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One of the dominant ideas surrounding site-specific performance is that it’s a kind of theatre which is made of and from a particular place: its stories, myths and landscape. Rather than acting as a seemingly neutral backdrop – as in a conventional theatre venue – place and space (and sometimes the community found there) are intrinsic parts of site-specific performance. To change the site would be to completely change a site-specific work. Think of NTW’s The Passion, a work inseparable from Port Talbot or the 1000-plus community volunteers who supported the three-day spectacle.

A similar relationship to space (though not community) might be at work, I think, in Dan Pinchbeck and Robert Briscoe’s Dear Esther, a game not only set on a remote Hebridean island but in which passage across the island is the most distinctive feature of the work’s aesthetic. While the island itself might be treated metaphorically – an empty space of isolation and loneliness – I’m more interested in the ways in which the different texts of the game combine through that space, and in which that space is inseparable from those texts.

At the level of game mechanic, Dear Esther’s fragmentary narration is triggered by the player’s chosen path across the island, by the locations he or she choses to visit and the order of progress. At the same time, the player is slowly introduced to spatial cues – not only carefully framed mise-en-scène of abandoned campsites and shipwrecks, but to figures which hover on the edge of vision, shadows or ghosts who fade and vanish when you turn to look directly at them. Memories of a car crash overlap with images of what look like medical records, circuit diagrams and chemical equations – distributed not only in time as you progress through the game, but in space.

Elements of this fragmentary, spatial structure – deliberately fragmented or obscured to invite, if not force, the player to try to make connections – might be compared to the storytelling devices of previous games like Bioshock, whose distributed audio-diaries slowly fill in the events of the fallen city of Rapture. What’s different in Dear Esther, I’d suggest, is the role played by landscape – by the ways in which the game plays with the view in the distance as much as the immediate location in which the player is located.

As an artwork, then, the experience of Dear Esther arrives through lines of sight in movement, from shifting perspectives as the player moves across the island. Dear Esther works, I think – and to crib terms from Tim Ingold – by allowing the player paths of observation, by the deliberately slow pace to and through the spaces of the island: the climb from the shore up towards the radio tower which moves in and out of sight.

The gameplay mechanic of movement through space, then, isn’t merely the way in which information or narrative fragment is parcelled out. It frames and shapes the way in which the player understands and responds to that material. Put simply, the view is the game and the game is the view.