Terra Nova has an interesting analysis of Nintendo GameCube title Animal Crossing, celebrating its unique blend of virtuality based in a real sense of reality. To paraphrase what IGN said upon its release, it's the closest thing to an online game that offline players will get, thus the discussion on TN. Indeed it is (if only it wasn't so time-consuming). But author Nathan Combs brings up a good point about what it is that makes this game and others like it (online as well as off) so darn appealing:
Places such as these speak to a world where solitary (or small group) experiences can be successfully blended into a world-sense of place. It suggests to me that places are experiences and journeys - not just destinations
So what exactly is this sense of "place"? To find out, I turned to my Environmental Psychology notes, and have elucidated a few key ideas which have wended their ways into some of the most forward-thinking games on release.
Home versus House The sense of place is most concisely summed up in the Anglo/Germanic linguistic distinction between "home" and "house". The latter is the physical environment in which one resides, while the former is overlaid with a more emotional canvas. Home is, effectively, where the heart is.
Even in the digital sphere, ostensibly a platform which provides affect-less building blocks for communication, a virtual area can be made into a home; web homepages represent the personalisation often only so obviously expressed in a teenager's bedroom, festooned with portraits, photos and bad poetry. In games like Animal Crossing, a player's digital house can be decorated with objects and furniture, becoming a place to express identity, and a place to rest when necessary.
Even more complex, it can be argued that an avatar, representing the player in an online game, can be a kind of home. There are well-documented examples of people using the characters to represent something about themselves, and often people hide inside them, feeling more comfortable in the digital skin than in their organic matter. Allowing for personalisation gives the players a sense of ownership in the digital domain, which ensures that they invest themselves in becoming a part of it, thus deriving a sense of place.
"At home"-ness Importantly, personalisation isn't the only aspect that makes a place a "home". You can give avatars and digital walls all manner of boob-sliders, hair colours and wallpapers, but that doesn't ensure that players will feel like their little virtual space is their own place. They have to feel a sense of being "at home", which calls forth a distinction between what goes on outside and what happens inside.
The outside is what goes on in the world: the physical and sensory surroundings, other participants and the personalisation. The inside is
"...grounded in the everyday experience of living in a particular environment; it involves processes and events normally unnoticed and unquestioned. The insider generally takes his or her place and region for granted, rarely conceiving of them as explicit entities that might be made objects of directed attention."Phenomenology Online
That requires a seamlessly-developed and consistent environment which allows the player to become immersed in a familiar landscape with no out-of-place entities, dropped pixels or bugs slamming the fantasy back into reality. In the case of Animal Crossing and other games, this includes everything from the logical chat of the Non-Player Characters (NPCs) to the opening hours of the local shops. It's everything that allows players to suspend their disbelief and to expect things to happen as they should. It isn't relegated to feel-good titles either; multiplayer deathmatch arenas also have a sense of place, because they're used by a community of players with expectations of what's appropriate for that space.
Social Immersion Speaking of suspending disbelief, it's also important for the actors in a space to have empathy for others in the environment, as well as for the environment itself.
Sense of Consequence Also related to "at home"-ness is a concept of consequence, or a belief that the actions that are taken will have logical ramifications in the world which players inhabit. Great examples of this offline are Animal Crossing, Fable and Black and White. Online, any of the MMOGs have it as default based upon the social norms which develop out of human social play (even if it is masked by a digital medium).
This aspect is particularly important for the sense of place, especially in the sense that Combs suggests, because it allows the player to see him or herself as an entity with links to the larger socio-economic milieu, or as part of the fabric which constructs the coherent and cohesive game world. That players in Animal Crossing can leave messages for one another and for other characters and expect them to be received and dealt with means that this aspect contributes to the feeling that the player inhabits a living, breathing world with rules, social norms and boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. So Defender did it on a small scale. Modern games are becoming much more attuned to the players' need for consequence, and therefore the game worlds are becoming richer and more habitable places.
Place Identity Of course, players don't come into a tabula rasa game world. The designers of the game spaces populate the imaginary vistas with objects, situations and other characters, all of which contribute to the place identity. The physical setting offers a template for what should happen in the world, the architecture influences actions and behaviours and the player learns to use the place to derive his or her satisfaction with the world. This goes beyond picking up a key and taking it to a door to enter into another discrete level of puzzles, a la Tomb Raider, although these aspects gave that game its own sense of its purpose. Place identity allows players to imbue their own self upon the objects in the world, and to associate them with that place.
Perhaps game designers are architects of the new urbanist communities, laying out the landscape with physical features, architectural styles and open spaces. Offline research certainly points to these factors as essential in the development of community, and with that sense of belongingness comes an attachment to a place.
