The conquest of videogame space is the players’ “manifest destiny” just as the expansion from one end to the other of the continent was, according to the widespread belief of the 19th century, the “manifest destiny”, the justified mission, of the United States of America. In fact, the space in these videogames is explicitly designed to be conquered. Aliens are enemies and territory is a resource to be exploited. Players conquer space, robbing it of its treasures and massacring its previous inhabitants.
#Moncage meaning series#
A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully to the south,” begins Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods (1977), forefather of the “adventure” genre that takes its name from this game and inspired series such as Monkey Island.Įxploration of the new videogame frontier is often violent. “You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Most of all, the first textual videogames offer a description of their places. The history of the creation of videogames begins with table games and paper role-playing games, like Dungeons & Dragons, where the space in which the action takes place is crucial, be it the gameboard, the dashboard or a subterranean labyrinth (the dungeon). New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, MIT Press, 2004).
Henry Jenkins called the development of videogames “narrative architecture” and wrote, “Game designers don’t simply tell stories they design worlds and sculpt spaces.” (“Game Design as Narrative Architecture” in First Person. Arts de faire (1980), wrote, “Every story is a travel story, a spatial practice,” (The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1984). Michel de Certeau, in L'Invention du quotidien 1. In fact, videogames have much to tell about how we relate to the unknown because when we enter the world of a videogame, like that of MirrorMoon EP, we inevitably enter an alien space whose rules we do not know, especially at first, a space that we only understand insofar as it reminds us of the actual physical space. Now, in 2022, a second volume will be released, conceived for the 23rd International Exhibition entitled Unknown Unknowns. Maybe we even begin to understand something of this mysterious world.įor the 21st International Exhibition Triennale Game Collection in 2016, the director of Santa Ragione, Pietro Righi Riva, curated a selection of videogames commissioned specifically to address the themes of the exhibition in that medium. Now we can interact with the moon, turning and moving it.
We walk on the planet, finding architectural structures and adding pieces to our strange gun. There’s a moon in the sky, and at a certain point, we realize that it is actually a copy of the celestial body on which we stand, in effect, a three-dimensional map suspended above us. We are holding something that seems like a gun but it doesn’t shoot. We activate switches, a bit randomly, push a button, and suddenly we find ourselves on a planet. At the beginning of the videogame MirrorMoon EP by Santa Ragione (2013), we are in the cockpit of a spaceship before a myriad of keys, screens, knobs and levers whose function we do not know.
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