Videogame landscapes

Computer games are big business and can have many hundreds of millions of pounds spent on creating them, and earn even more in sales. Some of them have landscapes which are perfectly rendered, and incredibly life like. There are open worlds, with city streets, and landscapes to explore at your will, rather than being linear or controlled, or repeated.

Who knew Red Dead Redemption 2 would be so good at representing geographical features?!! Dried out river showing some distinctive features of a meander. @Mr_StoreyGeog pic.twitter.com/ODeVgVpn0D

— Mr Smith (@MrSmith_Geog) November 12, 2018

The Victoria and Albert museum in London had an exhibition on videogames last year.

The landscapes of video games have developed substantially from the early games, where they had to be described in a few short text extracts.
I know there are teachers who have taught about cities and favelas using video game landscapes.
This also connects with the academic keynote at the first TMGeographyIcons event earlier in the year. It featured Phil Jones from the University of Birmingham.
He reminded us that any renderings of places in video games are also therefore places, and many young people will spend more time in these fictional places than out in the real world.

Head for the Ice Sheets of Antarctica here.



Image: Alan Parkinson

The Long Dark

I've added a few blog posts over the years on the link between Geography and Games. I have a large pile of boardgames in my office which are used occasionally, and some of which I still have to play properly as I haven't had the opportunity yet.
I've got quite a few STEAM games on my account, including Never Alone and Firewatch.
I prefer games with a bit of intensity, and where the setting and the sense of place created in the game is an integral part of the game.
The Long Dark is a new STEAM game which is getting very good reviews.

Here's the premise:

NEED TO KNOW

What is it? A survival game set in the Canadian wilderness.
Expect to pay £27/$35
Developer Hinterland Studio
Publisher In-house
Reviewed on GTX 1080, Intel i5-6600K, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer None
Link Official site

£23.79

VIEW AT STEAM

A geomagnetic anomaly has plunged the world into darkness and rendered all technology useless, including the plane you were flying over the vast, frozen wilds of Canada. You awake surrounded by flames and wreckage—badly injured and freezing to death—and find yourself in a battle to survive in one of the most inhospitable corners of the planet. It’s a hell of a place to spend the apocalypse, and death lingers around every corner of this deadly, wintry expanse.

I came across it via a Robert MacFarlane tweet which had a lovely description of the game which was written by Ewan Wilson, and referenced Nan Shepherd and Caspar David Friedrich as influences for the visuals, which means it ties in quite nicely with some of the ideas in the resource I've been developing with Peter Knight from Keele University.

Also connects with the idea of place.

More on this to come over the summer, when I get a chance to play some of these games... It beats Fortnite...

Disease Game

Last year I wrote a unit of work on FOOD AND HEALTH for Richard Allaway's Geography all the Way website.

The resources can be obtained by GATW subscribers HERE

This new game challenges you to contain an outbreak of a disease by selective vaccination, by breaking the chain of infection.... If you are able to save a certain percentage of people from the original 100, you can progress to a harder level, or try to beat your previous personal best.
What strategies work best ?

Good for anyone studying the Geography of Disease...

LocateStreet

You may have seen on my earlier post on GeoGuessr the mention for LOCATESTREET 

This is a variation on GeoGuessr, with various points being offered for guidance, although the Elevation option doesn't offer that much help...

You can choose to play on a Global basis, or other scales.

You are presented with 4 options of location to choose from, and if you pick the correct option you can earn bonus points for clicking on the actual location on a map...
The site takes you to some fairly out of the way places... I seemed to end up on rural roads, and in cul-de-sacs on industrial estates quite often.

Hardcore players should choose the GLOBAL option... and discover that South America looks a lot like Australia in places...
Choose the COUNTRY option, and explore a range of countries from a list, which includes the UK. This offers potential for a CITY based search for example.
There are also some US based Thematic search options.

The game is addictive. Had to stop myself playing on it last night....
If you get one of the highest scores so far you can enter your e-mail to be added to the High Score table. May be an incentive for some to use additional 'support' to search for business names etc., but that wouldn't be in the spirit of the game...

Also, while playing, I've come across a few random sights.
This looks like some sort of hawk diving into a field to catch something ?

And what is this bloke doing standing in the road ?

The game was developed by Nick Burkhart of Chelonia Labs in California.

As with GeoGuessr, there are various clues that you can look for to help with locating yourself in fairly random housing estates.

Telephone dialling codes tend not to be blurred out. 020 will tell you that you're in London.

If on a main road, head for junctions where there'll be road signs.

Look at the vernacular building materials - some places have distinctive stone or house designs.

Become familiar with the basic geography of London, which features heavily in the UK option.

Be aware though, that they can be misleading. I spotted a Yorkshire registration on a motorbike, which ended up being up in the far north of Scotland, flipping tourists...