Topophilia

After Wednesdays lecture I was thinking a lot about Topophilia and how it related to me and in a sense what I do in games design.

I think sports is the perfect way to underline what Topophilia really is. Personally the feeling when walking into a football stadium is powerful, it can be a place of emotion, both good and bad. This can also be seen in the players, the home advantage is well recognised due to the feeling of being at somewhere you can control and somewhere where your supporters can really make themselves heard. This can also work in the opposite way, arriving at a stadium that brings back bad memories, it could be because of previous defeats holding a bad omen or something worse such as the events that happened at Hillsborough in 1989, people who were there or who lost someone close to them there will always remember that location for a negative reason.

I found relating this to games design to be quite difficult, sometimes it’s harder to get emotionally attached to an environment in a game then it is say the woods by your house. However the more I thought about it the more I remembered good feelings arriving at certain locations in game, as you then know you have made it, this is especially apparent in survival horror games. Many of these games feature very little “safe” zones, so when you arrive at one finally away from the marauding zombies or demons can bring a feeling of relief, the Left 4 Dead series is a great example of this. Some games play on the emotion of panic and terror to push the player along, knowing that you will eventually reach a safe spot after all the ups and down is the incentive to keep going.