Inventing Space: Toward a Taxonomy of On- and Off-Screen Space in Video Games

Abstract

Last year marked the 25th anniversary of commercial video games, which began with Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space arcade game in 1971. In the past quarter century, the video game market has boomed and has proven to be powerful competition for film and television; and as films like Super Mario Bros. (game, 1985; film, 1993), Street Fighter (game, 1987; film, 1994) and Mortal Kombat (game, 1992; film, 1995) have shown, a source of material as well. In the last ten years, home computers and CD-ROM drives have taken over a large sector of the gaming market, although game systems such as Super Nintendo, Virtual Boy, Atari Jaguar, Sega Genesis, and others continue on in the game-console tradition. Stand-alone arcadestyle video games found in malls are also keeping pace, moving into ever more detailed three-dimensional environments, virtual reality, and simulator games. Despite more than two decades of development, there is relatively little scholarly study of these games. As audiovisual entertainment whose content is largely representational, video games have a lot more in common with film and television than merely characters and plotlines. Video games compete for audiences at the very same sites as film and TV-most multiplex theaters have video games in the lobby, if not a separate room devoted to them, and home video game systems use the television set itself, trading game programs for broadcast ones. Even the video rental industry now rents games and game systems. Theoretically, many of the same issues are present in video games and film: spectator positioning and suture, point of view, sound and image relations, semiotics, and other theories dealing with images or representation. Indeed, video games are themselves becoming more like film and television, embedding video clips within the games, or like Dragon's Lair (1983), Space Ace (1983), Dragon's Lair II (1991), and Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold (1992), relying on video sequences almost entirely. Many games now use recorded sounds rather than just computer-generated ones, and visually they include opening scenes, closing scenes, and credits, attempting to create a more cinematic experience (Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold has over a dozen screens' worth of end credits!). As video game graphics increase in resolution and film and television move into the digital realm, the gap between them continues to close. At present, film and television theory are best equipped for dealing with the medium of video games, which clearly overlaps them in places and extends many of their ideas, such as the active spectator, suture, first-person narrative, and spatial orientation. Video games are certainly deserving of their own branch of theory, and it will likely be one which is in close kinship to film and television theory. The study of the video game as a form of art and entertainment will undoubtedly bring to light certain unacknowledged assumptions in areas of theory including reception, spectatorship, and narrative structure, as well as the nature of the diegetic world and one's experience of it. One of the many phenomena shared by film and video games, for example, is the use of on-screen and off-screen space in the creation of a diegetic world. Most games, like films, contain scenes or