The Poetics of Space
I'm still thinking about games as an experience of space, and instead of looking for relevant games criticism like a sensible person, I dug into Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space.
Bachelard was one of those continental philosophers. You know the ones--he influenced Foucault and Derrida. But he had some compelling ideas, backed up by his readings of poetry, fiction, and visual art, about how our imaginations reflect the places where we spend our time.
Through poems, perhaps more than through recollections, we touch the ultimate poetic depth of the space of the house.
This being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. (Ch. 1)
Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world. The problem is not only one of being, it is also a problem of energy and, consequently, of counter-energy.
In this dynamic rivalry between house and universe, we are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms. A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space. (Ch. 2)
In particular, if the house is a microcosmic universe of meaning ("a universe outside the universe," Bachelard says at one point), maybe this enables us to conceive of every image in this way. I'm not attached enough to psychoanalysis to want to think of this as a direct causal relationship, the effect of the home on a developing mind or whatever. But at least the way we invest inhabited space with all sorts of meaning can provide a model for how we might invest anything else with meaning.
[T]he spirit finds the nest of immensity in an object. (Ch. 8)
Poets will help us to discover within ourselves such joy in looking that sometimes, in the presence of a perfectly familiar object, we experience an extension of our intimate space. (Ch. 8)
Before getting totally lost in the metaphor here, I want to acknowledge that a video game isn't a place in the same way that the setting of a novel isn't a world. It's a picture drawn on a screen by a computer 60 or so times per second based on a bunch of math. But you can change the underlying math by pushing some buttons, and the question in my mind is how far play (or the resulting "mixed field of physical and virtual space," as this article puts it) gets us. Is the illusion strong enough that the game becomes something like a "corner" of the room?
[E]very corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house. (Ch. 6)
In any case Bachelard notes that "valorized space is a verb," a process of meaning expansion, and at this point it's practically cliche to refer to the actions a game makes available to you as its verbs. If the ideal "poetic space ... does not enclose us in affectivity," if the point is running toward an infinite horizon, maybe play, or the ubiquitous verb of navigating, pushing forward or clicking through, gets us closer to that.