Pointing to the past and the future.
Welcome back to The Video Game City Week.
Next stop: statues.
The Horseback Monument
Statues are important.
Disco Elysiums Revachol is one of my favourite video game cities.
Over the last couple of years Ive thought considerably about why that is.
One of the most obvious elements is its brilliant sense of place, and how weathered it feels.
Weathered in two ways: the shivering sheets of coastal rain and sleet soaking the pockmarked pavements and streets.
But also its timeworn layers of history and the contested politics that are constantly at play there.
If you want to know a citys ambitions or learn about its collective psyche, look to its statues.
In the center of a roundabout in the small Revacholian district of Martinaise stands the Horseback Monument.
Dragging his body from the royal mausoleum, they dumped his frozen remains in the bay nearby.
History is in constant dispute, and so often statues are the battlegrounds in which we wage war.
In former Yugoslavia, thousands of strikingSpomeniks(Serbo-Croatian/Slovenian for monument) have been destroyed.
If you play a radical, the statue is sprayed with red graffiti.
If youre money-obsessed, the statue is plastered in parking tickets.
