VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

The videogame industry has become a significant (if unofficial) steward of digital heritage, assembling expansive virtual worlds from proxies of real-life artifacts, monuments, and cultural landscapes. Built through pipelines that combine high-fidelity reality capture workflows (e.g. photogrammetry, LiDAR) with procedural modeling, today’s “gamescapes” are more than mere backdrops. They reimagine real-world places through processes of appropriation and embellishment, extracting distinctive cultural and environmental features and reconfiguring them according to the operational logics of gameplay. Using contemporary videogames as examples, including Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed and Guerilla’s Horizon franchises, this paper advances a critique of “assetization” as an epistemic shift in how place is known, valued, and reproduced within videogames. Assetization—a term borrowed from Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa—foregrounds tensions between authenticity and ludic imperatives, wherein historical and cultural specificity is routinely subordinated to gameplay requirements such as traversal and storytelling. Places are thus reduced to portable digital assets, flattened through abstraction and rendered endlessly recombinable across titles, genres, and contexts. Reality-capture pipelines, exemplified by asset marketplaces such as Epic Games’ Quixel Megascans, accelerate this process by enabling the large-scale extraction of real-world cultural artifacts and landscapes, converting them into standardized, licensable digital proxies. Detached from place-specific context and embedded within proprietary ecosystems, these assets circulate as interchangeable components rather than situated places. This shift raises critical questions about data ownership, interpretive authority, and the expanding role of the videogame industry as a powerful intermediary shaping heritage futures.