Dwelling in Digital Game Worlds

This paper argues that existing game studies scholarship has characterized the player's spatial existence in digital game worlds as essentially hermetic, meaning path-oriented, transitive, and defined by movement and progression. Drawing on Edward Casey's distinction between hestial dwelling (the centralizing, inward-gathering home) and hermetic dwelling (the outward-pulling path), along with Heidegger's and Norberg-Schulz's phenomenologies of dwelling, the author contends that a hestial mode of being-in-the-gameworld is also present and deserves recognition. The paper aims to broaden the theoretical understanding of the spatial dimension of player existence beyond the dominant framing of games as spaces to be traversed.

The argument rests on a critical survey of influential theorists, including Aarseth's ergodic theory, Gazzard's and Calleja's accounts of maze and exploration, Wolf's notion of navigable space, and Günzel's view of the wandering ego, all of which the paper interprets as privileging forward movement. Exceptions acknowledged include Flynn's "digital hearth," McGregor's architectural nodal space, and Liboriussen's work on building in Second Life. The paper's own method is a conceptual and close-reading analysis rather than an empirical study, with Animal Crossing: New Leaf and Minecraft as primary case studies and Dark Souls, This War of Mine, and Dragon Quest Builders as supporting examples.

Through these cases, the paper identifies three spatial structures that support hestial dwelling: a centre around which the game world is organized in concentric circles of decreasing intimacy, a demarcation of inside and outside that generates oppositions such as safety versus danger and civilization versus nature, and the establishment of a dwelling-place that anchors the player's relation to the wider world. These structures afford practices of lingering, building, and cyclical departure and return. The paper concludes that such games exhibit a mode of being-in-the-gameworld that calls for expanding the discipline's spatial vocabulary beyond traversal.