ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the construction of the image of the virtual flâneur as well as the digitally enabled experience of flânerie through a comparative analysis of two different examples of this phenomenon: an open-world video game partially set in 18th-century Havana that allows players to explore and roam the colonial city as they see fit (Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag) and a web-based application that invites users to explore the city of Bogotá in an interactive and two-dimensional way (Caminando Bogotá, developed at Universidad Javeriana). Since the late 19th century, the figure of the flâneur has played a central role within Latin American cultural traditions, particularly in regard to the articulation of the ideological and cultural mapping of the city space from the perspective of the male gaze. 1 Urban chroniclers such as Manuel de Zequeira y Arango (Havana, Cuba, 1764–1846) and José María Vergara y Vergara (Bogotá, Colombia, 1831–1872) are early examples of the crucial role the figure of the “urban explorer” or “city wanderer” played in terms of the literary appropriation of the city space by the cultural elite of these two countries. During the 20th century, a corpus of urban literature and films further disseminated critical approaches to Latin American urban spaces, relying often on the figure of the flâneur and the practice of flânerie for such approaches. With the advent of video games and interactive media, digitally enabled forms of flânerie have been made possible, in most cases through the design of computer-based models of the city and interactive avatars that allow users to explore these simulated city environments in different ways, and in order to accomplish a variety of gaming goals. The latter includes both multimedia developed in Flash and similar low-end technologies – which are characterized by their bi-dimensionality, low production cost and their evocative and minimalist approach to the cityscape – and sophisticated 3D video game simulations developed by the entertainment industry.
