Flight Simulator); remediations of "traditional" games into digital forms (Solitaire, Chess); and the extraordinarily complicated formations of (simulated?) sociality in massively–multiplayer on–line games (Ultima Online, Everquest, The Sims Online).

[2] This is obviously an experiment doomed from the outset to fail, yet the exercise is necessary for any attempt to theorize a Thirdspace of videogames.

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