Description

Digital and analogue games engage implicitly with space, place, and landscape – whether through representation, the structuring of territory, or the abstract production of space through narrative and play (Gray. et. al., 2018; Fraser, 2015). At the intersection of spatial theory, media geographies, creative geographies, and digital geographies, games in their myriad forms present worlds and environments that are entangled with geographical imaginations, politics, and ideologies. However, geography as a discipline is only recently grappling with the significance of games to conceptualisations of space and technology (eg. Ash and Gallacher, 2011); likewise, the discipline of game studies has only engaged in a limited fashion with the geographical nature of games (eg. Calleja, 2011).

The role of places and landscapes in games demands critical consideration of the underlying relations, fictions, and imagined worlds that constitute games, and the identities, experiences and ways of knowing entangled in play. This session invites presentations that grapple with the complexity of space in digital games (video, mobile, AR, VR) and analogue games (board games, card games, roleplaying games), reflecting on legacies of mapping and territorialisation, and representations of space and place as they appear on tabletops, screens, cards, and across popular culture. We welcome presentations that explore and interrogate what we create and what we encounter as we make our way through the spaces of games, and the social and cultural structuring of space, place and landscape through gaming media and technology.