Where are you from? Maybe it’s just part of my generation and our anxiety, but I feel defined by where I’m from to the point it’s getting hard to relate it to people as I get older. There’s probably a dead guy with a good book about collective experience being tied to where we’re from.

Spider-Man is defined bty the city of New york. We can assume that it’s the place that, as Peter Parker, he went on his first date or had his first apartment. Spider-Man knows New York and he loves it, to the point that it’s hard to imagine the character elsewhere.

Open world games want us to love their worlds as much as Spider-Man loves New York. Even though they’re mostly just amusement parks than they are real places. The best of these amusement parks allow you to learn landmarks and understand the world for what it is. Metal Gear Solid V may not take place in a city, but it still teaches the player how important the world is down to every rock and bush.

Spider-Man’s latest digital outing doesn’t take too different an approach. Insomniac wanted New York to not just be the location of the story, but factor in to the identity of its characters and the player.
Mary Jane Watson’s best quote in the game, “New York is about subway rats and street pizza, not sunbathing.” is pretty endemic of how Insomniac wants the player to not just see New-York, but feel it through the characters.

It’s worth pointing out too, that even with fictitious inclusions like a floating monorail line that goes through lower Manhattan and Avengers Tower that every building and vaguely-named pizza joint still feels like they belong right where Insomniac put them. Just swinging through can make you connect with Spider-Man a little bit better, it’s a feeling that few other open-world games have used.

Keeping me so well connected to New York through the entire game, Spider-Man constantly had me thinking about other cities I’ve been to in videogames. Fictional ones, mostly, ones that are less real than the cultural hodgepodges created for Grand Theft Auto. Over and over again, my mind kept drifting to the Arkham Asylum trilogy and of course, Batman.

There’s a big reason for that – Spider-Man has so much of the DNA of Rocksteady’s Batman games you’d swear they were related. Considering that both characters are orphans, I can only imagine the awful family reunions that would entail. Spider-man may owe it’s creation to Rocksteady’s series like Batman owes his to an alleyway and a gunshot, but Spider-Man’s soul is completely different.

Part of that soul comes from the texture and realness of New York. It helps the stakes feel more significantly more grounded, giving an idea of how much is at stake. As the situation in the game grows more dire with each chapter, New York falls into waste and chaos.

What does a sterile and lifeless Gotham City communicate then, about Batman? Gotham really never feels real despite howmuch the Unreal Engine tries to make it look that way. It is, at best, an amusement park inside a giant ridiculous Gothic cathedral. With hollow and empty streets that are only ever occupied by the worst of the worst, a perpetual gangland fantasy that never ends.

Batman seems overly concerned with the empty city in the Arkham Asylum trilogy. So much that he’s fiendishly dedicated to liberating it from the hands of villains – a city that I doubt Bruce Wayne has ever lived in. There are no characters part of the plot that aren’t immediately related to Batman, because there’s really no city beyond him.

It’s as if the developers of the Arkham Asylum games never saw a greater need for the city to exist – it is the eternal carnival house of terrors for Batman to go adventuring in, an excuse for the rich kid to test out his gadgets and wage his war on crime.

Gotham city is the anti New-York. It’s the one part of the DNA that Insomniac must have known needed changing – that without the people in it a city is just architecture and newspaper clippings.

Spider-Man doesn’t really care about collateral damage, as long as people are safe. What’s that next to a few streets of concrete and asphalt?