What If the Places I Lived Became Games?

I have been thinking that some of the places I have lived could become games, although I am not completely sure yet what that means. I do not mean games about travel, because travel games usually turn places into collections of landmarks, foods, and visual styles. That would be the easiest version, and probably the least interesting one. I am more interested in whether Argentina, São Tomé, and Taiwan each created a different set of rules around me, and whether those rules could be turned into something playable.

When I think about those places now, I do not remember them as neutral backgrounds where events happened. I behaved differently in each one. I paid attention to different things. I had different amounts of confidence, money, language, and understanding. Even basic actions changed. Asking for help, crossing a city, buying food, meeting someone, figuring out where I was supposed to be. The action might look the same from the outside, but the system around it was different.

This is maybe the part that makes them suitable for games. A game is not only a story. It is a set of conditions that decides what is easy, what is difficult, what information is available, and what happens when you make a mistake. A place does something similar. It gives you an interface, but not always one you understand.

Taiwan seems like the most obvious example because I arrived with such limited access to the written environment. The city was full of information, but most of it was unavailable to me. Street signs, menus, notices, forms, messages, names. I could see that everything meant something, but I could not yet enter the system properly. I had to navigate through shapes, colours, remembered turns, and the behaviour of other people. Sometimes I recognised a shop because of one object outside it rather than the name. Sometimes I knew which bus to take without understanding anything written on the bus.

That could be a mechanic. The game would not translate everything for the player. At the beginning, most of the interface would remain unreadable. You would slowly learn recurring signs, sounds, and patterns, but probably not in the orderly way language-learning apps imagine. You would first learn the characters connected to places you use every day, then a food you order repeatedly, then something embarrassing or strangely specific. The world would become readable unevenly.

I like the idea that progress in the Taiwan game would not mean becoming stronger. It would mean noticing more. A street that initially looked chaotic would eventually reveal a temple, a clinic, a breakfast shop, a political poster, a place selling something you did not know existed, and a route you have walked twenty times without understanding why it felt familiar. The map would not expand. Your ability to read the existing map would expand.

But even Taiwan is not one game. Taipei and Tainan did not produce the same version of me. Taipei was faster and easier to understand as a city, at least in the sense that it behaved more like other large cities I already knew. Tainan became familiar in a more accidental way. I learned it through repeated routes, small streets, people, food, university buildings, and places I entered for one reason but kept returning to for another. A Tainan game might not have clear missions. The player could spend a long time doing things that appear unrelated until the relationships between them gradually become visible.

São Tomé feels different in my memory. I remember connections between people and places more than movement through a large system. It is a small island, but that does not necessarily make it easy to understand. Maybe it makes everything denser. You meet someone, then later discover that they are connected to another person, a village, a family, a project, or a story you encountered somewhere else. The map might begin almost empty, not because the land is unknown, but because the relationships are unknown.

As the player spends time there, lines could begin appearing between people and locations. Not social-network lines in the clean interface sense, but messy connections that sometimes explain things and sometimes create more confusion. The island would become more complicated as you learn it, not simpler. That seems closer to what actually happens when you begin understanding a place. At first you only see roads and buildings. Later every road carries memories, obligations, and people you might run into.

I also keep thinking about the landscape there, especially plants and the way the same thing can belong to several systems of knowledge at once. A plant might have a local name, a scientific name, a practical use, a family story, and a meaning that somebody from outside would completely miss. A normal game would probably turn the plant into a resource. You collect three leaves and craft medicine. That would flatten the whole thing. Maybe the player should only understand the plant after hearing several contradictory explanations from different people. There may not be one final correct entry in the inventory.

Argentina is less clear to me as a mechanic, which perhaps means I have to think about it longer. I remember scale. Distance. The feeling that something could be inside one country and still feel extremely far away. Maybe the player spends more time travelling than arriving. The game could be structured around buses, roads, waiting, and the strange intimacy of being in transit for a long time with people you do not know.

It could also be about the gap between the map and the experience of moving through it. On the map, two places are connected by a line. In reality, the line contains hours of darkness, stops, conversations, discomfort, food, changing weather, and the feeling that you are suspended between one version of your life and another. Most games skip that part. You select a destination and appear there. But sometimes the distance is the main experience.

I do not know whether these games should share a character. Maybe that would make them too obviously autobiographical, as though the player is supposed to assemble a coherent image of me. I am not sure there is one coherent person moving through all of these places anyway. The person in Argentina is not exactly the person in São Tomé, and neither is the person who later lived in Taiwan. Of course they are connected, but the connection might only become visible afterwards.

There could be a few objects that move between the games. A passport, a camera, a laptop, old messages, unfinished film material, maybe something small that keeps surviving each move even when its original meaning disappears. Objects often travel more consistently than identities do. You arrive somewhere new with the same bag, but you are already starting to become someone else.

What I do not want is a collection of games that says each place taught me one important lesson. Argentina taught me distance. São Tomé taught me community. Taiwan taught me adaptation. That is too clean and probably not true. Places do not behave like teachers with prepared learning outcomes. Sometimes they confuse you for years. Sometimes you misunderstand them. Sometimes you leave and only later realise what you were actually experiencing.

The games should probably preserve some of that misunderstanding. The player should not always know what matters. A conversation that seems important might go nowhere. A small repeated action might later become the thing they remember most. Some parts of the map might remain unreadable even at the end.

Maybe this becomes a playable atlas, although even that phrase sounds more finished than the idea currently is. I am imagining a set of short games where each location changes not just the scenery, but the rules of perception and interaction. The point would not be to show where I went. It would be to explore how each place made a different life possible, and also made other things impossible, without me always noticing at the time.

Connected reading

• The City Is an Interface
• The City Is a Matchmaker
• The Internet Is a Studio Wall

AI authorship note

This essay began with Kris Haamer thinking about turning his experiences in Argentina, São Tomé, and Taiwan into games, then correcting an early draft that treated places as scenery rather than as systems that changed how he lived. AI supported drafting, editing, and implementation. Kris chose the locations, shaped the argument, corrected the voice, and approved the final essay for publication.