Cathedrals as VR worlds and mnemonic devices

In Leah Marcus' article in Chapter 2 of the Renaissance Computer, she discussed memory and the idea of finding ways to extend the memory. She briefly made mention of 'memory icons,' which sounded to me like a term, and I was not familiar with it, so I went on Google to see what I could find. 

One connection that came up was with the construction and embellishment of Gothic cathedrals, which, according to at least one guy, are themselves enormous memory devices.

The idea behind memory icons is that you first "build" a virtual space in your mind - the more complicated and detailed, the better. You should have a clear idea of what it looks like, its dimensions, and where its various buildings are in relation to each other. The idea is that you could 'walk around' in it in your mind. 

It has been speculated, for example, that the Plan of St. Gall, drawn up in the 800s AD was not necessarily intended to be built but as an idealized layout to serve as an aid to meditation. The monks could walk through the grounds virtually and meditate on various things that its layout represented symbolically and possibly on the significance of icons that they had placed around the grounds. It sounds like a medieval version of a virtual world or MOO - or maybe also a MUD, because if all the members of this community used the plan as a meditation tool, they could theoretically collaborate on its construction or talk about virtually shared experiences in that space.

But back to memory icons - once you 'build' your space, then, you start to put things in it: objects, people, critters of various kinds. They should be striking in some way, so that they arrest your attention. Then, once you have this space built and populated with stuff, you can "store" things in it by making associations with the things you want to remember and something inside the space. Mentally, you go to a certain place in your virtual memory and put the thing you want to remember inside or behind or under one of the critters or things you have sitting around in there.

Anyway, if a cathedral - even just the plan of one that was never built, could serve as a huge mnemonic device to preserve spatially and visually, through association and symbols, the history of its community, what if VR worlds could be intentionally constructed as a teaching tool or memory device for telling important aspects of our culture and history?

I just think it's interesting, especially the possibilities of gaming as an educational tool, in the medieval tradition. 

In a lot of ways, there really is nothing new.