Game Tourists

Videogames are virtual worlds allowing us to explore and traverse imagined spaces, to interact with and explore existing places from our own home, giving us new ways to relate in spatial terms.

These new artificial spaces are full of life and nature. They make up a new digital landscape which transcends gaming sessions and begins to take on its own life, both on and off screen.

This section includes numerous works such as:

Munus Immunity and community in affective architecture is a performative intervention in an online gaming space by the name of CryptoVoxel. Conducted in 2020, during the pandemic and lockdown, it reflects on how we abandoned real spaces and instead en masse inhabited virtual spaces as the only possible form of socialisation and exploration. Focusing on reflections as to the concept of immunity, the work proposes a poetic reflection on the sense of community during the pandemic era, while strolling through a three-dimensional city which functions as a shop window for the artistic and cultural activities of an online community.

Mini Metro is a commercial game in which the task is to trace out metro routes between unconnected stations. This shows how the metro, beyond its role as a public transport system, is a regulatory tool used by humans to build an extensive network of relationships: with the city, with time, with everyday activities. It suggests the notion of “affective management”, the capacity of city-dwellers to manage their own emotional experiences and states, in describing the role of the metro in planning everyday life. Mini Metro likewise illustrates how designing the network of connections in a city means mapping out the network of possible relationships based on its inhabitants. The game allows us to map the state of possible relationships on the one hand, and on the other, to drive and define other visions of our urban world.

This reflection which can be seen in the adaptation of Mini Metro also forms part of Place Utopia, the work by Pablo Martínez Garrido, who also conveys us to a real environment, but this time one which is much more distant and which we cannot inhabit: Mars. The whole territory has been created using audiovisual material that NASA and the ESA share via different probes and satellites, inviting us to ask the question: what would be the most viable way to inhabit a new planet right now? 

Lastly, the in-game photographs (the art of videogame photography) by photographer Leo Sang, as well as those by Elise Aubisse, reveal how photography undertaken within a gaming environment has arrived at a new frontier of artistic practice with regard to digital images. These photographs show different urban spaces, both real and imagined, which although digital, allow us to embark on an emotional and cognitive journey as real as the experiences we have in urban spaces. According to the reflections of thinker Susan Sontag, these spaces have a great emotive charge, allowing us to experience meaningful moments that can be recorded, to be shown to our future selves and to our community. In this vision, both public space and private space take on a new meaning.