From confined spaces to infinite spaces: the representation in screen-mediated games

The field of research about video games has paid a lot of attention to the issue of spatiality in the last few years. If in fact the thematic and structural categories, such as goals, genres and prizes, have remained almost unchanged, the set of environments, scenery and visual languages is rapidly changing and becoming increasingly complex: in other words, the video games innovation is taking place in their representation of the space. The spatial representation is always screen-mediated, as well as in the other visual media; the screen, in fact, is a constant of the visual culture, from the Renaissance paintings to the films of the 20th century: being in the physical space but acting on the simulated one, it is able to enclose a virtual space into a real environment, thus ensuring the coexistence of two totally different spaces. The video game screen, however, no longer contains static spatial images, but it includes explorable places that, being dynamic and interactive, have their own distinctive features. Therefore, the research sets out to investigate the specificities of the spatial representation in video game and the evolution of its relation to the screen: we will analyze games in which the screen forms both the visible and the spatial border, other games in which it coincides with the visible border but it does not match with the spatial limit, until reaching the pervasive games, in which the screen loses its peculiarity of border to fit itself into the real space