DIGITAL DESTINATIONS
Our love of videogames is so often connected to the virtual places they allow us to inhabit. After all, this is what videogames can do that other mediums can’t: allow us to live in a fictional space. Videogames cities and towns are perhaps the most powerful expression of this. It is in these spaces where we are given the opportunity to see a society in action. They speak to us – neglected districts tell a story of social inequality, architecture reveals a city’s history, borders and boundaries gesture to its power structures, locations reflect real places we are familiar with back at us, offering an opportunity to anchor and orient ourselves around them, as we do with real landmarks.
Konstantinos Dimopoulos, who has turned his PhD in urban planning and geography towards urban design in videogames, tells us that while a convincing virtual city needs to feel believable, this doesn’t mean it has to replicate real cities, rather, the dynamics that “makes cities tick”. He says developers need to figure out what makes “these spatial expressions of society cities. What makes them fascinating, exciting, and desirable. If they understand, adapt or replicate their fundamental structures and processes”.
“If they capture and reinterpret their dynamism, spectacle and vibrancy, they can craft utterly unique and weird places that will feel real,” Konstantinos continues.
The cities in this list are examples of places that have done just that. We aim not only to revisit these memorable places but, through them, to explore what makes a videogame city impactful and compelling enough for them to remain lodged in our minds.
When we first stepped in to one of the PlayStation’s most memorable locales back in 1998, what we found instead was a city abandoned, broken and burning. This might be any city: it has delicatessens and petrol stations, parking garages and basketball courts, alleyways and courtyards. That familiarity makes it a fantastic location for a horror title. We’ve all walked streets at night with no one else around, and perhaps felt a little uneasy as we take a shortcut through an alleyway, or found ourselves nervously crossing the exact kind of dishevelled basketball court that can be found in the game. Racoon City plays on those fears and realises the worst of our imaginations by punctuating those moments of tense loneliness with lurching zombies out for your flesh. Its impressively detailed and evocative prerendered backgrounds still hold up today and its vision of a broken society – perhaps best expressed in making a symbol of stability in the form of the police station the centrepiece of a place torn apart by chaos – still has
