Lost in Paradise! Open-World Landscapes as Baroque PleasureGardens

While others see the landscapes depicted in open-world games as mazes or labyrinths (see, for example, Aarseth 1997), we argue in this brief abstract that these landscapes are rooted in Western concepts of the Baroque garden and the picturesque, and are thus constructed from a Christian-romanticized, eurocentric worldview.Their design perpetuates the colonial narrative of romantically charged conquest of the wilderness through exploration, expansion, and extraction.Therefore, in video games as in artificial gardens, the landscape is meant to be admired and appropriated by the player at the same time (see Bonner 2023).