The Video Game City Week: on the vivid authenticity of Midgar's slums

Welcome back to The Video Game City Week. Next up, a visit to some familiar slums.

Midgar's slums

I often think about the playful, deceptively mundane poetry in the word ‘skyscraper’; a building so tall, so gross, that it can wound the skyline. Midgar’s slums have no real sky. And yet, in their vivid authenticity, stand taller than the places above them. Shops and houses hewn from a hodgepodge of discarded industrial scrap, made warm with smatterings of personal effects. Inside giant pipes, abandoned vehicles, and steel shacks, the people of the slums live and work. Midgar isn’t the only video game city to craft class division into its spatial topography, subterrain to skyscraper, but it’s the one that sticks with me as the most effective: a depiction of a marginalised class refashioning their segmented, stingy share of a city, turning a disused space into a physical extension of struggle, ingenuity, and resolve.

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