What Games Get Right, and Wrong, About Faraway Places

Games love to send players to faraway places, drawing on real cultures, regions, and histories for their settings. Done with care, this can illuminate a place and spark genuine interest; done carelessly, it reduces living cultures to decoration and recycles tired cliches. As games reach ever wider for their inspiration, it is worth looking honestly at what they get right about the faraway places they portray, and what they still get wrong.

Right: atmosphere and sense of place

Games are often excellent at atmosphere, capturing the feeling of a place through light, architecture, sound, and detail. A well-made setting can convey the particular mood of a region, its heat, its hush, its bustle, in a way that genuinely transports the player. This evocation of atmosphere is one of gaming's real strengths, and at its best it gives players a felt sense of somewhere they have never been.

Right: inspiring curiosity

A game set in a real culture can open a door, prompting players to learn more about the history, language, or traditions it draws on. Many players have followed a game's setting into real research, reading about a period or place because a game made them curious. When a game treats its inspiration seriously enough to intrigue, it can be a genuine gateway to understanding a part of the world.

Right: showcasing beauty

Games can present the beauty of a faraway place to an audience that would never otherwise see it, rendering landscapes, cities, and art with loving detail. This showcasing has real value, carrying the visual richness of a region to millions and often instilling appreciation and respect. A game that renders a place beautifully can leave players with a lasting admiration for somewhere they encountered only on screen.

Wrong: culture as decoration

The commonest failing is treating a living culture as mere set dressing, borrowing its visual surface, its clothing, buildings, symbols, while ignoring its substance. A place becomes an exotic backdrop for a story that has nothing to do with it, its people reduced to scenery. This hollowing-out, using a culture's look without its meaning, is where games most often go wrong, and it is a disservice to the real people behind the aesthetic.

Wrong: recycling cliches

Games frequently fall back on tired cliches about faraway places, the same handful of stereotyped images standing in for whole regions and peoples. These shorthand depictions flatten rich, varied cultures into a few lazy signifiers, and they persist because they are easy. A place deserves to be portrayed in its real diversity and complexity, not reduced to the clichés an uninformed audience already half-expects to see.

Wrong: the outsider's gaze

Many games portray faraway places purely from an outsider's perspective, framing a culture as strange, mysterious, or dangerous rather than as ordinary life to the people who live it. This outsider's gaze others a place, making it a curiosity to be visited rather than a home to be understood. The remedy is perspective, portraying a place as its own people might see it, which far fewer games attempt than should.

Wrong: history flattened or sanitised

Games set in real histories sometimes flatten or sanitise them, smoothing away the difficult realities of a period or place to keep the entertainment comfortable. A setting drawn from real history carries real complexity, and erasing it in favour of a tidy backdrop misrepresents the place and the people who lived there. The best historical games wrestle with that complexity; the weakest use history as a costume and discard its truth.

The difference research makes

What separates the games that get faraway places right from those that get them wrong is almost always research and care. Teams that consult people from the culture, study its history, and portray it with respect produce settings that illuminate; teams that grab a surface aesthetic produce ones that distort. The care behind a portrayal is visible in the result, and it is the single clearest predictor of whether a game honours or caricatures its inspiration.

Why it matters more as games grow

As games reach a vast global audience, how they portray faraway places genuinely shapes how millions perceive those places. A respectful portrayal can build understanding; a careless one can entrench stereotypes in the minds of people who know a place only through games. That reach makes the responsibility real, and it is why the question of what games get right and wrong about faraway places matters more with every passing year.

Toward portrayals worth having

Games are capable of portraying faraway places with real beauty, atmosphere, and respect, and the best already do. The path forward is simply more of that care, more research, more perspective, more willingness to treat a culture as a living reality rather than a backdrop. When games extend the same respect to the places they borrow that a thoughtful traveller extends to the places they visit, virtual journeys to faraway places become something genuinely worth having.