As a non-gamer (and please note, I’m getting that out there right up at the top of this post. I may put it in bold. Manage your expectations accordingly.) what really fascinated me when I started playing Echo Bazaar, and indeed, kept me playing, was the world created by the text.

We talk a lot about fictional realms as though they occupy real spaces. This holds, to varying degrees, across all forms of fiction, in games and out. More than one publisher’s blurb or literary review talk about novels taking us on a journey, with all the metaphorical space that implies. What I'd like to talk about is space in games, more specifically, what Echo Bazaar does to create space and how this affects the player's experience of the Bazaar.

Spatial representation is built into human cognitive processes. Thinking about abstract, symbolic relations, such as a transaction between users, as though they are objects taking up space is one of the things that humans do best. What is true is that the term 'space' used in relation to fiction is primarily providing us with a metaphor. When I talk about being drawn into the world of a book, I'm using a spatial metaphor to describe a sensation of immersion. To take a more game-related example, 'levelling up' is a spatial metaphor. 'Up' is a directional word, 'levelling' denotes an extended hierarchy, but actually what these words are describing is in practical terms a changing series of actions undertaken by an agent in a set order and, correspondingly, a change in status for that agent. The spatial metaphor allows us to conceptualise our position relative to others. Space is a useful metaphor for talking about our experience of and reaction to games. What games can do peculiarly well, better than perhaps any other form of fiction, is create a sense of space for the player that works on many levels.

At the most literal level, this is hardly earth shattering news. Any game occupies the space of the screen that transmits it, just as the words of a book take up the space of the page. Games with a social dimension create space on another level, the sense of community between users effectively extending the user conception of the game world further. Games with a narrative built in occupy another kind of space again, the representative space that is created by the user in imagining the more-or-less complex world that the game evokes. It’s this third kind of space which allows games to generate a sense of openness to the player’s experience of the gameworld.

One fairly well established narrative theory argues that a fictional text constructs a world in which the events of that fiction occur, and it is this world building that enables us to talk and think meaningfully about that fiction[1]. One can say, for example, ‘if character X had not taken action Y, event Z would have happened’ because we have conceptualised the fictional world of the novel as a complete world. We assume complexity and we do this using spatial metaphor. We use our own ideas to fill in gaps. If I am reading, for example, a novel by Ian McEwan set in London, and this novel doesn’t mention the country India - doesn’t refer to it in any way - I as a reader, asked if India exists for McEwan’s characters would probably answer yes. I’d certainly give the question serious consideration. I have assumed that the world of the fiction operates like a real world in real space. I have assumed completion of that world, and if the text doesn't specifically tell me that such-and-such is different in that world, I assume that what completes that world is in-line with my own actual-world experience.

Games with narrative structures can use this and take it a step further. The narrative structures that are the basic building blocks of the gameplay push us into constructing a complex world in which we operate and interact as players, blurring the boundaries between one kind of space and the next. Because of narrative, the world of the game as conceptualised by players can and does bear greater complexity. The game world, generated by narrative, pushes part of the burden of creation onto the player’s shoulders. When I play Echo Bazaar, I read text about one area of Fallen London but I assume there are more. Even if I don’t assume anything very specific, I assume a coherent and complete world. I will work, as a reader, to generate that world. I will look for links between events. I will wonder if NPCs are in contact with each other. I will wonder if there are things I'm not being told, will never be told. I will treat the game world, in short, as though it worked like a real world. In doing so, I’m generating a world at a level of complexity and fullness that the regular events of gameplay cannot. Narrative is what pushes me to do this. I conceive of the actions I undertake as a player as being spatially embedded in a world, because this is how I represent narrative to myself, and the world I conceive thus is an altogether richer experience.

[1] A theory called, imaginatively enough, fictional world theory. This is an offshoot of modal realism, that is, the useful attribution of degrees of reality to possible worlds, which I would talk about lots, but which few find as delightful as I do, so I will restrain myself.