Space in video games is not, strictly speaking, physical. It’s made of pixels on a screen, and the movement of objects within it are governed by the algorithms of its central processing unit. This artificiality has the ironic effect of making the world inside of a video game more immediately familiar than the world beyond our living rooms, as if the game is a memory we didn’t know we had. I can’t tell you how many times I reached a level-end boss for the first time only to have the sensation I’d been there already, a room in a house I’d forgotten I’d visited.
Head on over to Electric Literature to read a lovely argument for video games being their own special type of poetry.
