Trigger Happy
Steven Poole takes a guided tour of gaming’s most memorable cities
Welcome, voyager, to Antescher. Please watch your step, and read this important travel guide. “To explore the eerie ruins,” it reads, “without at least a motion scanner to warn of the sudden appearance of the gigantic ants, is still considered suicidal.” You may wish to check out the city’s Great Pyramid and the obscure Monument before you are consumed by huge mutant insects. Enjoy your stay!
Videogames have long been thought of as, among other things, a form of virtual tourism to imaginary places, but what if we treated those places as real objects of study? That is the conceit of Konstantinos Dimopoulos’ new book Virtual Cities, a guide for the prospective traveller to 45 game conurbations.
It starts with Antescher, from Sandy White’s 1983 classic Ant Attack, taking in Dun Darach, Woodtick (Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge), Clock Town (Majora’s Mask), Whiterun (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim), Novigrad (The Witcher 3), City 17 (Half-Life 2), and more along the way. These are not traditional walkthroughs but evocative essays on the feel of a place. So Dimopoulos writes of Yharnam from Bloodborne: “The blooddrenched city of metal and stone, now all but ruined, finally resembles the wild architectural fever-dream it always aspired to become.”
In this respect his book resembles one of the great works of 20th-century literature, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in which the traveller Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan a host of dreamlike cities defined according to the desires or superstitions of their inhabitants. (What do signs indicate is permitted in the city of Tamara? “Watering zebras, playing bowls, burning relatives’ corpses.”) At the end of the book, we are told that “the Great Khan’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoé, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria.”
To those we could now add videogame metropolises, such as Arkham City – which,
Dimopolous says, “would never have worked from an urban-planning standpoint” – or Raccoon City, first explored in Resident Evil 2. I was pleased to learn that its absurdly massive police station is actually modelled on a real-world art museum. In a technical sidebar where he suspends the conceit that it is a real place, the author writes: “Overlapping influences, restrictions, and sensibilities have shaped Raccoon City: an intriguingly skewed vision of American Midwestern urbanism crafted by Japanese game developers using late-1990s technology under the influence of 1970s and 1980s zombie movies.”
And this is quite appropriate, because overlapping influences and sensibilities, across many human lifespans, are what shape real cities, which is why the London skyline contains both the Shard and St Paul’s Cathedral. London itself is represented in this book by the version in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate but not Team Soho’s PS2 game The Getaway; meanwhile, we get the New York City of Deus Ex but not of Marvel’s SpiderMan, though the former still sounds rather topical from the description: “It is of little wonder that in such times, conspiracy theories are so popular… stories of black helicopters, Area 51, gray aliens, millionaire anarchists, and benevolent god-like AIs thrive.” Two decades later, in post-Trump America, only the content of the conspiracy theories has changed.
Of course, every reader will have their own favourite game cities that are not included – I thought wistfully of Ridge City (R4: Ridge Racer Type 4), or the city-scale castle in Ico – but to prompt such memories is part of the book’s charm. As is the decision not to use screenshots of the cities as they appear in the actual games. This might have been purely a pragmatic call, since getting the necessary permissions for the reproduction of such images can be a nightmare for authors, but the upshot is that the imagery comes instead from a beautiful and slightly abstracted style of watercolour or ink illustration by Maria Kallikaki: the kinds of sketches, paintings, and maps that tourists in fact used to make when visiting foreign cities, before the invention of photography.
As the Khan observes in Invisible Cities: “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” As Dimopoulos’s lovely book shows, the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of videogame cities too.
Games are thought of as a form of virtual tourism, but what if we treated those places as real objects of study?