OVER T HE E DGE
Birthplace Of Ossian lets players explore 100km² of virtual Scottish Highlands. Creator Connor Sherlock has never visited Scotland himself, and so pieced together the tones and topography of the landscape from paintings, photos and memories of watching Highlander. The terrain isn’t meant to be viewed from above like a traditional diorama, but when it is, you can see the crisp lines of its squareshaped dissection. One of the edges in
Birthplace Of Ossian isn’t hidden by mountains like the others, but is instead open to the surrounding void. It’s possible to fall off the edge into negative space. “I wanted the player to be aware of the non-real nature of the terrain, and the visual language of dioramas was easy to leverage,” Sherlock says. “Instead of hiding the edge of the game world like most videogame worlds, I wanted to highlight it, and invite the player to play with escaping the boundaries.”