Paper Abstract - Axel Stockburger

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ABSTRACT

HEAD LEFT - CLIMB UP - JUMP IN: What do Walkthrough texts reveal about
representational navigable spaces in computer games?

Axel Stockburger

"There is no foreign land; it is only the traveller that is foreign"
(Robert Louis Stevenson)

As an artist I am currently working on a practice based PhD researching the Representation of Space in Video and Computer games. Several of my video and audio-installations that have been shown in an international context are dealing with the deconstruction of the specific spatiality produced by those games.

So far the aspects of the production and navigation of spaces represented by computergames have been widely neglected by most researchers in the field, while the favourite approach has been the investigation of narrative elements. I am convinced that one of the main factors, special to the medium of digital games is precisely the possibility of navigation through represented spaces. As a point of entrance into this vast field I have chosen to take a closer look on a special form of text, produced by the gaming community - the Walktrough.

The paper given will be accompanied by a Videopiece, called "Walkthrough".

Walkthroughs are texts describing the navigations and actions necessary to complete a specific game. They describe all the entities present (opponents, riddles, navigational obstacles, structural items) that are present and sometimes go as far as marking bugs (errors) or elements specific to the industrial production of the game.

Initially walkthrough texts are used by people who are stuck at a certain point in a game and don't want to spend the time and effort to search for the vital clue needed to move on. Walkthroughs are a viable element of the computer-gaming community. They are part of a chain of elements such as cheatcodes, hints and patches, all belonging to the active community of gamers and can mainly be found in relation to action and adventure games as a kind of tourist guide through a particular game. The first player who manages to publish an exhaustive walkthrough of a game that has just appeared on the market receives positive reactions from the gaming community.

My aim is to show how Walkthroughs provide us with ways of understanding the specific types of spaces produced by playing computergames. Theories of space such as Henri Lefebvres Production of Space and Michel de Certeaus analysis of spatial relations in everyday narrative are providing the framework for this examination. Based on the Research on Tourism and the theory related to it such as Dean MacCannels work , we can draw conclusions about the game-worlds described in Walkthrough texts and the navigation within those. By looking at the way exploration and navigation are pragmatically structured in those texts we will be able to learn about their functions in the actual game-play. The main focus moves from the relations between movement and seeing that can be found in everyday narrative related to spatial practice to the ways those functions are used in the realms of representational spaces such as computergames.

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