Continual creation: Idealism, metaphor and the representation of spatio-temporality

Abstract

In this examination of spatio-temporality’s representation in two- and three-dimensional video games, diegetic time and how a game’s overriding metaphors may be reflected in both gameplay and a storyworld’s virtual environment are considered at length through the idealist philosophy of George Berkeley, with an important adaptation of what Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to as ‘information-time’ experienced by conscious players operating in ‘memory-time’. After considering a number of examples from Outer Wilds and the Legend of Zelda franchise, the question as to whether video games are ontically presentist is resolved by way of a synthesis between the expression of time in spatial terms and every video game’s minimum of interactivity, a distinction I adapt from Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The continual creation of a digital world, while materially a fact of hardware limitations, is shown to lend itself metaphorically to an eidetic reading, bound to our intuitive association of time and space with inhabitation.