Hero and digital city

Abstract

The city is a powerful source of representations, experiences and meanings. Art and literature, for example, exploit this source in order to represent socio-historical circumstances, forms of subjectivity and relationships with otherness and culture’s outsidness. In this paper, we investigate other fictional territories generated by digital environments in videogames to underline the processes of modeling of the unstable reality of the contemporary city and to emphasize some tensions and paradoxes that emerge around the heroic adventure on these spaces. We will interrogate about which are the hero’s poetics and the urban politics that three video games enable: Assassin’s Creed II (2009); Max Payne 3 (2012) and Grand Theft Auto V (2013).