The question of fidelity and Shadow of the Colossus
Editor's note: Once a month we're lucky enough to be graced by the presence of Gareth Damian Martin, editor of Heterotopias, to share some proper insight before we go back and default to just writing about PUBG and Destiny 2. If you want to read more in-depth critical writing, you can find a Heterotopias bundle celebrating the zine's anniversary here.
As someone who spends much of their time with games thinking about and photographing their spaces, architecture and worlds, I often forget that these are spaces we never truly enter. While our minds might seem to wander past the screen, it's a hard border for us, one we can never pass. In truth it seems that game spaces aren't true spaces at all, but images of spaces, presented at the steady clip of 30 or 60 frames per second. Why does this matter? Because while games may be the bastard child of art and architecture combined, it's worth remembering that their pre-digital history is one that connects to the history of images, and images of spaces, before it does to the history of architecture or spaces themselves.
All this became immediately evident to me when I encountered the upcoming remake of Shadow of the Colossus. Here was a space I knew intimately, that I had spent huge volumes of time in (or at least imagining I was in) being reshaped, changed, even transformed. And yet it wasn't the space itself that was changing, but the image of it. The volumes of sloping hills, the rolling surfaces of windswept planes, the scattering of haggard crags, all were matched to the original games layout as if part of a ritual of recreation. Each one was mirrored to the spaces I knew and had let sink into my memory. But the way these spatial elements, these landscapes and massings, manifested as images was changed totally.
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