Pathfinding Affect: Reading Maps, Bodies and the Affective in Colonial Videogames

The Pathfinder, the protagonist of the videogame Mass Effect: Andromeda (Bioware, 2017), often gazes across the vast expanse of the Andromeda Galaxy, its planetary systems and also the often-hostile landscape of the planets, some of which need to be made habitable for the human colonists for whom she scouts the terrain to make it inhabitable in accordance with the colonial promise of the mission. The Pathfinder could even have been surveying the vast map of any of the Age of Empires games (Ensemble Studios, etc., 1997–), mostly obscured by the black ‘fog of war’ and waiting to be colonised by the player. As games researcher Shoshana Magnet describes it, the space is a ‘gamescape’ or a ‘landscape in video games [that] is actively constructed within a particular ideological framework’.