The day of landing: why video games and islands belong together

Is there a more beautiful word than island? Actually, switch to Latin and it's even better: insula. It's hard not to get reflective about a word like that, hard not to even get a little moony. Join me for a sweet second or two! Islands, a kind of cherished space out in the world that offers something that can only truly be internalised. A place found on the mind as well as the map.

Islands are special. For the invading Romans, the island I live on, the island I'm so familiar with that I barely even notice it anymore, once marked the ragged, terrifying edge of the known world. Elsewhere, Sancho Panza's offered an island in Don Quixote as a reward for putting up with, well, Don Quixote. Crucially, like so much else in the book, whose major theme is perceptions and misperceptions, I think I remember that the promised island's never actually real. It doesn't have to be. Perception or misperception, it's a glittering idea, a thing forever glimpsed on the horizon.

Located somewhere between the real and the entirely imaginary are video game islands. These are places I've passed a lot of time in over the years. And they're places I've been thinking about since, earlier this year, I spent a few weeks on an island in the Aegean. It turns out that life on an island - I mean a small island; I appreciate, again, that I lived on an island already - can work a kind of magic on a person. I feel more connected to the place I'm in on an island, while I'm simultaneously more aware of all the other potential places where I could be nearby. It's made me think about how games use islands and why I love games that focus on islands so much. Let's dig in.

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