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psychogeography in-game london remains alien to me ~8 months of living here. A significant difference (and why i think i am still not acclimatised) is the way i’ve been using transport, as compared to where i lived previously; mentally, the psychogeographical map of london is very partial and segmented: [flat]--------[supermarket]--[station] | | | [king's cross]-------[university] | | | '------------[therapist] | | [leicester square]----------[covent garden] | | | | [hyde park] [etc] everything exists as Zones; levels. obviously immediate parallels to my brain poisoned by game dev thinks of discrete Rooms and Room Transitions, series of doors and tile maps connected by short coordinate shifts(tube travel = loading screen). walking in london could be described as a walking simulation(walking sim(see gone home etc)), wandering around Gamespace having exited The Cave[tm], moving from screen to screen to get to the destination, ingest the right amount, learn something maybe and so on. ofcourse thiss idea of the gamification of life is nothing new; merely recounting specific kinds of dissociation experianced. the nature of london especially in contrast to the more err affable city pop. of say, manchester, makes this more jarring: you begin to really exist isolated in a crowd, much like the existence of props and npcs(ugh, not in the awful recent appropriation of the term) with no real autonomany; the crowd exists to make me think i am not alone. this is a radically self centred view being pseudo imposed, things places and people becoming more a means to an end (see: ursula k le guin carrier bag fiction). if the sims could be analogue to office work, walking sims can become analogue to travel, existing in a city, and vectors for psychogeographical introspection and play. in fact, (as wark would argue too) the 'real' version is merely an imperfect reflection of the idealised version in-game. psychogeography and/or play in public spaces is evidently tied to privaledge of certain types of bodies ie who can or can not be 'playful' in public without arousing anything beyond a passing interest or a 'look, quirky art students!'. games offer what gamespace(irl) cannot offer in that regard. a game like gone home can absolutely become a vector for things such as abandoned urban exploration, the sensory outputs (knowledge gain, deduction, mental mapping, piecing stories together etc) are w/o doubt recieved via a 'digital' version of the 'real'. [...] Yume Nikki offers a significant example of somewhat large scale psychogeography divorced from the constraints of gamespace, and even that of 'actual' experiencing, owing to the otherworldy design of the game...