Experiencing virtual places: insights on the geographies of sim racing

Abstract

Virtual spaces have emerged as everyday life spaces in contemporary societies. Very quickly, they have gained a cultural role in the daily life of their users, as these new territories gain their own communities, ideologies, and spatializations. However, little is known about how place is experienced in these different realms. This study seeks to understand place experience in virtual spaces, taking the sim racing virtual spaces as a case study and endeavoring to build a bridge between theory and empirics. This study uses ethnographic methods, which included a year-long participant observation period and a set of 20 in-depth interviews with users, in order to understand their narratives of the virtual geographies of two sim racing videogames: Gran Turismo and rFactor. The results of the study show that spirit of place, place ballets, and sense of place exist just as well among users of virtual spaces—despite the particularities of these new territories and their remaining tensions.

Keywords:

• virtual place
• place ballet
• sense of place
• spirit of place
• 3D environment
• sim racing

Notes

1. Despite the non-play part of games being important in terms of virtual identities due to the customization of characters that some videogames allow (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009; Thornham 2011), this is less significant in sim racing because there is not an actual virtual character or identity: there is no distinction between the real racer and the virtual racer.

2. These are names of fictional tracks in the GT series.

3. Dirty racing means racing without safety rules.

4. A room is the virtual space in the videogame software where online gaming takes place.

5. A-spec is the part of GT where one races solely against the computer.

6. AI stands for artificial intelligence, i.e. the part of the software that controls the cars that the users race against.