The Historical Environment as Aged Icon in the Gamed West

Abstract

ABSTRACT As far back as Theodore Roosevelt or Owen Wister and his novel of western grit and masculinity, The Virginian, the American West has been charged with an evocative sense: as virtue, as place, as image. In this paper, I argue that the image, as place and virtue, is exhibited in video games through a built environment that contains the ideas and meaning of the ‘Old West’ and the imagined past, in what I refer to as aged icons. The nostalgia of the American West has been built into the American psyche and is represented in film, T.V., novels, toys, amusement parks, and generalised game play. While digital games are a relative newcomer and their imagery is derivative, their immersive nature allows players the opportunity to explore and live within a world that revels in its own disintegration. The built environment and its contents in the digital play space are shown as having aged themselves – they are falling apart, dilapidated, or contain the death and destruction of a lost era. The aged icon references the buildings and objects within those structures as reinforcing and authenticating a distant and figural past that comports with a broader cultural memory of the ‘Old West.’