A Level Editor is a piece of software that is increasingly shipped along with popular 3D PC games. An example of this is Worldcraft, developed by Valve and attached to the first-person shooter game Half-Life and it's subsequent mods (short for modifications), such as Counter-Strike, of which there are hundreds.

This software allows the user to design their own playable environments, using the gaming engine which drives the commercially-sold game as its foundation. It does this by providing an interface similar to a 3D-modelling program in which the user can build environments from scratch, including lighting, surfacing and surrounding organic landscapes. Within the environment the user can also control the placement of trigger-points for events to occur, such as whether doors are openable, or whether a surface that looks like glass will smash when shot at. The user can also choose the placement of various entities provided by the engine, such as monsters and terrorists replete with artificial intelligence.

Once finished, the environment and all it's settings are compiled and becomes a playable map. This can be posted on the Internet and downloaded by other gamers who can then open it within the parent-game and play within that map.

Level-editors are developed for use by designers within a gaming company itself. However a large number of game-players are now utilizing these tools to build their own maps, and therefore contribute new places for the gaming community to play in.

In this context 'place' can be simplistically described as space which has become semiotically-invested through human activity. It is a point of inter-animation between both the subject and the landscape. The subject animates the landscape through activity; and the landscape animates the subject through their production of local knowledge about that landscape. Knowledge is used loosely here both factually, (eg: ecological), and generatively (eg: mythological).

Place can have layers of signification both socially pre-empted and individually generated. What we do in a place defines what it means for us, but that can also be mixed-in with remnants from other people's use of the space (eg: tags, litter, paddocks denuded of trees), or signifiers referencing a collective social structure, such as advertising or street names.