part0013

Space: it was hardly the final frontier for video games. Rather, considerations related to spatiality and environment have been fundamental concerns for game design and analysis from the start. This chapter examines the spatialization of culture in video games, building on the substantial body of existing analysis concerning video game space from the viewpoint of game design or player experience or both, as well as taking into account critical perspectives on the relationship between culture and space in other media traditions. From a game development standpoint, a culturally coded gamespace can add dimension to semiotic and narrative elements by contextualizing them within a specific environment with its own particular manners of conveying meaning. Game designers—working within the parameters of the hardware and software, programming languages, and game engines available to them in a particular place and time—not only adapt settings from real-life spaces with their own cultural connotations, but also make innumerable decisions throughout the design process aimed at augmenting the cultural context of their gamespaces. From the perspective of gameplay, spatial exploration, discovery, and “virtual tourism” are often cited as motivating factors for gamers across the globe. From text-based adventure games to three-dimensional open worlds, culture has been a concern in the development of game interfaces and environments since the onset of the medium, making it crucial to consider the role of culture when seeking to explain how meaning is generated within video game space.

Many game scholars cite spatiality as one of the most significant aspects in distinguishing games from other media, so much so that some see video games as more closely linked to architecture than to film or literature. 1 James Newman argues that “gameplay may not only be seen as bounded in space, but also as a journey through it,” 2 while Henry Jenkins highlights space’s relationship to narrative in creating meaning, asserting that “[g]ame designers don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces.” 3 Edvin Babic goes a step further: “More than time, events, and goals, almost all computer games celebrate and explore spatial representation as their central theme.” 4 Game spaces are unique because they are spaces that are at once present in and separate from the spaces of everyday life. In this sense video games can be seen as heterotopias, which Michel Foucault defined as “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” 5 And indeed, video games are spaces in which an endless array of “real sites” from known cultural contexts are “represented, contested and inverted,” heterotopic locales ritualistically detached from “real life” yet ultimately inseparable from it.

As with narrative techniques, “camera” angles, and game rules, the use of space in video games corresponds to numerous traditions of representation. Most notably, video game spaces appropriate the established techniques of painting, photography, cinema, and just as importantly, those of architecture and computer-aided design, putting them to new uses. Those traditions are never far from hand—referring to their influence on contemporary technology, Manovich goes so far as to argue, “the nineteenth-century panorama can be thought of as a transitional form between classical simulations (wall paintings, human-size sculpture, diorama) and VR [Virtual Reality].” 6 Manovich points to the importance of understanding the ways games relate not just visually or conceptually but also spatially to other forms of representation. Games’ fundamental difference from other traditions, as with so many of the other aspects that they remediate, relates to player immersion, embodiment, and interaction with the virtual space, all of which expands games’ capacity for conveying cultural experiences. This chapter traces the conceptual progression in the uses of culture in video game space, examining the spatialization of Latin American culture throughout the history of the medium. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates that no analysis of culture in games is complete without a discussion of space; and likewise a comprehensive analysis of space in video games must take culture into account.

The transitions among landscape, setting, and environment in the representational arts are transgenerational as well as transmedial, responding to various technological advances of different historical eras. Video games use space in a way that responds to traditions including nineteenth-century landscape painting and photography, the use of setting by the directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, and contemporary cinematic practices such as the use of computer-generated imagery, computer action modeling, and motion capture. But games fundamentally alter these practices by situating them within a multidimensional and mutable gamespace. This transformation into a multimodal game environment , as opposed to a still landscape or a narrative setting , involves a level of interactivity and responsiveness absent in the prior media. This is the main reason Shoshana Magnet distinguishes pictorial, photographic, and filmic landscapes from interactive “gamescapes,” in order “to underline the fact that the virtual landscapes found in video games are not static objects ‘to-be-looked-at,’ but are dynamic and require the active involvement of the player in their construction.” 7 Video games engage players in multisensory and participatory exploration of space, requiring them to interpret input such as on-screen images (both diegetic visual clues as well as nondiegetic health levels and other indicators in the heads-up display), 8 environmental sounds, and physical feedback like controller vibration, all of which distinguishes the medium from other forms of spatial representation.

The study of landscape, unlike that of film or video games, comes from a tradition of the static image, particularly the legacy of nineteenth-century painting and photography. The observer of a landscape is assumed to be situated in “a fixed point of a static scene,” while the film viewer takes a “mobile view on a mobile world,” 9 and this mobility is multiplied in the spatialized activity of video game play. Films generally use space as a setting for action—in Martin Lefebvre’s terminology, “the place where something happens, where something takes place and unfolds.” 10 While video game spaces are certainly frequent sites for action and interaction, they also provide myriad opportunities for players to pause, contemplate, and consider their surroundings. Unbound by the constraints of a ninety-minute narrative arc, video game design opens up landscape in a new way, as an experiential and interactive event within a broader environment. Indeed, in many games there are moments when the action is momentarily halted by something akin to what Lefebvre refers to as the viewer’s “landscape gaze” with regard to film—that is, a moment in which “the spectator mentally arrests the unfolding of the film and internally holds the space for contemplation until returning to the narrative mode.” 11 Situated within the spatial environment of a video game, such “landscape moments” can enhance the player’s experience. “What is attractive” in these moments of pause and contemplation, Calleja explains, “is not only the beauty of the landscape but the element of pleasant surprise at making the discovery.” 12 This is one way interactivity fundamentally transforms the ways video games relate to earlier traditions of spatial representation.

Like film and theater, setting is a central consideration in the development of video games, though its uses are also transformed through their adaptation to a different medium. Film directors have long sought to choose a setting that would reflect the overall tone of their works, creating the circumstances in which “[p]lace becomes spectacle, a signifier of the film’s subject, a metaphor for the state of mind of the protagonist.” 13 Setting is cultural as well, the cinematic “spectacle” being dependent in part on the context in which a film’s action takes place. It is in this sense that a film’s setting can function as a “symbol that stands for relationships, values and goals of a group of people, e.g. in the form of national attributes,” 14 or more critically as “an ideologically charged cultural creation whereby meanings of place and society are made, legitimized, contested, and obscured.” 15 Unlike the single viewpoint offered by the landscape gaze, in cinema setting is a context for metaphorical signification and a space of cultural contestation. Jameson famously referred to space as the “fundamental organizing concern” in the process of cognitive mapping, or “the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories.” 16 The viewer of a film, like the occupant of a real city, creates a mental depiction of the space they or their narrative occupies, a cognitive map that allows for a sense of spatial context.

Video games allow their players to create ever more complex cognitive maps. Calleja has argued that “[a]s cognitive maps of game environments improve, the player’s spatial disposition to them shifts from the conceptual to the inhabited,” leading to internalization of a game’s spatial architecture and “a stronger sense of inhabiting the game space.” 17 This means that as players explore a game’s environment, they cease to rely upon guidance mechanisms like maps and radar, turning to their experiential knowledge and the spatial familiarity that supplants the cognitive map with inhabited space. Video game space must be considered in terms of interactivity, responsiveness, and function above and beyond its relationship to traditions of spatial representation in film and the visual arts. If setting is the space where the story takes place and landscape is space freed from eventhood , 18 the video game environment can be characterized as evental space . 19 Video game spaces are virtual environments in which actual events occur: areas are explored, discoveries are made, and gaming literacy is increased. Rather than space in isolation or as the setting for the narration of events, video game space is an environmental context for the active creation of culturally contextualized meaning.

Culture has been incorporated into numerous aspects of gamespace since the inception of the video game medium, and continual advances in design techniques have allowed for simultaneous improvements in the possibilities for the spatialization of culture. In “Space in the Video Game,” Mark J. P. Wolf defines eleven different “spatial structures” including entirely text-based games with no visual space, one-screen games, scrolling games, and interactive three-dimensional environments, among others. 20 Examples of Latin American cultural representation can be found for each of Wolf’s categories—we could think, for example, of the ways the region’s cultures are interpreted in a range of spatial environments including the 1980s text adventures The Mask of the Sun and Amazon , single-screen games like Pelé’s Soccer (Atari 1980), flying combat scrollers like Harrier Attack or Jungle Strike , two-axis scrollers like Sid Meier’s Civilization and Tropico (Gathering of Developers 2001), or interactive three-dimensional environments in games like Just Cause , Mercenaries 2 , Tomb Raider , and Max Payne 3 . While examples of Latin American cultural representation have existed in all types of spatial frames throughout the history of game design, the relationship between video game space and Latin American culture—and moreover, the relationship between video game space and culture in general—bears substantial further exploration.

Latin America has appeared in video game spaces since the earliest days of the medium, even in games that might appear to be devoid of spatial representation altogether—the types of text-based adventure games Wolf categorizes as having “no visual space.” One such example, Indiana Jones in Revenge of the Ancients (Mindscape 1987), has Indy traveling through Mexican pyramids and jungles in an effort to recover a key indigenous artifact and, naturally, to keep the Nazis from getting to it first. Though the game is entirely textual in format, it represents Latin America through a narrative focused on exploration of virtual spaces. Consider the centrality of spatial depiction in the game’s opening lines:

As the introductory text of Indiana Jones in Revenge of the Ancients makes clear, spatiality prevails even in a game that is devoid of the types of three-dimensional environments to which today’s gamers are accustomed. Architectural details (a solid stone floor; a domed room), directional cues (above you; through a door to the south), and sensorial descriptions (a scraping and sliding noise; a vast, shadowy space) provide a sense of spatial orientation, while at the same time cultural cues (the Tepotzteco Pyramid; a carved stone panel) serve as reminders of the Aztec environment that the player inhabits.

In similar ways, other primarily text-based “graphical text adventure” games round out the Latin American cultural spaces depicted in their limited visual imagery with narrative detail. Examples like The Mask of the Sun and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? (Broderbund 1985) complement their verbal rendering of Latin American cultural space with images depicting the jungles, temples, and colonial architecture in which the actions take place (figure 5.1 ). A number of other text-based adventure games carried on the tradition of the explorer/adventure genre, including the early-1990s Spanish games La diosa de Cozumel , Los templos sagrados, and Chichén Itzá , as well as games from the United States such as Tombs & Treasures (Infocom 1991). Other graphical text adventure games were situated in the contemporary sociopolitical spaces of Latin America, including Telarium’s 1986 PC game Amazon , written and partially programmed by bestselling novelist Michael Crichton as an adaptation of his novel Congo , then rewritten due to legal concerns, resignifying the African jungle setting as South America in the process. Hidden Agenda (Springboard 1988) was a political strategy game set in the fictional Central American nation of Chimerica, which required the player to achieve a sustainable balance in public opinion in a setting highly reminiscent of Nicaragua after the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979. Graphical text adventure games such as these combined written text and visual elements to create a dynamic and innovative spatial framework for cultural representation.

Though it is by no means all-encompassing, the transition from two-dimensional or textual formats to fully interactive environments seems now to have been an inevitability for game design. Historical signposts signal this transition in games set in Latin America—Amazon: Guardians of Eden (Access 1992) still relied upon two-dimensional images, but added animation to its cutscenes, while in Flight of the Amazon Queen (Warner 1995), the player moves through two-dimensional space and selects actions from visual menu icons rather than entering textual commands. The transition from a textual to an audiovisual environment is crystallized in Amazon Trail II (1996) and Amazon Trail 3rd Edition (1999), sequels to developer/publisher MECC’s 1994 game The Amazon Trail , which first added animation and then real voices and screen-capture acting to the game’s audiovisual display. A recent resurgence of two-dimensional and even non-dimensional gamespaces rely upon experimentation with innovative game mechanics—British developer Somethin’ Else’s iOS games Papa Sangre (2010) and Papa Sangre II (2013) have been respectively described as a “video game with no video” and “a game for your ears,” because they are entirely audio-based horror-themed games set in the Mexico-based Kingdom of Papa Sangre. And even in this nonvisual portrayal of culture, spatiality is of the essence, as the game’s designers depended upon advances in the generation of 3D binaural audio effects in order to create the sonic illusions of spatial inhabitation necessary to achieve their vision.

In his book Video Game Spaces , Michael Nitsche divides his analysis between five spatial planes: rule-based (mathematical programming rules), mediated (presentation on the image plane), fictional (imagined space), play (player and hardware; where play takes place), and social (space affected by interaction with others). 22 While the present analysis touches on aspects of all of these spatial categorizations, the primary concern of this chapter is with the mediated and fictional planes, through which space is represented visually and imagined conceptually. The mediated space, per Nitsche, “consists of all the output the system can provide in order to present the rule-based game universe to the player,” while the fictional space is the world the player imagines from the provided information. 23 In the interaction between these two spatial planes, the cultural capacity of video game space is revealed to be both a programmed element of game design and a component of the fictional universe that exists beyond and around a game.

Like other elements of gameplay, the environment can function as an obstacle or an affordance depending on its deployment by the player in relation to the game’s rules and coding. As Newman explains: “The player is not merely pitted against the game space but rather is encouraged to think about how the space can be utilized to assist in the attainment of the player’s objective.” 24 Likewise, it is important to remember that though cultural verisimilitude is an important element of a convincing game environment, its significance is subordinated to the overarching goal of a satisfying gameplay experience, so “while videogames can be said to be spatial, it is their deviation from the patterns of ‘real space’ that enables them to function as games.” 25 And lest we go too far over the edge and fall into the trap of technological determinism, we must weigh player agency as one of the determining factors in creating meaning for game space above and beyond the software’s code itself. As Laurie Taylor explains, videogame spaces “are more than simply the sum of their code—they are experiential spaces generated through code and the player’s interaction with the execution of that code through the medium of the screen.” 26 Thus gamespace can be used to the player’s advantage or disadvantage, in ways that go with or against the intentions coded into the games preprogrammed rules, but its meaning is consistently defined through activity.

In other words, culture takes on meaning through use within game environments. In “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” Jenkins emphasizes the role of space in what he calls “environmental storytelling,” explaining that “spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives.” 27 This helps explain the associations in game design between space and narrative, and the ways that narrative meaning can be conveyed through culturally coded game spaces in a nonlinear, nontextual fashion. As Jenkins elaborates, “[w]ithin an open-ended and exploratory narrative structure like a game, essential narrative information must be redundantly presented across a range of spaces and artifacts, since one can not assume the player will necessarily locate or recognize the significance of any given element.” 28 This is how cultural messages are often communicated in games, as underlying but continuously reiterated elements of the environment that serve to provide an overarching sense of cultural context. Because video games present culture experientially to the player, its means of iteration are also transformed in order to express culture in ways that cannot be captured through language or other systems of representation. Culture is a major element of the environmental contexts of video games, and the possibilities for cultural expression and experience are transformed with each successive technological advance and design breakthrough in the game industry.

Sound is an element inseparable from the spatial environment, as well as a key means of cultural signification in gamespace. Like visual and linguistic signs, sounds convey meaning about the cultural space to which they pertain. As Alejandra Bronfman and Andrew Grant Wood argue in their introduction to Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean , “[s]ound (both natural and mediated) offers us much in the way of content,” and moreover, “[i]f sight remains the primary sense by which we constitute and represent our scholarship, then we have marginalized much that is relevant to other sense records potentially rich in information and cultural clues.” 29 Michele Hilmes echoes this point, suggesting that “sounds in their creation and in their context are representations : the product of a specific communication situation, layered with meaning.” 30 Nitsche has noted that sound effects “are part of a virtual world’s identity,” 31 with a major impact on the signifying experience of gameplay—for example, “[e]laborate soundscapes can build up a dramatic foreshadowing, provide direct acoustic engagement up to the climax, and mark an end with a cathartic aftermath.” 32 Video game sound is carefully crafted to contribute to the overall gameplay experience, including the environmental contextualization of cultural meaning. As Nitsche argues, the “acoustic telling of space in modern video games has become highly elaborate, not to simulate realistic worlds but to evoke dramatic game locations.” 33 Furthermore, as others have noted, sounds affect video game meaning by “informing the player about the state of the game world and by cuing emotions that enhance the immersiveness of the game,” and “when used effectively can evoke feelings from excitement, to melancholy, to desperation.” 34 Every sound in a video game has been carefully selected for a representational purpose by the game’s designers, and each sound has the potential to affect the depth and functional meaning of the simulation.

Contextualized within gamespace, all sound—in-game dialogue, ambient noise, sound effects tied to actions, the musical score, and licensed musical tracks—functions as a feedback system . Feedback systems in current video games are multiple, pervasive, and increasingly naturalized, not to mention integrated with the cultural environments of present-day games. Feedback systems include not only conventional point tallies and health meters but also environmental cues that indicate player progress as well as missteps. Culturally coded elements are identifiable in all four types of in-game sound identified by the editors of Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction . These sound categories include (with some examples from games situated in Latin American gamespace): (1) vocalization (spoken dialogue in Spanish or Portuguese); (2) sound effects (footsteps across tin rooftops and plywood buildings of the favela, or echoing through the stone hallways of jungle temples); (3) ambient effects (cheeping frogs and tweeting birds in certain areas, dripping pipes and construction work in others); and (4) music (the Caribbean soundtrack to Tropico , or diegetic salsa music playing on a Panamanian yacht in a side mission of Max Payne 3 ). 35 In addition to these types of video game sound that can contribute to the conveyance of cultural meaning, there are several contextual effects that help shape sounds’ meaning relative to gameplay, including effects of: (A) environment, such as “the size of the location, the material of the walls, the characteristics of the carrying medium (air, water, etc.), the weather conditions,” and other qualities; (B) spatiality, such as the relative volume of nearby and distant sounds; and (C) physics, as “sound may be affected by relative movement (e.g. it may mimic Doppler shift), etc.” 36 Therefore there are not only many reasons to consider the impact of sound on cultural meaning in video games, but there are also many important considerations to take into account when analyzing sound’s role in the process of cultural spatialization.

The use of foreign languages in video games is a particularly functional sonic indicator of culture, and in fact foreign language use can relay important information even to players who are not familiar with the language in question. This is because communication occurs on two levels when foreign languages are used in video games, on a narrative (or representational) level and on a ludic level. Take for example the use of Brazilian Portuguese in two of the games discussed in chapter 4 , Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Max Payne 3 . In Modern Warfare 2 the “Brazilian Militia,” a playable faction within the game’s multiplayer mode, are the primary Portuguese speakers throughout the game. Brazilian Militia members are audible to other players as they communicate among themselves in Portuguese about their actions—“Atirando uma granada de mão,” “Apareceu de repente!,” “Alvo neutralizado!” or in the campaign, “Tá pensando que invade a minha favela assim?” This type of foreign language communication is a common feature in the Call of Duty series, meaning that a hardcore player might know how to say “Enemy down!” or “Throwing frag!” in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic. On the one hand, for a player who understands (or learns to understand) the language being spoken, these (foreign-)language phrases retain their representational meaning—they describe the action being taken in throwing a grenade or help to identify a downed target. However, with this type of linguistic usage, it is generally assumed that the player does not speak the language in question, and therefore the meaning that is conveyed is not only representational but also ludic, creating a meaning specific to the game environment. These phrases, spoken in Brazilian Portuguese, can offer important ludic information even to the non-Portuguese-speaking player: the sound of spoken language can reveal the location of other players, their relative proximity or distance, and most importantly, whether the person in the next room is a friend or foe. All of this valuable ludic information can be gleaned through a number of game mechanics combined with the fact that Portuguese is being spoken, independent of the linguistic meaning of the words being used.

Language can also be used in other ways to enhance a game’s cultural context, as demonstrated by the ubiquitous use of untranslated Portuguese in Max Payne 3 . During the bulk of the game, both in moments of action and moments of narrative exposition, Max is surrounded by characters speaking a language he does not speak himself. Likewise, the player is constantly exposed to spoken and written Portuguese throughout the game—voiceovers play continually, and almost all of the characters speak Portuguese, at least in background dialogue. Written Portuguese is involved with many of the clues (receipts, letters, files) that must be interpreted visually, as well as being a constant part of the surroundings in the form of advertisements and signage. What is most remarkable about Max Payne 3 ’s employment of Brazilian Portuguese is that the game offers no option for English subtitles for these tens of thousands of lines of foreign-language dialogue. Therefore, only those players fluent in Portuguese will glean the representational meaning communicated by the use of the language, and this definitely works to their advantage within the game, revealing information that remains concealed to other players. In this way, too, the non-Portuguese-speaking player’s experience echoes Max’s own, as they are immersed together in an environment that is semiotically cryptic and linguistically incomprehensible. These examples reflect how spoken language can be used not only to deepen a game’s cultural environment, but to convey important information, whether players are fluent in the language in question or they don’t speak a word.

Music, in addition to spoken language and other types of culturally coded sound, can have a major impact on the way culture is conveyed in the gameplay experience. Zach Whalen argues that “music is essential to the semantic operations of a videogame,” and that “the musical soundtrack of a game affects the user’s experience and creates a seamless impression of game-play,” 37 fluidly combining with other visual and interactive elements to round out the game’s environment. Video games’ extended periods of gameplay (relative to feature-length films, for example) and variations in level of action (from aimless wandering to brutal confrontation) place unique demands on composers of musical scores as well as curators of video game soundtracks. These demands include not only extending the length and number of tracks included, but also the need to create new approaches to the fusion of music and environment. This has led to the development of dynamic music generation , a process through which music files are fragmented into different sections and set to play in loops for given periods of time, after which point “[s]pecific conditions—anything from the protagonist’s state of health to the type of on-screen action—may combine to inform the game what music is most appropriate; similarly, built-in rules may tell the game how and when to shift from one composition to another.” 38 There are several recent games set in Latin America featuring dynamic music generation as part of their soundscape, including Tomb Raider: Underworld and Red Dead Redemption , both of which are discussed in detail later in this chapter. Thus, in the most complex of contemporary game environments, score music is not a linear affair along the lines of classical orchestral composition, but rather an active, algorithmic component that is tied through software code to the actions undertaken by the player.

In today’s game design world there are several possible approaches to composing the musical score to a game, some more conventional and others more innovative. On the one hand, there are games that rely on a variety of songs from one or two artists to round out the cultural environment, such as Tropico 3 , which features a brassy jazz soundtrack performed by Miami-based artist Alex Torres, along with a handful of other Caribbean performers. Other games feature original scores written by a single composer. For example, the scores of all of the games in Ubisoft’s Call of Juarez series have been penned by Polish composer Pawel Blaszczak, who cites the classic film scores of American Westerns by Italian composer Ennio Morricone, as well as “Native American, Mexican, and Gypsy tunes” as influences to the games’ musical environment. 39 In this way, composers frequently attempt to incorporate traditional sonic representations associated with a given cultural or historical environment into the musical score, alluding to cultural context through choices in instrumentation, musical genre, and compositional style. Another example is the score of Papo & Yo , which was composed by Brian D’Oliveira in collaboration with the game’s designer Vander Caballero. D’Oliveira, who “grew up poor in South America,” identified with the story of the game’s working-class Brazilian child protagonist, and set to work applying his curiosity and passion for the region’s music into the game’s sonic atmosphere. 40 He incorporated dozens of unique acoustic instruments into the score, many of which struck Caballero as “unnameable, foreign and rare,” in an attempt to “create a language … something that feels familiar internally, something that resonates with your emotions. Something sonic and just as exotic and magical as the game.” 41 Cases like Papo & Yo show how a composer can specifically aim to complement the vision of the game designers in developing the game’s sonic environment.

In addition to (or even in place of) an original musical score, many games use songs by major recording artists on their soundtracks, another way of using music for cultural contextualization. The Mexican-themed levels in Little Big Planet , for example, feature songs by popular artists like Mexican Institute of Sound, as well as the song “Volver a comenzar” (“Starting Over Again”) by Mexican alternative rock outfit Café Tacuba. These tracks are selected to round out the visual and interactive signifiers of Mexican culture featured in these levels of the game, but they also offer added value for the Spanish-speaking player—for example, the repetitive lyrics and hypnotizing chorus of “Volver a comenzar” represent a clever play on the repetitive starting and restarting of the gameplay, which also restarts the musical track. The game’s British developers at Media Molecule also used music to enhance the cultural environment in Little Big Planet PSP (Sony 2009), which features songs by Brazilian artists like Astrud Gilberto and Bazeado for the game’s climax at a Brazilian carnival parade. The New York-based soundtrack supervision team For Max Payne 3 took things a step further, increasing the nuance of their portrayal of São Paulo by including recordings by more than a dozen contemporary Brazilian artists and groups, featuring a range of genres from samba and bossa nova to hip-hop. In addition to existing commercial recordings, Max Payne 3 ’s designers enlisted Paulistano rapper Emicida to record several original songs for the soundtrack, demonstrating how cultural context can be effected in part through the musical soundtrack’s incorporation into the video game space.

While games like Little Big Planet and Max Payne 3 have original scores in addition to their use of popular music, others have eschewed an original score altogether in favor of prerecorded tracks. Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series has relied entirely upon in-game radio stations to provide its soundtrack up until GTA V (2013), the first in the series to feature an original score in addition to in-car radio. In games like the GTA series, radio stations are a central component to the multicultural urban environment, offering glimpses of the diverse population of the cities where they broadcast. GTA V features seventeen separate radio stations, including those dedicated to hip-hop (West Coast Classics, Radio Los Santos, FlyLo FM), electronica (Soulwax FM, Radio Mirror Park), rock and pop (Los Santos Rock Radio, Non Stop Pop FM), reggae (Blue Ark FM), Latin (East Los FM), alternative/punk (Vinewood Boulevard Radio, Channel X), soul/funk (Lowdown FM, The Space 103.2), international jazz (WorldWide FM), country/western (Rebel Radio), and talk radio (WCTR, Blaine County Radio). Cultural context is conveyed in multiple ways on each of these radio stations: in the selection of music broadcast, the advertisements and political debates that cut in between songs, and the spoken dialogue of the DJs, who include stars from their respective musical genres such as the hosts of East Los FM, electronic artist Mexican Institute of Sound, and Mexican comic/musician Don Cheto. Latin music and culture have had a longstanding presence on GTA’s radio dials, starting with Radio Espantoso, the Caribbean jazz, salsa and funk station in GTA: Vice City (Rockstar 2002), on which DJs Hector Hernandez and Pepe played hits from Mongo Santamaría, Xavier Cugat, Benny Moré, and Tito Puente, among others. GTA IV (2008) introduced San Juan Sounds, a station hosted by reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee, featuring Caribbean artists like Calle 13, Wisin & Yandel, and Don Omar. GTA V ’s East Los FM features a range of Mexican and Latin music including the narcocorridos of Los Tigres del Norte and Los Buitres de Culiacán; 1970s and 80s classics by Sonora Dinamita, Los Ángeles Negros, and Fandango; hip-hop acts like Milkman and La Liga; the quirky electro-pop of Hechizeros Band and Don Cheto; and punk screamers like Jessy Bulbo and La Vida Boheme. Range and diversity like this demonstrates that music is a cultural component of great relevance to the designers of the GTA series, a way to add sensorial detail to the diverse cultural environments in which the games take place.

In addition to providing added cultural detail for the player, radio stations are a way of contextualizing the culture of GTA ’s nonplayer characters, as the music choices in a given NPC’s vehicle are frequently tied to the culture of the character’s neighborhood, which is in turn tied to racial and economic background. A high percentage of residents in GTA V ’s Latin neighborhoods listen to East Los FM, while many African-American residents of Grove Street and Chamberlain Hills prefer one of the hip-hop stations, and the residents of rural Sandy Shores and Blaine County tend to listen to Channel X and Rebel Radio. This correspondence between radio station selection and a character’s cultural traits is not consistent, however, nor does it always reinforce stereotypical cultural assumptions. But default radio stations are one way the game demonstrates the potential to convey cultural meaning through environmental cues. For example, all commercial vehicles and helicopters in GTA V default to the reggae station, The Blue Ark. In fact, taxi drivers almost universally prefer Latin music in the GTA universe, with secondary preferences for hip-hop or public/talk radio, according to the default radio stations in taxi cabs: the taxis in Vice City default to Radio Espantoso; in GTA IV they default to San Juan Sounds or hip-hop station The Beat 102.7; the cabs in GTA V default to East Los FM all the time, except when the cab is hotwired, in which case it defaults to West Coast Talk Radio. Does this imply that all civilian and military transportation workers in GTA V have an affinity for Jamaican music, or that all the cabbies in the series are Latin? No, but it demonstrates that music, like spoken language and environmental sound, has the potential to play a significant role in conveying cultural experience through video game sound.

In video games, sound combines with the spatial environment in order to produce a multidimensional cultural context. Sounds are selected, recorded, and integrated by game developers with specific functional purposes in mind, and sound contributes as a feedback system as well as a cultural indicator. Foreign language in games can be used for various purposes, whether to open the game to a different audience through language localization, through communicative meaning, or through ludic meaning conveyed through foreign language’s transmission in accordance with a game’s particular physics and mechanics. Music, like spoken language, is another major sonic indicator of culture in gamespace. Both musical score and licensed musical tracks contribute meaningfully to a game’s cultural context, rounding out narrative, symbolic, and mechanical elements of games’ meaning. Music can contribute to a game’s representation of a single and specific cultural setting, or it can be used to showcase cultural diversity of the game’s environment through the use of different genres of music in different cultural contexts. Because video game spaces are audio visual in nature, and because gameplay is a multisensorial experience, the perception of culture in gamespace is affected on myriad levels by sound.

In a history of development spanning four decades, commercial video games have incorporated culture into an increasingly broad spectrum of spatial environments. A number of typical cultural scenarios for video games now stand out, appearing first in the two-dimensional or textual spaces of late-1970s and early-1980s games, with continual updates including further development of the cultural context in subsequent iterations of games from the same genres and scenarios. With regard to the staging of Latin America in gamespace, there are three spatial paradigms that merit particular attention, each with its own implications for the spatialization of culture: (1) the recursive space that is opened up gradually in procedural adventures from Pitfall! to Tomb Raider to Uncharted ; (2) the isometric perspective of “god games” including Sid Meier’s Civilization and Tropico ; and (3) the open world or “sandbox” environment of games like Just Cause or Red Dead Redemption . An examination of each of these prototypical gamespaces will demonstrate the degree to which cultural representation is determined by a game’s spatial model.

As noted in chapter 1 of this book, some of the major motivators for gameplay include exploration, discovery, and acquisition, all of which rely on the player’s relationship to space. Aylish Wood highlights the significance of space to gameplay, describing the latter as “an experience through a combination of engagements with culturally embedded sound and imagery, a physical relation with a game interface, ‘imaginative’ connections with the game, its rules and objects, as well as the avatars of other players in multiplayer gaming environments.” 42 This is why Wood refers to the use of “recursive space” in video games, or “a repeated procedure in which the outcome of each step is defined in terms of the results of previous steps.” 43 This procedural conceptualization of video game space can be visualized as the way a player often “opens up” spaces gradually in a game, through a process of trial and error that leads to ways of working around obstacles to spatial advancement. On the most basic level, recursive space is frequently seen in video games that use a black, darkened, or blank map whose content is revealed bit by bit as the player progresses.

While map-based management simulations use recursive space to represent geographical exploration, action/adventure games frequently utilize recursive space to gradually guide the player through complex environmental puzzles. The basic procedural dynamics of the action/adventure genre—explore a new room or screen, discover the necessary clues to reach the next area, perform the series of maneuvers required to navigate the space successfully, and repeat these steps again—were established by text-based adventure games as well as early graphical adventures. The 1979 Atari game Adventure , a knights-and-dragons exploration featuring some thirty navigable screens, required the player to procedurally discover space, setting the stage for an enduring tradition in game design. By 1983, Expedition Amazon was using a text-based input system to lead to block-by-block revealing of a blacked-out map (figure 5.2 ), while Quest for Quintana Roo contained rooms and areas closed off to the player until necessary tasks had been performed and milestones met. But it was Pitfall! that really raised the bar for depth of a game environment in the early 1980s, because of its groundbreaking execution of a circular path of 255 navigable screens. 44 The instruction manual for Pitfall! describes the game as “a circular maze” and a “journey” to “encounter all 32 treasures,” a spatial framework in which the player accesses the environment’s benefits—bags of money, diamond rings, and gold and silver bars—by mastering the navigation of its hazards—rolling logs, scorpions, fires, snakes, crocodiles, swamps, quicksand, and tar pits. 45 The focus on navigation as well as environmental risk and reward would come to typify the action-adventure genre in the following decades.

In 1996, when players walked into the very first mission in the Tomb Raider series, they were also entering a relatively early three-dimensional rendering of the adventure genre’s typical Latin American cultural setting. Having arrived in the Peruvian Andes, Lara Croft sets out in search of the tomb of the (fictitious) ancient ruler Qualopec. In the narrative cutscene preceding the first mission, a guide wearing a wide-brimmed hat and striped wool cassock guides Lara to a mountain dwelling, where he is suddenly and viciously torn apart by wolves despite Lara’s attempt to intervene by gunning down the whole pack. The character has no dialogue in the game, and his passing is merely the next guidepost allowing Lara to move forward. In this way, Lara’s unnamed Andean guide embodies the manner in which the Latin American population has frequently been portrayed by games in this and other genres: as a decorative touch or a means to an end for the first-world protagonist. But it must be understood that the reduction of such characters to the level of their objective functionality is not—or at least not entirely—due to shortsightedness in game design. We must remember that nothing in gamespace appears by accident, but rather each element has a function, whether semiotic, procedural, or both. As Barry Atkins explains, “[i]n Tomb Raider , if it moves your best option is usually to kill it, and the expectation according to the internal logic of the game is that you should do so,” since the real focus of the game is engagement with components of the game’s architectural environment: levers, pulleys, ropes, and differently textured surfaces on the walls and ceilings that can be moved, manipulated, or climbed. 46 Christopher A. Paul reiterates the significance of environmental cues, explaining how adventure game environments offer the player “less explicit forms of persuasion” such as falling objects that block off pathways, conveniently colored objects that stand out to indicate an opportunity for interaction, and other elements that “interpolate gamers, encouraging them to pick up and play while offering them the ability to move smoothly without needing too much help.” 47 Elements such as these make a functional difference in gameplay through the manipulation of space, demonstrating that the action/adventure genre is fundamentally based upon the interaction between the lone explorer and an unknown but conquerable environment. Therefore, every element in the gamespace of the action/adventure game, both human and nonhuman, gains significance through its potential as a risk or reward to the player.

This may provide at least a partial explanation for the fact that Latin American locales in adventure games, like others from throughout the globe, are frequently devoid (or practically devoid) of population, with the player more commonly doing battle with spiders and jaguars, or focusing on the other major aspect of Tomb Raider ’s gameplay: solving spatial puzzles. Though some Tomb Raider titles feature more shoot-‘em-up action than others, the series focuses primarily upon player interaction with the environment through a series of spatially contextualized puzzles. The navigation and exploration of space by trial and error creates a recursive loop between player and software, requiring the player to make repeated attempts at advancement, each time incorporating the knowledge gleaned from the previous attempt. This recursive process of exploration requires the player to learn through cognitive and muscle response the combinations of buttons and maneuvers required, for example, to make Lara jump upon a ledge, shimmy across it, pull herself up to a standing position, pivot, balance upon a horizontal flagpole, leap to a hanging chandelier, or jump from crumbling rock holds to flimsy boards. Thus the player learns to navigate space through cognition and virtual occupation of the site in question, opening up space recursively with the solution of each consecutive environmental puzzle.

Eidos Interactive, the British design firm (now owned by Japanese publisher Square Enix) that is responsible for the Tomb Raider series, has produced more than twenty titles for a multitude of platforms spanning as many years of development. Over this time Eidos designers have taken a variety of approaches to the evocation of culture through space in the series. The 2008 game Tomb Raider: Underworld features immersive and responsive, lushly detailed worlds that offer variations on several conventional game scenarios: underwater exploration in the Mediterranean, spelunking in the icy caves of Jan Mayen Island in the Arctic Ocean, and deep jungle quests among the Buddhist temples of Thailand or the Mayan temples and caverns of southern Mexico. The game’s depiction of the Mayan temple of Xibalbá—which is the Mayan name for the underworld but does not correspond to a real-world archeological site—is architecturally reminiscent of the seventh-century Mayan constructions at Palenque, Mexico, and abounds with details that help tie the game’s virtual space to the real-life cultural environments it portrays. The temple’s central ball court offers a 360-degree view of the surroundings, dominated by structures built of large limestone blocks, one of the many material clues that help indicate playable pathways. Tomb Raider: Underworld also features multiple environmental feedback systems: when the player is on the right path, colorful clues like parrots or flowers will appear; at each checkpoint a subtle bell rings faintly in the background, indicating progress; small treasures appear occasionally at the sides of the correct pathway; dynamic music generation makes the score’s tempo pick up and its tone become more dramatic as the player approaches an objective; and different colors and materials are used for functional objects, such as the handholds on the walls of the Mayan temple of Xibalbá, which consist of sea-weathered limestone and seashells. Each of these elements demonstrates how cultural context can be integrated into persuasive feedback systems. The recursive space model demonstrates that a game’s environment can also be procedural, the context for an ongoing trial-and-error process between player and software in which each step builds upon all those that came before. The action/adventure games examined earlier are exemplary of this process, since their players must respond to environmental cues in order to advance, and that advancement is defined in terms of spatial expansion.

The games sometimes referred to as “god games”—the most ready referents being the Sid Meier’s Civilization or The Sims (EA 2000) series—feature another type of spatial orientation known as isometric perspective. Isometric perspective is a technique borrowed from architectural drawing for the presentation of three-dimensional objects in a two-dimensional form, which unlike the top-down perspective allows the player to inhabit the gamespace in three dimensions. 48 Isometric perspective places the player in the position of looking down from above on a miniature world exposed to her total manipulation. There is a considerable history of resource management simulations and mixed-genre games using isometric perspective that are situated wholly or partially in Latin America, many of them focusing on themes of conquest and colonization. Early examples like Utopia (Mattel 1981) and The Seven Cities of Gold established enduring patterns carried on by a host of games including Gold of the Americas: The Conquest of the New World (figure 5.3 ), Inca and Inca II: Nations of Immortality , Sid Meier’s Colonization , Conquest of the New World (Interplay 1996), Imperialism II: The Age of Exploration , the Age of Empires II: The Conquerors and Age of Empires III: The War Chiefs expansions (Microsoft 2000 and 2006), American Conquest (CDV 2003), Anno 1602: Creation of a New World , Anno 1503: The New World, and Anno 1701 (Sunflowers 2006), all of which focused on management of societies during periods of conquest and colonial rule.

The gamespace of resource management simulations is inhabited by a multitude of manipulable miniatures that make up an NPC population to be controlled by the player in a variety of ways. While an avatar is meant to fix the player’s identification to a single entity, “miniatures” is the term used to refer to characters that can be fully or partially controlled by the player, but do not represent the player. 49 Calleja argues that this dispersion of character identity results in “environmental agency,” a form of control that “is not anchored to one particular entity but instead embraces the whole environment.” 50 This means that in order to be successful, players of games in the isometric perspective must become one with the game’s environment. Some god games are unique in combining the manipulation of miniatures with an identifiable avatar—for example, your choice of an array of real-life and fictional Latin American dictators in Tropico , or the Aztec emperor Moctezuma in Civilization V (2K Games 2010). The combination of an individual avatar with the distanced manipulation of miniatures further expands and diversifies the player’s sense of environmental agency. God games place the player at once above the game space and in the game space, watching over the world that they are free to manipulate and set into action. Friedman refers to simulation games as “maps-in-time, dramas which teach us how to think about structures of spatial relationships,” 51 pointing to the centrality of space to the genre. Isometric perspective can also affect a game’s temporal orientation—Juul uses the term “fictional time” to describe the way events such as the establishment of infrastructure or construction of buildings occur at an accelerated pace in the miniature world of simulations. 52 Time, like culture, is ultimately subordinated to the spatial concerns that dominate games using isometric perspective.

This explains why the rendering of culture in management simulations is always dependent upon its environmental and mechanical contributions to gameplay. The gamespace of Tropico 3 , for example, reflects a process of “high-tech tropicalization” 53 aimed at creating a familiar yet exotic cultural environment for gameplay. Many elements within the space are familiar signifiers of tropical culture in general, and of Caribbean and Cuban culture more specifically—the island’s geography contains major sections of coastline, mountains, and forest, which can be used to support agricultural operations like tobacco farms, banana and sugar plantations, and industries producing canned fish, rum, and cigars. Calleja argues that miniature space is a “tactical space” whose functionality is predetermined by the strategic goals of the games’ designers. 54 This explains why certain areas in Tropico 3 are more suited to tobacco production, while in others it is not possible to plant the crop—the player must account for variables like these when making decisions about the development of infrastructure. Playing Tropico means internalizing its spatial model, taking into account the environmental obstacles and affordances that affect progress.

Tropico 3 uses isometric perspective in a variety of ways to create a unique spatialized relationship, particularly in the way it bridges the gap between the world of the avatar and the miniature world of the island’s inhabitants. At the start of each round of play, the player’s view is situated on the ground level of a new Tropican island, putting him on the level of the island’s miniature inhabitants, at which point he must zoom back in order to occupy the classic isometric perspective of the god game. This placement of the player at the level of the game’s miniatures is a reminder of the uniqueness of the game’s NPCs as entities—each character has a series of assigned characteristics that affect its behavior and everyday habits. Clicking on a character will earn the player a quick snippet of dialogue—an older female resident complains, “Los jóvenes de ahora no respetan nada” (“Kids today have no respect”), while an elderly male inhabitant proclaims, “¡Si yo tuviera diez años menos!” (“If only I were ten years younger!”). Clicking a miniature also reveals many culturally relevant attributes of that particular NPC, including its level of religious faith, political orientation, employment, living situation, and family background. Again, these factors are not only cultural but also functional elements of game design, variables that can affect the outcomes of players’ decisions. These cultural attributes can have substantial effects on the player’s ability to perform the task that is ultimately at hand in a resource management simulation: the manipulation of spatial variables through isometric perspective.

Open world or “sandbox” games, along with those that use recursive and isometric spatial orientations, represent another paradigmatic form of Latin American gamespace. Open world games give the player free reign to explore and interact with a three-dimensional environment without being bound to a linear game narrative, presenting unique opportunities for the development of cultural content. Though there are many precursors and early examples of games with characteristics of the open world, the genre experienced a boom as a result of 3D graphics innovations that allowed for the free-roaming exploration of space, including the groundbreaking open world environments of Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 1996) and Rockstar’s 2001 game Grand Theft Auto III . Likewise, representations of Latin America in the open world genre have largely dated from the late 1990s forward. An early example of the 3D rendering of Latin American cultural space is Montezuma’s Return! (WizardWorks 1998), in which the player embodies a descendent of the Aztec emperor who must solve puzzles and perform tasks within the spatial setting of a pyramid’s interior (figure 5.4 ). The game, a conceptual sequel to the 1984 Parker Brothers game Montezuma’s Revenge! , allows the player to explore stone temples replete with “ancient” traps and puzzles from the first-person perspective; however, it is bound by a traditional mission-by-mission procedural structure unlike a truly open world or sandbox game. Driving games also frequently feature open world options, for example Driver 2: Back on the Streets , which features free-roaming gameplay that allows the player to explore a three-dimensional Havana from behind the wheel of a 1950s sedan, or to barrel through the streets of Rio de Janeiro behind the wheel of a passenger bus.

Since the turn of the millennium, a number of open world third-person shooter games with gameplay mechanics akin to the GTA series have been set within the cultural contexts of Latin America. Many of these could be categorized according to Frederick Luis Aldama’s distinction between urban and rural games portraying Latin American culture. 55 Notable examples of open world games set in the region’s rural environments include Just Cause , situated in the fictitious tropical island of San Esperito; Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood , an FPS that features a number of free world areas permitting the player to roam or choose side missions while navigating the Mexican-American border region; and the detailed rendition of the same border region during the early twentieth century in Red Dead Redemption . Urban open world games in Latin America are also popular, with examples like the 1950s-era Havana of the video game rendition of The Godfather II ; contemporary Rio de Janeiro in Gangstar Rio: City of Saints (Gameloft 2011); and the colonial-era Havana of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag . Once again, culture is spatialized in open world games, but as always in ways defined by considerations particular to the genre in question.

Open world game environments are unique contexts for cultural simulation for a number of reasons related to the particularities of the genre. For example, the borders of playable space in open world games are frequently defined by environmental obstacles related to the broader cultural setting, providing a logical explanation for keeping certain areas of the game’s map closed off until the player has made a certain degree of progress. In this way, Red Dead Redemption begins not as a truly open world, but one whose barriers and barricades are justified through narrative details related to the game’s cultural setting: the player cannot explore Mexico until a determined point in the gameplay, due to the fact that the bridge across the San Luis River has been damaged by revolutionary forces and must be repaired. It is necessary to justify these sorts of limitations in order to maintain the illusion of depth of the open world, which is of course not a truly open space, but rather one delimited by the game’s underlying code. A major measure of success for open world game design is the ability to maintain the illusion of openness, because once “players realize that there is no opportunity to become lost, the scope for exploration is severely diminished and the environment is perceived for what it is: a multicursal labyrinth (that is, one with branches and dead ends).” 56 Not only that, it is necessary to justify these limitations on a cultural level as well, in order to coordinate the player’s perception of the open world within the game’s broader narrative, lending a sense of openness to the sociocultural situations explored in the plot of games like Red Dead Redemption .

Designers of open world games create a sense of openness and limitlessness in a number of different ways. The manner in which Swedish design firm Avalanche Studios went about creating an open world in the 2006 game Just Cause is emblematic in this regard, given that they had to overcome hardware and software challenges that required fragmenting the game’s narrative and play into different parts of the map and individual mission scenarios, as well as potential disturbances to environmental seamlessness like “loading” screens and narrative cutscenes, while still maintaining the illusion of openness. In spite of the fact that the game’s narrative follows a procedural path carved out by the major missions faced by protagonist Rico Rodriguez, the player is free to explore the world outside of the linear narrative of Just Cause as well. It is then that the cultural details that define the space of San Esperito as particularly Latin American most clearly emerge on an environmental level. A driving score of guitars, trumpets, and bongos serves as the sonic backdrop to interactions with Spanish-speaking NPCs that greet Rico with short phrases like “¡Hola!,” as well as street vendors touting their wares by shouting “¡Aguas frescas!,” “¡Coco fresco!,” “¡Refrescos!,” “¡Cerveza fría!,” or “¡Helados, helados, helados!” The soldiers of the presidential regime speak Spanglish—“¡Madre de dios! Get me outta here!” So do those soldiers friendly to Rico’s subversive foreign invasion—“Let’s go, amigo! ¡Viva la revolución!” The player wanders through palm tree-covered tropical beaches, rural country roads lined with ramshackle buildings, mountainous jungle regions, the haciendas of wealthy land barons, colonial plazas, and rural farms, all of which add breadth and depth to Just Cause ’s 3D rendition of the geographic and cultural environment of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

As evidenced in the preceding section on sound, multicultural open world spaces are key to the success of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, considered by many the benchmark of the open world genre. Latin American culture is brought to bear in different ways on all of GTA ’s gamespaces. Each of the series’ major locations—Liberty City (a parodic New York), Vice City (Miami), and Los Santos, San Andreas (Los Angeles, California), established in the first game in the series, Grand Theft Auto (BMG Interactive 1997)—is home to a substantial Latino and Latin American NPC population. In addition to the ways that the region is represented in the radio stations and musical soundtracks of these games discussed earlier, cultural space is delineated in GTA in uncommonly clear, territorial terms. Since these games center largely on the battles between criminal organizations, particular spaces and areas of the games’ maps are frequently dominated by specific criminal (and cultural) groups. Released in 2001, GTA III was Rockstar’s first open world, three-dimensional title, and was set in Liberty City. Its plot centers on a conflict between Japanese and Italian crime families, but culminates in a conflict with Catalina, one of the series’ first major Latin American characters, who is eventually revealed to be associated with a Colombian drug cartel. There are also some early Latino criminal organizations in GTA III , such as the street gang Los Diablos.

The gamespace of GTA: Vice City , a fictionalized 1980s Miami, is coded Latin at every turn, even from the very moment the player arrives at Escobar International Airport, an obvious reference to the Colombian capo whose cocaine business fueled the real-life 1980s nightlife and underground economy of the cultural setting being parodied in the game. Vice City has a large Caribbean population, and includes a battle for territory between the Haitians, led by the voodoo practitioner Auntie Poulet, and the Cubans, who eventually take control of the city’s Little Havana neighborhood. Each of these and other Latin gangs in Vice City—including the Diaz Cartel, the Costa Rican Gang, and the Cortez Crew—occupies a space designated by cultural signifiers specific to that group. For example, the neighborhood known as Little Haiti is occupied by a population of Haitians that all speak patois, wear purple and white, and prefer listening to the radio stations Flash FM and Fever 105 in their favorite car the Voodoo, a two-door low-rider reminiscent of the 1960s Chevy Impala (figure 5.5 ). Members of the Colombian Diaz Cartel, meanwhile, occupy the area surrounding their leader’s mansion, wear crimson and light blue, and can be seen in either of two sedans or a sports car. Groups like these fill the Vice City ’s space with the visual, linguistic, musical, and dramatic signifiers of the cultures they represent. Such gang rivalries are also prominently portrayed in the next installment in the series, GTA: San Andreas , which was released in 2004 and included neighborhoods dominated by various Latin gangs like the Los Santos Vagos, Varrios Los Aztecas, and the Mexican gang San Fierro Rifa. Through the use of audiovisual and behavioral signifiers among the NPC populations of the GTA series, Rockstar creates environments in which culture is not only portrayed but also spatially experienced.

Perhaps more than any previous game in the series, the 2013 blockbuster GTA V integrates diverse Latin American cultural elements into its rendering of the open world. Returning to and expanding upon the series’ earlier version of Los Santos (the GTA version of Los Angeles), GTA V features cultural microenvironments ranging from Michael’s stylish mansion in the upscale Vinewood Hills neighborhood, to Trevor’s trashed trailer in meth-ridden backwoods of Sandy Shores, to urban barrios whose streets resound with Latin music and the Spanish spoken by their primarily Hispanic inhabitants. Transportation offers another environmental reflection of culture as well as socioeconomic class—in the poor, rural area of Sandy Shores in GTA V , locals ride dirt bikes, quads, tractors, RVs, and beaters, while in Michael’s upscale Vinewood Hills neighborhood residents drive sports cars, luxury SUVs, and high-end sedans. In addition to the neighborhoods where the main characters reside, Los Santos features spaces occupied by the major Latin crews including the return of the Mexican gangs Varrios Los Aztecas and Los Santos Vagos, as well as the first appearance of the Marabunta Grande, a fictionalized version of the real-life Salvadoran-American gang Mara Salvatrucha. As was the case in the series’ earlier installments, members’ clothing, tattoos, and accessories represent cultural as well as gang identity—the Vagos all wear yellow and black, many feature black bandanas and most have tattoos on their arms, while the Marabunta Grande, like their real-life counterparts, are known for white tank tops and prominent face and neck tattoos in gothic script. Not only these gang members but also Hispanic characters of various ages, nationalities, and backgrounds reside in the neighborhoods of East Los Santos, including La Mesa, El Burro Heights, and Murrieta Heights (in-game equivalents of the East Los Angeles neighborhoods of the Arts District, Signal Hill, and Boyle Heights, respectively). The neighborhoods of East Los Santos are home to many businesses that are coded Latin—like “Auto Re-Perez” and “Attack-A-Taco”—but this working-class area is by no means the only place in the game to feature such cultural signifiers. In fact there are Latin characters at all income levels throughout the game, not only in the barrios of East Los Santos but also in the hilltop mansions of characters like crime kingpin Martin Madrazo. Thus, through the cultural coding of space, GTA V attempts to demonstrate the cultural and economic diversity of the populations that inhabit its world.

Culture can also be a functional element of game dynamics in GTA V ’s open world. For example, each of the game’s three protagonists—wealthy Italian-American career criminal Michael de Santa, twenty-something African-American gang member turned mover-and-shaker Franklin Clinton, and loose cannon meth manufacturer Trevor Philips—gets treated differently when approaching the mountain enclave run by the elusive “Altruist Cult.” While Michael and Franklin will be relentlessly attacked, Trevor will go unnoticed by the cult members, to whom he refers conversationally as his “friends in the mountains.” This is one example of the many ways cultural difference impacts navigation of the game’s space: when wandering through El Burro Heights as Franklin, for example, the player will be offered warnings by NPC Vagos gang members, such as “Compadre! It’s not safe for you here!” and the more direct, “Get the fuck out of my barrio!” If, on the one hand, examples like these interactions from GTA V may strike us as violent trivializations of Latin American culture, on the other hand we must keep in mind that the disposition of the game in question is toward violent interaction with a hostile environment, and that even within this context it is possible to produce a nuanced portrayal of Latin American culture.

Red Dead Redemption (RDR ), an open world game released by Rockstar in 2010, offers one of the company’s most thorough renditions of a Latin American cultural environment to date. RDR is the second game in the series after Red Dead Revolver (Rockstar 2004), which had been developed by Capcom prior to being sold to Rockstar in 2002. RDR , the first game in the series developed entirely by Rockstar, takes place along a fictionalized version of the Texas-Mexico border during the Mexican Revolution. The plot follows the protagonist, John Marston, as he seeks revenge for crimes committed against him and his family, while making his living by wrangling cattle and assisting various lawmen, outlaws, and shysters in the borderlands. Marston (and thus the player) eventually ends up embroiled in the Revolution itself, first on the side of the federal authorities, and later joining the ranks of peasant revolutionaries (figure 5.6 ). The environment of the game is expansive and richly detailed, and completing its main narrative requires more than forty hours of gameplay, though it is highly unlikely that many players would finish the game in that time due to a multitude of digressions that readily derail the game’s linear narrative at every turn. When Marston is not corralling steers, he is just as likely to be collecting the herbs of the Sonoran desert for bartering purposes as he is to be learning about the poetry of Mexican corridos from revolutionary leaders, or reading a purchasable newspaper’s report on the struggle taking place south of the border. In these and myriad other ways, subtle cultural details are conveyed through the mechanisms of RDR ’s open world.

The environmental detail and cultural contextualization of Red Dead Redemption are of course no mistake. Rockstar founder Dan Houser explains that designers strove to imbue the game’s spatial environment with cultural reflections of tone, attitude, and atmosphere particular to the border region at the turn of the twentieth century: “You do it in the landscape, you do it in the buildings in the landscape, you do it in the pedestrians, the NPCs, they way they’re dressed, the way they behave, the things they’re speaking about, their cumbersome interactions with telephones, their talk about mythical technology that we now regard as absurd, their social attitudes, all of these different things, it kind of bleeds into all of them.” 57 In RDR just as in GTA , this means making cultural differences a tangible element of the game’s design. The NPC population on either side of the border in RDR consists of individuals from a variety of US and Mexican ethnicities. However, population densities as well as the possibilities for interaction with NPCs vary depending on which side of the border the player is occupying. Cultural elements are also incorporated into the game’s ethical models. From the start, the player is provided with two meters, one for honor and one for fame, and these meters go up and down depending on the decisions made: steal a horse and kill its owner, and your fame increases; save a horse’s owner from having his steed stolen, and your honor increases. It is up to the player to decide which path to take at innumerable points during gameplay, and the relative honor or fame players sustain will profoundly affect the way other characters respond to their actions. The choice of whether to act sympathetically toward the local population or to antagonize them in a sociopathic manner, for example, is not a meaningless or arbitrary decision in this context, but rather such subjective and culturally dependent decisions have ludic consequences. Thus the ability to make choices that are appropriate to the game’s cultural context will determine the outcome of any given exchange, requiring the player of RDR to adapt culturally in order to advance spatially.

In their own ways, each of the three types of paradigmatic gamespaces discussed in this section require unique considerations of their spatial nature in order to understand the way they incorporate Latin American culture. Recursive space is mechanically oriented toward exploration and discovery through the opening of previously closed-off areas in a game’s environment, spatial parameters that have proven attractive to developers of games based on these same themes of exploration and discovery. Games using isometric perspective rely upon environmental agency from a player perched high above the NPC population of miniatures that respond to the player’s input, a game mechanic that has been particularly useful to the designers of resource management simulations focused on conquest and colonization. Finally, open world games use detailed and responsive environments with a capacity for producing elaborate simulations of diversity and difference, where cultural awareness can have significant repercussions on the player’s progress and experience. Each of these examples demonstrates how the obstacles and affordances particular to a given model of gamespace can set the parameters for particular types of cultural representation.

Video game spaces are shaped in countless ways by culture. And since spatial exploration and models are key to video games’ unique ways of making meaning, the spatialization of culture is an essential consideration for designers and players of all sorts of gamespaces. Players can experience “landscape moments,” generate cognitive maps of spaces inhabited, and make discoveries with real-life significance in the evental space of video games. Moreover, the meaning of cultural artifacts and references within games is determined by their use within the game environment, impacting a game’s capacity for environmental storytelling. Culture is spatialized in video games in ways that must be redundant enough for the player to encounter, but not so obvious as to derail the believability of the cultural context. And sound within the game’s environment can represent culture in a variety of ways through dialogue, environmental noises, diegetic sound effects, and music. With space as with sound, each genre or type of gamespace endows designers with particular obstacles and affordances to the depiction of culture. Because meaning is spatially situated in video games, cultural portrayal in games must work within the particular parameters of the spatial environment being used.

As the cases in this chapter show, Latin American cultures have been represented in virtually every type of gamespace imaginable, from Pelé’s Soccer to GTA V . When Latin America has been portrayed in games, space has frequently been central to its depiction: ancient indigenous temples, guerrilla war zones, and geographically massive colonial regions seen from a bird’s eye view all have their own particular ways of portraying culture spatially. When players explore space recursively, they inhabit cultural spaces defined procedurally: by going back on their previous steps in order to advance a little more with each session of gameplay, replaying difficult sequences of games like Tomb Raider or Uncharted over and over, the player is rewarded by opening up more space. In the action/adventure genre, the relationship between avatar and environment takes precedence over the characters’ relationships with other humans, making space particularly fundamental to the ways culture is evoked in these games. On a different plane altogether, games that use the isometric perspective offer players a top-down view on a miniature world at their behest, allowing them to play god with their own tiny universe but at the same time requiring them to account for the environmental agency dispersed among the NPC population, the balance of which will define their success or failure in games such as Sid Meier’s Civilization and Tropico . Finally, open world games like Just Cause , Grand Theft Auto , and Red Dead Redemption exponentially increase the possibilities for cultural representation in spaces that are expansive, responsive, and filled with interactive cultural details. Within such environments, culture can be conveyed through myriad elements including written and spoken language, the population demographics of different neighborhoods, radio station preferences, quality of available transportation and housing, the relative reaction of NPCs to characters from different backgrounds, and character clothing, tattoos, and hairstyles.

Spaces are culturally coded in video games in order to add dimension to the experience of gameplay, to enhance the game’s narrative and procedural meanings, and to offer the player a chance to inhabit an appealing and novel environment. Space is fundamentally related to all sorts of meaning in games, providing the context for semiotic cultural signification as well as the conduit through which a game’s narrative or simulated meaning is transmitted. Without a doubt, space has always been a primary consideration for game designers and players alike. As this chapter has shown, game designers have been producing cultural environments of ever-increasing complexity and nuance over the course of the medium’s history, making it essential to continue to analyze how culture shapes meaning in gamespace. We cannot realistically explain how culture operates in video games without examining its relationship to space. And at the same time, a rigorous analysis demonstrates that in order to fully understand how space works in video games, we must take into account the multiple and pervasive effects of culture on gamespace.