The Psychogeography of Imaginary Places

TL;DR

The paper addresses extending psychogeography to imaginary places, emphasizing video game environments as fertile ground for rethinking how environments shape emotion and behavior. It surveys historical roots of psychogeography and the shift toward subjective, embodied practice, then introduces the concept of a Psychogeography of Games to analyze time, space, and engine-driven constraints in digital worlds. Key contributions include a framework for applying dérive-like exploration in games, consideration of engine physics, time-scale manipulation, and player agency, and the role of environmental storytelling and hauntology in shaping meaning. The work highlights the practical impact for game design, interpretation, and critical analysis by treating games as laboratories and landscapes where personal resonance and cultural politics emerge from constructed virtual spaces.

Abstract

Psychogeography -- the study of how environments shape emotion and behaviour -- has long concerned itself with the emotional resonance of the physical, often through the idea of the derive through the city. Its philosophical core, however, is primarily concerned with identifying affective relationships between the personal and the environmental, and this does not require the constraint of concrete. This paper extends psychogeographical practice into the realm of the imaginary, proposing a psychogeography of virtual and fictive spaces. Drawing on literary, Situationist, and contemporary psychogeographical traditions, we examine how the derive might operate within the elastic spatiality and temporalities of video game worlds. We argue that digital environments, being wholly constructed, invite new forms of meaning-making and self-reflection. Through this reframing, games become both laboratory and landscape for a revitalised psychogeography: one attuned not only to the spirits of streets and cities, but also to the ghosts that haunt code, pixels, and play.