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