Architecture and Games

By far the best session I attended at Develop was the panel on Architecture and Games (some notes at Gamasutra, full audio at Edge), run by Alex Wiltshire from Edge, and featuring City 17 designer Victor Antonov, who trained as an industrial designer, Rory Olcayto of The Architect’s Journal, and Lionhead artist and trained architect Rob Watkins. Rob later moved into videogames and enjoyed the freedom they offer. In his words, you don’t have to worry about damp proof courses and RSJs when you’re constructing virtual buildings.

All of them had great deal of insight, Victor talking about how Half Life 2 featured huge tenements with very confined narrative paths carved straight through them, and Rob contrasting the style of Fable II, in which every building could be bought by the player and had to function as a unit, perhaps even half icon, half structure compared to the mess of real world cities.

Another really juicy tidbit was that Valve wrote three bits of context for every place in Half Life 2: What happened there two days ago, two weeks ago, and two years ago, then had the designers build each of those stories into the environments. I once took a background narrative approach to level design when I was a mod maker, and it really brought the level to life with tiny, unique and coherent details (the gameplay was awful though).

Victor also observed that the city itself is a form of entertainment, something I would keenly agree with. The concept of the Flâneur made a lot of sense to me when I first encountered it, as I always like to walk around cities. I cross reference tube maps with real ones to avoid unnecessary changes when a 2 minute walk would get me to the same place, and in much the same way I scout before I act in games. I walk new cities to learn them for later, because learning a place makes you more capable in that territory, and makes time spent there richer and more rewarding.

Possibly, this is where I most keenly feel a difference between game worlds and real ones: Game worlds only have a limited amount of content to consume, whereas real worlds are more likely to be bottomless, fractal experience generators. Far Cry 2 was a very impressive example of systemic design, but not even that has enough content in the system to avoid feeling a little bland after a while. While I like to explore games, it’s never long before I bump up against the walls of the system. User generated content such as Second Life can keep up with any hunger for new locations, but simply lacks the coherence and beauty of the real world too.

Dovetailing with the city as entertainment, Rory talked about the idea of an “experience economy”. Places like Dubai exemplify this: They sell themselves on an image, but underneath it’s really quite badly constructed. Capital cities can offer very guided experiences, with a great deal of consideration given to the kind of image they present, and likewise places like Las Vegas offer little beyond an image. Often, these experiences are poor, but game and level designers are experts in creating them. Perhaps, the panelists said, architects could learn something from game design. It seemed a tiny bit glib given the constraints that aren’t present in games, but there’s some truth to it. Game design is going to have insights that could be taken to other fields, but at the moment it’s *still* an embryonic discipline.

I got the feeling during this panel that it may really be about to find it’s feet though. The main implication I took from the session ties nicely to what Frank Lantz said at GDC this year: Games are not media. Calling them that, comparing them to media separates them from their cultural heritage of many thousands of years of play. Just before, Eric Zimmerman had quickly got everyone deeply involved in a trivial notecard swapping game, and Frank followed this up by saying that regarding games as media is as if we think adding computers to something is a way to make it worse.

While Architecture looks at things in greatly more practical terms than simply play, it nonetheless has strong aspects of design for behaviour. In fact, I’d say the broader range of behaviour that architectural design can encompass probably correlates to a similar spectrum emerging in games ranging from casual games to detailed simulators. We need to look to design disciplines that inform what we’re actually doing, and as a former level designer for mod teams, I’d agree that games have a vast amount more to learn from architecture than they do from film.

(CC image by Thomas Hawk)

This entry was posted by davidhayward, on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 4:23 pm and is filed under aesthetics, convergence, design, events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.