Dynamic Movement in Video Games: Space, Time, and Perspective

Abstract

The dissertation studies dynamic movement in video game space, time, and perspective. The topics of the three chapters—space, time, and perspective—are connected through the possible conceptual movement in video games. The dissertation attempts to develop new analytical tools for game studies by connecting game studies tools with the media theoretical tools of German philosophy and critical theory. The first chapter studies detective role-playing Disco Elysium and the virtual game city Martinaise. The chapter starts by looking at the avant-garde qualities of the game opening, which teaches players new ways to engage with the game space. The second section studies the aesthetic form of the game to claim that navigating through the game space is a form of critical interpretation of the urban landscape. The chapter ends with a reflection on history in the game space of Martinaise using Paul Ricoeur’s theory of time, narrative, and history. The second chapter shifts focus from the navigation through the game space to the movement through time. Through my analysis of the temporal experiences in real-time-strategy video games such as Age of Empires IV and first-person-shooter games such as Doom Eternal, I will establish that video game temporal experiences are inherently plural and liminal. After that, through my analysis of video games in which protagonists can control time through time-stop and time-rewind, I will show that such abilities blur boundaries between the players’ real world and the fictional world, between the static and the dynamic, and between time and space. Lastly, the third chapter discusses the precondition of the spatial and temporal experiences analyzed in the first and second chapters. The chapter starts by examining the experience of game perspective of early arcade video games. Although the Cartesian perspectivalism in video games may seem to replicate the three-dimensional visual experience of reality, I argue that such representation of perspective already contains a rupture from the so-called “Cartesian perspectivalism.” I lastly show how such rupture develops the game perspective into the visual technique of knowledge, with which users extract pieces of knowledge in their game spatial environment.