Looking Down Not Up
Authors: Gibbons Liam 
Published: November 2024

Virtual Environments and Colonial Spatial Practices
The history of artificial and virtual environments, particularly those found in digital games, is rife with destructive colonial ideologies. Themes of conquest, domination, and Othering permeate many kinds of game design, for instance, including board games where mechanics such as seizing large tracts of ‘uninhabited’ land, stripping it of resources, and dominating those that live there are considered part and parcel even today (Flanagan and Jakobsson 9). In Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games, Dyer-Witheford and de Pauter draw from Hardt and Negri’s Empire to articulate how digital games are fundamentally linked to the ongoing effects of colonialism. For instance, they trace how games feed into issues like energy consumption and exploitive labour practices in their production and dissemination: a result of unequal distribution of power and capital after imperialism (xviii). They also point to how games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) have the player reassert and act out the processes and structures of imperialism, in which their relationship to the virtual landscape is to “occupy it, activate it, and network it into a setting for optimal capital accumulation” (162). Other scholars have pointed to how strategy and adventure games have players perpetuate colonial practices such as military manoeuvring, map-making, and resource extraction, and encourage them to lay claim to supposedly empty spaces through violence and exploration (Lammes 1; Mukherjee 35).
As such, many of these destructive colonial practices and ideologies manifest in the player’s movement through the virtual spaces that they occupy, which are often framed as territory to be constantly expanded and acquired. While particularly visible in contemporary works such as No Man’s Sky (2016), this movement pattern has dominated the design of videogame environments for some time. Games such as Super Mario Bros. (1985) recycle the myths and movements of sixteenth and seventeenth-century colonisers, for instance, using the seemingly harmless “appetite for encountering a succession of new spaces” to fuel the consumption and mastering of artificial land (Fuller and Jenkins 62). This endless pursuit of new and exciting spaces produces a particular, goal-oriented, point-to-point movement pattern, in which arrival is always deferred to another destination, just over the horizon (63). This movement pattern is particularly endemic to contemporary open-world game designs, where the player moves directly and efficiently between any resource that will give them an advantage: items, power-ups, quests, and so on (Keogh par. 2). While open-world games will often claim to grant total freedom of movement, players are thus instead funnelled into “a constrictive topology of nodes and [the] connections between them” (Aarseth 161). Even in the open, non-linear Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020), for instance, where the player can theoretically wander in any direction they choose, objective markers embedded in the game’s user interface constantly push them towards the next item or place of value, just over the horizon.
Importantly, this goal-oriented, colonial movement structure affects not only how players traverse a virtual environment, but also how they look at and value that environment. For instance, Magnet outlines how the totalising, distanced perspective of strategy games like Tropico (2001) encourages the player to ignore the impact of their actions on the artificial landscape and non-player characters below them (149). Similarly, in a virtual environment viewed and explored from an embedded, first-person perspective, a point-to-point movement pattern flattens the player’s view of that environment, reducing it to a series of potential resources to be acquired in an expanse of unimportant negative space. The landscape itself is seen by the player as simple set-dressing, merely there to fill out the areas in between where they really want to be. Their attention is directed outwards, to the next objective, the next landmark, or the next resource to be commodified: the environment itself is seen as incidental, and thus ripe for exploitation and plunder. This matters, because how players view, move through, and interact with artificial environments shapes and affects how they view, move through, and interact with actual environments. As cultural artefacts, videogames and virtual environments are formed within and perpetuate the dynamics of societal power, and so do not “simply transcend ‘old-media’ problems of ideology and political control” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter xxvii). Indeed, as performed, interactive experiences they actively train players in certain behaviours, viewpoints, and modes of engaging with the world (Flanagan and Jakobsson 19).
In the era of climate crisis and ecological destruction, virtual environment designers should therefore seek to design and engender alternative, more caring ways of seeing and interacting with virtual and actual environments. Rather than encouraging players to devalue, accumulate, and plunder virtual landscapes, we should encourage them to value, care for, and maintain those landscapes, informed by the practices and principles of those who have been caring for and maintaining the environment for thousands of years: Indigenous Australians (Pascoe). As scholars such as Pumpa have noted, these principles and practices have been cultivated and developed in actual, dynamic environments as lived, collaborative, and dynamic knowledge, and thus might at first seem incompatible with the fixed, unchanging structure of a digital virtual environment (51). However, he also points out that it is possible to design virtual environments that negotiate this tension by embracing a fluid and collaborative design process where the environment continues to evolve, as in the Virtual Songlines (2003-present) project (Pumpa 53). Others have pushed further, stating that the form itself is a particularly useful vessel for the sharing of cultural heritage and practices. This is due to the way that first-person virtual environments foreground direct participation and performance in response to spatial events and features, similar to many Indigenous systems of environmentally-embedded knowledge storage and access (Barrett 77). Projects like Torres Strait Virtual Reality (2018), for example, leverage the direct perspective and navigation of virtual reality to immerse the player in Indigenous stories, practices, and language.
These projects represent one way of encouraging care for environments: by virtually collecting and sharing the specific stories and knowledges that make a particular place unique and valuable. Other projects offer other ways of cultivating care for land: by encouraging players to pay closer attention to it. In discussing the design of their site-specific AR app Hidden Rippon Lea (2024), Briggs et al. highlight the importance of attuning oneself to an environment when building a relationship of care and maintenance with it. Before we can care for an environment, we must first orient ourselves and our senses towards it, as “understanding comes through our own awareness of Country — our capacity to listen and observe” (5). An important part of this process of listening and observing, they note, is physically slowing down, and moving through the environment at a gentle pace. “Slowing down can be a deliberate act of respect and a pathway to careful interactions with others”, as it affords the cognitive space necessary for contemplation and reflection, and guides our attention towards our current surroundings, in the present moment, rather than what’s ahead (11). A similar project, Epiphyte (2017), offers a particular way of encouraging this close attention, by using AR markers to lead players on a bushwalk through the Sherbrooke Forest in Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges. Each of these markers, placed temporarily amongst the natural landscape, allows the player to collect a virtual seed that contributes to an “artificial ecology on their mobile device” (Riley et al. 240).
Epiphyte thus aims to “encourage an affinity” between the player and their surroundings by engaging them in an attentive, non-linear wandering of the space, rather than leading them through it along a pre-determined trail (240). In order to discover the various markers distributed throughout the space, the player has to slow down, explore, and pay careful attention to their environment (243). In discussing what she calls wandering games, Kagen explicitly positions this kind of intuitive meandering as “a mode of movement much opposed to purpose-driven conquest” (7). When we wander an environment, we embrace ambiguity, indeterminacy, and inefficiency, because we are allowing our own intuition to guide us, rather than a pre-determined spatial goal or pathway. Solnit similarly notes that the “indeterminacy of the ramble” allows and encourages us to attune ourselves to an environment, to understand its layout and features, and to gain a stronger sense of place (10). Wandering, in other words, requires and encourages close and sustained attention, and close and sustained attention affords and encourages care, as we are not extracting resources from the environment for our own use, but engaging with and appreciating the environment on its own terms in order to move forward. In projects like Hidden Rippon Lea and Epiphyte, players are not exploiting or consuming the environment, but paying attention to and conversing with it (Briggs et al. 1). How might these kinds of environmental practices be encouraged in a wholly virtual environment, rather than an augmented reality overlying an actual environment? And how can designers use the unique affordances of that form to further encourage a more collaborative relationship between player and environment, in the interests of fostering a more caring design paradigm?
Designing for Wandering, Attention, and Care

Fig. 1: One of the interactive vignettes that the player can uncover in Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather.
To investigate this, I designed and made a shortform, exploration-based virtual environment entitled Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather (2024). The project is a spatial memorial to my late grandfather, and has the player wandering through an artificial landscape based on the beaches, neighbourhoods, and parks close to his house, in Boon Wurrung Country in Melbourne, Australia. My goal was to bake the principles of wandering, attention, and environmental collaboration into the design at a deep level, so that the player’s performance is fundamentally motivated by care and reciprocity, rather than consumption and exploitation. To elicit the intuitive wandering that would foster the requisite careful attention to the environment, I began by designing a series of interactive, three-dimensional vignettes that were based on key memories that I have of my grandfather, and distributed them throughout the virtual space for the player to find. These included sitting on a bench to watch the trains go past (see fig. 1), a particularly eventful Christmas at his house, and so on. Crucially, the player does not know the location of these scenes ahead of time. Rather than positioning each vignette above the ground, so that they were visible from a distance, I placed them under the surface of the landscape, ready to be drawn forth with a mouse click. I used a looping sound and animation effect to mark the specific location of each vignette, but these can only be heard and seen when the player is relatively close to them.
As such, the player can only happen upon these interactive scenes through genuine exploration and discovery, rather than moving directly between a series of enticing, but pre-given landmarks. The player must feel out the environment through their movement, with the vignettes serving to show the player where they have already been, rather than directing them where to go next. This means that the virtual landscape, at least initially, appears quite sparse, which results in a visual uniformity that presents all possible locations within the space as equally viable for exploration. This lack of any distinguishing features—and thus explicit spatial direction—produces a more intuitive, dérive-like movement pattern (Debord). It encourages the player to consciously and deliberately look down and pay closer attention to their immediate surroundings as they meander over the virtual landscape and trace its contours, rather than simply looking up and over it in anticipation of a clear destination on the horizon. As in Hidden Rippon Lea and Epiphyte, wandering in Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather requires and encourages close attention to the landscape, but I also took specific steps to cultivate that attention. I slowed down the movement speed of the player’s avatar to a substantial degree, and reduced how quickly they can look around the virtual space. This prevented the player from rushing through the experience at speed, and instead gives them time to attend to the environment around them, and to notice the various stories and objects that I have embedded within it.
To further direct the player’s attention towards the environment, I deliberately avoided some of the traditional control inputs that one might expect in a first-person, exploration-based virtual environment, such as sprinting and jumping. Not only did this slow the player down, but it encouraged them to look around their immediate vicinity, as “with fewer interactions to perform, the player has little else to focus on other than the audio-visual and virtual environment” (Muscat et al. 5). Rather than overloading the player with a complicated set of instructions and movements to learn and perform as part of the experience, I limited the interactive design to a simple mouse click for each action, allowing them to focus on their exploration of and interactions with the environment itself. I also used a series of explicit spatial barriers—in the form of fences, buildings, and the edges of the landscape itself—to circumscribe the environment, and to contain the player’s wandering within it. Rather than trying to push outwards to conquer and consume an endless expanse of terrain, these barriers make it clear to the player that their attention should be focussed within the boundaries, rather than outside of them. Thus, with the player’s attention firmly and sustainably on the environment, I turned to developing a more collaborative relationship between the player and the environment. To do so, I set each of the 3D models that populate the landscape—every plant, fence, building, bench, bridge, pathway, stair, and powerline—to be invisible to the player until they are approached.

Fig. 2: A series of buildings that have been activated by the player’s movement in Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather.
I achieved this by placing a trigger zone around each of these assets: when hit by the player, the associated object will fade into the scene over a couple of seconds. Because I distributed the assets across the landscape and positioned them slightly apart from one another, this has the effect of the environment filling in with detail as the player moves through it. Importantly, this shifts the character of the player’s interaction with the environment. Rather than ignoring the landscape as they dash to a new destination, the player is attentive to its form and its details, and looking at and listening to it as it expresses itself. Players of Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather are not destroying the environment through violence, or removing elements from it. Instead, they are contributing to it in an act of co-creation: they are bringing parts of the environment into being through their movement, at the same time that the environment is offering them stories, objects, and knowledge (see fig. 2). The final form of the landscape is the unique result of the collaboration between the player and the environment, with each party having as much effect on that form as the other. Without the player, the details of the environment do not emerge; without those details, the player has no sense of place or narrative. As such, the player is not the sole producer of meaning, but reminded that they are “merely a small part of a greater whole” (Reitsma 1556).
In other words, the environment and the player enter into a reciprocal relationship of what Bawaka Country et al. call co-becoming. In this ontology, an environment, the knowledge that it carries, and the people and animals within it, are understood “as relational, as always emerging … and as both bounded and constituted through flows and relationships” (460). In each interaction in Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather, the player becomes something a little bit more, as does the environment. As the player wanders the artificial landscape, and encounters and interacts with each of the vignettes and objects, they build up a subjective, interpretive impression of who my grandfather was. This impression is expanded and deepened as they draw connections between each vignette and the details of the places that he occupied, and they learn more about him. Therefore, just as the player shapes the environment by activating the assets through their movement and interaction, the environment shapes the player by offering new emotional and narrative information to reflect upon, and to inform their broader impression of my grandfather. Both entities enjoy a ludic and spatial relationship that is more cooperative than combative, and so the player is motivated to learn from, value, and care for the environment as an equal partner in their play, rather than an incidental container for it. This relationship is made possible by their close attention to the space, fostered by the spatial practice of wandering that I embedded into the structure of the design.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that the content and structure of Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather is specific and local. I didn’t attempt to capture a particular place in meticulous detail like Virtual Songlines does, nor did I use the virtual environment as a vessel to store and transmit specific cultural knowledge from a specific cultural group (Wyeld et al.). Instead, I have poured my memories and knowledge of a particular place that is important to me into a virtual, impressionistic depiction of that place. In doing so, I used that specificity to encourage players to wander, pay attention to, and care for the specific places that are important to them, and to offer designers a model for producing work that is informed by principles of care and collaboration, rather than destruction and consumption. Virtual environments, like all media, are not devoid of ideology and socio-political propagation: after all, they “embody the values to which the surrounding society subscribes” (Flanagan and Jakobsson 19). In the case of many exploration-based and open-world videogames in particular, these values are informed by the legacies of violence and colonialism that equally shaped many of the countries in which these games are made and played. In order to disrupt and displace these problematic and destructive legacies as they manifest in the design of virtual environments and videogames, it behooves designers to consider how their work can foster more caring and sustainable modes of seeing and interacting with space, both virtual and actual.
References
Aarseth, Espen. “Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games.” Cybertext Yearbook 2000, eds. Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa. Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, 2001.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. PlayStation 4 version. Ubisoft Montreal, 2020.
Bawaka Country, et al. “Co-Becoming Bawaka: Towards a Relational Understanding of Place/Space.” Progress in Human Geography 40.4 (2015): 455–75.
Barrett, James. “Virtual Worlds and Indigenous Narratives.” The Immersive Internet: Reflections on the Entangling of the Virtual with Society, Politics and the Economy, eds. Robin Teigland and Dominic Power. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 77–91.
Blouin-Payer, Roxane, et al. Decolonizing Play: Exploring Frameworks for Game Design Free of Colonial Values. 7. Polaris Game Design Retreat, 2023.
Briggs, N’Arwee’t Carolyn, et al. “Listen – Look Up! Listen – Look Down! Experiencing the Counter-City through a Sonic and Augmented Reality Experience of Urban Undergrounds in Southeast Melbourne.” Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning 14.2 (2023).
Epiphyte. Mobile app. Matthew Riley and Troy Innocent, 2017.
Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” Les Lévres Nues. Trans. Ken Knabb. 1956.
Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009.
Flanagan, Mary, and Mikael Jakobsson. Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games. Cambridge: MIT P, 2022.
Fuller, Mary, and Henry Jenkins. “Nintendo and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue.” CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Steven G. Jones. Sage Publications, 1995. 57–72.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. PlayStation 2 version. Rockstar North, 2002.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.
Hidden Rippon Lea. Mobile app. Carolyn Briggs and Laura Harper, 2024.
Kagen, Melissa. Wandering Games. Cambridge: MIT P, 2022.
Keogh, Brendan. “Performing Colonialism.” Reverse Shot, 24 Mar. 2016. 10 Sep. 2024 <https://reverseshot.org/series/entry/2189/performing_colonialism>.
Lammes, Sybille. “Postcolonial Playgrounds: Games as Postcolonial Cultures.” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 4.1 (2010): 1–6.
Magnet, Shoshana. “Playing at Colonization: Interpreting Imaginary Landscapes in the Video Game Tropico.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 30.2 (2006): 142–62.
Mukherjee, Souvik. Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Muscat, Alexander, et al. “First-Person Walkers: Understanding the Walker Experience through Four Design Themes.” Proceedings of 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG, 2016.
Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture. Magabala Books, 2018.
Pumpa, Malcolm. “Beyond the Map: Issues in the Design of a Virtual 3D Knowledge Space for Aboriginal Knowledge.” VSMM’07: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia. Springer, 2007. 47–57.
Reitsma, Lizette, et al. “A Respectful Design Framework. Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge in the Design Process.” The Design Journal 22.1 (2019): 1555–70.
Riley, Matthew, et al. “Re-Imagining Bushland Settings through Location-Based AR Mobile Gameplay.” The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art, eds. Larissa Hjorth et al. Taylor & Francis, 2020. 236–47.
No Man’s Sky. Windows PC version. Hello Games, 2016.
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin, 2000.
Super Mario Bros. Nintendo Entertainment System version. Nintendo R&D4, 1985.
Torres Strait Virtual Reality. Windows PC version. Rhett Loban, 2018.
Tropico. Windows PC version. PopTop Software, 2001.
Virtual Songlines. Browser-based. Indijiverse, 2003 - present.
Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather. Windows PC version. Liam Gibbons, 2024.
Wyeld, Theodor G., et al. “Doing Cultural Heritage Using the Torque Game Engine: Supporting Indigenous Storytelling in a 3D Virtual Environment.” International Journal of Architectural Computing 5.2 (2007): 417–35.