Navigating sociotechnical spaces: Comparing computer games and sat navs as digital spatial media

Introduction

When Niko Bellic, the central character in the PC and console game Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV Rockstar Games, 2008 – for reference listing of computer games and mobile applications, see Gameography), struts out into Liberty City, he has constant access to informational guidance. As a sophisticated avatar inhabitant of the fictionalized New York City, Niko has in-game gadgets to help find his way around. On a typical ‘mission’, Niko has to drive across town to locate some character to murder. To get Niko to that destination, the player controlling him consults a top-down map of the whole city, and then uses the controller to walk or drive Niko across town. Throughout, he (let’s assume a male player) consults an array of live information devices, including a mini-map, mobile phone, computers and satellite navigation to get around the game world. Devices such as these are becoming ubiquitous in everyday life — from global information systems to personal smartphones. This article interrogates the significance of an accelerating proliferation of more powerful digital spatial media in both gamespace and social space.

When the player of GTA IV finishes a mission, he wants something to eat: perhaps something Italian. To find a restaurant, he Google searches on the satellite navigation device (sat nav) in his car. The search quickly locates some nearby restaurants, and calculates a route to the selected establishment. He calls a friend and arranges to meet there. Turn-by-turn, the sat nav guides him to the restaurant. The sat nav performs in the physical world navigational procedures similar to those in the gamespace. But where GTA IV world is a world simulation, the sat nav uses global positioning system satellites to sense the vehicle’s position on the planet, and presents game-like interfaces to guide the driver. Both these devices illustrate the importance of developing critical readings of the range of translations and reconfigurations of technical, human and spatial components at play in the heterogeneous range of digital interventions in spatiality.

This article will limit itself to examining digital navigation in two mediated spaces — the playful fictional world in GTA IV, and the spatial representations and guidance of a sat nav in actual space. These products alone have been distributed globally on a large scale. GTA IV sold 22 million units (Orland, 2011) and TomToms sold over 14 million units in 2008. Sales of dedicated sat navs have since dropped off, but digital spatial media more widely have proliferated in smartphones and ubiquitous computing devices, to an extent that Adam Greenfield (2006) refers to it, appropriately, as ‘Everyware’. Games and devices with GPS have annual sales of many millions.

I will identify three characteristic features in both media that tend to structure user perception and movement in space. First, reified routes displace ad hoc spatial practices to make route plans increasingly concrete. Second, digital maps in both games and sat navs have become privatized, oriented to a subjective perspective, and primed for consumption. Third, these devices juxtapose real time information about the space against space itself. Most users experience digital guidance as a convenience, but these practices do change the sites and methods of influence on bodies in movement.

How space has changed since the 20th century

Digital spatial media are among many contributors to new logics of spatiality in late capitalism. Spatial practices are changing as many disruptive changes appear in the mediation of space: from megamalls to superhighways. Henri Lefebvre (1971, 1991) is the benchmark for a critical understanding of the technosocial production of space in the 20th century. For Lefebvre, the configuration of social space is always historically specific. He identifies a key moment around 1911 when space changed for the 20th century. Ford and Einstein, the Great War and cubism were characteristic of the structuring of space with greater abstraction and technocratic force, but also with new possibilities for change in revolutionary movements.

How do we determine whether new media are contributing to another historical spatial singularity in the early 21st century? In this article my two main examples of new media serve as exemplars of this emerging spatial paradigm. I will argue that space is dominated less by what Lefebvre calls the ‘conceived’ (1991: 34), and (paradoxically) is becoming dominated by ‘lived space’ (1991: 361). Conceived space is highly formal, distant from everyday life. The technologies of conceived space are remote and dominating. Digital media today are more approachable, light and even potentially subversive. As gadgets and games have made technologies more accessible, the everyday lived spaces of real time mapping and spatial information have come to play new roles in spatial practices and pleasures.

Lefebvre, and those influenced by his work, propose that spatial configurations in a society are staged through dialectical struggles between practice, thought and imagination (Shields, 1998). Social spaces are simultaneously real and imagined, and also historically specific (Elden, 2004). When the everyday (perceived) space of communities is disrupted by the intervention of abstracted (conceived) spaces, less determined ‘lived’ spaces emerge. Lived spaces are imbued with unexpected meanings and social complexity.

In his classic book, The Production of Space, Lefebvre (1991) contends that space is a dynamic participant in everyday practices, and not simply a passive container. Space is always socially produced: ‘every society … produces a space, its own space’ (Lefebvre, 1991), and the composition of space betrays the action of historical forces. As these forces change, space itself also changes. Lefebvre describes the processes by which space is being produced through a dialectic, or trialectic (Soja, 1996), between three forms of space: perceived, conceived and lived space.

Perceived space — the space of everyday life, is patterned by the ways that people encounter it. It is a space that supposedly precedes calculation. Pathways and networks emerge over time simply as reinforcements of regular spatial practices. These pathways are both physical — the traces of thousands of footsteps — and psychic — the habits and associations that constitute psychogeography. Perceived space is already marked by power relationships and by the spatial practices of work, family and other institutions. However, perceived space operates without any consistency or overarching strategy (Lefebvre, 1991).

Lefebvre’s conceived space is ‘conceptualised space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers’ (1991: 38), and is ontologically distinct from perceived space. Professions work with ‘representations of space’ (1991: 38), informed by the traditions of perspective, geometry and other formalisms. Lefebvre argues that people treat these representations as real, with an ‘objectivity’ that tends to be detached and alienated from actual space. He argues that conceived space is always the dominant and dominating form of space. Those working with kind of space consider their understanding to be superior to perceived space. Computers embodied conceived space. In the mid to late 20th century, most computers were mainframes, managed by corporations, military and the state. Information technologies operated in secure clean rooms, imposing surveillance and domination — in the popular imagination as much as in actual operation. For those excluded from conceived space, this abstracted space seemed lethal, alienating. For Lefebvre, the agents of domination are large-scale institutions: ‘armies, war, the state and political power’ (1991: 166). He foresaw a condition approaching when ‘the domination of space is becoming dominant’ (1991: 164).

In the third kind of space, lived space, it is possible for space to unfold less predictably. These spaces of conflict, contestation and change emerge from the struggle between perceived and conceived spaces. Lived spaces are incommensurably different from the other two, as ‘a produced difference presupposes the shattering of a system; it emerges from the chasm opened up when a closed universe ruptures’ (1991: 372). Lived space is populated by ‘users’ and ‘inhabitants’ (1991: 364), whose subjective experiences produce a space redolent with meanings, conflicts and strategies. Lived space, or what Soja (1996) calls ‘Thirdspace’, has greater complexity than the other levels. It is the space of utopias, heterotopias, and other forms of complex spatiality, each irreducible to the ‘too close’ level of perceived and ‘too distant’ level of conceived. This space is paradoxical, sometimes liberating, sometimes dominated. It is the space inhabited by users of sat navs and players of computer games.

Lefebvre almost always casts technology as a distant and dominating force, aligned with conceived spaces. As the Cold War paradigm of technology began to soften he only shifts his attitude slightly. I can identify two examples of Lefebvre adjusting to changing technological paradigms. First, he creates a binary between the serious and dangerous technologies of the state against the trivial gadgets to which people get access:

He dismisses gadgets as ‘trivial’ (1971: 54), ‘petty’ (1971: 57) and ‘ideological’ (1971: 57). His depiction of technology as a monolithic agent is characteristic of this era of Marxist thought. Like all binaries, though, it tends to dismiss all differences among phenomena on the opposite side. Since the 1980s, readings of class politics, ideology, technology and popular culture have become more complex, particularly in cultural studies and other newer disciplines. Some fields have analysed the active roles of consumers in creating their own meanings (Paterson, 2006). Games have been recognized for their rhetorical and persuasive power (Bogost, 2010). Digital spatial media devices have matured and become more powerful and widely accessible, even supporting experiments in art and activism. Many artists using these devices invoke the situationist movement, a group of French urban activists who aimed to disrupt conventional space. Lefebvre was involved with this group in the 1960s (Flanagan, 2007).

The style of Lefebvre’s (1991) second response to modern computers seems more open to interrogating the spaces of new technologies, if he remained very cautious. What comes through most clearly in Lefebvre’s words is a sense that he is entering a space with which he is highly unfamiliar.

Since Lefebvre’s death in 1991, user experiences with computer games and sat nav devices have made that ‘space peculiar to information science’ very much a part of everyday life. Information technologies no longer operate purely as technocratic domination. Even if they inherit the research legacies of the military, the state and capital, these devices have been domesticated as user-friendly commodities, objects of desire and information utilities. They offer the interactive pleasures of knowledge and mastery.

In spite of his critical view of technicity, Lefebvre’s work on the paradoxes of spatiality has been significant for games scholars. Understanding the interplay between experience, formal rules and structured play is crucial in critical work on computer games (Aarseth, 2007; Apperley, 2010; Flynn, 2003, 2004; Magnet, 2006; Ryan and Nichols, 2006; Stockburger, 2006; Taylor, 2002).

Navigating games spaces

The status of game space is contentious in the academic field of games studies: Is game space an illusion based on formalisms, or a real spatiality, as measured by gamer experience? For example, Espen Aarseth draws on Lefebvre to argue that spatial representations in games are not spatial at all: rather they are ‘a reductive operation leading to a representation of space that is not spatial’ (Aarseth, 2007). Games are rule-bound allegories of space quite unlike actual space, as they necessarily sacrifice complete openness in order to be playable.

By contrast, Lammes (2008) argues that games enhance our experience of space: they are ‘playgrounds, where gamers can find an intensified space to express, and give meaning to, spatial regimes and spatial confusions that are part of our daily life’ (Lammes, 2008: 264). Games can be critical sketches of possible spatialities. With their capacities to escape geometricality and formalism, they define explorations of space as meaningful, refiguring memories of colonization as play.

Computer games exist by simultaneously and automatically employing formalisms of space (3D models begin as conceived spaces), and activating in everyday play (perceived spatial practice, even if those spaces are fictional). Aarseth and Lammes emphasize two different features of games’ spatial logic.

Jesper Juul (2005) proposes a distinction that brings Aarseth’s and Lammes’ arguments together: that games use both formal abstractions and playful expression, or what he calls ‘rules’ and ‘fiction’. Games are make-believe spaces bound by formal constraints. This pairing positions space as a synthesis of the fictional and the rule-bound:

By this construction, a game level designer’s choices structure the possibilities for play through the combination of fiction and rules. Some features constrain (corridors, narrow roads, coastline, dangers) and others enhance (high ground, ramps) the players’ capacities and interactions. The level designs (known, confusingly, as ‘maps’) heavily influence the flow of game action. Nitsche (2009) provides an extended reading of formal features of media, narrative and play in game spaces.

However, game space is certainly more complex than levels that inform the play. Stockburger’s (2006) analysis of spatial practices in games goes beyond the fiction – rule binary by drawing on Lefebvre’s (1991) and Soja’s (1996) concepts around the spatial triad: perceived – conceived – lived. He analyses game play dynamics when spatial foundations underlying the game are taken up in spaces of play:

Stockburger extends his analysis of the spatial practices in particular games by extending these elements to include multiple types of space in operation simultaneously. In a hypothetical arcade ‘space shooter’, he notes that:

Different games genres allow for different possibilities for spatial practices. In some genres, the narrative and rule space representations are highly constrained. Beat ’em up games such as Tekken 6 (2007–2009) or Mortal Kombat (1992–2011) and sports games, for example, take place in closed arenas, in line with Huizinga’s (1955) conception that play tends to take place in a ‘magic circle’. Other games allow the character some movement through space, but constrain avatars to particular pathways, a technique known as putting a game ‘on rails’ (for example, Half Life, Sierra Entertainment, 1998).

Open world games, by contrast, support apparently unconstrained movement within available game spaces. To support this freedom of movement in narrative, audiovisual representational and kinaesthetic spaces, designers must offer both extensive, detailed level design, and interface devices that give players an awareness of where they are in space, and in the game narratives. The lived space of open world games seems to celebrate ideologies of freedom and individualism. It supports random acts of violence, and of consumption. At the same time, games such as GTA IV are satirical not only at the level of content, but also of spatial practices. The non-playing characters are distributed in ways that affect the suburban variations. Some open world games can be read as complex critical essays in mediated spatiality.

The most influential open world games series is Grand Theft Auto (GTA), developed by Rockstar Games (Loguidice and Barton, 2009). The first in the series, Grand Theft Auto (DMA Design, 1997) was for fifth-generation platforms (Playstation and personal computers – PCs), not yet capable of 3D space. The game featured a top-down viewpoint onto a city, a perspective recalling Lefebvre’s conceived space. But far from presenting cold abstractions, the game sends players on a frenzied, if ironic, crime spree, in which the avatar runs, drives and shoots his way through a busy city. In the midst of this chaos, the game offers informational cues, including an arrow floating next to the car that indicates the direction of the current destination. Icons of police heads indicate the intensity of police attention. The game combines world data (image and wild sounds) with informational metadata (graphs, flags, subtitles and so on).

In recent iterations of GTA, the fictional worlds have become increasingly photorealistic, rendered in three dimensions in GTA III (2001 on Playstation 2) and in high definition in GTA IV (2008 on Playstation 3). The game world aesthetics of these later versions are more detailed, with day and night, changing weather, and streets inhabited by chatting pedestrians. Just as importantly, GTA IV gives players more information about the wider gamespace, including a mobile phone, a sat nav-like animated mapping system in cars, and computers with websites and email. These devices give Niko ways of perceiving and interacting in spaces beyond what is immediately visible to him.

Open world games in particular need to give players spatial information to connect the perceived (‘real life’ in the fictional world) with the conceived spaces of rules, states of play, health levels and so forth. GTA portrays and parodies a world of meaningful lived space, a space of calculation and meaning in which ‘users’ are the universal identities. Ironically, among the most persistent features in the GTA gamespace are the in-game gadgets for mediating space.

Playing GTA IV is typically associated with leisure spaces, in which subversive meanings are possible. Therefore, it is not unusual that the gamespaces are ripe with satirical content, including an absurd in-game conservative TV channel called Weazel news, a city scape saturated with parodies of advertising, and a story line that accentuates class, race and political corruption. Lefebvre observes that, while leisure space may seem to have potential to be disruptive and transgressive, like a public carnival where normal roles break down, this hope is barren:

Lefebvre concludes that this disruptive potential of leisure is only an illusion: ‘The case against leisure is quite simply closed – and the verdict is irreversible: leisure is as alienated and alienating as labour’ (1991: 383). Lefebvre dismisses the subjectivity of the ‘user’ as politically silent and abstracted. Unfortunately, Lefebvre’s rigid distinctions provide little scope within the category of the ‘lived’ for critical attention to the spatial regimes brought up by digital spatial media.

The analysis of gamespaces given earlier has established a starting point for understanding changing digital spatial practices. It drew attention to two spaces: a live gameworld, and spatial media that help the character (and the player) navigate in that world. The sat nav is a device that shares a lot in common with the in-game maps of that latter space. However, it belongs not in a game world, but in everyday space. The story of its emergence as a consumer product brings it in contact with secret military projects and computer games.

Satellite navigation: From military to commodity

The early story of sat navs is embedded in 1970s militarism, and its conceived spaces of command and control. In the depth of the Cold War, the USA secretly launched 24 Navstar satellites to create the global positioning system (GPS) infrastructure. The synchronized GPS signals allowed US military units anywhere in the world to discover their own location almost instantly. GPS remained secret until 1983, when Russian fighters shot down Korean Air Flight 007 for straying into USSR air space. President Reagan used this event to justify opening up access to GPS for civil and commercial uses (Jacobson, 2007). Commercial sat navs would surface a decade later, bringing with them very different spatial practices.

Early GPS users could read their location information as coordinates, but they needed training to use the device effectively. This spatial practice represented a significant change from calculating location using maps, landmarks, compass readings and other observations. With GPS, the mechanics of location-finding are freed from thought. Live spatial information became observable alongside space itself, but until the 1990s, only within military contexts.

For GPS devices to become a media platform that provides live spatial information in consumer electronics devices, they would need to be released from conceived space. Portable computer games became clearly a model for sat navs. They used cheap displays, rechargeable batteries, accessible controls and visually rich screen interfaces. Among the developers of these devices was an Amsterdam-based business software and games company, which became TomTom, and introduced its first Navigator product in 2001.

Sat navs render maps from databases as cartoonish views of the space of navigation. The map data contains not only roads and street names, but ‘traffic signs, prohibited manoeuvres, vehicle restrictions, post/zip codes, house number ranges, points of interest, tourist information, speed camera data, and much more’ (TomTom International, 2009). Just as the game player has access to live in-game information, users of sat navs have their experience of space augmented by information on databases, and even live data.

The worlds of sat navs and computer games overlap. Games and sat nav developers share similar educational backgrounds, combining engineering with design and computer science. They are likely to have experience with each other’s work: playing the others’ games or using sat navs. Consumers have expectations and ‘training’ from playing games that sets their expectations about the look and feel of consumer electronics devices. The devices share similar graphical computers, software algorithms and powerful CPUs – central processing units (Shepherd and Bleasdale Shepherd, 2009). While patents are more commonly used in GPS engineering, there are occasional overlaps in patents for global information systems and games (Uhlir et al., 2004).

The practices of making game levels and making maps for sat navs share some commonalities because they use similar digital tools and spatial data capture techniques. In games development, level design has much more fictional detail than sat nav diagrams. GTA IV’s level is loosely modelled on New York City, and research on the game began with thousands of stills and videos of the space (Goldstein, 2008). Level design involves several ways of modelling space: contour maps, vector maps, wireframes, texture maps, bump-maps and so on.

Like games, sat nav maps are composites, stitched together from multiple sources, including official records and vehicles on the road. TomTom combines their own data collection with community data posted deliberately and automatically by drivers about the spaces they are navigating. Controversially, TomTom was discovered selling on data about routes and travel times gathered from private sat nav devices. Police in the Netherlands used such data to place speed cameras in places where drivers’ own records show that cars have been speeding (Ramli, 2011). TomTom faces substantial competition over digital mapping data, not only from commercial companies such as Google and Microsoft, but also community neogeographers, who have become significant actors in a new knowledge politics of space (Elwood, 2010; McFedries, 2007). However, most drivers adopt the maps bundled with their own proprietary devices.

Transformed into part entertainment platform, and part instrumental device, sat navs took a driving position in many cars. In the remainder of this article, I discuss three features of digital spatial navigators found in different forms in computer games and in sat navs (Table 1): routes become reified; maps become subjective; and, information is overlaid onto perceived space.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Comparing mediations of spatial practices in GTA IV and sat navs.

	Open world games (GTA IV)	In-car satellite navigation
1. Digital routes	‘Cut scenes’ present scripted introductions followed by guided navigation in live game space.	Nav calculates routes, visualizes paths on a map, and gives instructions until reaching a destination.
2. Subjective viewpoint	The privileged virtual cameras align the view of the world to a subjective perspective.	Personalized map view is aligned to the vehicle’s direction of movement and decision-making.
3. Information overlays	GTA updates information on the state of play (missions completed, character health etc.).	Constant updates of live information about the space around: time to destination; safety camera warnings.

Digital routes

Digital spatial media reify routes as procedural information. The gadget presents each route with rhetorical force, with multiple strategies to persuade the driver to take certain paths. These routes, in combination, may contribute to producing different spaces, actual and imaginary. Both sat navs and games generate and follow the routes. In doing so, they define and enact traces of possibility across a space.

The typical driver almost always gets into her car with an informal plan, and a wider set of meanings motivating the trip (pick up a book from a shop in Leichhardt, visit a friend in Bondi and so on). When she enters the name of a destination into a sat nav, though, the device generates a route as reified information - as representations of space (Lefebvre, 1991: 38), as on-screen images and spoken instructions. That route has more actuality and force than a street directory flopped open on the passenger seat, and more precision than directions scrawled on a scrap of paper. Where a route may be created in conversation with a human navigator, routes are increasingly constructed in automatic conversation with others outside the car, such as Vehicle Ad Hoc Networks (Dornbush and Joshi, 2007) that use local networking between cars to balance traffic flows.

In a game world, narrative spaces (Stockberger, 2006: 107) provide meanings, while rule spaces (2006: 117) define formal constraints on the game avatar's actions. GTA IV players encounter space in a staged series of main missions, with many subsidiary missions and tasks. Each mission typically opens with a ‘cut scene’, a cinematic narrative animation that introduces the setting for the gameplay. This set-up justifies the acts of audiovisual violence that Niko is urged to commit, and provides some, typically unreliable, instructions about what to do. As each mission starts, points in space are marked as destinations. Players can also add their own destination points using the sat nav. As the GTA series has developed, the designers have introduced more guidance for users. The additions make navigation and play easier, reflecting Rockstar’s strategy to expand their market beyond traditional hard-core gamers. Across many games, these developments have built a conventional spatial lexicon.

The mission structure in GTA IV has a parallel in sat navs, as drivers move through the road system. Just as new missions in GTA IV generate routes to checkpoints, the TomTom projects destinations into routes almost instantly. The narrative of the journey is as a race, with checkpoints and a chequered flag at the end. While drivers can disobey the instructions, or even switch it off, there is a rule-like power to the insistent audiovisual voice and image interpellating the disobedient driver: ‘Please make a U-turn when possible’. This is not the planner’s conceived space (in the actual shape of the road or the road signage), but a lived space brought to life as a voice and map inside the car. When this guiding force is paired with spatial control systems such as ‘Autohabits’, it becomes less game-like and more surveillant, allowing a boss or parent to use the car’s computer, GPS and mobile data to trace and record the movements of drivers (Autohabits, 2011).

The mission structure characteristic of games is also in play with spatially locative games in physical spaces that became popular in the 1990s. Players of geocaching, for example, try to hide, and find, small packages using a GPS device (De Souza e Silva and Hjorth, 2009). These practices became more popular when smartphones and services, such as Foursquare, made spatial practices much more accessible. Such devices have driven the marketing fashion for ‘gamification’ (Deterding et al., 2011), porting games practices and conventions into everyday life.

Subjective perspectives

Digital spatial media have translated maps from public to private signs, from objective to subjective perspectives, and from multiple navigational components to totalizing systems. Traditional paper maps are public images implying a universal perspective. They are reference material that takes work to interpret. Navigators must consult indexes, find pages, and trace coordinates to a location. They may draw on a number of documents and instructions. Matching the map location with a current location in space requires constant work.

By contrast, sat nav images are constantly regenerated as the vehicle moves through space. These are private images, tuned to the sites at which they are created. As digital outputs, they are evanescent, but always available, until the battery goes flat. Their visual perspective is aligned to the driver’s viewpoint, and their operation is in real-time movement of lived space. The significance of this alignment of kinaesthetics and viewpoint is heightened when the car goes around a corner, and the driver's perspective on the space, and the route simulation, are held in alignment.

The subjective perspective in GTA IV is both an exemplar and a playful parody of the spatial regime of digital media. It illustrates well the historical change from the ‘conceived space’ of maps and models to the lived spaces in digital maps that are immanent to subjective perception. The live information anticipates the player’s needs, but withholds complete accuracy to keep the game challenging. The game only reveals a part of the world at each point in the game.

GTA IV’s view onto its simulated game world is oriented to subjective action The game’s default ‘third person over-the-shoulder’ perspective moves around the avatar to line up with the aim of the current weapon. This floating camera view combines cinematic composition conventions with an orientation to game action (Christie and Normand, 2005). This viewpoint allows players to make sense of the world, enjoy the game spectacle, and act against threats. Managing the players' viewpoints is critical, because 3D space can be disorienting and incoherent. The game illustrates this potential for disorientation with the optional cinematic camera, which cuts between random camera positions, counterpointing the ‘natural’ subjective points of view. This view offers a parodic challenge for players, because it is almost impossible to control the car.

Alongside the camera view, a circular mini-map head-up display (HUD) gives a compact visualization of salient features in Niko’s own immediate world. There is a graph of health and armour, and, around the perimeter, icons representing features beyond the mini-map, such as home bases, weapons stores, friends and enemies. In the top right corner of the screen are indicators of the current weapon and ammunition level. As Gunzel observes, a game map ‘is not a picture of the gamespace, but a representation of what is known about the gamespace’ (2007: 447).

The information-rich GTA mini-map has something in common with a driver’s view and experience of the road, which even before the GPS was already overcoded and information saturated (Thrift and French, 2002). Driving involves constant interplay between car and driver agencies. As Thrift (2004: 49) observes: ‘automobiles become more and more like hybrid entities in which intelligence and intentionality are distributed between human and non-human’. The dashboard display, and the road itself, demand constant attention as complementary modes of information. However, unlike leisurely game players, drivers are likely to become either stressed by driving challenges, or bored by the long trip. Much driving is not voluntary, and the road presents real risks to the driver’s body. The very constrained interfaces of windscreen, dashboard, wheel and accelerator define the driver’s possible relationships to space. Line markings divide zones of driveable and non-driveable space. At night, the road is illuminated by colour coded lights: blinking orange; steady white; intermittent red; and, flashing blue. Inside and outside the car, salient and distracting information proliferate and compete to a point that compromises driving performance (Wu and Liu, 2007).

The goal of designing sat navs is to provide information about one’s surroundings with live-refreshed information displays that counteract these common indecisions and distractions. TomTom’s standard ‘Driving View’ (TomTom International, 2006) updates information about the vehicle’s location along the route, geared to the driver’s immediate needs. Unlike 3D games, TomTom images are symbolic rather than naturalistic, since the actual space is already visible through the windscreen. The device regularly recalculates a simplified perspectival map view to show street patterns, names, and selected points of interest. The map image is occasionally interrupted by timely new information, such as graphics to suggest which lane to take. The map is also overlaid with a multitude of icons and readings about the current states of affairs: speed, remaining journey time, battery level, and next instructions.

Therefore, sat navs operate by different conventions about modulating the user’s cognitive and affective load than computer games. When a computer game challenges a player with a new mission, the design aims to intensify the playing experience. The sat nav is designed to enhance the driver’s capacity to control the vehicle and make judgements to avoid risks. In calculating directions and offering timely instructions, sat nav designers aim to reduce the cognitive and affective demands on drivers. For example, research on taxi drivers in Barcelona using sat navs reported that these devices allow them to relax, particularly in unfamiliar new suburbs, or bad weather. It also reassures passengers that the drivers know where they are going (Girardin and Blat, 2010). Others report improved personal relationships as sat navs reduce fights over directions (English, 2009).

On the other hand, the sat nav is not always a reliable guide to the road. Even if engineers aim to ensure accurate calibration between the actual and map space, accuracy is notoriously poor. Errors of up to 20 m are commonplace. In addition, ‘human factors’ designers often introduce design flaws that actually make human error more likely (Heron et al., 1997). The instructions are often hard to follow, let alone in the noisy environment of a family car. Some argue that using sat navs detaches drivers from their awareness of the road: ‘they demand less skill and attention by providing orientation and navigation as a commodity, with instant availability, ubiquity, safety, and ease of use, resulting in loss of engagement with the environment and others’ (Leshed et al., 2008: 1675). Furthermore, digital map information quickly goes out of date, and updates are expensive. There are special risks when a supposedly total system gradually becomes prone to error.

Information overlays

Among common features of digital spatial media are read-outs that summarize current local information for the driver/player: representational spaces in Lefebvre’s terms. If there is a salient change in surrounding states of affairs, the device marks the subjective map and alerts the user. This information is displayed directly alongside the perceived space visible through the windscreen. The dataspace is the space of the Lefebvre’s ‘user’ - not the spatiotemporally distant space of planners, but the lived space of live data. In most cases, Lefebvre’s ambivalence about the political value of these spatial overlays is borne out. The content of GTA IV is a high satire of capitalism and political corruption, and the gameplay is only partly a parody of masculine violence. The spatial information available to drivers on their sat navs is oriented towards calculating travel metrics, and movement towards sites of consumption.

Digital spatial media often bring abstractions for domination into lived space, a practice most evident in games fictions. At many points in GTA IV, information overlays drive the player’s experience. Particular regions of space become privileged in the mini-map, showing an opportunity or a threat. For example, one ongoing goal of the game is to steal good cars. If stealing a car attracts police attention, the player becomes ‘wanted’, and a star on screen signifies that the state of the game has changed. The higher the ‘wanted’ level, the more stars appear. This symbolic change manifests in gameplay as more aggressive police pursuit. The character has undergone an incorporeal transformation, from free to wanted (Chesher, 1997). The ‘wanted’ state of affairs has much in common with the legal and operational abstractions that police actually use, in combination police band radio to coordinate actions against suspects. As Niko is pursued, a circle on the mini map on screen shows a hot zone in which the player will attract attention. He must escape that circle to reduce or evade the attention of police. Alternatively, he can find a paint shop to respray the car so the police no longer recognize him (the non playing characters take on the clichéd role as dumb cops).

Drivers on the road with sat navs also become ‘users’, as their information space is populated by databases and live information. Manufacturers promise this will give them greater command over the road: if there is traffic ahead, live traffic information will suggest changes to the route. Read off the on-road display equivalent to health, fuel and direction indicators in computer games. Find the cheapest petrol nearby, great food and shopping. Watch the estimated distance and time to destination, and live information. In each way that users open themselves to more information, they can open themselves to influences of advertising, tracking and other forces.

The range of information overlaid on space is even greater in smartphones. For example, the iPhone’s ‘Find my friends’ (2011) app locates registered friends nearby on a map. Augmented reality apps such as Layar bring information from the network to overlay labels onto the camera image. Real time navigation features seem to fulfil long-standing futuristic promises of technology. However, they also represent opportunities for advertisers to coerce drivers towards their clients, integrate location-specific advertising (Froeberg, 2003) and impose other commercial intrusions.

Conclusions

In the 1980s, Lefebvre critiqued the domination of space by remote, abstract planners. Since then, the power of conceived space has been rivalled by new practices of ambivalent domination in lived space. Still working with abstractions, the lived spaces of users become immanent to perceived space. With technological mediation, a kind of automatic lived space increasingly structures everyday spaces in heterogeneous ways (this is neither a universal, nor a univocal spatial transformation).

In this article, I have looked at spatial practices mediated by computer games and sat navs. Each artefact implies its own distinctive spatial imaginary, and positions its users in relation to new spatial practices. GTA IV, like many games, is both an allegory of a space, and a simulation of spatiality. The detail of the world presents an urban landscape alienated and indifferent, while the vehicles and weapons offer a kinaesthetics of speed and destruction. The TomTom is also a media phenomenon, with celebrity voices (from Homer Simpson to Darth Vader) present in the car as persuasive companions with knowledge of the city.

In analysing these two examples of contemporary spatial mediation, I have shown that there are significant mutual influences between games and sat navs. While gamespaces and roads are different spaces, the practices of navigation are broadly similar. The computer automatically reifies routes with a tangible authority. Both devices influence navigation in real time (this spatial logic is also apparent in the way that non-playing characters approach Niko in GTA IV). The intellectual properties from entertainment industries (Simpsons and Lucasfilm) cross over in an open media market. The sat nav spatial logic anticipates the emergence of self-driving vehicles, such as Google’s robot car, which promises to translate lived space routes directly into autonomous road users (Markoff, 2010).

Contemporary social space is increasingly structured by the capacities of digital spatial media, translating the wider political and economic forces of consumption in technospatial terms. These new media are oriented to subjective spaces, in contrast to public maps. Generating custom maps on the fly, spatial navigation is increasingly personalized for implied subjects and real-time conditions. These devices typically default to mediating relationships between mobile consumers, public spaces and local companies. More drastically, spatial systems can turn surveillant, perhaps offering the lure of cheaper insurance or discounts for drivers to disclose their movements (Iqbal and Lim, 2010). On the other hand, artistic and activist applications may open up more public and collaborative modes of mediating spatiality (Crang and Graham, 2007). Personal information spaces are overlaid by a growing array of information nodes, informing subjects about surrounding spaces. As these technosocial phenomena become more intimately embedded in everyday life, the hermeneutics of the technical, social and political forces, both ‘trivial’ and power-laden, must be taken seriously.

Gameography