MARY FLANAGAN
[domestic]
2003
[domestic] uses a software engine normally used to generate violent first-shooter video games in order to reconstruct a remembered childhood space where a dramatic event has taken place: a house fire. The player navigates an oddly constructed domestic space that is a psychogeographic map of Flanagan's memory. Spaces alternate between claustrophobic hallways and rooms with seemingly endless ceilings, breaking with the visual conventions of 3D gaming. Family snapshots and shifting, morphing unstable texts line the surfaces of the space. Players encounter fire in the space and are able to shoot "coping mechanisms" at the walls and at the fire in order to contain them -- romance novels, beer bottles, and words. The work provokes the questions, what are the ways space and memory can be reexperienced? What role, if any, does narrative and memory have in contemporary computer games? How can we 'see' memory?