Three-dimensional graphics represent a dramatic artistic and technical development that suggests an overall transformation of games as media. The experience of space has become a key element of how we understand games and how we play them. In Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (MIT Press), Literature, Communication, and Culture Assistant Professor Michael Nitsche investigates what this shift means for video game design and analysis. How do game spaces evoke fictional worlds? What are their key qualities? How can we improve them?

Drawing on concepts from literary studies, architecture, theater, and cinema, Nitsche argues that game spaces can evoke narratives because the computer has to tell them to a player who is interpreting them in order to act in them. Virtual spaces stage the player in a dramatic relationship to a new digital world; they invite us to reclaim the story space and inhabit it. Consequently, Nitsche approaches game spaces not as pure visual spectacles but as meaningful virtual locations. His argument investigates what structures are at work in these locations, proceeds to an in-depth analysis of the audiovisual presentation of game worlds, and ultimately explores how we use and comprehend their functionality.

Nitsche introduces five analytical layers to better specify the connections between a computer's rule-based basis for a three dimensional world, its visual presentation, and social dynamics. He uses them in the analyses of research projects and commercial games that range from early classics to recent titles as he revisits current topics in game research from this new perspective.

Video Game Spaces is being received with enthusiasm by academic gaming experts. Katie Salen, author of several books on gaming describes it as a "fantastic journey that resonates with what we love best about games their double identity as places to both ponder and play."