Mapping the places of serious games

We live in a world filled with maps. Google Maps take us from a planetary perspective down to a name on a door. But the maps we create today are almost entirely of a kind. The corners, the shadows, the tactical escape routes and the ephemeral meet-up places that serious games require and construct are all absent from these modern maps. In Junana, the software aggregates member content into walkable representations of cities. There are no maps of Castalia, although its members could draw some. The scenes and the plazas of Junana are lived spaces, waiting to be mapped in some new fashion that can reveal their logics.


In the Knol "Serious Games and the Study of Place" I show the need for other maps, if we are to capture the key activities of society and culture:

"In the course of modernity one might note a shift away from maps that acquire meaningfulness during an activity, that inform and are com pleted through the activity, to a type of map that can be created and then in­terpreted without the experience or memory of such engrossment. The dis tinction between maps the interpretation of which requires a link to en grossment in activities and those that do not is, of course, determined by this feature of the realms/places the maps describe. As modernity is bound up in the devaluation of knowledge/meaning tied to bodily activities (in favor of disembedded meanings, rational discourses, experimental reasoning, etc.) there is a corresponding devaluation in the production and interpretation of maps of such realms (in favor of maps of spaces, satellite images, topo graphical representations, etc.). The field of hyper-locality emerges in the vacuity of de-activated places. Once the activities that sustained these places disappear, there is no place left to “save,” no “there” there to take away. The task facing the ethnographer is thus two-fold; to acquire knowledge of a place (as thickly described, to use Geertz’s term) and also to develop the theoretical and practical means to map (represent) this place."

Image: Illuminated Manuscript Map of Cairo, from Book on Navigation, Walters Ms. W.658, fol. 305b, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image from medmss's photostream