The paradigm shifts of the various philosophical-cultural turns (e.g., spatial, linguistic) significantly brought the subjective perception and construction of space into focus in geography as a spatial science. In video games, vast digital spaces are created and experienced. These digital spaces—often oriented to “real” spaces—are created by designers/programmers based on different motives, values, prior knowledge domains, abilities, emotions, and worldviews, and in turn, are received/played by players through these same filters. Thus, when playing and producing/programming games, constructions of (digital) spaces are created, negotiated, and interpreted. Players and designers communicate about spaces and what they experience, thus successively influencing their view of spaces. Based on this argumentation, this contribution wants to initiate more intensively the discourse to recognize video games as a medium in geography and hence wants to integrate itself into the relevant discourses of the disciplines of geography and geography education. In the following article, the main aim is to theoretically develop and present a model of reflexive spatial analysis in video games based on discourses of the digital turn and (digital) spatial reflexivity in geography (education). This model is then, secondarily, used to theoretically justify the concept of a lesson design, which applies the model and is used in a bilingual geography classroom with the goal of promoting pupils’ reflexive competencies of spatial perceptions and constructions of digital space in video games. The empirical analysis of the lesson and its processing of digital spatial reflexivity is based on the qualitative analysis of transcripts of 51 students (Most of the time, if not separately explained/defined with students, pupils at high school are meant.) and three teachers (think aloud protocols). It reflects upon the subjective construction and perception of digital spaces with reference to the generated emotions—as an example of spatial reflexivity—of the recipients, using the game That Dragon, Cancer. The results show that students can actively and critically relate gameplay and spatial constructs and certainly reflect on the emotional impact of digital spaces.

Anthropogenic climate change nowadays has an impact on many young people's lives. However, awareness of the climate crisis does not necessarily lead to a transformation of one's lifestyle. With high hopes of preparing students for global challenges and sensitizing them to act in solidarity, the pedagogical approach of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is now part of many curricula, but this does not necessarily achieve the desired success. The field of Transformative Education is currently developing out of the criticism of the now institutionalized educational approach of ESD, both in terms of content and methodology. The aim of this paper therefore is to give an overview how Transformative Learning and Digital Location-Based Gaming can be combined as a different way of climate change-related knowledge transfer.

This chapter introduces theories around space in game studies as well as geography and argues for assemblage theory as comprehensive approach to spaces in digital games. Through interdisciplinary extending previous attempts, five dimensions are identified: technologies, bodies, architectures, geographies, and discourses. These highlight the dynamic multiplicities of digital games and provide a theoretical framework as well as analytical guideline for future research.

The Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) process requires knowledge of water and governance systems to reach its dual goal of equity and sustainability. These goals align with self-transcendence motivated values, which mean to extend one’s sense of self; i.e., to want the welfare of other humans (equity) and non-humans (sustainability). Serious games, a type of role-play simulation with a specific societal goal, could be used to teach players self-transcendence motivated values. Using AquaRepublica, designed to teach IWRM, four game events with eight teams were held between 2016 and 2017 across Eastern Canada. Players included graduate students of IWRM at McGill University (n = 18), and local stakeholders in two provinces (n = 12). Using a mixed method approach, the research demonstrated that AquaRepublica exemplified the pillars of IWRM but that its design did not allow players to easily make choices motivated by self-transcendence motivated values while still scoring high. The game incentivized competition to the detriment of self-transcendence motivated decision making. These results illustrate the importance of testing assumptions of a game and ensuring that incentives align with the learning goals of the serious game.

This article focuses on how MMO-gamers’ strategies of dealing with new technologies as early adopters have (re-)emerged in other online endeavors. Giving some examples from real life and online communities entering and settling “new” spaces, it also offers some insights from an ongoing research project on how the digital ecosystem might be shaped through these interactions presently. While a variety of games will be mentioned, the focus will be on the space sandbox MMO Eve Online.

Walter Christaller’s central space theory is a crucial component of video games with gameplay mechanics that involve resource management and development tied to virtual places. In games such as Sim City series or Stellaris, Christaller’s influence is assumed on the background more than actively followed. Due to central space theory’s use of geometry, it is relatively easy to scale it up and apply to the algorithms necessary to run the ruleset of a video game. This method effectively creates a predictable pattern for the management of space. This standardization becomes particularly interesting when a deviation on the spatial model is implemented. The discussion of anomalies often unfolds in concrete terms, instead of the abstraction inherent in Christaller’s theory. That perspective implies a change in video game genre and thus, from the usual strategy and management video games that rely upon the central place theory. The gameplay implications shift to a narrative approach found in role playing and adventure games, as the cases of Dragon Age: Origins, Disco Elysium and Horizon Zero Dawn show.

Conference papers, articles, books, and blogs have already examined how aspects of cultural geography can be explored through video games. This paper will explain how games and game engines can be modded (modified) to allow players to explore aspects of GeoHumanities, in particular, place and presence, from a perspective aligned with a selection of concerns and methods in cultural geography and critical geography.

This essay argues that the scripting of the urban geography in Beat Cop (2017) complicates the subversive potential ascribed to the everyday practice of walking by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). Walking constitutes the predominant mode of movement in the game, thereby placing limitations on the players’ policing powers when chasing suspects. Because players step into the shoes of a police officer and play as the disciplining authority themselves, however, the use of walking in the game thwarts any direct sense of what de Certeau describes as “eluding discipline.” The depiction of the urban space in Beat Cop furthermore perpetuates long-standing prejudices about black communities and communities of color in the United States as in particular need of surveillance. This racist coding finds expression in the narrative, the gameplay mechanics, and especially the visual focus of the game with players monitoring their game space from a wide-angle camera position. Beat Cop thus maps uncomfortably onto existing surveillance models driven by the expansion of CCTV technology and resonates with the first trials to patrol neighborhoods with robots as well as forms of distant surveillance using drones.

Field trips are firmly established in geography education. However, the constructivist turn in geography education poses new challenges, especially for the implementation of field trips. According to a constructivist theoretical approach, space is to be understood as a social construct and not only as a physical phenomenon. Consequently, the question arises as to how the implementation of a field trip can be theoretically justified. An answer to this question is given by the method of searching and reading traces according to Hard. In the context of a field trip on-site, traces are searched which then can be read and interpreted as consequences of human actions. At the same time, digital media and computer games are increasingly being used to enrich teaching and therefore field trips. Location-based games are a special form of computer game. With these games, a learning location can be explored interactively with the help of a computer game. Consequently, location-based games can also be used to search for traces in the sense of Hard’s theory. But is the use of a location-based game in this context a medium that enables a search for traces, or is the game itself moreover a trace, which needs to be analysed in the classroom? With recourse to recent contributions to systems theory, this contribution gives an answer to this question.

The rapid development of extended reality (XR) technologies, notably virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), is transforming various sectors of society, including gaming, education, and security training. This chapter explores the adoption of VR in training emergency, police, and security personnel for complex, life-threatening situations based on qualitative interviews and participant observations with German state police agencies, software vendors, and police instructors. Some stakeholders promise a safe, immersive, and cost-effective alternative to traditional training methods, which are often considered resource-intensive and disruptive to general workflows. By simulating real-world encounters, VR training allows for comprehensive debriefings and data analysis, enhancing some learning processes. This chapter examines the spatial dimensions of VR, the role of gamification and creative guidance in scenario training, as well as potential unintended learning effects. It also addresses the challenges of integrating VR with traditional training frameworks, emphasizing the necessity for trainees to understand and navigate the virtual world effectively. While VR training presents unique advantages, it raises critical questions about its impact on real-world operations and the future of police training. The findings suggest that—if implemented and evaluated carefully—VR training can be a valuable supplement. But it is not a replacement for traditional training methods and comes with its own questions and problems.

“Flyover country” is a distinctly US-American concept that uses the semantics of geography to talk about culture as it creates a “metaregional” (Anthony Harkins) imagination that eradicates any local or regional specificity within its larger national framework. This notion has taken on a variety of different rhetorical purposes: it can serve a struggle for recognition or for hegemony, and it has also developed as a particular way of addressing class difference and economic exploitation. My essay detaches the concept of “flyover country” from its meaning as a vague synonym for the American Midwest in order to describe a certain kind of cultural differentiation that may also apply to other contexts, so that it no longer describes a certain regionalism but serves to analyze regionalism as such. I want to use this highly ambiguous concept to analyze how Far Cry 5 dramatizes this polarization in its controversial representation of Americanness and maintains it as a tension: it depoliticizes a variety of tropes associated with right-wing politics, yet a simplifying political reading of its setting as “Trump Country” also participates in the metaregional defamation whose binary cultural imagination glosses over relevant specificities.

Key concepts are fundamental guiding ideas of systemic thinking that are comprehensible to learners and that can be found in the various different geographic subject matters. They represent systematic patterns of thought and analysis patterns as well as explanatory approaches, and they can represent the subject-specific approach of geography to a learning object. Thus, the key concepts and the responsibility to understand the objectives and structure of these concepts in the teacher training program in geography play an important role. However, due to a certain level of abstraction, it is often difficult for students/pupils to internalize the (full) complexity and scope of these key concepts. Therefore, it is important to continue to strive for innovative teaching concepts in order to anchor the guiding ideas of the key concepts sustainably through emotional learning and memorable examples that perhaps go beyond previous views. Video games are an essential part of youth culture and systems in itself. Video games create digital spaces that deal with geographical issues. Video games further somehow digitally represent aspects of the real world and therefore shape the views students/pupils gain of the world. Therefore, competences for students/pupils are important that enable a mature, reflective handling of games. These are all reasons why video games should be further integrated as a medium in geography education. The article presents a best practice of seminars and lectures for teacher students in an early stage of their professionalization in which open world games were used to reflexively teach key concepts. Furthermore, the digression discussed with the students the potentials for using the games in the classroom to teach basic geographical thinking approaches. For this purpose, the goals, structures, courses of action, further gameplay elements, and game design decisions used in the games are considered. The paper serves to incorporate a best practice into the discourse around the potential of video games for reflexive methods in higher education teaching and in geography education and calls for increased empirical testing of these ideas as well.

This introductory article provides a discursive overview of the forthcoming book that explores the intersection of gaming and geography. The book seeks to advance the consideration of video games as a significant geographical medium, acknowledging the role of digital spaces and worlds in shaping our experiences and perceptions. It aims to offer a comprehensive overview of current discourses within the realm of video game research, particularly focusing on geography and geography education, which remain relatively nascent fields. By transferring research questions from various geographical sub-disciplines to the context of video games, the book encourages scholars to reflect on the geographical potential of video games and their implications for education. Additionally, the book endeavors to make the concept of reflexivity within digital spaces more accessible and relevant to geographical education. Through a combination of theoretical insights, empirical evidence, and practical examples from both school and university settings, the book aims to bridge the gap between discourse and practice, enriching the pedagogical approach to geography with innovative perspectives from video game studies.

Through plot, game play, and design, computer games can convey spatial images and notions of identity that are especially problematic when they involve right-wing propaganda. The following analysis explores the question of how these images are discursively produced and represented in the 2D jump-'n'-run digital game ‘Heimat Defender: Rebellion’. The game provides insights into how German right-wing extremists imagine a dystopia in 2084 and what role migration, globalisation, urbanisation and liberalism, among others, play in shaping public space. The analysis shows that, using the concept of ‘Heimat’, Germany’s Far Right justifies social demarcations, spatial classifications of the own and the foreign, as well as resistance and militant self-defence against ‘the other’.

There is growing recognition of the role of digital games in propagating hegemonic geopolitical imaginaries, especially regarding military-themed video games. However, such a focus has overlooked the purposeful design of digital games that challenge, disrupt, and critique popular understandings of geopolitics. This chapter outlines how digital games can be used in a higher education context to demonstrate how they can illustrate a counterpoint to dominant geopolitical narratives. Through their combination of narrative and playful structures, games can offer novel ways to challenge perceptions of geopolitical events and ideas. This chapter reviews existing literature on teaching geographical and geopolitical ideas with digital games and notes their pedagogical value. It outlines available resources, including Games for Change, an organisation that designs and hosts various games to promote social and political change. I draw on a specific case study example Unmanned ((Online version) [Video game]. Molleindustria, 2012). Designed by Molleindustria, this game focuses on the effects of drone warfare from the perspective of a drone pilot and draws on a number of salient themes and topics discussed in the teaching of popular geopolitics. Finally, the chapter offers practical advice, outlining critical considerations for incorporating digital games into a classroom, reflecting on developing students’ critical analysis of games, and discussing modes of assessment.

As leisure activities, tourism and video games share the context of exploration and joy and serve the escapist fantasy. Drawing on theory of the respective field, we are able to identify even deeper similarities on how geographical space is produced by environmental storytelling and visual consumption in both cases. Both form hypergeographies highlighting only relevant fragments of space meant to provide convenience for the visitor during a stay. Can this congruence been shown by empirical analysis of gameplay and marketing materials? And how can these findings inform geo-education? In a mixed-method approach, we use digital walk-alongs to observe how players react on the identified categories during gameplay in selected games representing geographic space. In a second step, we show that marketing materials advertising tourist destinations and video games respectively also make congruent and intense use of the concepts identified. This comes at the risk that hegemonic structures known from tourism also apply to video games and can be made visible by counter-narratives from the Global South. Based on these findings, we propose to use the method asking pictures to teach students about the structural similarity and to reflect on the possible consequences.

Moving beyond the stakeholder agency perspective, it is argued in this chapter that the existing core–periphery imbalances within the European Union mirror themselves into the unequal distribution of resilience capacities. It is shown empirically that there is an association between the capacity to be resilient and the level of economic development across the European Union member states to the detriment of its eastern and southern periphery. Building on the literature on regional economic resilience, the main determinants of the geographical distribution of resilience are identified. In particular, we focus on compositional, collective, and contextual factors. It is then shown that the decisive structural drivers of the lack of resilience in the European Union’s periphery are particularly the economic diversity and knowledge capacity, social capital, and trust, as well as the institutional quality.

The final section provides policy recommendations for dealing with social tipping points from the perspective of the EU periphery. First, we recommend not focusing on governing social tipping points per se, but rather on governing their side effects. Second, we recommend strengthening state capacity in all of its aspects. Third, we recommend that the state and society as a whole invest more resources into strengthening the resilience of transnational, private, as well as local non-state actors as it also enhances their respective capacities and resilience. Fourth, we advise pooling more resources into building a more resilient EU. Fifth, it is suggested that not only is the periphery dependent on the well-functioning EU, but the EU’s resilience also requires a fortified periphery given the deep interconnectedness between the geographical core and periphery. Lastly, we recommend that policymakers and key stakeholders alter their methodological starting points from purely social ones to ones taking into account the whole inter-dynamics of social–ecological systems.

This chapter summarizes the theoretical concepts presented in previous chapters and introduces the conceptual framework of multilevel governance of social tipping points in social–ecological systems within the European Union’s (EU’s) periphery. Based on the deductive-nomological conceptual framework, an empirical strategy and methodology are devised. We then formulate the research question and research goals and state the hypotheses. To answer them, we employ a multi-case research design with three cases of potential social tipping points in the EU periphery, each with a different trigger: migration, climate change, and geopolitics.

The introductory chapter establishes the puzzle the book aims to address, namely how does the EU’s eastern and southern periphery cope with tipping points resulting from migration, climate change, and war and how is the governance of social tipping points and resilience against them geographically conditioned given the core-periphery EU dichotomy. An argument in brief is laid down. The chapter concludes by providing the basic outline of the book.

In times when resilience in social and economic, geopolitical, green, and digital dimensions was introduced as an official compass for EU policymakers (EC, 2020a), the concept of resilience as the ability to withstand and cope with endogenous as well as exogenous challenges while undergoing transitions in a sustainable, fair, and democratic manner, secured its prominence in the EU policymaking. The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly unfolded the EU’s need to enhance its resilience. This becomes especially important for the EU’s southern and eastern periphery as well, arguably the most fragile parts of the EU. The ambition of this monograph was thus to fill the gap in the literature, which tends to overlook the EU’s peripheral countries in the east and south in terms of their resilience building against the abrupt nonlinear changes erupting in one system (e.g., climate) but having impacts beyond the system’s boundaries (e.g., society, economy, and politics). In order to analyze the resilience of the peripheral EU countries, we employed an interdisciplinary approach, combining theoretical intersections from the social tipping point literature, public policy, regional economic resilience, and European studies. This allowed us to shed light on two, still relatively understudied areas in the resilience literature – social tipping points and EU peripheral studies – and present a conceptual framework of governance of tipping points in the EU periphery. The conceptual framework links together the concepts of social tipping points, governance, state capacity, state resilience, and interactions between the state and non-state actors. Moreover, the multilevel governance approach is also complemented with a coherent description of the structural factors contributing to lower levels of resilience to the detriment of the EU periphery in the east and south. Subsequently, the conceptual framework is tested against three case studies, each social tipping point with a different trigger (migration, climate change, and geopolitics) and each social tipping point situated in a different EU peripheral country (Greece, Slovakia, and Poland). Such a multiple case study research design ensures greater robustness and validity of the results.

The chapter is devoted to surveying the literature on a still relatively understudied concept of social tipping points. In this chapter, we thus assess the origins of the concept and its usage in environmental and social sciences. We then point to differences and intersections of how these two broad fields of study understand and utilize the concept. A definition of social tipping points and their defining characteristics used throughout the book are presented. The definition follows up the literature on social–ecological systems with the aim of introducing interdisciplinarity into the study of social tipping point governance. Lastly, a visual depiction of social tipping points in social–ecological systems is introduced.

The chapter summarizes case study reports of three social tipping points with different triggers: migration, climate change, and geopolitics. For the migration-triggered tipping point, we assess the burning of the Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. As a social tipping point with climate change as a trigger, we analyze the bark beetle epidemic in the Slovak Tatra Mountain. The last case study focuses on the war in Ukraine and the ensuing refugee crisis on the Polish–Ukrainian border. Based on the cross-case conclusions from these three case study reports, we reflect our theoretical conceptual framework. It is concluded that while state capacity and resilience are critical in addressing social tipping points, the collaboration of non-state actors (transnational, private, and local) with their respective capacities and resilience can mitigate some of the consequences resulting from social tipping points and help the state to prevent yet another tipping point from occurring.

In the chapter, a theoretical link between the concepts of governance, state capacity, and resilience is presented. Adopting a state-centric view of governance and resilience, it is argued that the state remains at the forefront of addressing the impacts and adverse consequences stemming from social tipping points. What determines the success of the state in addressing social tipping points is according to our framework the state capacity, which consists of five critical subcomponents (i.e., administrative, legal, infrastructural, fiscal, and military). We then focus on the concept of resilience, which represents the flip side of the state capacity and is thus pivotal in determining the successful governance of social tipping points. Lastly, adopting a multilevel stakeholder agency perspective, we hypothesize about the role of non-state actors (transnational, private, and local) in governing social tipping points. A special emphasis is placed on the European Union as a transnational actor sui generis due to the integration of core state powers.