Game e World Space: una rappresentazione del rapporto dinamico tra spazialità e narrazione = Game and World Space: a representation of the dynamic relationship between spatiality and narrative

Abstract

De Certeau (1984) claims that spatial relations between objects represent the organizing principle of narrative since "every story is a story of travel, a spatial practice." Our "cultural need" for narratives refers to the search for credible, meaningful, primitive spaces within which stories can be told to explain how to measure the possession or the desire for a territory (Fuller and Jenkins, 1995). Games, therefore, stand as the equivalent of de Certeau's (1984) spatial narratives, with game worlds representing places infused with narrative potential, in which playful action can be interpreted, at least in part, as an act of colonizing and enacting transformations of space (Newman, 2012). The aim of this paper is to propose an approach for the analysis of the representation of spatiality in the video game medium. In the first part, the role of space in the narration and representation of quasi-social contexts will be explored (Longo, 2006) within which the environment - the place where the action takes place - is not simply the context in which the player's avatar moves, but, rather, "the hero of the story" (Friedman, 2002). With a reference to Juul's (2005) identification of spatial typologies, namely Game Space and World Space, several works will be analyzed that present distinctive features in the relationship between narrative and playful space