(Not) Game Genres, pt. 6: Wolf's Elementary Spatial Structures of Video Games (part one)

In my last post, I analyzed a system of video game genres developed by game scholar Mark J. P. Wolf and published in his book, The Medium of the Video Game (2001). This time, I am switching to the topic of spatiality, a chapter subject that Wolf included in The Medium of the Video Game, but was previously published as the article "Inventing Space: Toward a Taxonomy of On- and Off-Screen Space in Video Games" published years earlier in Film Quarterly (Fall 1997, vol. 51, no. 1).

Film Quarterly (Fall 1997, vol. 51, no. 1)

This means that 25+ years ago, Wolf devised a taxonomy of digital game spatiality, much the same as my current research. I previously analyzed Wolf's taxonomy in my own unpublished essay, "A Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces" (Rowe, 2021). Our works don't completely agree, but certainly applaud his early stabs in the dark at defining something so nebulous and undefined as game spaces.

He based his analysis of the spatial structures of digital games on his background of film and television theory, but made a prescient call that "video games are certainly deserving of their own branch of theory" (Wolf, 1997). Within a few years of that quote, game studies (or ludology) started to be recognized as an academic study and the first journals dedicated to the subject started to be published.

Wolf felt that video game theory would likely be "in close kinship to film and television theory" (1997), and much of early game studies reflects this notion. When he first published the essay, many game developers sought to converge digital games with cinema. 1997 was in the midst of the "Silliwood" (Silicon Valley/Hollywood) era when studios invested heavily in making "interactive movies" using full motion video (FMV) of live action actors mixed with digital elements. The fad boomed with the proliferation of CD-ROM drives, but most FMV games simply weren't very good. It isn't easy to create a dynamic and interactive world from pre-recorded film clips and many of these games were sold more for spectacle and star appeal than for substance. [As a personal aside, I got my start in the industry in 1996 as a tester for Voyeur II by Interweave Entertainment and later worked for DreamWorks Interactive, publisher of games like Steven Spielberg's Director's Chair. So, my game design career is a product of this Silliwood era.]

Inside Adventure's Blue Labyrinth and Black Castle image from "Space in the Video Game" (The Medium of the Video Game, Wolf, 2001)

As Wolf's essay title alludes, he was interested in how games create a sense of space, both on and off the screen, to create a sense of a cohesive world. He notes how, in games, these connections between spaces may create impossible, non-Euclidean worlds that cannot exactly be mapped on a rectangular topology (such as the example of Atari's Adventure, shown in the image above from Wolf's revised 2001 version of the essay, where screens have impossible connections to one another and an entire multi-screen labyrinth is "inside" of a smaller castle object). He likens these spaces to similar "impossible" spaces in film and television, the the TARDIS from Doctor Who. 

Wolf's 11 Elementary Spatial Structures of Video Games

1. No visual space; all text-based
2. One screen, contained
3. One screen, contained, with wraparound
4. Scrolling on one axis
5. Scrolling on two axes
6. Adjacent spaces displayed one at a time
7. Layers of independently moving planes (multiple scrolling backgrounds)
8. Spaces allowing z-axis movement into and out of the frame
9. Multiple, nonadjacent spaces displayed on-screen simultaneously
10. Interactive three-dimensional environment
11. Represented or “mapped” spaces

I'll go into more details on Wolf's spatial structures and compare them to my own spatial topology in the next post.