A guide published this Friday by Polygon catalogues every photography location embedded in Forza Horizon 6‘s collection journal — a mechanic that rewards players for driving to designated spots, framing a shot, and logging it as a completed entry. The guide is utilitarian, a completionist’s checklist. But read against the game’s broader design, it is also a document of something more consequential: a corporation’s decision about which angles of a real-world landscape are worth aestheticizing, and which are not.
That decision belongs entirely to Microsoft, which owns the Forza franchise through its Xbox Game Studios division. The stakes are not merely aesthetic. Forza Horizon is among the best-selling open-world franchises in the history of the medium, with cumulative players in the tens of millions across its installments. When a studio of that scale encodes a visual grammar into its world — here is a vista worth capturing; here is a ruin worth framing; here is a coastline that rewards the patient photographer — it is not describing a place. It is authoring one. And it is doing so without any of the democratic accountability that governs, however imperfectly, the image-making institutions of the public sphere.
The Picturesque, Gamified
The tradition the mechanic inherits is old enough to have a name. The picturesque — as a formal aesthetic category developed in eighteenth-century Britain — prescribed the correct way to look at landscape: rugged but not savage, cultivated but not tamed, framed as if already a painting. It was, from the beginning, a technology of possession; to render a landscape picturesque was to render it legible to a particular class of viewer, and to render it available, symbolically, for that viewer’s pleasure. The colonial dimensions of the tradition have been extensively examined in art history — the way survey painters and travel photographers followed imperial frontiers, aestheticizing territory that was simultaneously being enclosed.
To render a landscape picturesque is to render it available for possession; Forza Horizon 6 simply automates the process and calls it a journal.
Forza Horizon 6‘s photography journal does not operate with imperial intent — that would be too crude a reading, and the people who built the terrain are not colonizers in any straightforward sense. But the structural logic rhymes. A studio — staffed, in all likelihood, by artists and designers working under considerable creative constraint — builds a photorealistic rendering of real geography. That rendering necessarily involves choices: what landmarks to include, what communities to make legible, what light to cast on what hill. Those choices are then locked into a reward system that steers millions of players toward specific vantage points, training a habitual way of seeing a place that the studio has already pre-approved.
Whose geography is it? The question is not rhetorical. Rest of World has reported extensively in recent years on the labor conditions of artists and cartographers contracted by major game studios to produce the terrain data and cultural texture that make open-world games feel lived-in. That labor is frequently outsourced, frequently undervalued, and frequently invisible in the credits that scroll past the photography journal’s completion screen. The people whose knowledge of a place made the place legible are not the people who decided which angles of it were worth a reward.
The Political Economy of Virtual Land
There is a version of this argument that tips into overreach — that holds video game aesthetics to a standard of political accountability that we would not apply to a novel or a film. That version is worth resisting. Forza Horizon 6 is a racing game with a photography minigame; it is not a land registry. But the scale at which these systems now operate, and the degree to which they shape how millions of people imaginatively inhabit geography they may never visit in person, makes the question of editorial control harder to dismiss as category error.
The Verge and Ars Technica have both tracked, in recent years, the growing sophistication of open-world environmental design — the investment studios make in photogrammetry, regional consultants, and geographically specific soundscapes. The more convincing the simulation, the more consequential the editorial choices embedded in it. A photography mechanic that feels like a gentle collectible is also, at scale, a curriculum: here is what this place looks like; here is what it is for; here is the frame.
Hannah Arendt wrote that the public realm is constituted by the capacity of many people to see the same thing from different positions. What Forza Horizon 6‘s photography journal offers is something structurally opposite: many people seeing the same thing from the same position, because a studio in Leamington Spa — operating under the authority of a corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington — decided that position was the correct one. The Polygon guide published this morning is a map to those positions. It is a useful guide. It is also, if you pull the thread far enough, a record of who gets to decide what a place is worth seeing.
Naomi Feldstein is the magazine’s lead culture writer. She moves between literary criticism, intellectual history, and the politics of the cultural institutions — universities, museums, prestige publishing — that produce and police the American liberal imagination.
