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A Player's Sense of Place: Computer Games As Anatopistic Medium

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A Player's Sense of Place: Computer Games As Anatopistic Medium University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations August 2019 A Player’s Sense of Place: Computer Games as Anatopistic Medium Kristopher John Purzycki University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the Geography Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Rhetoric Commons Recommended Citation Purzycki, Kristopher John, "A Player’s Sense of Place: Computer Games as Anatopistic Medium" (2019). Theses and Dissertations. 2235. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/2235 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A PLAYER’S SENSE OF PLACE: COMPUTER GAMES AS ANATOPISTIC MEDIUM by Kristopher Purzycki A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee August 2019 ABSTRACT A PLAYER’S SENSE OF PLACE: COMPUTER GAMES AS ANATOPISTIC MEDIUM by Kristopher Purzycki The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2019 Under the Supervision of Professor Stuart Moulthrop This project works to understand how open-world computer games help generate a sense of place from the player. Since their development over a half century ago, computer games have primarily been discussed in terms of space. Yet the way we think about space today is much different than how those scientists calculated space as a construction of time, mass, and location. But as computer games have evolved, the language has failed to accommodate the more nuanced qualities of game spaces. This project aims at articulating the nuances of place through phenomenological methods to objectively analyze the player experience as performed through various behaviors. Using a conceptual model that partially illustrates sense of place, I demonstrate how players create out of place—or anatopistic—places through play. After a historical survey of play as it is manifested through interaction with miniaturized environments, I turn to computer games as they have helped embody their creators’ sense of place. The third and fourth chapters offer a pair of case studies that reflect upon the experiences of the individual player and player groups. First, I compare virtual photography with tourism to reveal an array of sensibilities suggestive of the pursuit of place. This is followed with a look at Niantic’s Pokémon Go and how player groups use the game to act out ritualistic forms of play. Positioning the player as a “ludopilgrim,” I demonstrate how players perform individual or intersubjectively meaningful places as a form of transgressive placemaking. ii Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) Kristopher Purzycki, 2019 iii For Sarah iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .......................................................................................................................... ii List of Figures ................................................................................................................ vi CHAPTER I. Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 Sense of Place ............................................................................................................ 5 Open-World Games ................................................................................................... 9 Phenomenology ....................................................................................................... 12 Chapter Descriptions ................................................................................................ 15 Concluding Statement .............................................................................................. 18 II. Setting, Community, Happenings: A Notional Model for Sense of Place ....................... 21 Theories of Space .................................................................................................... 26 Theories of Place ..................................................................................................... 34 Sense of Place .......................................................................................................... 41 A Framework for Identifying a Player’s Sense of Place ............................................ 44 Sense of Place in Computer Games and Digitally Mediated Space ........................... 46 Setting ............................................................................................................... 47 Objects ............................................................................................................... 48 Community ........................................................................................................ 49 Events ................................................................................................................ 49 Perception .......................................................................................................... 50 Meaning-Making Player ..................................................................................... 52 Omissions .......................................................................................................... 53 III. Dollhouses and Wargames: Play as Placemaking and Toys ............................................ 58 Imaginative Play and the Transformation of Space ................................................... 62 Dollhouses and Wargames ....................................................................................... 66 Tabletop Game Communities ................................................................................... 73 Text Adventures and Mainframe Communities ........................................................ 76 Online Communities ................................................................................................ 82 Richard Garriott and the Ultima Series ..................................................................... 85 Id Software ............................................................................................................. 89 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 93 IV. Tourists of Los Santos: Snapshotters and Perception in Grand Theft Auto V .................. 97 Grand Theft Auto: A History .................................................................................. 101 History of Screen Capture ...................................................................................... 110 In-Game Photography ............................................................................................ 112 The Virtual Tourist and the Captured Experience ................................................... 120 Sense of Place as Commodity ................................................................................ 129 v V. Computer Games as Anatopistic Places: Pokémon Go as Ludopilgrimage ................... 137 History of Pokémon Go.......................................................................................... 142 Places of Play: Milwaukee County v. Niantic Inc. .................................................. 148 Pokémon Go as Pilgrimage .................................................................................... 156 Places of Pilgrimage .............................................................................................. 161 New Traditions for the Ludopilgrim ....................................................................... 164 VI. Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 171 Reflections on the Place of Games ......................................................................... 175 PlayStation Home and Multiplayer Games. ...................................................... 176 Wolfenstein and Gone Home ............................................................................ 179 Implications for Design .......................................................................................... 184 Implications for the Player ..................................................................................... 186 Parting Thoughts.................................................................................................... 188 VII. References ................................................................................................................... 193 VII. Curriculum Vitae ......................................................................................................... 217 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Model for Sense of Place ............................................................................................ 46 Figure 2: Vista Snap ................................................................................................................ 104 Figure 3: Image of Far Cry 4 using Ansel ............................................................................... 120 Figure 4: Pokémon Go players at the bottom of the Lake Park ravine ...................................... 140 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Place is only as strong as the people that help make it and this work is the result of the many gifts given to me over the last several years: First
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