Spatial Literacy: Reading (and Writing) Game Space

Conventions of Spatial Literacy Conventions in media serve as a kind of shorthand between creator and audience: In order to understand and enjoy novels, films, theaters, audiences must be able to “read” the conventions of these media. Though early filmgoers did not understand that the train coming toward them in the Lumiere Brothers’ L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895) was merely a projected moving image on a two-dimensional surface, today’s cinema audiences are accustomed to the language of film. Media consumers frequently take these conventions for granted, yet, as Sturken and Cartright have pointed out; media literacies are neither intuitive nor passive. Producers invent conventions and visual languages with which viewers must actively engage in order to construct meaning (2001). Audiences must become complicit in these conventions, engaging in what Janet Murray describes as the “active creation of belief” (1997, 110).