Virtual Tourism: I Lost Myself in Tokyo and San Francisco

I spent the other evening playing through Go! Go! Nippon!: My First Trip to Japan, Overdrive's first visual novel targeted at overseas audiences. The somewhat by-numbers romantic plot aside, Go! Go! Nippon! contains elements of travelogue. Players can choose three of six possible areas of Tokyo to visit, followed by a visit to Kyoto and then, depending on how the romance plot plays out (which depends on which areas you chose to visit), either Kamakura or Yokohama. It veers towards virtual tourism.

Meiji Shrine, Shibuya

Sadly, while the locations are beautifully drawn (and often link to photographs of those locations on Google Maps), and the textual information about the locations imparted by the two girls is interesting (at least, I learned some stuff I never knew), iconic, familiar landmarks (and even familiar views of those landmarks) are favoured. In a way, it's unsurprising that a title like this, targeted at overseas audiences, would show people the things most people want to see, but in the static frames of the visual novel format, the landmarks become decontextualised: more a highlight slide-show of a visit to Japan than a virtualisation of an actual visit, and it left me feeling strangely unsatisfied. One might suspect that that's the point: After playing, I've gone from "I'd like to visit Tokyo some day" to "I'd like a little more to visit Tokyo some day".

But I'm really interested in virtual tourism proper. It's not a substitute for real travel, but it's inexpensive and convenient. More than that, though, it's risk-free, and you're not limited to travelling to places in the real world. Let's say you want to experience life in the Old West, or in Pompeii before Vesuvius blew its top, or Renaissance Europe, or Edo-period Japan. Those places don't exist any more, so the only way to experience them is virtually. Further, you could visit worlds that can't exist -- a common setting for games, but games are... different. Even further, you don't have to be yourself when you visit these locations. You don't even necessarily have to be human.

Video games have given us an indirect taste of what virtual tourism might be like. Ernest Adams said that he was very excited about exploring Far Cry's Pacific island environment until he realised that he couldn't do it without someone shooting at him every 30 seconds. The Grand Theft Auto series allows us to visit 'gamified' (though it's not really anything to do with Gamification) versions of New York, Miami, L.A., San Francisco and Las Vegas. True Crime: Streets of L.A. and L.A. Noire both allow us to visit somewhat more authentic recreations of L.A. than does GTA: San Andreas (and, as a bonus, L.A. Noire lets us visit a recreation of an L.A. that no longer exists, albeit with the disclaimer that it's not entirely authentic), but they somehow feel less believable.

Let me tell you about an early gaming experience of mine. Visiting my dad at a young age, he let me on his PC and loaded up for me a game called Vette! This game involved racing Chevrolet Corvettes around a cubist San Francisco (the game was released in 1989, and the 3D technology of the time didn't permit much in the way of detail). As a child, I was always interested in subverting the object of the game and finding other play-spaces within the game's systems, so it wasn't long before I realised I could ignore the actual race and just go for a leisurely drive around a recreation of San Francisco. While my brother was probably more interested in the proto-Grand-Theft-Auto elements (you were, shockingly, able to run over nuns!), this was probably my first taste of virtual tourism; complete freedom to drive around the city and just see what was there (interrupted only if I happened to crash into a certain statue, at which point the developers posted a textual memorial to the Tian An Men Massacre and froze the game).

Ok, your virtual tourism could also be interrupted if you got stopped by the police for your reckless driving. Those poor nuns!

The thing is, video games give us a seductive glimpse of what virtual tourism might be like, but they're not actually that good at virtual tourism. Game environments are often the spatial equivalent of a movie montage: enough to convey the sense and salient details, but necessarily contracted and warped. Partly this is because of technical considerations, and partly it's for the sake of the gameplay. A street that takes five minutes to walk down in real life might take thirty seconds in a game, because spending five minutes walking down a street is boring from a gameplay perspective. Virtual tourism, unlike games, has a covenant of simulative fidelity: it needs to be accurate. Technologically, there's a trade-off between accuracy, detail, and scale. This is why World of Warcraft's Azeroth is, mile for mile, about the size of a small city; not so much a 'world' at all. Morrowind and Oblivion have earned a reputation as games the strength of which lies in being "a place to be" rather than "a game to play", but their environments are still designed in a very game-like way. Virtual tourism using existing game technology would probably be necessarily limited to very small areas, or else be rather unpretty, violating the expectations we -- thanks to games -- now have of virtual environments.

Other, non-game applications have moved towards virtual tourism as well. Second Life contains impressive recreations of real-life locations. But Second Life's problem is community-generated content. Much of it is ugly due to people not realising that just because you can contribute, doesn't mean you should -- and, though I'm no prude, the permissive nature of the user-generated content creates a pervasive air of seedy sexuality: you can almost smell the jism, which is naturally rather off-putting. Google StreetView is another application that suggests virtual tourism. In The Book of Japans, Momus (whose song Folk Me Amadeus I reference in the title of this post, because I'm a bit of a fan) gives instructions for recreating the journey taken by two of the novel's characters in Google StreetView. The problem with Google StreetView, I would suggest, is that tourism is not purely exploratory; you can see things, but it suffers from a lack of agency, and, like Go! Go! Nippon!, from the static frames in which you explore (albeit with an awful lot more of them, although using only the visual medium). Further, both Second Life and Google StreetView have navigation problems that interfere with the sense of presence that a good game can provide: surely a prerequisite for satisfying virtual tourism!

It would be nice to think we could just load up a program and visit some exotic locale, but the more I think about it, the more difficulties I see with that concept. Video games may make an attempt at distilling and approximating what we want from virtual tourism, but that relies on "what we want" from virtual tourism being an objective truth, rather than the subjective thing it is. For now, we have to close off some of the possibilities.