Video Games as Travel Writing

Abstract

The worlds presented in video games have become increasingly sophisticated. Players of these games travel through spaces that are designed and optimised for rhetorical, symbolic and aesthetic purposes. Video games do not just simulate travel – they enact, approximate and transform it in particular ways, incorporating different modalities of control. They invite travel writing in the form of player responses, documented on many online forums; but they are also authored products themselves, offering their players a particular set of affordances. This chapter discusses the ways in which video games model spatial and bodily engagement – forms that are couched in a history of touristic mobility and travel writing. Several emblematic examples are discussed, such as the Assassinʼs Creed series, Dark Souls, Firewatch or Death Stranding. These examples, it is argued, offer different responses to the dialectics, well known in travel writing, of familiarity and estrangement. In their capacity to break the normative focus on immersion, video games offer pathways to an ethical reflection on our touristic ‘fit’ in the world.