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I might well have faced a lifetime of travel had my brother, recently married (I missed the wedding because I was stuck in the mountains of Java at the time) not become a father. Desperate to meet my niece, I rushed back to Geneva in time for the birth.

I started traveling extensively in 2004 when I moved to Belgium. My work required about 75% travel. However, I wanted to travel ever since I was a child, even though in communist Romania, where I was born, this seemed almost like an impossible dream back then. I have always been fascinated with Asia and China in particular, and if I have to really pick a place then it would be when I went to China for the first time and I spent 1 week by myself in Beijing.

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At this very moment my answer has to be Africa! I would just travel all around the continent: by road, by air, by boat, you name it. I would love to experience all sides of Africa: the local tribes, the jungle, but also those extremely expensive African Safari lodges. And I would love to do it for a few months. Damn, you just made me start dreaming again!

I used to be surprised but not anymore. During so much travel I come to realise that actually the vast majority of people are kind! I have had the best experiences in Asia. For example, I always remember and tell people about that time in Japan when I was traveling to a very local place outside of Kyoto. People were constantly coming to me to ask if I needed help with directions. They saw I was a foreigner and that I had a map in my hands (at that time, actual paper maps were still a thing haha) so even if they did not speak English they were constantly trying to help me.

I cannot NOT do it. I always say that travel is an investment in yourself and that it is the best teacher you can have. So I travel for that, for my own continuous development. But to really benefit from travel in the way that I want I need to take it slower and spend more time in each place.

elite ranks of Instagram with more than 107,000 followers. It is not necessarily a travel book per se but it is the book that made me fall in love with Japan before I even saw it. Now it is my absolute favourite country!

The World Travel Guide (WTG) is the flagship digital consumer brand within the Columbus Travel Media portfolio. Available in English, German, and Spanish versions, the WTG provides detailed and accurate travel content designed to inspire global travellers. It covers all aspects, from cities to airports, cruise ports to ski and beach resorts, attractions to events, and it also includes offbeat travel news, stories, quizzes and guides for adventurous travellers.

The eyes of the world are on Qatar right now. Following the discovery of oil in the 1940s, this small Gulf state has been catapulted from a small fishing and trading hub to one of the richest (per capita) countries in the world.

The World | Travel Stories features 245 destinations, including all world countries, territories, and dependencies, offering basic information on each destination, and writing space to record your visits. Also included are prompts for reflection, world maps, inspirational travel quotes, and blank note pages.

Illustrated by Wesley Allsbrook, this lively travel romp both soothes and sizzles, packed with hundreds of specific tips and opinions: Where to tread and stay and dine (luxurious, casual and hole-in-the-wall finds); what to eat (palate-pleasing selections galore) and what to avoid; and, most meaningfully important, how to see and see and see again as you embrace our eye-opening world anew.

I'm a publishing vet who's been on the staffs of Domino, Martha Stewart Living, Metropolitan Home, and Every Day with Rachael Ray magazines, and was Senior Digital Editor at Food Network. Now instead of spending my days behind a desk in a Manhattan skyscraper, I'm out in the world telling the food and travel stories I discover as a freelance writer. My work has appeared in publications including Vogue, Glamour, Fitness, Eater, Tasting Table, and TripSavvy. Follow my adventures at @eatseditor.

Geoff Morrison is a tech and travel writer/photographer based (occasionally) in LA. For most of the year he's a digital nomad, working while travelling around the world. He has been to 60 countries on 6 continents, all 50 states, and 34 US National Parks.

This essay appears in Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communicationand Community, ed. Steven G. Jones (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications,1995): 57-72. It is used here with the permission of the authors.

Mary Fuller: We want to start by telling you two stories.

Henry Jenkins: Here's the first. Princess Toadstool is kidnappedby the savage King Koopa. Two brave brothers, Mario and Luigi, depart ona series of adventures to rescue her. Mario and Luigi, simple men of humblebeginnings (in fact, Italian American plumbers), cross a vast unexploredspace, encountering strange creatures, struggling against an inhospitablelandscape. Finally, they confront and best the monarch and his minionsin a life and death struggle. In the process, the Super Mario Brothersnot only restore the princess to her people but also exert control overthis strange new world and its curious resources.

MF: My story is really a collection of stories, which I can probablyevoke for you in some form just by mentioning a few key words: Walter Raleigh,Roanoke, the Lost Colony, Virginia Dare. Or Jamestown, John Smith, Pocahontas,John Rolfe. I want to draw for the moment not on the complexities and particularitiesof these stories but on what is simple and popular, what can be evokedas an indistinct impression: the saleable, inaccurate, recurrent myth ofthe captive princess and her rescuers (Virginia Dare, the first child bornin what was to become the "Lost Colony"; Pocahontas, a genuineprincess who became a candidate for rescue--or kidnapping --thanks to herown gesture of rescuing John Smith; Smith himself, both a hero of humbleorigins and a kind of princess in drag who represented his entire careeras a repeated experience of captivity and rescue by women; or, for thatmatter, Virginia itself, personified by English apologists for colonizationas a virgin to be rescued from savages). Nintendo's Princess Toadstooland Mario Brothers is a cognate version of this story.

What we want to get at is not these alluring narratives of Princess Toadstool,Pocahontas, and Virginia Dare (or of Mario, Luigi, and John Smith) butanother shared concern in our material that seems to underlie these morememorable fictions in a constitutive way. Both terms of our title evokeexplorations and colonizations of space: the physical space navigated,mapped, and mastered by European voyagers and travelers in the 16th and17th centuries and the fictional, digitally projected space traversed,mapped, and mastered by players of Nintendo video games. Simply put,we want to argue that the movement in space that the rescue plot seemsto motivate is itself the point, the topic, and the goal and that thisshift in emphasis from narrativity to geography produces features thatmake Nintendo and New World narratives in some ways strikingly similarto each other and different from many other kinds of texts.

HJ: This chapter is the result of a series of conversations we'vebeen having over the past four years. Our conversations began with hesitantefforts by each of us to understand the other's area of specializationbut have grown in frequency and intensity as we began to locate pointsof contact between our work. We hope that what follows will reflect theprocess of that exchange, opening questions for future discussion ratherthan providing answers for immediate consumption.

MF: This work is a confessedly exploratory attempt at charting somepossibilities of dialogue and communication between the disparate professionalspaces we inhabit. Yet the association between computer software and theRenaissance "discovery" of America is not exactly new. A computersoftware firm in Boston claims in its advertisement, "Sir FrancisDrake was knighted for what we do every day . . . The spirit of explorationis alive at The Computer Merchant" (Boston Computer Currents,September 1990, p. 34). More generally, discussions of virtual realityhave widely adopted a language borrowed from this earlier era: One headlinereads, "THE RUSH IS ON ! COLONIZING CYBERSPACE" (Mondo 2000,Summer 1990, no. 2, cover).

HJ: The description and analysis of virtual reality technologiesas the opening up of a new frontier, a movement from known to unknown space,responds to our contemporary sense of America as oversettled, overly familiar,and overpopulated. Howard Rheingold's (1991) Virtual Realitv unselfconsciouslymimics the rhetoric of earlier promoters and settlers when he promisesto share with his readers the account of "my own odyssey to the outpostsof a new scientific frontier . . . and an advanced glimpse of a possiblenew world in which reality itself might become a manufactured and meteredcommodity" (p. 17). Or consider Timothy Leary's proclamation in thatsame book: "We live in a cyber-culture surrounded by limitless depositsof information which can be digitalized and tapped by the individual equippedwith cybergear.... There are no limits on virtual reality" (Rheingold,1991, p. 378). Virtual reality opens new spaces for exploration, colonization,and exploitation, returning to a mythic time when there were worlds withoutlimits and resources beyond imagining. Technologists speak of the "navigationalsystems" necessary to guide us through this uncharted realm. The adventof this new technological sphere meets the needs of a national culturewhich, as Brenda Laurel suggests, finds contemporary reality "toosmall for the human imagination" (quoted in Rheingold, 1991, p. 391).Few of us have donned goggles and powergloves to become settlers of thisnew cyberspace, although both heroic and nightmarish accounts of virtualreality proliferate in popular culture. Many of us have, however, interactedwith digitalized space through Nintendo games. We felt it might beproductive to take seriously for a moment these metaphors of "newworlds" and "colonization" as we look more closely at thespatial logic and "cognitive mapping" of video games.

MF: One has to wonder why these heroic metaphors of discovery havebeen adopted by popularizers of the new technologies just as these metaphorsare undergoing sustained critique in other areas of the culture, a critiquethat hardly anyone can be unaware of in the year after the quincentaryof Columbus's first American landfall. When John Barlow (1990) writes that"Columbus was probably the last person to behold so much usable andunclaimed real estate (or unreal estate) as these cybernauts have discovered"(p. 37), the comparison to cyberspace drains out the materiality of theplace Columbus discovered, and the nonvirtual bodies of the pre-Columbianinhabitants who did, in fact, claim it, however unsuccessfully. I wouldspeculate that part of the drive behind the rhetoric of virtual realityas a New World or new frontier is the desire to recreate the Renaissanceencounter with America without guilt: This time, if there are others present,they really won't be human (in the case of Nintendo characters), orif they are, they will be other players like ourselves, whose bodies arenot jeopardized by the virtual weapons we wield. The prospect of seeingVR as a revisionary reenactment of earlier history raises issues that weaddress only in passing: One would be the ethics and consequences of sucha historical revision; another would be to ask whether it is accurateto say that VR is unlike Renaissance discovery in having no victims, thatat no point does it register harmfully on real bodies that are not thebodies of its users. These kinds of questions frame our discussion, whichhas a narrower focus on the specificities of Nintendo games and voyagenarratives as rhetorical and cultural artifacts. If the simple celebrationof expansiveness borrowed from the age of discovery for virtual realityno longer seems adequate to the texts and experiences it once described,it seems no less important to map the narrative and rhetorical configurationsof these texts themselves, which have provided model and metaphor for somuch later experience, their authors', in Derek Walcott's (1986) words,"ancestral murderers and poets" (p. 79).

The kinds of New World documents I have in mind are ones like Columbus'sDiario (1492-1493) or Walter Raleigh's Discoverie of the large,rich and beautiful empire of Guiana (1596) or John Smith's TrueRelation of such occurrences and accident sof noate as hath hapned in Virginia(1608)--that is, chronologically structured narratives of voyage andexploration, from ships' logs to more elaborate texts. At the outset, onemight expect these narratives of travel to and return from what was atleast conceptually another world to assume a different kind of structurethan, in fact, they do: a romance or quest motif, the ironic contrastsof utopian fiction, or at least an overt "theme." Such expectationsare largely disappointed. One literary critic complains that the traveljournal underwent no sustained development as a literary form but conformsmore or less consistently to a formulaic pattern: "The abstract reads,we sailed, did and saw this and this, suffered and were saved or lost,made such and such encounters with the savages, hungered, thirsted, andwere storm worn, but some among us came home" (Page, 1973, p. 37).Part of the problem lies outside the texts, in that practical strategiesembedded in the material diverge from the demands of narrative coherence:the same critic complains that the carefully prepared climax of JacquesCartier's Brief Reedit is spoiled when Cartier decides to sail forhome instead of waiting for a long anticipated Indian attack. Reading thevoyage narratives from the perspective of conventional narrative expectationsis an experience of almost unremitting frustration. Yet these texts, ifthey are not conventional narratives, are equally clearly not transparentrecords of an experience that itself demands no commentary. On the contrary.

And so one wants first to find a way of characterizing their structureand its shaping imperatives on its own terms and second, to account fortheir reception, their uses and pleasures for audiences then and now. Thisis material that was produced and printed in extraordinary quantity. RichardHakluyt, one of the founding members of the Virginia Company, made a lastingname for himself by collecting and publishing documents of voyages by hiscontemporaries, documents ranging the gamut of possibilities from ethnographicsurvey to narrative poem to navigational instructions. Hakluyt's firstcollection appeared in 1582 as a slim quarto volume. By 1601, the thirdand final collection, The Principal Navigations . . . of the EnglishNation, took up three large folio volumes totaling almost 900 pages(12 volumes in the modern edition). Hakluyt's work was continued by SamuelPurchas, whose Hakluytus Posthumus, appearing in 1625, had expandedto 4,262 pages. Simply on the basis of volume, these documents would imposethemselves on our attention, whatever their narrative shape.

HJ: Nintendo, similarly, plays an increasingly visible rolewith the American imagination. By the end of 1990, one of three homes inthe United States owned a Nintendo system. My household was one ofthem, and I wanted to know more about how we might discuss these phenomenallypopular games as cultural artifacts, as popular narratives, and as a newmedia for mass communication. As I discovered when asked to review tworecent books on Nintendo (Kinder, 1991; Provenzo, 1991; see Jenkins,1993), current accounts lack any serious discussion of the particularityof Nintendo as a means of organizing cultural experience; the writersfail to address what it meant to be playing the games rather than watchingor reading them. Both books seemed interested in talking about Nintendofor other reasons: in one case in terms of issues of pedagogy, in the otherin terms of issues of intertextuality but both offered accounts that presupposethat traditional narrative theory (be it literary or film theory) can accountfor our experience of Nintendo in terms of plots and characters.

This application of conventional models to an emergent form seemed unsatisfyingbecause it ignores the way that game players discuss the experience ofplay and the ways that the games are marketed to their consumers. Plotis not a central feature of Nintendo"s sales pitch. Ads talkedabout interactivity rather than characterization ("Nintendo givesyou power to choose") and about atmospheres rather than story lines("awesome graphics"). Nintendo, a 100-year-old playing cardcompany little known outside Japan, revitalized the declining Americanvideo game market by moving from the simple, abstracted spaces of Pongor Pac-Man(TM) to create an ever changing and visually fascinating arenafor play.

Nintendo's central feature is its constant presentation of spectacularspaces (or "worlds," to use the game parlance). Its landscapesdwarf characters who serve, in turn, primarily as vehicles for playersto move through these remarkable places. Once immersed in playing, we don'treally care whether we rescue Princess Toadstool or not; all that mattersis staying alive long enough to move between levels, to see what spectacleawaits us on the next screen. Mario's journey may take him by raft acrossa river of red hot molten lava, may require him to jump from platform toplatform across a suspended city, or may ask him to make his way througha subterranean cavern as its ceiling collapses around him. The protagonistof a sword and sorcery game may struggle against a stormy sea, battle amassive serpent, confront a pack of wolves who rule a frozen wasteland,or combat an army of the dead that erupt from the trembling earth, allin search of lost fortunes and buried gold. A game like Lemmings putsus in charge of an army of tiny creatures, willing slaves who live anddie at our bidding and who dig tunnels or construct bridges to allow usto continue to venture deeper into the game space. For the most part, thetechnological limitations of the game systems mean that we move left toright through this space, but designers may simulate other kinds of movement,such as an elevator in the Ninja Turtles game that allows us tobattle our way higher and higher into Shredder's command center or racinggames that allow us to skim forward along a winding racetrack getting closerand closer to the glistening city that looms on the horizon. The more sophisticatedSuper Nintendo system allows for multiple levels of graphics thatinteract with each other in ever more complex fashions. The art of gamedesign comes in constructing a multitude of different ways we can interactwith these visually remarkable spaces.

Most of the criteria by which we might judge a classically constructednarrative fall by the wayside when we look at these games as storytellingsystems. In Nintendo's narratives, characters play a minimal role,displaying traits that are largely capacities for action: fighting skills,modes of transportation, preestablished goals. The game's dependence oncharacters (Ninja Turtles, Bart Simpson, etc.) borrowed from other mediaallows them to simply evoke those characters rather than to fully developthem. The character is little more than a cursor that mediates the player'srelationship to the story world. Activity drains away the characters' strength,as measured by an ever shifting graph at the top of the screen, but itcannot build character, since these figures lack even the most minimalinteriority. Similarly, plot is transformed into a generic atmosphere--ahaunted house, a subterranean cavern, a futuristic cityscape, an icy wilderness--thatthe player can explore. This process becomes most visible when we lookat games adapted from existing films or television programs; here, momentsin the narrative trajectory become places in the player's itinerary, laidout as a succession of worlds we must travel through in order to reachour goals. Playing time unfolds in a fixed and arbitrary fashion with noresponsiveness to the psychological time of the characters, sometimes flowingtoo slow to facilitate player interest and blocking the advance of theplot action, other times moving so fast that we can't react quickly enoughto new situations or the clock runs out before we complete our goals. Expositionoccurs primarily at the introduction and closing of games: For instance,the opening of Super Mario World reminds us that the Princess has onceagain been kidnapped. The game's conclusion displays the reunion of Princessand champion and a kind of victory tour over the lands that Mario has conquered.But these sequences are "canned": Players cannot control or intervenein them. Often, a player simply flashes past this exposition to get intothe heart of the action. These framing stories with their often arbitrarynarrative goals play little role in the actual experience of the games,as plot gives way quickly to a more flexible period of spatial exploration.Although plot structures (kidnapping and rescue, pursuit and capture, streetfighting, invasion and defense) are highly repetitive (repeated from gameto game and over and over within the game, with little variety), what neverloses its interest is the promise of moving into the next space, of masteringthese worlds and making them your own playground. So although the child'splay is framed by narrative logic, it remains largely uncontrolled by plotdictates.

The pleasure of spatial spectacle may be most visible in games that donot seem to require anything more than the most rudimentary spaces. StreetFighter II (TM), one of the most popular Nintendo games in recentyears, basically centers around a kickboxing tournament that could havebeen staged in any arena. The game, however, offers players a global arrayof possible spaces where the individual competitions can occur: a Braziliandock, an Indian temple, a Chinese street market, a Soviet factory, a LasVegas show palace. In the Indian sequence, elephants sway their trunksin the background. Water drips from the ceiling into a Japanese reflectingpool. In Spain, flamenco dancers strut and crowds cheer as the combatantsstruggle for dominance. All of these details constitute a form of visualexcess ("eye candy," as computer enthusiasts call it), a conspicuousconsumption of space. Such spectacular visions are difficult to program,unnecessary to the competition, yet seem central to the game's marketingsuccess.

MF: It sounds to me as if not only space but culture is being consumed,used and also used up as local cultures from India to Las Vegas shrinkinto a procession of ornamental images. Each is "colorful," yetnone is really alien. Certainly, the ability to register local differencesvaried among Renaissance travel narratives: The same image might beginits career as close observation at first hand and reappear in progressivelymore stylized and ornamental forms detached from its original reference,as John White's drawings of North Carolina Algonquians reappeared on theengraved frontispiece to Theodor de Bry's America and were, in turn,reproduced as illustrations for John Smith's adventures in Virginia. Onemight also think of the famous Rouen entry of Henri II, where an entireTupi village was recreated, employed for a day or so as a place for theperformance of Brazilian life, and then burned.

If Nintendo feeds the appetite for encountering a succession of newspaces (as well as helping to create such an appetite), that same appetitewas, of course, central to these New World narratives. In turn, there werepressures on texts to conform to a locodescriptive form, the equivalentin writing of Nintendo's scrolling succession of spaces. One precursorof the travel narrative would be the logbook, in which a grid divides thepage into spaces for date, time, compass bearing, wind, speed, and, finally,notes. The logbook presents a succession of indexed spaces on the pagethat correspond to a succession of days and places. Implicitly, each ofthese spaces is of equal importance: The grid predisposes its user to makesome notes in each space but not too many. Athough the logbook wasa technical tool of long-distance navigation, its form strongly influencedlandbased narratives that followed arrival.

As an instance of a locodescriptive project both in action and writing,John Smith's strategy of successively exploring and mapping all the riversaround Jamestown contrasted with the Virginia Company's desire to imposegrander, more recognizable, and more goal-oriented trajectories on thetravels of the colonists: to find a gold mine, a passage to China, or Raleigh'sLost Colony. These ultimate objectives, held as in suspension, enabledSmith's presence in Virginia and his day-by-day progress through the naturaland human geography of the Chesapeake. This configuration, of "story"as pretext for narratives of space, is (as we suggested at the outset)a common one in this material. Voyages and narratives that set out in searchof a significant, motivating goal had a strong tendency to defer it, replacingarrival at that goal (and the consequent shift to another kind of activity)with a particularized account of the travel itself and what was seen anddone. Hernan Cortes (1986) walked into Tenochtitlan in 1534, becoming masterof its gold and other resources; yet the bulk of his Second and Third Lettersconcerns not this period of achieved conquest and consumption but the surveyof points on the way there and then a second survey of points passed throughon the drive to reconquer the city through more conventional military means.Even goal-driven narratives like those of Raleigh or Columbus at best offeredonly dubious signs of proximity in place of arrival--at China, El Dorado,the town of the Amazons--phenomena that, interpreted, erroneously suggestedit was just over the horizon, to be deferred to some later date.

Rhetorical as well as documentary goals bear on the narratives, which aimnot only to describe but to persuade. That is, Walter Raleigh wanted tofind El Dorado, and he also wanted to produce a narrative that would stimulateinterest in Guiana and persuade Elizabeth to restore him to favor. Theimperative that operates on his text in consequence is less that of coherencethan of completeness, a (doubtless, loaded) inventory of what was doneand seen, one that provided at once both an alternate, more diffuse kindof justification for the discovery and motives and informational resourcesfor a repeat performance. Ralph Lane, one of the Roanoke Colony's governors,noted that the particularity of his account is "to the end it mayappear to you . . . that there wanted no great good will . . . to haveperfected this discovery"-- of a rumored mine the company never setout towards (Lane, 1979, p. 309). Even in the Discoverie of Guiana,a text whose teleology is announced in the title, the actual searchfor Guiana, the narrative concomitants of searching for something, getlost in a welter of details, of events and places that have little to dowith El Dorado but that occupied the days of the voyage. The sequencedinventories of places and events replace, defer, and attest to an authenticand exculpating desire for goals the voyages almost invariably failed toreach.

Given the inconclusiveness I've described, it was the ability to move inspace (rather than to arrive) that generated and structured narrative;John Smith wrote primarily about the times he was in motion, not the timeshe was sitting in Jamestown. The resulting narratives were, in turn, organizedby elapsed time (sequences of dates) but also determined by it. Henry mentionedthat "characters" in Nintendo can be described less in termsof learning and transformation than in terms of resources gradually expendedin the course of the game. This sense of a trajectory dictated not by changeor crisis but by expenditure, the gradual running out of a fixed quantityof time or resources, is an almost universal feature of the narrativesI study because it was an equally frequent phenomenon in the voyages andcolonial experiments they document. Many documents record the consequencesof poorly managing resources--the season for sailing passing as one sitswindbound in an English harbor, a crew mutinying at the idea of sailingbeyond Ireland, food running out in the middle of the winter or the middleof the ocean (this one over and over), having to write home hypotheticalaccounts of the treasures you would discover if you had better boats ormore food or it were not so late in the year. These documents end not becausesome resolution or conclusion has been achieved but because something hasrun out. To give another example, John Smith's ability to trade for cornto feed a starving colony was unarguably more critical than the story aboutthe rescue of the Lost Colony that the Virginia Company tried to imposeon him or the story about Pocahontas that he recounted 16 years after theevent and 6 years after her death.

HJ: Although we've noted the experimental nature of this chapter'sjuxtapositions, there is, in fact, a precedent for them in Michel De Certeau'swork in successive books on New World discourse (Heterologies, 1984a)and on the politics of consumption in contemporary popular culture (ThePractice of Everyday Life, 1984b). While we are claiming space as theorganizing principle for two kinds of narrative, as what makes them differentfrom novels, for example, De Certeau (1984b) lays out a grand claim forspatial relations as the central organizing principle of all narratives:"Every story is a travel story--a spatial practice" (p. 115).Our cultural need for narrative can be linked to our search for believable,memorable, and primitive spaces, and stories are told to account for ourcurrent possession or desire for territory.

De Certeau's analysis of "spatial stories" provides tools fortalking about classes of narratives that have proven difficult to discussin terms of traditional notions of plot or character. Consider, for example,the emergence of science fiction in the late l9th and early 20th centuryas a means of creating imaginary spaces for our intellectual exploration.The adventure stories of Jules Verne drew upon centuries of travel writingas they recounted a variety of trips to the moon, under the sea, into thecenter of the earth, or around the globe. The technological utopian writersoften created static plots (a man from our present goes to the future)that allowed them simply to describe the landscape of tomorrow; one candraw a direct line from the moment in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward,where the book's protagonist stands on his balcony and surveys Boston'sfuture, to the train cars that allowed visitors to the 1939 New York World'sFair to ride above and look down upon Futurama. Hugo Gernsback's AmazingStories magazine was full of chronicles of "odysseys" acrossthe uncharted wilderness of Mars or Venus and encounters along the waywith strange flora and fauna. Writers often modeled these aliens' worldsafter the American West so that they could cross-market their stories toboth western and science fiction pulps. A focus on plot and characterizationwas slow to develop in this genre that seemed so obsessed with going "whereno one has gone before."

A similar claim could be made for various forms of fantasy writing. Tripsto Oz or Narnia or through the looking glass, adventures in Middle Earth,or quests for the Grail all seem to center as much on the movement of charactersthrough space as on the larger plot goals that motivate and give shapeto those movements. Maps appear in fantasy novels with the same frequencyand function that genealogies appear in the great l9th-century novels,suggesting the relative stress the two forms give to spatial relationsand character relations. It is not surprising that science fiction, fantasy,and sword- and-sorcery stories provide much of the iconography of the Nintendogames.

Nintendo may also be linked to another class of spatial stories, theamusement park rides that as early as turn-of-the-century Coney Islandadopted popular fictions into spaces we can visit and explore. Walt Disney'sPeter Pan becomes a ride by flying ship across the landscape ofLondon and Never-Never-Land, Snow White turns into a runaway minecar tour, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is remade into a submarineride. The introduction of virtual reality technology to the Orlando, Florida,amusement parks results in a succession of ever more intense "tours"of the stars, the oceans, the human body, the World of Hanna-Barbera, andthe dawn of time. Nintendo's constant adaptation of plot-centeredcontemporary films into spatial narratives represents a miniaturizationof this same process. The tamed frontier of the virtual new world has,from the first, been sold to us as a playground for our world-weary imagination,as a site of tourism and recreation rather than labor and production. Publicinterest in virtual reality is directly linked to the amusement park'slong history of satisfying popular demand for spatial difference, spectacularattractions, affective stimulation, and sensual simulation. De Certeau'sdescription of Jules Verne's stories as focused around the related imagesof the Nautilus's porthole (a windowpane that "allows us tosee") and the iron rail (that allows us to "move through"fantastic realms) has its obvious parallels in these amusement park attractionsthat invite us to look upon and travel through but not to touch these spectacularspaces (De Certeau, 1984b, p. 112). What is a spectacle at the amusementpark ("Keep your hands in the car at all times") becomes a siteof more immediate interaction in the Nintendo game that asks us toact upon and transform the places it opens to our vision.

MF: Voyage narratives were almost never presented as recreativetexts, whatever they might become for later readers. Two exceptions areRichard Willes's Historie of travel (London, 1577) and Andre Thevet'sLes singularitez de la France antarctique (Paris, 1558). Althougha narrative like Thomas Harriot's Brief and True Report of the New FoundLand of Virginia (London, 1588) might offer a catalogue of America'sabundant flora and fauna, the items of the catalogue were presented notas strange things to wonder at but as "marchantable commodities,"goods for use and sale, the potential for industrious activity. Leisurein the New World was pejoratively characterized as idleness, associatedwith disease, mendacity, and social disorder. In most places the Englishsettled, colonists had to do some work to feed and shelter themselves;when a company shipwrecked on the uninhabited Bermudas and found an Edenicland of temperate weather and dreamlike abundance, its leaders found meansto take the company back to starvation in Jamestown. The project of colonizingitself was, in the English case, less a matter of acquiring a native workforcethan of finding work for what contemporaries envisioned as the teemingmasses of England's unemployed. Virginia's colonists were there (at leastin theory) to labor, not to look, and labor was directed to activatingthe commercial potentials of the land.

HJ: For De Certeau (1984b), narrative involves the transformation of placeinto space (pp. 117-118). Places exist only in the abstract, as potentialsites for narrative action, as locations that have not yet been colonized.Place may be understood here in terms of the potential contained as bytesin the Nintendo game cartridge or the potential resources covetedbut not yet possessed in the American New World. Places constitute a "stability"which must be disrupted in order for stories to unfold. Places are therebut do not yet matter, much as the New World existed, was geographicallypresent, and culturally functioning well before it became the center ofEuropean ambitions or the site of New World narratives. Places become meaningfulonly as they come into contact with narrative agents (and in the constructionof the New World in Mary's Renaissance stories, only Europeans are understoodas narrative agents). Spaces, on the other hand, are places that have beenacted upon, explored, colonized. Spaces become the location of narrativeevents. As I play a Nintendo game and master it level by level, Irealize the potentials encoded in the software design and turn it intothe landscape of my own saga.

The place-space distinction is closely linked to De Certeau's discussionof the differences between "maps" and "tours" as meansof representing real-world geographies. Maps are abstracted accounts ofspatial relations ("the girl's room is next to the kitchen"),whereas tours are told from the point of view of the traveler/narrator("You turn right and come into the living room") (De Certeau,1984b, pp. 118-122). Maps document places; tours describe movements throughspaces. The rhetoric of the tour thus contains within it attention to theeffects of the tour, its goals and potentials, its limitations and obligations.A door is a feature of a place, or it may be a potential threshold betweentwo spaces. One of my favorite games, A Boy and His Blob, placesthe resources of its imaginary world fully at our disposal. The blob canbe transformed into everything from a blowtorch to a stepladder dependingon what flavored jellybean we feed him, and as a result, the mutating blobcontains endless possibilities for acting upon and transforming the virtualplaying space. The pleasure of the game lies in creating our own paths,tunneling down deeper and deeper into its cavernous world. The blob, thevarious levels, the jellybeans exist as potentials that only become narrativelymeaningful when we act upon them and bring them into our control.

De Certeau is thus interested in analyzing and documenting the processby which we "mark off boundaries" within the narrative world,by which characters map, act upon, and gain control over narrative spaces.Just as narratives involve movement from stability through instabilityand back again, narratives also involve a constant transformation of unfamiliarplaces into familiar spaces. Stories, he argues, are centrally concernedwith "the relationship between the frontier and the bridge, that is,between a (legitimate) space and its (alien) exteriority" (De Certeau,1984b, p. 126). He continues: "The story endlessly marks out frontiers.It multiplies them, but in terms of interactions among characters--things,animals, human beings" (De Certeau, 1984b, p. 126). Plot actions,he argues, involve the process of appropriation and displacement of space,a struggle for possession and control over the frontier or journeys acrossthe bridges that link two spaces together. Such terms will, of course,be familiar to anyone who has thought about the discovery and colonizationof America. Yet Nintendo also enacts a constant struggle along thelines that separate known and unknown spaces--the line of the frontier--whichis where the player encounters dangerous creatures and brutal savages,where we fight for possession and control over the story world. As De Certeau(1984b) notes, the central narrative question posed by a frontier is "towhom does it belong?" (p. 127). The frontier here is apt to be technologicaland urban rather than primitive and pastoral (or, as in the Mario Brothersgames, a strange mix of the two) but then Mary's settlers were also mappingtheir adventures on spaces already occupied by someone else's culture.The frontier line is literalized through the breakdown of story space intoa series of screens. The narrative space is not all visible at once. Onemust push toward the edge of the screen to bring more space into view.

The games also often create a series of goalposts that not only marks ourprogress through the game space but also determines our dominance overit. Once you've mastered a particular space, moved past its goalpost, youcan reassume play at that point no matter the outcome of a particular round.These mechanisms help us to map our growing mastery over the game world,our conquest of its virtual real estate. Even in the absence of such amechanism, increased understanding of the geography, biology, and physicsof the different worlds makes it easy to return quickly to the same spotand move further into the frontier.

A related feature of the games are warp zones--secret passages that, likeDe Certeau's bridges, accelerate one's movement through the narrative geographyand bring two or more worlds together. Knowledge about warp zones, passwords,and other game secrets are key items of social exchange between game players.More to the point, they have become important aspects of the economic exchangebetween game companies and players. Nintendo engages in a playfulyet lucrative form of "insider trading," selling secret tipsabout traversing the game space to consumers either through 1-900 hotlinesor through subscriptions to Nintendo Power magazine, whichmarkets detailed maps of the many worlds and levels of popular games andtips for coping with the local flora and fauna or crossing difficult terrain.

The maps and charts that Nintendo Power publishes are curious documents.Strictly speaking, they are not maps at all, not abstract representationsof geographic places. The magazine simply unfolds the information containedon many different screens as a continuous image that shows us the narrativespace from the player's point of view, more or less as it will be experiencedin the game. (The closest analogy would be something like Japanese scrollpainting.) Surrounding these successive representations of the screen spaceis a narration or "tour" that identifies features of the landscapeand their potentials for narrative action, as in this text from a discussionof Adventure Island 3: "Lush jungle regions dominate Stage2. However, a remote island to the southwest appears to be snowed under.How unusual! One of the largest waterfalls known to mankind will be encounteredin Stage 2. Its cascading torrents may be too much for the loin-clothedisland hero. To the south, Higgins will be lost in the mist". Thetext may also suggest possible ways of acting upon this space and pointtoward the forms of resources and knowledge needed to survive there: "TheSpiders shouldn't give Higgins too much trouble. Some move up and downand some of them don't. There may be hidden Eggs in places such as this."At times, the text may also focus our attention back onto the larger narrativecontext, onto character disputes or goals that frame the game action: "Thevolcanos are erupting! Higgins had better act fast so he can rescue hisgirlfriend and get out of there. Because of the tremendous heat, the supplyof fruit is shrinking. There won't be much time for decision making. Thealiens, astonished that Higgins made it this far, will be waiting!"("Adventure Island 3," Nintendo Power, October 1992,no. 41, pp. 8-13)

Such representations of virtual space bear close resemblance to De Certeau'sdescription of early maps that "included only the rectilinear markingout of itineraries (performative indications chiefly concerning pilgrimages),along with the stops one was to make (cities which one was to pass through,spend the night in, pray at, etc.) and distances calculated in hours orin days, that is, in terms of the time it would take to cover them on foot.Each of these maps is a memorandum prescribing actions" (De Certeau,1984b, p. 120). Much like these earlier maps, the Nintendo documentationfocuses on the specific narrative actions to be performed upon these spaces,purposes to be pursued and sites to be visited, rather than a universalizedaccount of the possible places that exist independent of the reader's goalsand desires. In most cases, however, the game company withholds crucialinformation, and the final stage of the game remains unmapped and undocumented.Players must still venture into an unfamiliar and uncharted space to confrontunknown perils if they wish to master the game.

MF: As Henry's citation from De Certeau suggests, we might locate Nintendo'streatment of space in relation to a history of cartography. The Renaissancewas, in fact, the moment when mapmaking shifted from providing locallyoriented maps of previous trajectories and observations by coastal navigators(rutters) to the universalized overview of the Mercator projection. Yetthe "universalized overview" was still conceptual rather thanactual; the information needed to map the globe was still being gatheredin arenas of intense competition and secrecy.

I've suggested that the particularized accounts of travel offered by narrativeslike Smith's or Raleigh's more or less deliberately replaced arrival withthe details of travel as a process. These details, of course, were notonly substitutive but also served practical purposes of their own, guidingboth future voyagers and investors in the voyages. Printed books like RichardHakluyt's collection of voyage narratives or Smith's General History wereroutinely carried by ships on voyages of trade and settlement. Observingthis weight given to narratives, one might describe a shift in the centerof value from things to be discovered to information about the terraincovered en route. When Hakluyt describes the capture of the Portuguesecarrack Madre de Dens in 1592, among its spins was a 1590 treatise on Chinain Latin, found "enclosed in a case of sweet cedar-wood, and lappedup almost an hundred fold in fine calicut-cloth, as though it had beensome incomparable jewel" (Hakluyt, 1598-1600, vol. 2, p. 88). Informationitself becomes the priceless commodity. J. B. Harley (1988) links the censorshipof cartographic information in early modern Europe to the economic transformationsthat accompanied the beginnings of overseas empires. 2351a5e196