The capacity of game environments to produce spatially complex structures as well as respond to players’ location within them helps to generate what Calleja (2011) calls “spatial involvementȄ in the space of the image, whereby movement and navigation rešuire effort and skill. This effort and skill then produce a sense of exploration: ȃwhen a player plots a route through a geographical expanse and then navigates it, it is more likely that she will feel a sense of habitation within the game environment” (

a geometric understanding of screen space assumes that space is a property of the screen and that different forms of space are dependent on how geometry and graphical lines are presented on the screen. Space is therefore a bounded property of the distance between the lines and polygons that delimit the edges of the game environment and serves to separate and partition how and where the player can move within this space through the joining of straight lines and polygons.

This chapter has examined various ways of conceptualizing video-game space and place. It has argued that what makes video-game spaces and places unique is that, as digital simulations, video games are possibility spaces – spaces of potential opened up between the rules that limit players’ actions and the freedom that is available within these spaces.

representations of people and places. As a number of writers are now highlighting, there is a clear representational politics to video-game images and how they shape the geographical imagination of users. This politics has two clearly identifiable strands: representations of conĚict and militarism and representations of human identity.

Sometimes the view is from outside looking in, but more common, as in this photograph, is the interior view showing the world beyond.

rough photographs, the world was ȃmade familiarȄ and ȃbrought in intense reality to our very hearthsȄ (

his constant tension between photography and reality – a slippery relationship at once straightforward and enigmatic – can be found at the extreme ends of the photographic spectrum: from modest snapshots emerging from a Brownie camera or cell phone to the most serious ȃartȄ photographs.

we repeatedly encounter the power of media to transform the places in which they are used. This power is not a mere conceit of human audiencesDz animals and even plants respond to the presence of media in their environments (see lulka, this volume). Media transform a place from within, whether the place in šuestion is the nation-state, the neighborhood, or the home

A third feature of Geography, the Media and Popular Culture was its attention to power, whether in the form of the power to produce cheap television programming (Gould and lyew-Ayee 1985), the power to define notions like risk and danger (liverman and sherman 1985Dz Burgess 1985), the power to articulate a particular structure of space and time (Brooker-Gross 1985), or more generally the power to propagate dominant ideologies. Power remains a central concern in media geography,