Computer Games As Landscape Art 1St Edition Peter Nelson Online Ebook Texxtbook Full Chapter PDF

Computer Games As Landscape Art 1st
Edition Peter Nelson

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/computer-games-as-landscape-art-1st-edition-peter-n
elson/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Board Games as Media 1st Edition Paul Booth
https://ebookmeta.com/product/board-games-as-media-1st-edition-
paul-booth/
Games of History Games and Gaming as Historical Sources

1st Edition Apostolos Spanos
https://ebookmeta.com/product/games-of-history-games-and-gaming-
as-historical-sources-1st-edition-apostolos-spanos/
Make Games Pixel Art 1st Edition Derek Yu
https://ebookmeta.com/product/make-games-pixel-art-1st-edition-
derek-yu/
Shifting Grounds Landscape in Contemporary Native

American Art Morris
https://ebookmeta.com/product/shifting-grounds-landscape-in-
contemporary-native-american-art-morris/
Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games 1st Edition
Newton Lee
https://ebookmeta.com/product/encyclopedia-of-computer-graphics-
and-games-1st-edition-newton-lee/
Open ing Spaces Design as Landscape Architecture 2nd

Edition Hans Loidl
https://ebookmeta.com/product/open-ing-spaces-design-as-
landscape-architecture-2nd-edition-hans-loidl/
Games As A Service How Free to Play Design Can Make

Better Games 1st Edition Oscar Clark
https://ebookmeta.com/product/games-as-a-service-how-free-to-
play-design-can-make-better-games-1st-edition-oscar-clark/
The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art A History 1st Edition

Kristie C. Wolferman
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-nelson-atkins-museum-of-art-a-
history-1st-edition-kristie-c-wolferman/
Economics as Religion From Samuelson to Chicago and

Beyond Robert H. Nelson
https://ebookmeta.com/product/economics-as-religion-from-
samuelson-to-chicago-and-beyond-robert-h-nelson/
Computer Games As
Landscape Art
Peter Nelson
Computer Games As Landscape Art
Peter Nelson
Computer Games As
Landscape Art
Peter Nelson
Academy of Visual Arts
Hong Kong Baptist University
Ngau Tau Kok, Hong Kong
ISBN 978-3-031-37633-7 ISBN 978-3-031-37634-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
This book was inspired by the support and assistance of a great number of
people. I thank Gary Carsley and Royce W. Smith, whose undergraduate
classes on landscape and geopolitics had an enduring impact. I thank Gary
Wiggins, who has pursued the question of landscape with me for over a
decade. I thank curators Johnson Chang and Valerie Doran for speculative
conversations on landscape that helped me reflect on the questions I was
asking of computer games. I thank my academic supervisor from my grad-
uate student years, Olli Leino, who knew when to leave me alone with my
research and when to intervene with detailed critical feedback. From this
time I also thank Minka Stoyanova, Ariel Huang and Bogna Konior, for
frequent conversations that were so helpful. I also thank the wonderful
people I met during my short research exchange at IT University of
Copenhagen. I also thank the wonderful people I met during my research
exchange at IT University Copenhagen, who provided invaluable feed-
back over lunch of while waiting for the kettle to boil. In particular, I
thank Espen Aarseth and Hans-Joachim Backe for reading my work front
to back and for consenting to the innumerable conversations that proved
so helpful. I also thank the community of art history, game, media and
geography scholars who engaged and influenced me during this project, in
particular Emma Fraser, Clancy Wilmott, Nick Rush-Cooper, Stephanie
Boluk and Patrick LeMieux. I would also like to thank my dear friends
Andrew Luk and Alexis Mailles for all the fun and discovery we had mak-
ing Autosave: Redoubt together. Finally, I would like to thank City
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
University of Hong Kong for hosting my graduate study research and

Hong Kong Baptist University for allowing me to run a creative labora-
tory where I can write books like this while also playing with robots and
paint brushes.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 What Is a Landscape? 9
3 What Is a Computer Game? 29
4 Half-Life 2: Could I Apocalypse? 57
5 Tourism
and Gun-Running in Counter-Strike: Global
Offensive 83
6 Autosave: Redoubt119
7 Garry’s Mod: The Computer Game Becomes Photoshop139
8 Conclusion173
Creative Works Cited179
References181
Index195
vii
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Thomas Gainsborough. 1748–1750. Mr and Mrs Andrews.

Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London 2
Fig. 1.2 Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton,
Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow), 1836. Oil
on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2
Fig. 2.1 Caspar David Friedrich, Ruins of Eldena, near Greifswald,
1825. Oil on canvas. Old National Gallery, Berlin 17
Fig. 2.2 Albert Bierstadt, Valley of the Yosemite, 1864. Oil on
paperboard, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 18
Fig. 3.1 Falling over in QWOP, 2008. Bennet Foddy 35
Fig. 3.2 Falling over in Death Stranding, 2019. Kojima Productions 35
Fig. 3.3 Wang Hui. The ‘Southern Tour’ of the Kangxi Emperor,
c.1689–1692. Detail of hand scroll on silk, Palace Museum,
Beijing38
Fig. 3.4 Screenshot from Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, 2010. Blizzard
Entertainment39
Fig. 3.5 The landscape as a standing reserve in Minecraft,
2011. Mojang Studios 43
Fig. 3.6 Ascending Death Mountain in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of
the Wild, 2017. Nintendo 45
Fig. 4.1 An obstacle course landscape, built just for us, Half-Life 2,
2004. Valve Corporation 64
Fig. 4.2 Chases through the administrative architecture of canals in
Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1991. Directed by James
Cameron72
ix
x List of Figures
Fig. 4.3 Chases through the administrative architecture of canals in

Half-Life 2, 2004. Valve Corporation 72
Fig. 4.4 Chases through the administrative architecture of an asylum in
Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1991. Directed by James Cameron73
Fig. 4.5 Chases through the administrative architecture of an asylum in
Half-Life 2, 2004. Valve Corporation 73
Fig. 4.6 An architectural collage of Eastern European ruins and an
alien skyscraper in Half-Life 2, 2004. Valve Corporation 75
Fig. 4.7 Photographic textures of rocks and grass in Half-Life 2, 2004.
Valve Corporation 76
Fig. 4.8 An example of a database (textures.com) from which
computer graphics artists can source textures, author’s screenshot 77
Fig. 5.1 Reciprocal lines of sight in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive,
2012. Valve Corporation 90
Fig. 5.2 Running through the ‘Canals’ map in Counter-Strike: Global
Offensive, 2012. Valve Corporation 100
Fig. 5.3 The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive map ‘Office’, 2012. Valve
Corporation101
Fig. 5.4 Still image from the BBC series The Office, 2001. Capital
United Nations Entertainment 102
Fig. 5.5 Weapon skin for the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive weapon
Glock-18. Source: https://CS:GOitems.pro/. Author’s
screenshot107
Fig. 5.6 FN 5-7 pistol with custom ceramic coating. Source: Black
Sheep Arms (Instagram) 108
Fig. 6.1 Recreating the Shing Mun Redoubt in the Hammer editor,
author’s screenshot 120
Fig. 6.2 A trench and tunnel opening as part of the Shing Mun
Redoubt site, author’s photograph 121
Fig. 6.3 A tunnel section rendered to the 1 foot = 16 Hammer Units
grid. The faint black lines represent the original survey data.
The blue lines represent the geometry that we built in Hammer 127
Fig. 6.4 A tunnel section rendered to the 1 foot = 16 Hammer Units
grid. The faint black lines represent the original survey data.
The blue and pink lines represent the geometry that we built
in Hammer 128
Fig. 6.5 Plan view of the popular Counter-Strike: Global Offensive map
‘Dust II’, superimposed on a plan view of Autosave: Redoubt129
Fig. 6.6 Using a literal conversion of geographical measurements into
Hammer units, our first prototype tunnels looked too wide.
Author’s screenshot 130
List of Figures xi
Fig. 6.7 The narrow scale of the Shing Mun tunnels in Autosave:
Redoubt and in real life as seen by a 35 mm lens. Authors’
screenshot and photography 131
Fig. 6.8 This lighting configuration allowed us to balance the need for
ambient light inside the tunnels with an illusion that a light
source was coming from the outside 134
Fig. 7.1 Spawning objects into a blank landscape in Garry’s Mod,
2006. Facepunch Studios 140
Fig. 7.2 The driveable bathtub car—a common first project for
learning to build in Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios 140
Fig. 7.3 Adding a tree into a game map within the Hammer editor,
author’s screenshot 146
Fig. 7.4 Adding trees into Garry’s Mod from the player perspective,
Fig. 7.5 I park my Lamborghini and watch a nationalistic Korean video
selected by another player in a Garry’s Mod sandbox
environment, 2006. Facepunch Studios 152
Fig. 7.6 Alduin battles the Combine in a fragmented set of City 17, in
Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios 153
Fig. 7.7 Imprisoned in a cage by server admins in the Garry’s Mod
version of Minecraft, 2006. Facepunch Studios 154
Fig. 7.8 Stabbed in the ‘Swamp Cinema’ server, Garry’s
Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios 156
Fig. 7.9 Ruminating in apocalyptic idyll - playing Tetris over
Neoclassical Ruins while holding a cat in Garry’s Mod,
Fig. 7.10 Watching TV with discarded children’s toys in Garry’s Mod,
Fig. 7.11 A group of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump ‘Nextbots’
chasing YouTuber MsBreezy across the Lost Highway in
Garry’s Mod. MsBreezy. 2016b. YouTube Screenshot 163
Fig. 7.12 Haphazard ludic architecture in a Garry’s Mod sandbox server.
Fig. 7.13 A recreation of coloured barrel landscape stenography in
Garry’s Mod, 2006. Facepunch Studios 167
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The painting Mr and Mrs Andrews (Fig. 1.1) by Thomas Gainsborough

(c.1750) depicts a husband, wife, and their dog posing, or perhaps sit-
ting, in front of a landscape. The painting was commissioned by the
sitters to celebrate the agricultural wealth that furnished their new mar-
riage. Mr. Andrews gazes at us with a clear but casual authority, rein-
forced by the rifle slung under his arm and the loyal attention of his
hound. Mrs. Andrews sits in a static pose underneath the tree, hands on
her lap. We could look at this painting as a representation of the love of
nature and countryside shared by Gainsborough and the Andrews fam-
ily, as suggested by art historian Kenneth Clark in 1949 (Clark 1949,
34); or as a representation of property, wealth, and ownership, as sug-
gested by John Berger in 1972 (Berger 1972, 107); or as an encoding
of both women and land as property and reproductive resources, as
suggested by Gillian Rose in 1993 (Rose 1993, 91–3). When contem-
plating Thomas Cole’s dramatic landscape painting The Oxbow
(1836) (Fig. 1.2), Simon Schama sees the historical processes that
shaped the American frontier, the desire to overlook the conflicts of
colonial dispossession and to focus on a Romantic tension between an
untamed sublime nature and the hope of a biblical promised land
(Schama 1995, 365–7) and Edward Casey sees the birth of American
modernism in the transposition of Albertian perspective and Dutch
landscape painting composition onto a newly conquered territory
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
P. Nelson, Computer Games As Landscape Art,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4_1
2 P. NELSON
Fig. 1.1 Thomas Gainsborough. 1748–1750. Mr and Mrs Andrews. Oil on can-
vas, National Gallery, London
Fig. 1.2 Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts,
After a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow), 1836. Oil on canvas, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York
1 INTRODUCTION 3
(Casey 2002, 162). This layering of interpretations reminds us that

landscape images actively and passively encode historical processes and
ways of seeing. How we represent the physical environment tells us a lot
about who we are and how we relate to the world around us. In these
examples, the landscape image encapsulates a relationship between the
artist, the painting, the subject, and the events that shaped the physical
environment itself and how it has been represented.
This type of art historical analysis was one of the inspirations for this
book. I was originally trained as a painter and art historian, and my study
of computer games is indebted to this side of my life. Human geography
and cultural studies position landscape as a lens for analysing how we
have encoded the physical environment with our own history, and how
our attempts to represent it beam this history back to us. When I started
seriously engaging with computer games as a 3D artist and a graduate
student in 2015, I was fascinated by the repeated references to concepts
such as ‘space’, ‘place’, ‘landscape’, and ‘representation’. In this book, I
want to bring together what I have learned from other scholars on how
we might think of space, place, and landscapes in computer games, and
how, like the paintings mentioned above, we might be able to see our
historical position reflected back to us if we consider computer games as
landscapes.
If I started with art history and landscape painting, why write about
computer games? Well, there is a reason that art museums around the
world are often filled with landscape paintings. At the time when European
powers were building global trade networks and colonial empires, land-
scape painting was a new and popular genre. It was an art form that could
be commissioned and purchased by recently wealthy agricultural and mer-
chant classes, one that could represent the commodity of private land
domestically and in distant colonies, and one that could advertise non-
European territories as Edenic promised lands to new investors. If you
want to understand just how differently people were starting to see the
world during this period, landscape paintings are a good place to start. To
make my small contribution to helping us understand how history unfolds
around us, I want to extend this art historical line of thinking to computer
games, even though at times this book will not feel like an art history
book, it will feel like a book about computer games. Computer games
now find themselves at the centre of academic and popular debates around
technology, culture, and society. Their commercial dominance as a popu-
lar media and their technological relationship to non-game virtual
4 P. NELSON
environments suggest that it might be useful to examine how games reveal

aspects of our history as it is unfolding. I argue that computer games are
our most important contemporary medium of landscape and in the first
two chapters, outline a way of analysing them that is different from how
we might look at a painting, a photograph, or a film.
For the art historian, I show how to analyse computer games as land-
scapes by playing them, not just by looking at screenshots or video
recordings. For the game designer, I show how games not only absorb
artistic influences, but become part of a long cultural conversation, some-
times consciously and sometimes quite unintentionally. This book offers
a language of landscape for computer games based on a combination of
art history, geography, play-based game studies, and platform studies,
where the game engine, like paint and canvas, becomes the medium of
landscape. Twentieth-century art historians transformed eighteenth- and
nineteenth- century landscape paintings into portraits of a changing
world. This book attempts something similar for computer games.
Landscape is the lens through which our relationship to the environment
can be observed. Landscape studies for computer games reveal how our
relationship to the environment is changing and how we are expressing
this through computer games, whether it be through our obsessive recre-
ation of ‘normal’ places as sites of gameplay, or through the chaotic and
bizarre recycling of place fragments into digital swamps of subversive,
ambiguous meaning.
But with the breadth of this promise comes a limitation. In the first two
chapters, I bring together landscape and game studies to show how they
can work together, citing a wide range of artworks and computer games.
But in my own case studies, I focus on computer games made using a
single game engine, the Valve Source Engine. These games are Half-Life
2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), Garry’s Mod, and a CS:GO
mod I co-authored Autosave: Redoubt. The reason for this limitation is to
show the value of depth over breadth in landscape studies. There are
already some excellent meta-analyses of archetypal landscape spaces in
computer games (see Fuchs 2019), and what I wanted to do is to show
how the social and economic context of the game, its players and even its
software environment can deepen our understanding of what these games
mean as landscapes and cultural artefacts of their time. For those with less
experience with games, a computer game engine is the software environ-
ment that the computer game exists within. Other notable examples
1 INTRODUCTION 5
include Unity 3D, the Unreal Engine, CryEngine, and Godot. A game
engine is responsible for the rendering of sound and graphics, as well as
calculating physics simulations, artificial intelligence procedures, network-
ing, and all other forms of programmatic representations that uphold the
player’s experience of the game (Zerbst and Düvel 2004). The distinction
between the computer game and the game engine reflects a contemporary
trend in game development of using the same engine to make multiple
games, rather than building a new software environment for every new
game. The way that game engines are appropriated to make new games,
how their repeated use changes the engine over time, and how this accu-
mulation of production leads to an identifiable medium with its own cul-
tural and economic structures, is the process that I examine across my
chapters to bring depth and meaning to the games I study. By analysing a
carefully chosen set of games, I reveal how the Valve Source Engine func-
tions as a distinct medium of representation, and a distinct medium of
landscape. Game scholar Espen Aarseth observed that computer games are
not a medium per se because the variation in forms they can take is so
impossibly vast from a Furby to GTA V. By focusing on a single game
engine, I have provided a temporary solution that allows me to talk about
computer games and landscape with a degree of medium specificity—the
Valve Source Engine is the medium that gives these four games a shared
context for comparison. The experience of each game is an experience of
the Valve Source Engine, and each game creates a different relationship
between the player and the software. This is especially apparent as the divi-
sions between playing and creative game modification are slowly broken
down, from player-produced content in Counter-Strike to modding as a
form of playing in Garry’s Mod. These changes in game experience and the
economic relationships they create present a rich fabric of experience that
unfolds as I explore the Valve Source Engine as a medium of landscape.
Chapter 2 gives an overview of the concept of landscape, and the deli-
cate interplay between how we transform the physical environment, how
we make images of it, and how we normalise our past transformations into
a new state of nature. Chapter 3 gives some basic definitions of computer
games, how they can be studied, and how existing scholars have analysed
game environments and game worlds. At the conclusion of Chap. 3, I
offer my own synthesis of landscape and game studies and share the ana-
lytical template I use to study computer games as landscapes. In Chap. 4,
I look at the genre of the single-player first-person shooter game (FPS)
using Half-Life 2 as the central example. Starting from play-based analysis,
6 P. NELSON
I draw landscape parallels to Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of theme parks and

Angela Ndalianis’s analysis of the landscape safari and the touristic gaze. I
demonstrate how the alienating tunnel vision of the first-person shooter
avatar re-enforces the validation of danger, challenge, and pleasure that
the game uses to create a heroic protagonist whose presence in the land-
scape is rewarded, culminating in triumph. I argue that the single-player
first-person shooter provides pleasure via the contrast of the protagonist’s
safari landscape to the bureaucratic anonymous and precarious experience
of the modern workplace. The protagonist’s landscape offers a pleasurable
vision of societal collapse by simplifying life into a chain of heroic tasks. If
your working life seems inconsequential, FPS offers you the chance to
climb out of the office via the air-conditioning vent and save the world by
fighting monsters with a crowbar. In Chap. 5, I examine the landscape of
the tactical multiplayer first-person shooter Counter-Strike: Global
Offensive (CS:GO), which began as a player-made modification (mod) of
Half-Life. Despite their visual similarities, the multiplayer FPS is a radically
different type of landscape to the single-player. Now the player is no lon-
ger the protagonist and becomes one of many competing within a shared
environment. The protagonist’s landscape has been replaced by some-
thing more like a basketball court and the finite single-player safari is
replaced by endless online competition with an exponential rise in skill and
difficulty. CS:GO introduces the shift in computer game materiality where
games and their environments are designed by volunteer player-modders
rather than professional game developers. These landscapes are often free
content donated by fan artists onto the servers of game publishers, and
like all user-generated content, they often step into uncomfortable territo-
ries, such as recreating high schools and university campuses as the battle-
ground for a shooting competition. Chapter 5 also examines how the
uncharacteristic longevity of CS:GO is underpinned by gambling and how
this economy has been utilised for money laundering and the marketing of
real firearms. What emerges in Counter-Strike is a landscape of reciprocal
military vision fuelled by economic structures similar to those found in
sports geography and tourism. Chapter 6 adopts a slightly different
approach to the first two case studies and I describe the process of making
my own CS:GO mod using the Valve Source Engine. In 2017, I was a co-
author of the project Autosave: Redoubt, which was a recreation of a his-
torical site in Hong Kong within CS:GO. Converting accurate geographical
data into CS:GO revealed a new way of looking at the Valve Source Engine.
Using geographical data and historical accounts as a goal, we encountered
1 INTRODUCTION 7
limitations in digital geometry and gameplay that can help to move the
conversation away from quixotic distractions of ‘realism’ in games and
refocus our analysis on the medium-specific ‘game-ness’ of these Source
engine landscapes. Chapter 7 looks at what happens when the player from
Chaps. 4 and 5 are merged with the modder of Chap. 6. The sandbox
game introduces another layer to the landscape of computer games. Using
the Valve Source Engine game Garry’s Mod, I examine how the transition
from a game to something more like a creative software environment
reveals the underlying abstraction of the computer game landscape. When
we remove rules, goals, and narratives, the objects in Garry’s Mod become
like toys in a toybox, waiting to be given a temporary meaning by the
games invented by players. The safari and the sports field are transformed
into a Situationist playground where we glimpse the underlying landscape
of Web 2.0, a social and commercial space mediated by player networks
and populated by haphazard ludic remixes. Examining Garry’s Mod along-
side the growth of user-generated content, I explore the lack of ownership
or remuneration available to game modders and a peculiar media enfold-
ing where games start to resemble both creative software and social media
platforms akin to Adobe Photoshop and YouTube. This chapter identifies
a sort of billionaire simulator swampscape where everything is available yet
seems to have lost all of its value. It is a toy box world of ludic spare parts,
ready to be repurposed into something entirely unpredictable and entirely
temporary.
The conclusion of the book summarises the methodological question
of how to analyse computer games as landscapes and the insights gained
from applying this to the Valve Source Engine games. By focusing on
games made using the same piece of software, I show the art historian, the
geographer, and the cultural critic that we cannot make conclusions about
games based on visual parallels alone. For the visually-minded scholar,
gameplay is the sorting mechanism for representation where objects are
given meaning and hierarchical importance based on their significance to
the player, and this is where we find our landscape reading of the protago-
nist safari, the sports tourist and the billionaire simulator swampscape.
Games, like paintings, books, and films, exist in economic, social, and
technological networks that influence their meaning. This comprehensive
analysis of computer games as the paradigm medium of landscape illus-
trates how the interaction between visual representation, gameplay experi-
ence and technological networks reveals an insightful portrait of
contemporary life, which after all, is the goal of landscape studies. I hope
8 P. NELSON
that this book can demonstrate the value of considering computer games
as landscapes and provide the reader with a rich historical context for what
I think are some of the most fascinating cultural works of our age.
References
Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John
Berger. London, Harmondsworth: British Broadcasting Corporation, Penguin.
Casey, Edward S. 2002. Representing Place: Landscape Painting & Maps.
Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.
Clark, Kenneth. 1949. Landscape into Art. Boston: Beacon Press.
Fuchs, M. 2019. Phantasmal Spaces: Archetypical Venues in Computer Games.
Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
Rose, Gillian. 1993. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical
Knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. London: Fontana Press.
Zerbst, Stefan, and Oliver Düvel. 2004. 3D Game Engine Programming. Portland:
Premier Press.
CHAPTER 2
What Is a Landscape?
[T]he landscape may indeed be a text on which generations write their

recurring obsessions.
—Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, 1995, 12.
In this introduction, I outline what I mean when I say ‘landscape’, what

benefit we can get from thinking about computer games as landscapes,
and how this relates to other research that has been done on the topic of
computer games, spatial experience, and virtual worlds. At this early stage,
I want to make the disclaimer that the ‘landscape’ I refer to is primarily
that of the European and colonial diasporic conception. Whilst there are
many independent cultural modes for representing the physical environ-
ment in song, literature, or image, many of which are casually referred to
today using the term ‘landscape’, accommodating them within a single
overview without serious comparative analysis would bend them out of
shape and undermine their individual significance. James Elkins demon-
strated this problem in his book Chinese Painting as Western Art History,
where despite close formal similarities between Chinese and European
painting traditions, there are radically different philosophies at play, from
the symbolic meaning of forms such as trees and mountains to the social
function of the art object itself. An oil painting connotes both the sanctity
of the religious artefact and a commodity value, whereas a scroll might be
gifted between generations and physically annotated with new poetic

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4_2
10 P. NELSON
inscriptions like the opening pages of a book. My use of the term ‘land-
scape’ refers to the form of visuality that travelled the world from colonial
expansion to the global consumer economy, a particular way of framing
the environment that we see in paintings, photography, film, and, I argue,
computer games. But the reader should be reminded that cultural and
historical lineages are never simple, exclusive, or tracing a single line of
historical power structures. For example, when Vincent Van Gogh and
Claude Monet were becoming enamoured with Japanese Ukiyo-e prints in
the nineteenth century, what is often overlooked is the fact that these
prints were already entirely modern hybrids that combined Chinese and
Japanese techniques with new visual conventions from Dutch landscape
paintings imported by traders in Dejima two centuries prior (Mizutani and
Nakamura 1998), therefore what the Impressionists were picking up on
was already a semi-digested form of the modern European landscape, rein-
terpreted using various approaches from East Asia. The hybridity of con-
temporary visuality is no different, and in this book, where relevant, I
highlight similar moments when the spatiality of computer games was
shaped by unexpectedly congruent influences, such as that of sprite graph-
ics and isometric side-scrolling with the Chinese history of parallel projec-
tion and boundary painting. But as a general rule, this book focuses on the
origins and functions of landscape tracing European visual and linguistic
precedents.
So let’s start with the word itself. In his book Landscape and Memory,
Simon Schama writes the German word ‘landschaft’ originally signified a
physical area of human occupation that might make a pleasing subject for
an image. The word entered the Dutch language as ‘landschap’ and was
used to refer to the image of the physical environment, rather than the
physical environment itself (Schama 1995, 10). According to philosopher
Edward Casey, the German term ‘landschaft’ referred to a border zone
where nature and culture collided, where buildings situated amongst agri-
cultural land can be a contrast to ‘wilderness’. Casey argues that the transi-
tion of the German word into the Dutch ‘landschap’ occurred at a time
when nearly all proximal land had become in some way civilised, and the
term came to be used to refer to a site that would be represented by a
painter or mapmaker. Anne Whiston Spirn incorporates the process of
human land-shaping more directly into her etymological reading, and
highlights a connection to the Dutch word ‘landskab’, where ‘land’ (the
physical environment) was combined with ‘skabe’ and ‘schaffen’, which
means ‘to shape’, and the suffixes ‘–skab’ and ‘–schaft’ and ‘skip’ mean ‘in
2 WHAT IS A LANDSCAPE? 11
association or partnership’. Whiston Spirn writes “there is a notion,

embedded in the original world, of a mutual shaping of people and place:
people shape the land, and the land shapes the people” (DeLue and Elkins
2008, 92). The word ‘landskip’ entered the English language at the end
of the sixteenth century, referring to decorative scenery paintings (Casey
2002, 258–9). Art historian Mark Roskill writes that up until the late six-
teenth century, the physical environment functioned in a painting as a
“container or surround for actions and events” or as a symbolic represen-
tation of possible “worlds”, generally composed from the lexicon of
Judeo-Christian or Ovidian symbols (Roskill 1997, 8). In the seventeenth
century, the landscape in Dutch painting moved from a theatrical back-
ground for religious scenes to the primary subject matter of the painting
itself (Macarthur 2007, 20). These Dutch paintings, dubbed ‘Landskips’,
became popular collector’s items for English aristocrats (Schama 1995,
10) and began to turn landscape into a very specific subject, something
that could be objectified and quantified with a specific economic value and
aesthetic function, encapsulating the objectifying gaze that Europeans
would transport across the world. From the etymological outset, ‘land-
scape’ refers to a world transformed by human culture and the desire to
look back on the world as if it were an image.
The particular ways of seeing the world embedded in our landscape
images don’t arise out of nowhere and are relatively new. The better we
can understand where traditions of image-making come from, the better
we can step back and see our own cultural moment afresh and appreciate
what works such as computer games might be reflecting back to us. In the
1970s, Marxist material analysis and feminist scholarship began to chal-
lenge what we might describe as a sort of formalism in the study of land-
scape images, where visual composition and technical mastery had been
the dominant criteria for discussing the quality of landscape images. While
the principles of mastery and formal composition remain highly relevant,
material and feminist analyses revealed other stories encoded into land-
scape images that artists might not have directly intended, but were more
artefacts of their time. In this section, I will give an overview of two impor-
tant traditions in landscape painting, the Picturesque, and the Romantic,
and show how quite fascinating histories are embedded into landscape
images that we might think are quite benign, and how some of these his-
tories can transform into the digital landscapes of today.
12 P. NELSON
The Picturesque
Landscape painting emerged as a popular genre in Europe at a time of
immense change. For the Dutch and Golden Age painting, their recent
independence from the Spanish, and the successful reclamation of land
using windmills, drainage, and dikes resulted in a pastoral school of paint-
ing that took the physical environment as both a principal subject matter
and an object of national pride, and created a new market for small-scale
landscape paintings. These transportable commodities were no longer
overtly religious as in the case of genre painting, and of a small enough
scale to appeal to a new consumer market of recently wealthy agricultural-
ists, both in the Netherlands and in other European centres. During the
mid-seventeenth century, the Second Agricultural Revolution saw British
farmers abandon the age-old practice of resting fields between crop cycles,
and start rotating crops with nitrogen-fixing plants such as turnips and
clover, leading to a boom in productivity. With productivity came profit,
and a consumer demand for Dutch Golden Age landscapes. So popular
were these landscape paintings that their subject matter and aesthetic came
to influence how British landowners started to physically transform their
own properties (Fussell 1984, 10; Daniels and Watkins 1994, 20; Schama
1995, 10; Macarthur 2007, 46).
The Second Agricultural Revolution was tied in with the later Industrial
Revolution. Agricultural historian G. E. Fussell describes how as the pop-
ulation of London was growing, pressure was placed on food production,
which the rotations of turnip and clover answered, but with a new system
of land ownership that also brought about the land privatisations that
transformed a feudal countryside into a modern capitalist countryside.
The Enclosures Acts of the 1760s was a series of laws that shifted agricul-
tural production from smaller subsistence models (using common grazing
areas) to larger estates that could systematically implement the more pro-
ductive farming techniques of crop rotation (Fussell 1984, 15). They
removed the rights of common people to farm common lands and priva-
tised these lands so that wealthier individuals could implement modern
farming methods at a larger scale. This had several consequences, from
increased economic productivity to increased economic inequality between
landowners and peasants, and a surplus of labour, which further fuelled
the Industrial Revolution (Fussell 1984, 58). Land ownership was consoli-
dated into the hands of the rural aristocracy, who transformed some sub-
sistence farmers into waged employees, and pushed others to find work in
the cities (Fussell 1984, 15; Copley 1994, 50; Modiano 1994, 208; Roskill
1997, 92; Macarthur 2007, 7). The consolidation of land ownership facil-
itated the creation of vast private gardens, the dramatic remodelling of the
English countryside, and the pastoral visions that are at the core of the
modern notion of ‘landscape’.
For these wealthy farmers, Picturesque design theory became a fashion-
able way to transform the landscape. Inspired by the Dutch and Flemish
paintings they had been collecting, local landowners/Picturesque theo-
rists advocated that British gardens should be built in a rustic manner, not
looking ‘designed’ like the geometrical topiary of the French, but reach-
ing for an almost invisible aesthetic, something that looked like it had
always been there, and something that could both aesthetically and ethi-
cally justify this new balance of ownership and control. Picturesque theo-
rist William Gilpin wrote in 1794, “we must ever recollect that nature is
most defective in composition; and (it) must be a little assisted” (Gilpin
1794). Despite their naturalistic ethos, these improvements were often
quite dramatic, including hills and lakes as well as artificial ruins (known as
‘follies’), and a peculiar type of fence known as a ‘ha-ha’, which was a ditch
that could prevent livestock from wandering off the property but could
not be seen from the perspective of the house, giving the landowner a
visual impression of a boundless property (Fussell 1984, 16; Schama
1995, 539).
From around the 1970s, Marxist material scholarship emphasised that
in addition to studying the formal qualities of Picturesque gardens and
paintings, we need to understand that this movement was partly an attempt
to morally justify the mass privatisation of public lands. Comparative lit-
erature scholar Raimonda Modiano writes: [there was] “no way of ignor-
ing the fact that the major aestheticians of the Picturesque were wealthy
landowners and that their ability to reserve vast amounts of land for the
enjoyment of the Picturesque views was made possible by the profits they
drew from enclosures” (Modiano 1994, 208). Ian Macarthur connects
the process of landscape image composition, and dividing the image sur-
face in “parallel thirds” to structure landforms such as water, mountains,
and distant horizons, to a manifestation of an “aesthetic of ownership”
(Macarthur 2007, 197) and that the process of assimilating a physical
environment into this conception of landscape automatically communi-
cates a sense of property, because it requires the viewer to identify as sepa-
rate from what they are perceiving (rather than being engulfed, surrounded,
or part of it, as one might find in the immersive patterned abstractions of
14 P. NELSON
Western Desert painting in Australia). For Macarthur, this conception of

landscape is inseparable from the process of image-making, and making
modern landscape images implies some form of commodification, turning
the environment into something that can be identified, owned, and con-
sumed, either as a resource or as a visual experience (Macarthur 2007, 195).
While the Enclosures Acts of the 1760s had a dramatic influence over
the socio-economic relationships of rural England, the more abstract capi-
talist division between a commons and proprietary boundaries has seen
the notion of ‘enclosure’ take on a much wider significance in economic
theory. In his 2017 book Finite Media: Environmental Implications of
Digital Technologies, Sean Cubitt uses the ‘enclosure’ history of landscape
to discuss economic externalities in digital media technology, arguing that
just as Picturesque landscapes concealed their economic enclosures, our
digital images conceal their environmental enclosures. He suggests that
the environmental degradation brought about by resource extraction,
industrial waste, and atmospheric emissions can still be understood using
the metaphor of enclosure and that the modern sense of enclosure sepa-
rates landscapes that should be used for resource extraction from those
which should be aestheticised as ‘wildernesses’. There are those we travel
great distances to take photographs of, and those which we go to great
means to ignore, such as the open-cut mines that supply the minerals
needed for the cameras used to take the photos, or the unimportant for-
ests that continue to be cleared to meet the local needs of economic
expansion (Cubitt 2017). Just as Picturesque aesthetics sought to natu-
ralise property ownership, consumer technologies present a dual aesthetic
frontier where the design of the technology and the experiences it facili-
tates is coupled with the concealment of externalities, such as conflicts
over rare minerals, environmental contamination, or the End User Licence
Agreements that might ‘enclose’ the free labour of users from the private
profits generated by software platforms. Cubitt writes:
Land enclosures turned farmers into agricultural labourers; industrial enclo-

sures turned artisans into workers. The new change is so recent we have yet
to find our terminology, but we might say that it is changing knowing crea-
tures into ‘prosumers’ of knowledge: people who both produce and con-
sume it in relations no longer of shared information but of data exchange,
and therefore mediated by exchange value. What is clear is that today knowl-
edge is no longer something held as common sense between people, as
familiar as a hammer in the hand once was. Knowledge has become an
e nvironment confronting us as something apart: alien and inhuman, even

anti-human. (Cubitt 2017, 162)
When it comes to representations of landscape in computer games,

Cubitt argues that virtual worlds are upheld by their dependence on sup-
ply chains of resource extraction, as well as on the labour practices that go
into their production (Cubitt 2017, 158). This book argues that enclo-
sure and the objectifying gaze of landscape is simply the aesthetic language
that has developed alongside the broader processes of industrialisation,
colonialism, and globalisation. I am not making a moral or ethical judge-
ment that what we find in computer games is particularly good or bad, I
am simply trying to find a balanced description of what they might be, in
a way that an art historian might help us see the deeper significance of
cultural works in their own context. For the reader of this book, I hope we
can find pleasure in being able to reflect on the beauty and complexity of
computer games when we zoom out and try to look at them as if they are
landscapes, the cultural texts that describe us and how we relate to
the world.
The Romantic
While the Picturesque was more concerned with a secular economic ratio-
nalisation of landscape, the Romantic landscapes of the nineteenth cen-
tury had a more religious and metaphysical mission. For Romantic
landscape painters such as Caspar David Friedrich, landscapes were a place
where the abject danger of the Swiss Alps or the imperceptible vastness of
the ocean could eclipse the artificiality of the factory and the rituals of the
church and return oneself to the humility of the divine (Rewald 2001, 36)
or even experience the sublime, as described by Immanuel Kant and
Edmund Burke (Punter 1994, 220). The Romantic desire to escape the
scientific objectification of enlightenment culture and find God in the wil-
derness is also a relatively modern development. Scientific objectification,
the optical developments in telescopes and microscopes, and the new sys-
tems of standardised measures to systematise and rationalise the world
were extended by European nations in their exploration, cartography, and
colonisation (Descola 2013, 40–1). Anthropologist Philippe Descola
argues that this period more than any other led to a radical distinction
between nature and culture. The Copernican revolution, the Cartesian
rationalisation of space, and the development of lens-based optics led to a
16 P. NELSON
privileging of the visual, and projection of these concepts both conceptu-

ally and geopolitically via European colonialism. Of this process,
Descola writes:
Nature, now dumb, odour-free, and intangible, had been left devoid of life.
Gentle Mother Nature was forgotten, and Nature, the cruel stepmother,
had disappeared; all that remained was a ventriloquist’s dummy, of which
man could make himself, as it were, the lord and master. (Descola 2013, 41)
Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes that the European concept of ‘wilder-

ness’ also shifted dramatically during this period, once a signifier for chaos
and the realm of demons in the Classical period, the modern Romantics
transformed the concept of wilderness into a desirable relief from the
expanding Industrial world. Tuan writes:
Images are reversed so that the wilderness stands for order (ecological order)
and freedom whereas the central city is chaotic, a jungle ruled by social out-
casts. Suburb, once perceived as the place for paupers and obnoxious trades,
has now greater prestige than the decaying city core. Time-honoured mean-
ings of ‘core’ and ‘periphery,’ ‘centre’ and ‘margin’ are reversed. (Tuan
1974, 248)
Art historian Timothy Mitchell argues that for German Romantic

painters such as Philip Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich (Fig. 2.1),
the desire to develop landscape painting into a spiritual language divorced
from codified religious orthodoxies is precisely a product of this exagger-
ated contrast between enlightenment empiricism and the sense of the
divine that this empiricism left behind (T. F. Mitchell 1977, 79–80). This
spiritual motivation later collided with geopolitics, and Friedrich’s land-
scapes became infused with a German nationalism set against the French
Revolution, later recognised by the Nazi party as “true Germanic art”
(T. F. Mitchell 1977, 9).
The Romantic view of landscape also played a fascinating role in the
colonial expansion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where dis-
tant lands and cultures were defined according to the desires of Europeans.
The artist William Hodges (1744–1797) accompanied James Cook on his
second voyage across the Pacific Ocean (1772–1775). Art historian Mark
Roskill describes Hodges’s painting A View Taken in the Bay of Oaite Peha
(Tahiti Revisited) (1775) as a sort of Romantic postcard for the European
investor, which filtered Tahiti through the language of landscape, where
Tahitian women are transformed into bathing nymphs, alluding to an
Fig. 2.1 Caspar David Friedrich, Ruins of Eldena, near Greifswald, 1825. Oil on
canvas. Old National Gallery, Berlin
Edenic island, a sexually liberated paradise and an economically fertile land

ringed by sublime mountains. Similar compositions would later be
repeated in the North American paintings by Hudson River school paint-
ers such as Thomas Cole (Roskill 1997, 97–401).
When studying the influence of Romanticism on artists working in
colonial territories such as California and the Yosemite Valley, Rebecca
Solnit writes that Christian Arcadian sentiment and burgeoning North
American nationalism are vital for understanding how landscape painting
helped redefine the conquered territories of Native Americans into a new
promised land within the aesthetic imagination of British Protestantism.
Solnit describes the rapid speed with which the Yosemite Valley was trans-
formed from an Indigenous stronghold, to a fierce battleground and then
into a Romantic tourist spectacle for the future of the North American
Californian landscape:
The citizens of the United States had laboured under a mighty inferiority
complex when they looked back at Europe. The European landscape was
given meaning by the long history that could be read in its names and ruins
18 P. NELSON
and monuments. The American landscape lacked all that to its newcomers.
Over the decades, a new Yankee credo arose, in which the landmarks of
Europe were evidence that the place was weary, spent, used, soiled almost;
the supposed newness of the U.S. demonstrated that it was fresh, young,
pure, a child of promise with its history all laid out before it, a tabula rasa on
which a heroic history would be inscribed. (Solnit 1994, 116–7)
She continues:
The United States of America has, ever since this strange upwelling of
nationalistic optimism, been distinguished by its amnesias, its sense of pro-
digious destiny, its looking ever forward and never back – and its frenzied
transformation of landscape into real estate. (Solnit 1994, 117)
Looking back at the North American Romantic paintings of Albert

Bierstadt (Fig. 2.2) the photographs of Carleton Watkins and ‘The Course
of Empire’ series by Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole (Fig. 1.2),
Solnit identifies the Romantic projection of primeval wilderness combined
with the melancholy of a paradise lost, a Utopian optimism of a perfectible
Fig. 2.2 Albert Bierstadt, Valley of the Yosemite, 1864. Oil on paperboard,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
American future made possible by the promised land of the New World.
By aesthetically characterising the indigenous Ahwahneechee people as
extinct by disease, warfare, or miscegenation, they could be mourned and
absorbed into the mythology of the landscape, whilst the environment
itself could be converted into a visual spectacle of American modernity
(Solnit 1994, 258). At the same time that the nearby Sierra Nevada was
being enthusiastically excavated by the California Gold Rush, Yosemite
was becoming a destination to experience the unspoiled beauty of the
North American landscape. The amnesia of these historical rebrandings of
wilderness and landscape continues to create new chains of consequence
today. Like many of Australia’s most agriculturally productive regions, the
Edenic meadows of the Yosemite Valley were not permanent features but
were man-made products of indigenous fire-farming.1 The colonial dis-
ruption of Ahwahneechee land management disturbed the germination of
pine cones from the giant sequoias which required fire, and much like in
Australia where I’m from, regular controlled burns have been replaced by
irregular catastrophic wildfires, which plague us to this day (Solnit
1994, 280).
Like my description of Picturesque landscapes, this quick overview of
Romanticism is not intended as a moral condemnation of entire periods of
art-making, it simply seeks to unpack what Schama wrote about
landscapes as social texts that reflect contextual histories back at us. This
summary is intended to acclimate us to seeing landscapes as both aesthetic
statements of visual beauty and layered encapsulations of historical
moments, where even the most breathtaking mountains can arise out of
the fertile soils of historical contradiction. As an avid hiker and ocean
swimmer, I can’t discount the breathtaking wonder of submitting myself
1
Almost 30 years after Solnit’s research, Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate On Earth simi-
larly catalogues how the Australian landscape, before the British invasion, was shaped by a
complex regime of controlled burning by Indigenous people (Gammage 2011). Like Solnit,
Gammage uses this history to point out that present-day national parks in Australia, much
like Yosemite, are very different landscapes compared to when they existed under Indigenous
management. In both Australia and North America, concepts such as ‘wilderness’ must be
understood as a European projection that requires the erasure of the history of indigenous
land management, and the recognition that the landscapes painted by colonial settlers often
depicted the results of indigenous land management practices, not Edenic promised lands.
20 P. NELSON
to cold and treacherous seas or a dizzying climb. But my knowledge of

landscape and historical context reveals the layers we are walking on, and
that perhaps my breath is being taken in a very particular way, or that my
attraction to certain places will derive from the inseparable fusion of my
biological preferences (I will later introduce Jay Appleton’s prospect and
refuge theory) and cultural conventions, some new, some ancient. I say
inseparable because if we are living in a physical environment that has been
reshaped by generations of humans, and assuming that this physical envi-
ronment, in turn, shapes us, separating our biological from our cultural
preferences in landscape becomes somewhat paradoxical. In 1992, Tim
Ingold wrote an explicit criticism of a materialist reading of landscape,
arguing that it is not a framework for perceiving the world, but simply for
interpreting it. He presents these materialist historical frameworks as
second-order rationalisations of first order experience—the experience of
landscape is not pre-determined by the existence of historical narratives,
but at the same time, it cannot be abstracted from them. Ingold writes:
Humans do not, in the ordinary course of life, experience the environment

as a ‘blank slate’, i.e. as space, awaiting the imposition of cultural order; but
rather as a structured set of affordances in the context of current action.
(Ingold 1992, 53)
On the one hand, Ingold situates landscape primarily in experience, but

on the other, acknowledges that this experience is ‘structured’ by the
affordances of context. In the landscape theory seminar, art historian
Maunu Häyrynen presents a similar compromise. Häyrynen writes:
Textual and phenomenological interpretations of landscape do not exclude

one another. The representable and the unrepresentable occur in constant
interaction, resulting in the historical stratification of both. While landscape
experience can hardly be totally free from ideological framing, representa-
tion of landscape has to relate somehow to the lived environment. (Häyrynen
2008, 177)
Hiking up a mountain peak, I cannot separate my exhaustion from the

beauty of the view, nor from my knowledge of the writings on such beauty,
nor the myriad postcards that have framed this view before me, which
flicker in my mind as I wipe the sweat from my brow. Sean Cubitt argues
that the post-Romantic nature we experience today is defined either by a

“pantheistic integration” or by an invented nostalgia for “an impossible
return to the formless state of nature” (Cubitt 2017, 28), putting both the
hiker and the computer game player in a tricky position. Just as we can
only experience the world within the parameters of our bodily senses, the
study of landscape implies that our aesthetic inheritance and our concep-
tual architecture travel along with us, structuring what we see.
Definitions of Landscape
Now that I have covered some contextual histories of landscape, I want to
introduce a few key definitions, which will be referred to throughout this
book. These definitions, like my definitions of computer games in Chap. 3,
will set up the language for the major analysis of this book. In 1984, geog-
rapher Dennis Cosgrove, in his book Social Formation and Symbolic
Landscape, gave the following definition of landscape:
Landscape represents a way of seeing – a way in which some Europeans have

represented to themselves and to others the world about them and their
relationships with it, and through which they have commented on social
relations. Landscape is a way of seeing that has its own history, but a history
that can be understood only as a part of a wider history of economy and
society; that has its own assumptions and consequences, but assumptions
and consequences whose origins and implications extend well beyond the
use and perception of the land. (Cosgrove 1998, xiv)
In 1994, art historian W. J. T. Mitchell offered the definition of land-

scape that, like Cosgrove, draws heavily on material relations and the his-
tory of imperialism. Mitchell writes:
1. Landscape is not a genre of art but a medium.

2. Landscape is a medium of exchange between the human and the
natural, the self and the other. As such, it is like money: good for
nothing in itself, but expressive of a potentially limitless
reserve of value.
3. Like money, landscape is a social hieroglyph that conceals the actual
basis of its value. It does so by naturalising its conventions and con-
ventionalising its nature.
22 P. NELSON
4. Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a repre-

sented and a presented space, both a signifier and a signified, both a
frame and what a frame contains, both a real place and its simula-
crum, both a package and the commodity inside a package.
5. Landscape is a medium found in all cultures.
6. Landscape is a particular historical formation associated with
European imperialism.
7. Theses 5 and 6 do not contradict one another.
8. Landscape is an exhausted medium, no longer viable as a mode of
artistic expression. Like life, landscape is boring, we must not say so.
9. The landscape referred to in Thesis 8 is the same as that of Thesis 6.
(W. J. T. Mitchell 1994, 5)
Mitchell argued that the physical environment is inseparable from the

process of representing it and that landscapes both as images and as the
physical environment itself should be understood as a feedback loop that
we are stuck inside of. Human activities shape the physical environment,
and the physical environment shapes human activities. Landscape presents
the physical environment as a thing or something that can be looked at,
yet at the same time, does a paradoxically good job of encoding entire
histories connected to this way of seeing. Geographer Gillian Rose argues
that whilst Cosgrove and Mitchell’s definitions re-inject the historical con-
texts that formal analyses might have overlooked, they miss the varying
positions of subjectivity also encoded in landscapes. Rose points out that
the explorer and the empiricist looking onto the landscape might see
things very differently according to gender or ethnicity (Rose 1993, 7).
Rose writes:
Masculinist rationality is a form of knowledge which assumes a knower who

believes he can separate himself from his body, emotions, values, past and so
on so that he and his thoughts are autonomous, context-free and objective.
Many feminists see this desire for autonomy as typical of the master subject,
but the assumption of an objectivity untainted by any particular social posi-
tion allows this kind of rationality to claim itself as universal. (Rose
1993, 6–7)
Rose offers simple geographical examples, such as how the open space
of an empty street can become an oppressive space when a sense of
detached safety is replaced with feelings of threat or danger, to the point
where space becomes “an enemy itself” (Rose 1993, 143), pointing out
that the implicit removal of the body found in empiricism can lead to a
male-biased reading of space. Like Yi-Fu Tuan, Casey, and other geogra-
phers influenced by the philosophy of phenomenology, Rose re-inserts the
body as a critical consideration for how we understand the meaning of a
landscape. As we will see later, the body and the lack thereof in computer
games can provide a fascinating way to step aside and see the vision of the
world that computer games are presenting to us. In place of a homoge-
nous subject position, Rose argues that notions such as space, place, loca-
tion, cartography, and landscape should be characterised by what she calls
“paradoxical space”, that which is “lived, experienced and felt” and pro-
duces “radically heterogeneous geometries” (Rose 1993, 140).
In the early 1970s, geographer David Harvey focused on economic
relationships and social processes to destabilise the notion that landscapes,
both physical and represented, can be understood by formal relationships
between objects in the neutral container of Cartesian space (as was
espoused, e.g., by the Picturesque theorist William Gilpin). Instead,
Harvey argues that ‘place’ as experienced by the body, produces ‘space’
according to the material and historical position of the observer (Harvey
1973, 306). The Marxist revision of space not only challenged the notion
of space as a neutral absolute container but also sought to contextualise
Cartesian space as itself the result of material historical processes. In The
Production of Space (1974) Henri Lefebvre argues that the mathematical
system of absolute space of Descartes and Spinoza obscures how space
actually functions (Lefebvre 1991 [1974], 9). As an example of how
Cartesian space is culturally constructed in the landscape, Lefebvre
describes how perspectival representation partly derived from patterns in
land ownership developed in the Italian countryside during the thirteenth
century. The mêtayage system of agriculture, where production was incen-
tivised by redistributing a share of agricultural produce to mêtayers (for-
mer serfs) was introduced to meet the demand for produce coming from
the increased population of town-dwellers. The local division of architec-
tural space, from the houses of the mêtayers to the mansions of the land-
owners, and the delineation of rural properties using straight rows of
cypress trees, created a particular rural space that lent itself to converging
perspective lines and the Cartesian plotting of a landscape environment in
two dimensions, required for a typical abstract spatial conception. Whilst
this is only one of many contingent factors, Lefebvre argues that even the
scientific invention of perspectival drawing cannot be disentangled from
24 P. NELSON
particular socio-economic relations within the landscape (Lefebvre 1991

[1974], 78). The following passage from Lefebvre summarises his argu-
ment for how a social space should be understood as a result of a contin-
gent series of interactions:
A social space cannot be adequately accounted for either by nature (climate,

site) or by its previous history. Nor does the growth of the forces of produc-
tion give rise in any direct causal fashion to a particular space or a particular
time. Mediations and mediators have to be taken into consideration: the
actions of groups, factors within knowledge, within ideology, or within the
domain of representations. Social space contains a great diversity of objects,
both natural and social, including the networks and pathways, which facili-
tate the exchange of material things and information. Such ‘objects’ are thus
not only things but also relations. As objects, they possess discernible pecu-
liarities, contour and form. Social labour transforms them, rearranging their
positions within spatiotemporal configurations without necessarily affecting
their materiality, their natural state (as in the case, for instance, or an island,
gulf, river or mountain). (Lefebvre 1991 [1974], 77)
For Lefebvre, space is a political construction, borne out of the experi-

ence of individuals and their social practice. It is not a neutral Cartesian res
extensa;2 it is the emergent fabric weaved from “the exchange of material
things and information” (Lefebvre 1991 [1974], 77). Space is not the
neutral interval between objects, it is the politically charged interval that
results from social-spatial practice and ultimately stems from the experi-
ence of the body. Tuan’s work in human geography made a similar case for
space as a product of human experience and sought to position the body
as the fundamental locus of this experience. In reference to the phenom-
enology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Tuan positioned the body as the
anthropocentric locus around which spatial prepositions are developed (a
book is on a table rather than a table being under a book due to the logical
relationship both objects have with the human body) (Tuan 1974, 45)
Tuan used this approach to argue that geography should be based on the
shifting relationships that societies and individuals have to the notion of
2
In The Production of Space, Lefebvre criticises the notion of infinitely extendable abstract
space implied by René Descartes’s concept of res extensa. In Descartes’s ontology, res extensa
(translated as ‘extended thing’) exists in binary opposition to res cogitans, which refers to
consciousness or the non-physical mind, typically associated with dualist or idealist philoso-
phy (Lefebvre 1991 [1974], 39).
‘place’ and how this shapes the political and social status of their spatial
fabric. For example, Tuan describes how rectilinear architecture, whether
as urban structures or the orthogonal division of rural properties corre-
lates to the tendency of individuals to perceive shapes on a flat place, such
as a parallelogram, or indeed a straight line as an extension into a hypo-
thetical space (Tuan 1974, 76).
Given that I have been discussing how landscape experience produces a
particular kind of ‘space’, it is worth mentioning two influential and
related theories that present landscape through an instrumental biological
or militaristic experience. Jay Appleton’s 1975 book The Experience of
Landscape used John Dewey’s philosophy of aesthetic experience to derive
what he termed the ‘habitat’ and ‘prospect-refuge’ theories of landscape
experience. Habitat theory states that the aesthetic enjoyment of a land-
scape derives from the perceived potential of an environment as providing
safety and sustenance. The prospect-refuge theory states that aesthetic
enjoyment of a landscape derives from the perceived ability to safely survey
an environment without being seen yourself. According to Appleton,
landscape elements can be encoded with remnants of these biological
qualities, which collectively contribute to the aesthetic experience of a par-
ticular landscape (Appleton 1975, 63).
Appleton’s focus on a sort of survival-based instrumentality can also be
seen in the work of philosopher Paul Virilio. Influenced by Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenology, Virilio developed a theory of landscape-based on
war and the military gaze. In War and Cinema: The Logistics of Vision
(1989) and The Vision Machine (1994), Virilio outlined a theory of land-
scape based around spatial dominance, the line of sight, and a theory of
military optics that linked modernist architecture to technologies such as
the lens, the camera, and the moving image. In contrast to Marxist mate-
rialist accounts of landscape as value and commodity, Virilio focused on
speed and the ‘war machine’ as the dominant force in the landscape,
towards which production, the market and the state are subservient
(Virilio 1994, 3).
Within this whirlwind round-up of theories of landscape and spatial
experiences, what emerges is a paradoxical tension between whether physi-
cal landscapes and their visual representations are to be understood as
texts, via art history or cultural studies, or as experiences of the body, via
phenomenology. The two quotes below, the first from James Elkins and
the second from Rachel Ziady DeLue are taken from a 2007 debate on
landscape, and summarise this tension quite well:
26 P. NELSON
Like the body, landscape is something we inhabit without being different

from it: we are in it, and we are it…the object isn’t bound by our attention,
it binds us. (Elkins 2008, 69)
The landscape is always ‘for us,’ since we construct it; but it seems to me
that one of the things that a phenomenological reading allows us to do is to
break down the subject-object relation, to break down the idea of landscape
as a view. It is about lived experience, rather than ‘me-it,’ or self and other.
That is one of the things the phenomenological has to offer: landscape as a
thing that we live within. (Ziady DeLue 2008, 104)
Whether landscapes are texts to be studied or experiences that unfold is

exactly the problem we will find in the next chapter on computer games.
Are games texts that are composed of files and processes that can be stud-
ied objectively, or are they experiences that change every time they are
played? When preparing for this book, I repeatedly encountered the use of
experiential frameworks as a tool of primary analysis. I start with the expe-
rience of playing the game and worked back from there. But I also needed
to find a way to contextualise this experience in order that it was not so
esoteric that a second person playing the same game could sympathise and
resonate with the insights I identified, but no so deterministic, following
Ingold, that my historical and contextual worldview was pre-determining
the experience in front of me. I wanted to make claims that, should some-
one else play the game, I could feel reasonably confident that they could
see what I was talking about, and therefore we could agree that this
method can help us enjoy some deeper truths about these marvels of con-
temporary culture. In landscape studies, I was particularly taken by the
works of anthropologists Ingold and Christopher Tilley. In Place, Paths
and Monuments: A Phenomenology of Landscape (1994), Tilley offers a
framework for analysing landscape according to the different levels of spa-
tial understanding that arise from landscape experience, which comprise
somatic space, perceptual space, existential space, architectural space and
cognitive space (Tilley 1994, 15–17). I found that these five spatial layers
provide a practical set of questions with which one can analyse the experi-
ence of place, space, and landscape, and as I show in the next chapter, can
be converted into an interesting way to analyse the meaning of computer
games when experienced as landscapes.
References
Appleton, Jay. 1975. The Experience of Landscape. Landscape Planning. London
and New York: Wiley.
Casey, Edward S. 2002. Representing Place: Landscape Painting & Maps.
Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.
Copley, Stephen. 1994. William Gilpin and the Black-Lead Mine. In The Politics of
the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. Stephen
Copley and Peter Garside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cosgrove, Denis E. 1998. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. 2nd ed.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Cubitt, Sean. 2017. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital
Technologies. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Daniels, Stephen, and Charles Watkins. 1994. Picturesque Landscaping and Estate
Management: Uvedale Price and Nathaniel Kent at Foxley. In The Politics of the
Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley
and Peter Garside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
DeLue, Rachael Ziady. 2008. Elusive Landscapes and Shifting Grounds. In
Landscape Theory, ed. Rachel Ziady De Lue and James Elkins. New York and
London: Routledge.
DeLue, Rachel, and James Elkins. 2008. Landscape Theory. New York and London:
Routledge.
Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press.
Elkins, James. 2008. Writing Moods. In Landscape Theory, ed. Rachel Ziady De
Lue and James Elkins. New York and London: Routledge.
Fussell, G.E. 1984. Landscape Painting and the Agricultural Revolution. London:
Pindar Press.
Gammage, Bill. 2011. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia.
Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Gilpin, William. 1794. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel;
and On Sketching; To Which Is Added a Poem on Landscape Painting. London:
Printed for R. Blamire.
Harvey, David. 1973. Social Justice and the City. London: Arnold.
Häyrynen, Mäunu. 2008. Assessment of Landscape Theory Roundtable Seminar.
In Landscape Theory, ed. Rachel Ziady De Lue and James Elkins. New York and
London: Routledge.
Ingold, Tim. 1992. Culture and the Perception of the Environment. In Bush Base:
Forest Farm, ed. E. Croll and D. Parkin. London: Routledge.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space. Edited by Donald
Nicholson-Smith. The Production of Space. 1991st ed. Oxford and Cambridge,
MMA: Blackwell.
28 P. NELSON
Macarthur, John. 2007. The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other

Irregularities. London: Routledge.
Mitchell, Timothy Frank. 1977. Philipp Otto Runge und Caspar David Friedrich:
A Comparison of Their Art and Theory. Doctoral thesis. Indiana University.
Mitchell, William John Thomas. 1994. Imperial Landscape. In Landscape and
Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press.
Mizutani, Takeshi, and Setsuko Nakamura. 1998. Dutch Influence on the
Reception and Development of Western-Style Expression in Early Modern
Japan. In 64th Annual Conference 64.
Modiano, Raimonda. 1994. The Legacy of the Picturesque: Landscape, Property
and the Ruin. In The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and
Aesthetics since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Punter, David. 1994. The Picturesque and the Sublime: Two Worldscapes. In The
Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, ed.
Stephen Copley and Peter Garside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rewald, Sabine. 2001. Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers. New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Rose, Gillian. 1993. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical
Knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Roskill, Mark. 1997. The Languages of Landscape. University Press, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. London: Fontana Press.
Solnit, Rebecca. 1994. Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the
American West. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Tilley, Christopher. 1994. Place, Paths and Monuments, a Phenomenology of
Landscape. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes,
and Values. New York: Columbia University Press.
Virilio, Paul. 1989. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Vision. London and
New York: Verso.
———. 1994. Bunker Archeology. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
CHAPTER 3
What Is a Computer Game?
The ability to propel ourselves into the rich visual environments of com-
puter games makes it natural to start thinking about them as landscapes.
We can compare what these worlds look like to the vistas we find in paint-
ings and photographs, where a view of the world is framed on a flat sur-
face, and to films, where moving images and moving cameras bring us into
a represented world with its own diegetic time and space. But computer
games offer us something different, we can control the camera, interact
inside them, make decisions, and have these decisions affect the environ-
ment, our position in it, and even how we relate to other people occupy-
ing the same virtual world, as in the case of a multiplayer game. Computer
game studies have struggled with the visual comparisons between games
and film and the structural comparisons to narrative literature, partly
because there are just so many different experiences that we house under
the label ‘computer game’ that in some cases, certain comparisons make a
lot of sense, and in others, they make no sense at all (consider the narrative
significance of Tetris (Pajitnov 1984) versus The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
(Bethesda 2011)). If we remove the word ‘computer’, we can start to see
the problem more clearly. It would be strange to analyse a game of soccer
or chess as a film or an image, even if we were watching it on a screen. We
could retrospectively read a narrative struggle between the players of the
game relative to the rules, contextualised by biographical specifics of each
team, but it would be a stretch to read this narrative in the design of the

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37634-4_3
30 P. NELSON
jerseys of the stylistic carvings of the individual chess pieces. In this chap-
ter, I give a brief overview of how more sophisticated versions of these
comparisons have played out amongst scholars who study computer
games, and offer a framework that I believe is reasonably congruent with
what I have just discussed concerning the idea of landscape. From these
two perspectives, I outline a method for analysing computer games as
landscapes and hopefully justify my assertion that computer games could
be the paradigmatic form of landscape in contemporary media.
A Game Must Be Played

To simplify things, I will leave the word ‘computer’ aside for a moment
and focus on the word ‘game’. In Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals,
Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman offer a useful overview of various defini-
tions of games, and how in the English language, the term ‘game’ exists in
a dynamic relationship with the term ‘play’. Salen and Zimmerman’s defi-
nition of a game is as follows: “a system in which players engage in artifi-
cial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (Salen
and Zimmerman 2004, 80). Within this definition, they argue that a game
should be understood according to how players relate to a system that
includes a set of rules that distinguishes the game from real life, what
Johan Huizinga (1964 [1955]) called the ‘magic circle’. The rules struc-
ture the artificial conflict or competition, and the quantifiable outcomes,
such as points, or a win/lose condition, separate this type of ‘play’ from
less structured or formal activities, such as kicking a ball around a parking
lot or playing with your food (Salen and Zimmerman 2004, 172). Another
way of looking at a game is from the perspective of the player rather than
the rules and mechanics. In his book The Grasshopper: Games, Life, Utopia
(1978), philosopher Bernard Suits wrote that a game exists when players
decide to treat something like a game when they approach it with a “lusory
attitude”, and when they accept the restrictions of the rules to satisfy their
desire to play. According to Suits, a game is not a formally defined object,
but an experience that exists when players approach it with a lusory atti-
tude (Suits 1978, 35). In this definition, a game is not a matter of a formal
description, it is an experience. Game scholar Olli Leino adapts Suits’s
formulation to argue that when a player decides to play, every object takes
on a new meaning, they become objects that can help the player survive in
the game. Here, Leino is adapting Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential philoso-
phy to argue that objects inside games have a sort of ‘existential ludology’,
3 WHAT IS A COMPUTER GAME? 31
where their meaning relies on how they might help or hinder the ability of
the player to survive in the game. Leino defines this ‘gameplay condition’
as follows:
Given that I desire to play, and am willing to demonstrate the lusory atti-
tude, the materiality of the game artefact imposes on me a freedom of choice
of which I am responsible in my choices. (Leino 2010, 133–4)
From this perspective, games and the objects inside them have specific
meanings for players compared to passive observers examining screenshots
and recordings, just as a soccer ball means something different to the
player, and spectatorship means something different to a sports fan com-
pared to someone who does not understand the game. Put simply, a com-
puter game is more than just what it looks like, and its most intimate
meanings will be derived by those who are playing.1
Using Computers to Play Games

When we bring the word ‘computer’ back into the mix, a few things start
to change. Unlike regular games where players have to rearrange physical
tokens to uphold the rules and the game state, a computer can do all of
this automatically and to a greater degree of complexity, interpreting
player actions relative to rules and providing audiovisual feedback to
advance the state of the game, often before players have understood
exactly what the rules even are (Juul 2005, 6). Due to the complexity of
how computer game software interacts with rules and players, Lars
Konzack (2002) defines computer games using a series of discrete layers,
to isolate and define key features. Konzack’s layers are hardware, program
code (software), functionality, gameplay, meaning, referentiality, and the
socio-cultural layer (Konzack 2002).
Konzack’s ‘functionality’ layer is largely derived from Aarseth’s
Cybertext, where the computer game is situated in a broader category of
other interactive texts. In the inaugural issue of the Game Studies journal,
game scholar Espen Aarseth argued that because the term ‘computer
game’ applies to such a wide variety of media that defining computer
1
This is not to discount the notion of spectatorship, which is especially relevant for ESports
and the spectacle of Let’s Play YouTube videos, both of which will be discussed in Chaps. 4
and 6 respectively.
32 P. NELSON
games using a consistent set of formal criteria, or defining them, as a

medium is a fool’s errand (Aarseth 2001). In Aarseth’s book Cybertext:
Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Aarseth proposed a framework for
understanding various configurable and dynamic textual forms, which he
dubbed “ergodic literature”. In this formulation, like any form of repre-
sentation, a text is dependent on its medium. It comprises information
that may or may not make sense to the reader and this information com-
prises signs “as they appear to the reader” (scriptons), and signs “as they
exist in the text” (textons). In the case of a computer game, textons might
be in-game objects such as a 3D model of a barrel or a sound file, whereas
a scripton would be that barrel exploding in front of the eyes of the player
(Aarseth 1997, 62). For Aarseth, a computer game is a “cybertext”, which
is a mechanically organised text that requires the reader to actively engage
with non-trivial effort to derive meaning (Aarseth 1997, 1). Aarseth uses
the physics term “ergodic” to describe how the reader of a cybertext (or
the player of a computer game) traverses, or moves through a cybertext. A
cybertext, like a computer game, will always appear slightly different, as
the scriptons will appear differently depending on which moves the
reader makes.
Rules, Mechanics, Simulations, and Interpretation

Due to the complexity of rules that a computer game can maintain, vari-
ous game scholars have suggested that computer games make meaning via
a sort of simulation, where the rules function to communicate the meta-
phorical meaning of the game to the player, what Ian Bogost (2007) called
‘procedural rhetoric, such as the correlation between U.S. airstrikes and
insurgent recruitment in the Iraq War in the game September 12th, or the
visions of urban planning outlined in the rules of the SimCity series. In
2001, game designer Gonzalo Frasca proposed that rather than telling
narrative stories, computer games simulate concepts for players who can
experience and experiment with them (Frasca 2001). The complexity in
this argument, and as we will find in my analysis of games like Counter-
Strike, is that often the rules of a game simulate something different from
what is rendered on the screen of the player (I suggest that Counter-Strike
shares more rules with tennis, rather than the counter-terrorism opera-
tions visualised on screen). Like Frasca, Bogost located the procedure of
the game as the point at which the game designer can make a persuasive
argument, which the player experiences via what is seen on the screen.
Bogost argued that when what is seen on the screen is congruent with the
procedural rhetoric, a game can make a successful representation, mea-
sured by the degree to which the player is persuaded by the argument
being made by the game designer. According to this line of thinking, a
‘serious game’ might not be so serious if how it appears on the screen is
trivial, but an existing game can be ‘reskinned’ with more serious visuals
and a new procedural meaning can be generated (Bogost 2007, 49,
238–41). One of the problems with the procedural rhetorics argument is
that the player might not act or interpret meanings as the designers
intended, as this would constitute, as Miguel Sicart points out, an autho-
rial fallacy. Following the logic of Roland Barthes (“the unity of a text is
not in its origin, it is in its destination … the birth of the reader must be
ransomed by the death of the Author”) (Barthes 1967, 6), Sicart writes
“against procedurality an army of players stand and play, breaking the
rules, misunderstanding the processes, appropriating the spaces of play
and taking them somewhere else, where not even the designer can reach”
(Sicart 2011). While Sicart’s repost to Bogost is reasonable, I think we can
take it with a grain of salt and imagine a plausible set of assumptions by
which a player willingly engages as a player. If they throw the game con-
troller across the room or pour ketchup into their console, perhaps they
have started playing something else.
A more fine grained and pragmatic solution to how players might inter-
pret simulated meaning in a computer game traces back to what Leino
dubbed ‘the gameplay condition’, or simply the desire to stay in the game.
In the paper Emotions about the Deniable/Undeniable: Sketch for a
Classification of Game Content as Experienced (2007) Leino makes the
distinction between computer game representations that have a deniable
or undeniable significance to the player—do they help or hinder the player
to stay in the game. Leino defines this distinction as follows:
Undeniable meanings are the ones the player cannot deny without decreas-
ing his possibilities to act in the game, e.g. the importance of making it to
the next checkpoint in Turbo Outrun. Deniable meanings are the ones
which can be denied without such consequences, like the shape of Bismarck’s
moustache in Civilization IV. (Leino 2007, 116)
There is a hierarchical elegance in this distinction. While there can be

interesting objects with no ludic value to the player, their meaning can be
objectively separated from those that a player cannot ignore such as a
34 P. NELSON
dangerous enemy or a vital health pack, and these differences will be con-
firmed at the programming layer of the game. The existential drive of the
player to stay in the game can give us a fixed point of meaning, around
which we can balance other interpretations the player might make relative
to whatever the game designers might have intended.
This division between what is seen on the screen (what the graphics
card renders as a moving sequence of still frames) and the mechanics that
the player must resist to stay in the game are what Sara Mosberg Iversen
refers to as the rendered spectacle versus the abstract mechanical rules.
Iversen proposes that the dualism of a mechanics layer and a representa-
tional layer be understood according to ludic and thematic representa-
tions. Ludic representations exist as “the state machine with its objectives,
legal and illegal actions, points, and measurements of success” and the-
matic representations refer to the story fragments that exist in characters
and environments, driven by functional characteristics, but “interpreted
within the frame of everyday cultural significance” (Iversen 2009, 80–1).
Borrowing from the literary concept of the implied reader, Iversen argues
that computer game representation on ludic and thematic levels must be
triangulated by the implied player, who is both an assumed player pro-
duced by the expectations of the game mechanics and a subjective, or
‘situated’, individual who parses what they experience in the game and its
perceived cultural significance relative to their experience of the world
(Iversen 2009, 41–58).
Avatars and Game Spaces

As geographer Gillian Rose pointed out, the same landscape can be expe-
rienced differently depending on relevant variations in the individual, such
as age, gender, physicality, and so on. The word ‘avatar’ derives from the
Sanskrit for a deity descended to earth in bodily form. It was transformed
by Neal Stephenson in the book Snow Crash to refer to the electronic bod-
ies that players use to inhabit a virtual world. Following Rose’s logic of
landscapes, it would be fair to guess that different avatars would offer a
different experience of a computer game landscape. Can the avatar run,
and if so, can they get tired, can they fall over, or do they simply glide
forwards endlessly with the push of a joystick or keystroke (Figs. 3.1
and 3.2)?
Fig. 3.1 Falling over in QWOP, 2008. Bennet Foddy
Fig. 3.2 Falling over in Death Stranding, 2019. Kojima Productions

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
laulettavan ja sulosesti soiteltavan; kauniimmasti ja sulosemmasti
kun maalliseen tapaan. Ihastuksessani toivottelin kotkan siipiä niille
autuallisille asuntomajoille lentääkseni. Mutta vieras sano, ei muuta
tietä sinne olevan, kun luukujen kautta sillalta. Wielä lausu hän
sanoen: "noita ikikukostavia saaria on usiampia, kun tähtejä taivaalla
ja niiden takana toisia epälukusia, sillä meri ulottuu taemmaksi, kun
voisit ajatella'kan. Kaikki ovat ne hurskasten asunmajoja kuoleman
jälkeen. Heidän elämänsä ja ansionsa määräävät paikan, kulle
joutuvat. Kuta puhtaammat, jumallisemmat heidän ajatuksensa ovat,
sitä kauniimmalla, ihanammalla saarella saavat asuntonsa. Oh
Mirtsa! eikös nuo autualliset nurmet maksa suurimmanki
ahkeroimisen vaivaa? Onko siis elämä, jonka läpitse senlaiseen
onnellisuuteen vaellat, mitättömänä pidettävä, ylenkatsottava?
Taikka pitäisikö peljätä ja kauhistua kuolemata, joka viepi ihmisen
niin autuasten maailmaan? Taikka olisiko oikein ja kohtuullisesti tehty
nurista ja valitella pian ylimenevistä vaivoista ja kärsimisistä, jotka
kuitenki ainoastaan ovat aiotut ja määrätyt tekemään ihmistä
kelvolliseksi tulevan suuren ja ikuisen onnensa nautitsiäksi? Emmä
siis enää mahda'kan toiste kuulla sinun ihmisen elämän
mitättömyydestä ja turhuudesta valittavan!"
Werrattomalla ihastuksella silmäilin vielä kauan niitä onnellisiä

saaria. Wiimmen rukoilin vierastani näyttämään minulle toisenki
puolen merestä, joka vielä oli pilven peitteessä. Kun vieras sihen ei
virkkanut mitänä, niin olin kertoa rukoukseni, vaan samassa oli
kadonnut vieras silmistäni, enkä nähnyt enää laksoa, en virtaa, en
siltaa, en merta, en saaria enkä mitänä muuta paitsi taivaan päälläni,
vuoren allani ja tavalliset maisemat ympäristöllä.
Waatteista.
Waatteista pidämmä parahana, mikä muuten on hyödyttäväisin, ei

niin, mikä ainoasti on silmän kaunis. Niiden tulee varjella ruumis
kylmältä, suojella ruumiin tavallista huovuntaa (transpiratio) jonka
tukahtumisesta monta vikaa, sulku- ja loka-tauteja, luuvaloja,
kuivatauteja, sisällisiä polttoja, keuhkovikoja, vesitauteja, ruusu
vikoja, ryyhtynäisiä ja monta muuta vaivaa saavat alkunsa. Ei ylen
paksut ja lämpimät, eikä ylen hienot, keviät ja ohuet vaatteet ole
erittäin kiitettävät, vaan jotka vuosiaikain ja säävaihetten, tottumisen
ja töiden suhten ei millonkan vaivaa eikä rasita ruumista. Ei talvella
ainoasti vaan kylmempinä kesäaikoinaki on tarpeellinen pukea
lämpimämmästi ja kesäheltteessäki varoa, ettei semminki hikisellä,
kuumalla eli palavalla ruumiilla avorinnoin ja alastomia eli
vahäturvattuin mahoin paljaalle maalle nukuta. Aina lapsuudesta
viluun tottua on kyllä hyödyllinen, vaan useasti vaarallinen enää
vanhemmalla iällä siihen totuttaatse. Ylen ahtaat vaatteet estävät
veren liikunnon ruumiissa; liian väljat eivät lämmitä tarpeeksi. Ei pidä
kesävaatteisiin keväillä, eikä syksyllä talvivaatteisiin ylen aikasin eikä
yhtäkkiä ruveta. Semminki iällisten ihmisten tulee tämä asia panna
muistoon.
Pää, huoneessa asuen, ei kaipaa peitettä jos ei peräti kulju,

hiukseton. Siitä että tuvissa lakki päässä elellään, saadaan monasti
päärupia, silmä- ja korvavikoja, nuoha-ja röhkä-tautia, muita
pääkipuja ja kohtauksia.
Paksut, lämpimät kaulahuivit syyttävät kurkku- ja rintavaivoja; hyvä

ja hyödyllinen on siis jo lapsesta totuttaa kaulan vilua kärsimään.
Mahan turvaamisessa ja lämpimänä pitämisessä ollaan rahvaassa
kovin huolitonna, koska sitä toisinaan ei peitetä kun paljaalla paialla
matalain housuin ja lyhyen takin rajalla. Maha, varsinki hikisenä, on
arka vilulle ja sen palelemisesta saadaan moniaki tauteja, erittäin
kohoja, vatsaväänteitä, reväsimiä, punatauteja ja muita ulkosia.
Samati ollaan jalkainki turvaamisessa. Kylmemmällä ajalla ei

pitäisi avojaloin eikä märillä jaloilla millonkan astua. Matkoilla ja
muissa tiloisa, joissa jalat helposti kastuvat, pitäisi aina olla kuivia,
pestyjä sukkia varalla. Sangen vaarallinen on lämpimin jaloin kylmillä
kivillä ja märillä lattioilla kävellä, kuni liiatenki lapsilla ja piioilla on
tapana ja josta heille tulevatki alituiset yskänsä.
Puhtaat ja kuivat vaatteet suojelevat parahiten ruumiin lämmintä ja

ovat terveydelle otollisimmat. Likasten, hiestä taikka muuten märkäin
vaatetten siaan pitää viivyttelemättä kuivia, puhtaita muutettaman, ei
kylmiä, eikä kylmässä huoneessa tahi tuulessa, avointen, ovien ja
ahkunain vaihella, kuni, pahasti kyllä, palkollisitta pyhäaamuilla on
tapana pukea. Hyödyllinen on myös erittäin yöpaidat pitää. Päälle
viikon ei pidä yhdellä paidalla käydä ilman pesemättä, jos kohta se
viikon pidettyä ei vielä olisikan monen silmissä tarpeeksi likanen ja
pesemistä kaipaava.
Satuja.
1. Kissa ja Koira.
Kissa kuuli koiraa uskollisuudesta kiitettävaän ja vähä kadehtienki
lausu sentähden toiselle: "mikä uskollinen palvelia isännellesi sinä
olisit! makaat ulkona köllötät, taikka juoksentelet metsissä, taikka
haukkua rähiset ihmisiä — mutta minä, ka aina asun isäntäni
silmissä, enkä vaivaa hänen korviansa semmoisella rähinällä, kun
sinä, vaan naukuilen hälle suosioksi ja köyristelen selkääni hälle
kunnioksi." "Waiti mokoma, vastasi koira, pirtissä asumallasi,
naukuilemallasi ja selkäsi köyrystämisellä et tee isännällesi äyrinkän
hyvää; kiitä häntä, kun saat ruokasi, vaan elä kerskaile ansiostasi."
Ei ole kenelläkän meistä mitänä kerskattavaa.
2. Oinas ja Härkä.
Oinas muita lampaita väkevämpi jo viimmen luuli itsensä kaikkia

elämiä väkevämmäksi. Sillä toivolla kävi kerran härjänki käsiksi.
Waän härkä puskasi kerran, nosti sarvensa päässä oinaan korkialle
maasta, nakkasi siitä vasten ketoa ja heitti niin puolihenqissä
makaamaan. Siinä surkiassa tilassa taikka vähän tointuneempana
tapasi hänen eräs toinen lammas ja kysy: "no, veikkonen, missä nyt
olet ollut?" — "Opissa," vastasi oinas.
On Hiisi hyvimmälläi, jaloimmalla: Jumala.
3. Warpunen ja poikansa.
Warpusella oli pesä räystään ala. Eräs pojista, kun siivet vähäkän
kasvovat, heti yritteli lentämään. Waan vanhin varotteli, ei niille
luottaumaan, Wielä vahvistua tarvitsevan. Kerran vanhimman ruokaa
ulkona etsiessä lenteli tämä vähäkuuliainen lapsi kuitenki pesän
partaalla ja ja putosi viimmen maahan. Heti tapasivat hänen lapset,
ottivat kiinni, sitoivat rihman jalkaan ja kun minne'kän lentämään
yritteli, heti nykäsivät rihmasta jällen ja muutamassa nykäsemässä
katkesi jalkaki poloselta. Siteestä viimmenkän irtautunut koki lentää
ja pääsiki suurella työllä pesäänsä takasin. Waan ehkä henkiin
jäänyt, sai hän kuitenki kaiken elinajan jalkapuolena
tottelemattomuuttansa muistella.
Ei oppi ojahan kaaha, eikä tieto tieltä työnnä, neuo syrjähän

syseä.
taikka
Kunnioita isääsi ja äitiäsi, niin menestyt ja tulet

pitkäikäseksi.
Suomen kansan Arvutuksia.
[Ynnä monien muiden, outojen Arvutusten, Sanalaskuin ja

Sanojen kanssa, jotka mielelläni seuraavissa osissa olen
pranttäyttävä, Herra Komministeri Juoseppi Wilhelmi Durkmannilta
kerätyitä.]
1. Nykkii nyypää, kääree kääpää, pikku takkanen selässä.
2. Jänes juoksi jäätä myöten, hiippo, haappo hartioita.
3. Yöt kulkee, päivät kulkee, ei koskaan perille pääse.

4. Likka tonkkaa vetää, nahkiaista nauottaa.
5. Pikkunen kamari, usiampi akkuna, kun kuninkaan linnassa.
Osviittoja. 1. Rukkilapa. 2. Lumi jäällä. 3. Kello. 4. Korsteeni. 5.

Wingerpori.
Suomen kansan Sanalaskuja.
1. Ei ole hoppu hyväksi, eikä kiire kunniaksi.
Tosi kyllä taitaa se olla, ettei ylellinen hoppu ja kiire töissä edistä,
vaan kuitenki soisimma maamiestemme useinki liikkuvammasti
elelevän, kun tavallinen, eikä niin, että aika menee arvelossa, päivä
päätä väännellessä, taikka sillä tavalla kun entisen miehen, jolle
poika äkisti sisään juostuaan huusi: "isä, tulkaa auttamaan, susi vie
lampaan", vaan johon isä vastasi: "jahka ma pistän esinnä tupakkaa
piippuuni."
2. Henki on eläkkeen poika.
Seuraavassa kanssapuheessa kuultu: "Ainako on äänesi nuin

käriänä?" — "Ompa se kyllä" — "Pienuuestako se on ollut
laskeuksissa?" — "Saivat minun paremmallani ollessa keväillä aina
lohipatoja kahlaamaan. Siitä mullacääni turmeusi." — "Mikä oli
pakko ruveta siihen koiran virkaan (kahlaajaksi)?" — "Henki on
eläkkeen poika." (D-n).
3, 4. Kun ei nuorra viivykkiä, ei oo vanhana varoa.
Peräti vastoin sanotaan: nai'a nuorena pitäpi, ett' on vara

vanhanaki, ja myös näilläki sanoilla: saapi kaikkia katua, paitsi
nuorta naimistansa, aikasin alottamista. Millä puolella tässäki
asiassa oikuus, jääköön meiltä päättämättä. Waan sen toki
arvaammaki, ettei ole'kan paljo apua siitä, että nuori väki, tuskin
naimisikään päästyänsä, heti naiki, maikk' ei ole mitänä tavaraa
koottu uuden talouden alkeeksi. Olemma kuulleet mainittavan
muutamasta seurakunnasta, jossa oli senlainen keskinäinen
välipuhe ja suostumus toimeen saatu, ettei kenenkän naida, ennen
jonkun vähän tavaraa koottuansa, jolla voisi mähintäi vuoden elää.
Eikä saanut kukaan huoneesensa ottaa niitä, jotka tätä suostumusta
vaston naimisiin menivät. Emme tiedä, lie'kö toko oikein somelias
semmoinen suostumus ollut, vaan se on tiedoksemme tullut, että
samassa seurakunnassa oli tavallista vähemmin köyhiä ja
kerjäläisiä. Ja semmoisista sulhasmiehistä ei enää kuultu konsa
puhuttavan, joilla oli:
Lainalakki, lainatakki, lainakintahat käessä, lainakihlat kintahissa.
5. Onni orjana pitäpi, onni orjan käskiänä.
Jopa päätettäisiki, meidän joutavia loruaman, jos isäntäin onnen

rinnalla kiittäisimmä palkollisten onnea. Mutta usein kuitenki on
palkollinen isäntäänsä onnellisempi ja moniki palkollinen itse
isännäksi tultuaan, samassa tuli näkemään uusia vaivoja, outoja,
ennen tuntemattomia huolia ja murehia. Kuki virka, kuki onni
maailmassa on kiitettävä; joka ei tyydy yhteen, harvon tyytyy
toiseenkan.
6. Raha rikkahan kuluvi, pää menevi köyhän miehen. (Rikas pääsi
rahallansa, köyhä selkänahallansa).
Ennen oikeuden ja muun hallituksen epävakaisempia ollen taisi

niin välistä tapahtua'ki, kun sanalasku lausuu, vaan nykyaikoina jopa
lukisimma mahdottomaksi, niin konsa käydä. Monta muutai
sanalaskua on Suomalaisilla lain lumoamisesta, lainehtimasta,
lahjoista ja muista, joilla ennisaikana toki taisiki perustuksensa olla
niin meidän maassa, kun monessa muussai. Wanha Greikalainen
viisas aikoinansa vertasi lain hämähäkin verkkoon, johon sääsket ja
pienemmät kärpäset puuttuvat, vaan josta isommat kärpäset,
paarmat ja kovakuoriset lentävät lävitse, Wielä verkonki
mennessään särkien.
7. Isäntä olutta juopi, varsa varpuja purepi.
Niin kyllä useinki valitettavasti holhomma omia etujamme, toisen

etua ei muistaenkan.
*****
Ken tulevaksi vuodeksi tahtoo tätä kirjaa, pyytäköön

lähimmäisestä postikontuorista ja maksakoon samassa 3 Ruplaa 45
kopeikkaa paperirahassa, taikka toimittakoon itsellensä Oulusta,
jossa paikalla myödään 45:ttä kopeikkaa helpommalla. Tämän
vuoden panosta on vielä 200 kappaletta myömättä, joita saapi, ken
tahtoo, samaan hintaan. Jos joku tulevalla vuodella tahtoisi Suomen
kielellä kirjotettuja ja erittäinki suomalaisiin asioihin koskevia aineita
Mehiläiselle avuksi lähettää, niin vastaan otetaan ne
Kirjapränttääjältä, Herra C.E. Barckilta Oulussa.
Kajanista 15 Syyskuuta 1836.
Elias Lönnrot,
Läänin Lääkäri.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEHILÄINEN
1836 ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in
these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it
in the United States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of
this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept
and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and
may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the
terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of
the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as
creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research.
Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given
away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with
eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject
to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or
any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree
to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be
bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from
the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in
paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people
who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a
few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.
See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with
Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in
the United States and you are located in the United States, we do
not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing,
performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the
work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of
course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg™
mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely
sharing Project Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name
associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of
this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its
attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without
charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the
United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms
of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying,
performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this
work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes
no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in
any country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™
work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or
with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is
accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived

from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a
notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright
holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the
United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must
comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted

with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works posted
with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of
this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files containing a
part of this work or any other work associated with Project
Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you
provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work
in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in
the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that
s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and
discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project
Gutenberg™ works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™

electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe
and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating
the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may
be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to,
incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a
copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or
damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except

for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph
1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner
of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party
distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this
agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and
expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO
REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF
WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE
FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY
DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE
TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL,
PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE
NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you

discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it,
you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by
sending a written explanation to the person you received the work
from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must
return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity
that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a
replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work
electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to
give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in
lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may
demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the
problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in
paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted
by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the

Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability,
costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur:
(a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b)
alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project
Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of

Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.
It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and
donations from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a
secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help,
see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,

Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to

the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can
be freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the
widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small
donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax
exempt status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and
keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in
locations where we have not received written confirmation of
compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of
compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where

we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no
prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in
such states who approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make

any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of
other ways including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project

Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed

editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary

Computer Games As Landscape Art 1St Edition Peter Nelson Online Ebook Texxtbook Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Computer Games As Landscape Art 1St Edition Peter Nelson Online Ebook Texxtbook Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Computer Games As Landscape Art 1st

Edition Peter Nelson

Board Games as Media 1st Edition Paul Booth

Games of History Games and Gaming as Historical Sources

Make Games Pixel Art 1st Edition Derek Yu

Shifting Grounds Landscape in Contemporary Native

Open ing Spaces Design as Landscape Architecture 2nd

Games As A Service How Free to Play Design Can Make

The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art A History 1st Edition

Economics as Religion From Samuelson to Chicago and

ISBN 978-3-031-37633-7 ISBN 978-3-031-37634-4 (eBook)

University of Hong Kong for hosting my graduate study research and

3 What Is a Computer Game? 29

4 Half-Life 2: Could I Apocalypse? 57

7 Garry’s Mod: The Computer Game Becomes Photoshop139

Creative Works Cited179

Fig. 1.1 Thomas Gainsborough. 1748–1750. Mr and Mrs Andrews.

Fig. 4.3 Chases through the administrative architecture of canals in

The painting Mr and Mrs Andrews (Fig. 1.1) by Thomas Gainsborough

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

(Casey 2002, 162). This layering of interpretations reminds us that

environments suggest that it might be useful to examine how games reveal

I draw landscape parallels to Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of theme parks and

[T]he landscape may indeed be a text on which generations write their

In this introduction, I outline what I mean when I say ‘landscape’, what

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 9

association or partnership’. Whiston Spirn writes “there is a notion,

Western Desert painting in Australia). For Macarthur, this conception of

Land enclosures turned farmers into agricultural labourers; industrial enclo-

e­ nvironment confronting us as something apart: alien and inhuman, even

When it comes to representations of landscape in computer games,

privileging of the visual, and projection of these concepts both conceptu-

Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes that the European concept of ‘wilder-

Art historian Timothy Mitchell argues that for German Romantic

Edenic island, a sexually liberated paradise and an economically fertile land

Looking back at the North American Romantic paintings of Albert

to cold and treacherous seas or a dizzying climb. But my knowledge of

Humans do not, in the ordinary course of life, experience the environment

On the one hand, Ingold situates landscape primarily in experience, but

Textual and phenomenological interpretations of landscape do not exclude

Hiking up a mountain peak, I cannot separate my exhaustion from the

that the post-Romantic nature we experience today is defined either by a

Landscape represents a way of seeing – a way in which some Europeans have

In 1994, art historian W. J. T. Mitchell offered the definition of land-

1. Landscape is not a genre of art but a medium.

4. Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a repre-

Mitchell argued that the physical environment is inseparable from the

Masculinist rationality is a form of knowledge which assumes a knower who

particular socio-economic relations within the landscape (Lefebvre 1991

A social space cannot be adequately accounted for either by nature (climate,

For Lefebvre, space is a political construction, borne out of the experi-

Like the body, landscape is something we inhabit without being different

Whether landscapes are texts to be studied or experiences that unfold is

Macarthur, John. 2007. The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other

What Is a Computer Game?

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

A Game Must Be Played

Using Computers to Play Games

games using a consistent set of formal criteria, or defining them, as a

Rules, Mechanics, Simulations, and Interpretation

There is a hierarchical elegance in this distinction. While there can be

Avatars and Game Spaces

Fig. 3.1 Falling over in QWOP, 2008. Bennet Foddy

3 What Is a Computer Game? 29

4 Half-Life 2: Could I Apocalypse? 57

7 Garry’s Mod: The Computer Game Becomes Photoshop139

Creative Works Cited179

e nvironment confronting us as something apart: alien and inhuman, even