The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [13]
Not all presence-related phenomena stem directly from the virtual environment. Researcher Kwan Min Lee (pp. 44-45) identifies both social presence (“virtual social actors are experienced as actual actors”) and self presence (“virtual self/selves are experienced as the actual self”). In practice, the general feeling of presence usually exists as a mix of different types.
Environmental presence, unlike social or self presence, relies on a feeling of transportation into the virtually physical place. Furthermore, environmental presence is not just an illusion, or a failure to consciously notice the virtuality of a place. Sense of place also depends on the active construction of personal linkages to the environment.
From Spaces of Flows, Back to Spaces of Places
To understand the lasting legacy of warping, we must start with Nintendo’s classic Super Mario Bros. Super Mario Bros. wasn’t the first videogame to allow instantaneous travel, but it certainly popularized the practice. A huge commercial success and burgeoning cultural phenomenon, Super Mario Bros. single-handedly altered the landscape of videogame design. Mario, the player avatar, travels between levels by jumping into special green pipes. Certain pipes, hidden in hard-to-find areas called “warp zones,” let players skip forward through the game, multiple levels at a time. A powerful and oft-discussed secret, the warp zone cemented its place in videogame lore.
Mario uncovers one of several secret warp zones. This specific warp zone allows players to skip directly to Worlds 2, 3, or 4 (Super Mario Brothers, Nintendo).
The lure of warping as shortcut was an inevitable product of the game’s linearly forward trajectory. Separated by end-of-level celebrations, the environments of Super Mario Bros. function as obstacle courses. The game offers little encouragement to wander around and enjoy the worlds themselves.
Quite the opposite, players are pressured to complete each level within a certain time limit. Mario isn’t even allowed to run backwards past the left edge of the screen, which means players are prevented from retracing their steps. This linearity also manifests itself in the way players progress from level to level, as Mario can’t return to previously beaten worlds. The notion that players might even want to revisit completed levels seems somewhat absurd: the point of Super Mario Bros. is to survive, conquer the coming challenges, and move on. In short, the goal of level completion is prioritized over everything else.
It’s an oversimplification to claim that games like Super Mario Bros. are entirely about destination. The fact that Super Mario Bros. remains so enjoyable to play and replay proves that the “journey” is indeed enjoyable in its own right. But a journey through Super Mario Bros. occurs in a type of space very different than the physically contiguous, self-contained places in which we live. A game like Tetris, for instance, exists in a space that is almost purely kinetic. Borrowing terminology from Manuel Castells, we can think of such a space as a “space of flows”—one in which places are dominated by the movement between and within those places. In other words, the space of Tetris is more a process than it is a place.
No videogame—not even one as abstract as Tetris—can completely escape the “space of places.” As Castells writes, “Places do not disappear, but their logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network.”13Super Mario Bros., for example, does indeed consist of (virtually) contiguous levels that are navigated much like traditional places. But those levels exist solely to be completed, or even skipped; they aren’t valued in and of themselves.
In designing any videogame world, there always exists a tension between spaces of