Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces - EXPANDED EDITION
An interactive exhibition of planar geometric projection methods and artistic styles designed for various digital games.
A gamepad is recommended for this game.
Adjust the zoom setting on your browser window for best results.
- North face button or T key - Shift projection method (try this!)
- Start button or Tab - Open information window
- Select button or Q key - Return to main menu
- Left joystick or WASD keys - Move character
- South face button or Space Bar - Jump
- West face button or Shift key - Run (in platformer games)
The user may modify a game's spatial configuration as they navigate their player character avatar through virtual space.
The project is a replication of game worlds from three games that use different visuo-spatial configurations to project those worlds onto the screen. By pressing the T key or North face button, the user may cycle the game through other projection methods without interrupting or changing the gameplay. The user can change the projection to match other, similar games or experiment with as-yet-unexplored spatial designs.
The full project is designed to be a previsualization tool for game developers and a game art history tool for scholars and educators. It is an interactive exploration of my research that will culminate in the upcoming written work “Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces” (Rowe, unpublished), a framework and vocabulary for analyzing and describing different visuo-spatial configurations of virtual spaces in digital games.
This framework is an effort to create a diachronic history of digital games differentiated by stylistic design choices of visuo-spatial configuration and player affordances, dubbed spatial paradigms.
