The spatiality of video games is suggested in the very fact that we refer to them by the visual medium of the interface through which we interact with them. In all but a few novelty games where audio monitors or haptic devices are foregrounded, the video or computer monitor takes primacy as the device used for human-computer interaction with the underlying code that embodies the game's rule system and its representation through a graphical user interface. Furthermore, the vast majority of games involve the simulation of a spatial environment, often organised as one or a series of maps, segmented into levels. These two geographies taken together, the space of the interface-screen and the space of the game map, shape our interaction in the gamespace. McKenzie Wark (2007, pp006-008) has argued that the logic of gaming has become such an integral aspect of contemporary culture that it has “colonised reality”, moving out of the sites of processor and screen that support the virtual world and extending the gamespace into material space.

Transcending the contentious narratology-ludology debates of video game studies, Jesper Juul (2005) suggests that games should be considered “half-real” in that they are comprised of both rules, the underlying system of game mechanics, and fiction, the narrative and representative aspects of the game. Thus, descriptions of characters, spaces, and events in a game are real insofar as they describe the mechanics of the game-system, and unreal, in their description of a fictional story or abstract setting. Questions of spatiality bring up an interesting challenge to this binary.

“[...] space in games is a special case. The level design of a game world can present a fictional world and determine what players can and cannot do at the same time. In this way, space in games can work as a combination of rules and fiction.”
Jesper Juul, Half-Real (2005, p 163).

To put it another way, game level maps determine the affordances of a gamespace available to the player, as well as the representation of a simulated space that is mapped onto a video monitor.

Maps are inherently political (Wood, 1992, Kolko 2000). They include and exclude aspects of geography, simplifying and distorting the material world to frame their users' interaction with space through the embedding of their creators' worldview. The computer interface can be seen as a map that allows human interaction with the underlying system of a software's code (Selfe & Selfe 1994), which in turn also carries ideological assumptions (Nakamura 2005, Kolko 2000). In their study of the politics of computer interfaces in educational settings, Selfe & Selfe note:

“Within the virtual space represented by these interfaces, and elsewhere within computer systems, the values of our culture – ideological, political, economic, educational – are mapped both implicitly and explicitly, constituting a complex set of material relations among culture, technology, and technology users.”
- Cynthia Selfe & Richard Selfe, Politics of the Interface (1994, p 485)

In Fauxrabian geographies, the ideologies that we see encoded in these maps remediate stereotypes of the oriental Other from older cultural forms such as cinema and literature (Shaheen 2001), as well as from contemporary political and journalistic portrayals of Western conflict with Islam. In Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward 2007), the player navigates map levels from the perspectives of a US Marine and a British SAS officer. The game's plot concerns allied Western forces' attempts to undermine various plots involving collaborations between a Russian ultranationalist group and separatist insurgents in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. Praised upon its release for the realism of its graphics and sound (eg Goldstein 2007), Modern Warfare was produced by a team of over one hundred people over two years, and was designed in consultation with members of the military who had recently returned from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At the level of representation, the game is a pastiche of cold war paranoias and Islamophobic fantasies and simulations of actual spaces in the real world. For example, in a level titled “Shock and Awe”, Condoleezza Rice's notorious quip about non-existent weapons of mass destruction, “We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” (interview on CNN 2003) is made manifest when a nuclear bomb is detonated by the game's archetypically evil communist-islamist terror network. The game's narrative is advanced by interstitial cut-scenes that set the stage for the combat-oriented first-person gameplay. These cinematic, non-interactive sequences incorporate “mission briefings” that introduce the player to the level map through simulated satellite imagery and aerial photography. During play, the player moves through the level, but is also presented with information about the location of enemies and mission objectives through a HUD (heads up display), and has access to a bird's eye view map of the area. This configuration of the armed invader's ability to see, and thereby exercise deadly control over the cities and bodies of their enemies, provides a nexus of the Foucauldian concepts of biopower, the State's exercise of control and domination over the bodies of its subjects (Foucault 1988, pp138-143, Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter 2009, p123-125), and governmentality induced by a panopticon effect through the construction of authority by creating regimes of surveillance and visibility (Foucault 1979).

Modern Warfare's levels represent a distilled version of Western domination over occupied territory. The player's range of possible movement is restricted to allow engagement with the space only as an urban battlefield. Although many buildings are seen by the player, and from the game's story elements we are lead to believe that civilians are present in these buildings, their doors are not functional. They are purely facades with no architecture behind them. The map does not extend into the private spaces of civilian life, where a besieged people can be imagined to be sheltering. The player can assume that if a space is accessible to them, then that space is a part of the battlefield, a free-fire zone.

Other levels in Modern Warfare put the player in the perspective of a gunner in a helicopter equipped with thermal imaging technology. With striking realism, the interface that players view the territory of Fauxrabia through is virtually identical to that which an actual helicopter gunner in the allied Western forces uses. Graphics overlaid on an HUD communicate a range of information to the operator, including distance to target, global position, and compass orientation. This data contributes to the player's sense of operating in a complex three dimensional space, while simultaneously promoting an awareness of the artificiality of the interface's mediation of space through its hypermediated interface (Bolter & Grusin 1999).

Consider the above remediation of militarist aesthetics in regards to the nature of the United States' current military engagement in Pakistan. Predator drones are controlled by pilots at Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas, using an interface that features a screen and joystick. As satellite imaging has extended the US military's map across the entire globe, the distance between the seer and the seen has both been extended to tens of thousands of kilometres and collapsed to the space between eyeball and screen. Viewing the terrain from above, the drone pilot is able to see and therefore to control, with the power of death from above, the territory on the ground on the other side of the world pictured on their screen. This space, framed by the ideologies of military and moral superiority, contains an alien Other whose domination defines the character of its observer in opposition. The alienation of the remote cyborg warrior in the US from their targets on the ground in Pakistan parallels that of the Modern Warfare player from their Fauxrabian enemies.

“Once games required an actual place to play them, whether on the chess board or the tennis court. Even wars had battle fields. Now global positioning satellites grid the whole earth and put all of space and time into play. Warfare, they say, now looks like video games. Well don't kid yourself, war is a video game – for the military entertainment complex. To them it doesn't matter what happens on the ground. The ground – the old-fashioned battlefield itself – is just a necessary externality to the game.”
- Mckenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (2007, p10).