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Part One Going Nowhere PanoramicTravel So wonderful is the effect produced by this enchanting scene on the spectator, that they cannot help fancying themselves imperceptibly transported into the very interior of the province of Switzerland . . . viewing in reality, the very identical spot, on which their admiration is so intensely fixed. —­ Advertising handbill,“Grand View of a Lake and Waterfall in Switzerland,” Leicester Square, 1831 Digital living will include less and less dependence on being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible. If I really could look out the electronic window of my living room in Boston and see the Alps . . . in a way I am very much in Switzerland. —­Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, 1995, 165 The panorama is a unique space where the nineteenth century meets the present . Contemporary developments in panoramic videography have repopularized the word and helped to restore its specific visual meaning after a century in which it had come to signify any form of broad overview. Panoramic photographs can now be easily assembled by stitching overlapping digital images together, video “virtual tours” can be created with rotating line cameras such as Panoscan, and panoramic digital mapping using Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data allows computers to generate swooping panoramic images for GIS applications like Google Earth. And yet the panorama somehow retains the aura of the nineteenth century. In Katsuhiro Otamo’s 2005 anime film Steamboy, the Victorian world that provides the setting for its steampunk science fiction plot is evoked in wide-­ angle shots of Manchester and London. The hero’s flights aboard a steam-­ powered zeppelin initiate panoramic, wide-­ 30 Are We There Yet? angle views of London that begin at the top of St. Paul’s and zoom down into “a virtual tour of the twisting, intertwining streets of 19th-­ century London,” a visual tour de force that is often cited as an example of the film’s widely admired “detail and realism”(Audrey Doyle).As many Hollywood films from Mary Poppins onward reflect, panoramic views over rooftops make us think, in an almost subconscious way, of Victorian London. The noted video-­ game designer Cliff Breszinski may not be aware that one of the most famous panoramas of the Victorian period was a view of London taken from St. Paul’s Cathedral. Yet in his account of the evolution of his best-­ known game, Gears of War, Breszinski identifies the panoramic vista seen from St. Paul’s as the inspiration for his game’s uniquely timeless atmosphere. I’ll never forget the first time I went to London and experienced, firsthand, the beauty of Hampton Court Palace, Westminster Abby, and Saint Paul’s Cathedral . The afternoon was bright as the sun set on the last tours of the day. I had just climbed all 532 of the damp cathedral steps to the very top. As I emerged into the open air, the clouds parted to reveal a beautiful sunset, and I had an epiphany. Seeing all of London sprawled out beneath me was humbling and inspiring . Right then I knew that the next universe I would help craft wouldn’t be about aliens or tournaments; it would be character-­ driven, centered on themes of loyalty, redemption, paranoia, and“destroyed beauty.”1 Breszinski has said that one of his goals in Gears of War was to create a setting that seemed like an unexpected blend of the old and the new, and the sweeping city views seen in the game seem to evoke both the nineteenth century and the present. A screenshot from Gears of War (fig. 2) shows a panoramic vista that includes St. Paul’s on the right, and the avatar in the foreground closely resembles the spectator figures that were common in nineteenth-­ century landscape paintings like Caspar David Friedrich’s Traveler Looking Over a Sea of Fog (1818). Breszinski’s comment also demonstrates that the view itself seemed to evoke an imaginative world, a“universe” he sought to recreate in a game that has been praised as having“an experiential depth rare in the genre” (Bissell, 4). This world, though fictional, would not be fantasy. Breszinski’s response, as we will see, mirrors the experience of Victorians who viewed the panorama of London that Thomas Horner painted from the very same spot. The sense of transportation or immersion that Breszinski creates in his game was anticipated by this quintessentially Victorian art form. In this part, I will explore...

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