Games, de Certeau, and the City

Michel de Certeau’s influential chapter on “Walking in the City” from the book The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) chronicles the experience of construction place and space in the city from the pedestrian viewpoint. To de Certeau, the act of walking is dynamic and political. This is made possible because the city is operational (de Certeau 94). This operational city is able to produce its own space, its history is made by its people, and the city is used as an object that triggers its own construction through its denizens (de Certeau 94). This provides an interesting challenge to the study of game spaces, which are—in the case of single player games—constructed through only a single individual’s perspective. During the course of my thesis on representations of New York City in video games, I will look at the way the cities are design to be imbued with this property and if those that lack it seem less complete.

According to de Certeau, “to walk” implies lacking place, a record of this movement only indicates that which is no longer, but that movement can be understood as a system. This system, in part, consists of “modalities of pedestrian enunciation,” which reveal the relationship between movement and what that movement means (de Certeau 99). First, the “alethic” modality relate to the mood and intent of the movement (99). Is the pedestrian taking the most direct route from one place to the next? Does their choice of route represent the multitude of possibility spaces? How are they negotiating that movement which is impossible or forced upon them? Secondly, “epistemic” modalities are concerned with understanding the space and these aforementioned possibilities. Lastly, “deonic” modalities refer to the obligations of space, what they permit and forbid, and what they offer optionally. Because these modalities deal with rules and choices, they map well to the medium of the game.

Important to the concept of representative spaces in games are two terms de Certeau uses to describe fundamental stylistic figures of spatial collapse in the urban environment. The first term, “synecdoche,” means using a word in which a part stands in for a whole (de Certeau 101). The second, “asyndeton,” refers to when conjunctions are deliberately left out of a sentence or phrase. De Certeau uses this to explain the phenomenon of ignoring parts of the travel to connect to places, as if, for example, Baltimore and Philadelphia are next to each other. These concepts become especially important in mission-based games in which the player must travel between locales to trigger events. The space traversed is often ignored; the destination is often represented by a single symbolic piece.

The final concept in “Walking in the City” relates to the functions of naming in place-making. De Certeau identifies naming as making place believable, memorable, and primitive (de Certeau 105). The believable place, identifiable by a name, is a habitable place. The memories of a place help construct its evolving identity by patterning the use of the space—that which is no longer continues to act in the present. The primitive quality of naming is related to that which is whole or quantifiable. A place with a name is a basic unit of understanding; unnamed places are constantly seeking the stability of nominative forces. I will be looking at both de Certeau’s functions of naming as a cultural action as well as naming as a practical practice for navigation in games.

As one of my theoretical sources, Michel de Certeau is of utmost importance because his discussion of imaging the city is based on action and the movement of bodies—a significant part of the 3d game environment experience. Expect summaries of more of my theoretical sources to come!