Place Space & Monkey Brains: Cognitive Mapping in Games & Other Media

Abstract

This paper attempts to ground the relationship of architecture to game space, suggest ways in which real world design of places can help the design of game spaces, and distinguish between our experience and recall of episodic space as scene via film and literature, to our experience and recall of sequential and interstitial space in three-dimensional games. The following argument is based on informal feedback of game players, formal observations of navigation in virtual environments, and from discussions with researchers of medical visualization technologies. My hypothesis is that having an ergodically embodied sense of self (such as in computer games) enhances sequential spatial memory over traditional non-ergodic forms of entertainment (such as adventure books with survey maps, or traditional cinematic media). My proposed method of evaluation for analyzing and evaluating spatial cognition in an interactive virtual environment (such as a computer game), is to use brain scanning equipment.