power on time

In the last article I outlined the importance of the consideration of the phenomenon of time in architecture in much the same way we see it considered in games in what I labled 'events'. However, in this article I will continue that discussion in bringing some examples of where we see time considered in the design process in reality. I stumbled upon an article by a student, like me, in Australia (of all places) who was interested in a completely different topic, 'architecture and anarchy.'


Now Linda Bennett was interested in how governments exploit architecture for control, how 'cities are a product of capitalism,' and how sadly architects are part of this game. Thus the 'practice of architecture as a culture of hierarchy that appears entirely at odds with the ideals of anarchy,' this is because 'architecture is dependent upon commissions and regulations; the architect must work within a time frame, budget and brief, and is restricted according to safety, money and law.'


In the last article I outlined how the developer controls the players' experience of events by considering the movement of time relative to social encounters; it seems that in much the same way we experience control in reality. What I am interested in was how this relative linearity in which architecture is designed in cities to implement a higher powers' desire, considers the dimension of time to facilitate this control and how that may affect our social encounters. Linda Bennett talks about Le Corbusier, how 'he proposed the eradication of “social chance” and “architectural wilfulness” through mechanical efficiency and regulation of city structures.' Now although Le Corbusier may have gone to the extreme of this notion of control, for example 'Plan Voisin,' a plan that called for the eradication of Paris, to be rebuilt in a very controlled and organized fashion. But, considering, Linda claims that 'city planners to this day adopt Le Corbusier’s model, in which congested streets are replaced with a combination of towers and freeways'. However, even if Linda is wrong, we still do experience organized control on our social encounters in everyday life through things like traffic lights and organized queues, this is undeniably authoritarian control. However, that isn't to say this control is 'evil' or 'bad', there is no denying that “a society has to at least in part, conform to the structure of the city”, (Rollins 2010, pers. comm., 3 June) because if we don't we may live in chaos, and thus at the end of the day 'cities are controlled by the objectives of the people who make them'-Bennett.


To get more specific to the phenomenon of social encounters and time relative to control, I would like to explain how we experience this sub-consciously, daily. Linda continues her discussion to highlight how 'research shows that you’re most likely to turn right after entering a shop, that you’re most likely to buy something on an overcast day and that you walk slower when streets are planted with trees.' Furthermore that 'every space that you pass through in the city is designed with human traffic flow and productivity in mind. The city structure is a functional and efficient system which controls the way its inhabitants move through space. Individual and social components of the city are defined by corporate considerations.' Designers are aware of this, and use this! Linda brings forth a supermarket architect named Robert Smith who uses various ways to design the aisles so that the buyer always focuses on the stock. Robert Smith explains that this as a technique that ‘endures the maximisation of time spent in store and also as a way to capitalise on impulse buying.’ This shows that design in many of the spaces we dwell in daily, affect our social encounters by physically or physcologically controlling our duration of time in places.


Furthermore, from personal experience in places; I know that these physcoligical manipulations can even affect our perception of the time we spend in places. I outlined in this in the last article by talking about how time spent in doctors’ offices may seem life forever, or that time seemed like it was moving slower. I also recall the design of glass lifts in malls that affect my perception of time by enjoying views for instance. There are ofcourse hundreds of examples that even you can probably think of, simply by just exsisting in a city!


So, there is no denying that in fact, that there are places all around us in reality affect the our perception of time intentionaly, or even physicaly alter our duration in spaces to affect or social encounters from reasons stemming from efficiency to money to even enjoyments and all these reasons shape our social encounters. Thus in real architecture these reasons could be stemmed from anything (as I have outlined), but in games it is always to support the gameplay. Nonetheless, what is so intriguing is how we often overlook these coherently designed spaces. I used to think that we often overlook the dimension of time, but I suppose I was mistaken, it is sometimes precisely what is considered in many places around us...



Source

control over immidiate time

In the last post I outlined the difference between the kind of architecture we find in games to that found in reality in relation to time. I am begining to get deaper into the rabbit hole; how does the way we design a building in consideration to time affect our social encounters? We have all experianced spaces that make time seem like forever, (e.g doctors office) and spaces that make time move faster, (discoteque); mentally ofcourse and thus it would be fair to state that the perception of time in a space affects our feelings towards it. One architect I stumbled upon, Maria Lorena Lehman wrote an article on this in Discover entitled how our brain can control time.   

What I am interested in is how we can utilize time as a tool, control it, in order to change the experiance of a space, and in doing so, how that may affect our social encounters; One thing I noted down in the article is that "the brain utilizes time to understand things like distance. Timing is important for such functions as determining how far away someone is when speaking"-Lehman. This illustrates that for our brains, time in the present-tense is an important factor in spacial oreintation in regards to social encounters. She continues to explain how "a journey through architectural space can expand or contract time dependent upon the experiences encountered. Still, architects can and should use time as a tool to communicate and guide occupant journeys. Mental timing is an important factor to how architecture is perceived" - Lehman. Hence, it is important to understand that time, a dimension often overlooked, can play a major role in designing a space and be used effectivley when considered.

As I have mentioned earlier; this is often seen in games, where events (clusters of time), are created through the architecture to facillitate meaningful social encounters. These social encounters progress the game and in turn, help create the event itself.

I have not mentioned the factor of memory in relation to time however. Good games give you something to remember through the progression of the game. Thus time gives way to memorable moments, these moments create a kind of timeline in our brain which gives us a sense of how long the game took.This feeling can be obscured, controled, the more memorable moments you may have in a short amount of time, perhaps the more meaningful the game was. In a like manner, in reality the same can be said; living in Amsterdam I realize how narrow and tall buildings are and that although Amsterdam is a small city, sometimes people believe that they have been walking for ages simply becuase where there should perhaps be one building there are three tall buildings in place giving a sense that you have been walking for longer than you really have been. This phenonemon goes to show how architecturally, the mental perception of time can indead be controled. 

"Certain focal points, alignments, materials and other features can all contribute to how occupants experience, and subsequently remember a built environment. Architecture can utilize time in many instances. Such instances are reverberation time, travel time, textural rhythm and visual timing. Buildings are largely experienced through mental time – and the senses are key" - Lehman. This goes to show, that the mental perception of time is built on memory and understanding this, architecturally, can yield very meaninfulspaces; in games and in real life.

Source: Sensing Architecture

the relevence of social encounters and time in the architecture of fast paced first person shooters

10 years ago I would not of been able to write about this topic, architecture in games played what Ernest Adams in one of my previous articles called simply ‘a cosmetic role’ where in order to be convinced; buildings had to simply look ‘good’ and look ‘right,’ ‘realistic’ if you will. It seems that today, players have become more needy and in order to be convinced demand more than just realism through cosmetics. Today you will hear most people say, 'graphics are nice, but I prefer the gameplay itself.' To truly experience the spacial environment, to experience the smaller streets from the larger roads, the high ceilings, the dramatic lighting, we need to see the interactions of people through these spaces. How the dramatic lighting silhouettes running soldiers, how a market is felt through its people, who may barter, laugh, and interact with their spacial environments, that is how we are convinced today; to the point that there maybe a very good reason for the absence of people that supports the gameplay, not a reason that has to do with the computers strength to handle such a simulation. We are beginning to take ‘good graphics’ for granted, and demand more from the spaces than ever before, and in a years’ time, it would be more than ever once more. These ‘social encounters’ are felt through friend and foe alike, and play an unmistakable important role in enhancing and understanding the feeling the developer wanted to impose on the space.



Time is another major area of importance in video game. In my previous post I outlined the phenomenon of ‘waste in transit’:  the idea that buildings in the real world, may or may not take into account the unpredictable uses of the future, sometimes they even emphasize the uses of the past. Where as in games all of these may be mimicked, and in actuality the spaces in the architecture of games are designed for the presentence. Therefore ‘Waste in transit’ does not exist in fast paced first-person shooters (FPS’s), every single space is designed for an ‘event’ that supports the gameplay. Social encounters are affected by those ‘events’ and in turn affect the ‘events’ themselves. The two are not mutually exclusive, on the contrary in modern games, are very dependent of one another. Without the consideration of the ‘event’ the environment would be random, and would in some ways seem immature of the game, likewise without the social encounters to support the ‘event’ there would be nothing to play, and the realism would be gone, a player may get bored very quickly; for we are social creatures. Gaming is a realm built for those who are curious about spatial environments whether they realize it or not, the adventure and the progression is all built through spaces built around ‘events’ that progress through social encounters, without all these you may as well bang your head against a wall.


So what is the difference between game architecture and real architecture? The difference is the reason for the architecture; in games it is to support the gameplay and in turn the gameplay is the one constraint for the developer. In real architecture, it is made to support anything, and anything is the constraint. But the one thing that I find that truly highlights the difference is indeed, time itself. This can be seen through the social encounters themselves, which may be very intense, very exaggerated in order to progress the storyline. This progression makes the game move forward, the social encounters make the ‘timeline’ if you will in nearly every good paced FPS I have ever played. The social ecnounters are therefore the brain and the heart of these ‘events.’ It is seen through the freedom of the spaces and how they are built to direct you in the ‘right way’ to experience more and more ‘events.’ You will never really re-visit the same spaces, and if you do they are often different, for example either more destroyed, are experienced at a different time of day, or are simply seen from above while in a helicopter or space-ship. The point is that time is a key factor, because it goes to show how the game really does revolve around ‘events’ and  that the social encounters make these ‘events’ take place, otherwise they are just a pointless frozen moments in time that have no soul or reason to be. All this is not the same in real architecture; 'events' in real architecture do not imply the same thing, because you can revisit a building at any point in time, at any day and it will be there for you to experiance (without getting too technical), granted that it may never be truly the same as the day before (and not that you may even notice that considerably). Also buildings will age, unless you live infront of it for a good decade you will probably not notice the change. Social encounters will probably be more subtle, and will not be cinematics built to infuse a very specific 'event.' In games everything is very destined in the environments, where as in reality, its not (I am an atheist), everything that happens is queit random and not neccessarily planned as exstensivley by a higher power (the developer, or in real life e.g god). Ok, enough babbling...


I bring to the table an example which illustrates all that I have said, the new trailer to Battlefield 3, watch this trailer and see that everything is about ‘events’ and that the social encounters make the game alive and take place.

a short sum-up

Currently I am in Costa Rica and am enjoying this rare opportunity of finally adding a presentation I found on the web. This is a brief but important post, enjoy...




BELOW: The presentation below is from a student in architecture who like me was fascinated by the implication of architecture in games. In this presentation Martin Nerukar explains the methodology of writing games, his examples are mostly in FPS's. The role in architecture in games is to support the gameplay, this presentation outlines how. I particularly took interest in the various tools game writers use to control the players notion of time in games such as (cutscenes, flasbacks and sometimes an abstract sense of context such as a dark cave where time seems irrelevent). This control of time seems to play an important role in influencing the spacial experiance of games in comparison to real life, I for one find that this can be seen specifically in social encounters. One example, which is probably the most important is that time is used as a tool to enforce strong feelings towards characters in games throughout the progression and development of the story. The reliance of NPC's which direct the player, and with whom you develop a relationship with as the progression of the game developes in time influences the empathy and in turn the feelings of the player towards various environments (i.e your home, dangerous areas, the enemies home, simply the overall contexts); for it is by watching and observing how other characters behave towards the environment that the player judges for himself/herself how to engage a space. Thus, social encounters through time play an important role in the apprehension of the environment. Now, there are thousands of games, many of which do not follow this rule. However in my many years of gaming (and I've gamed a lot) short FPS’s do, hence it is important to address this issue as it is a very tangeable way in which I can contrast architecture in games to architecture in real life; a hardy task. This article does not specifically talk about this phenomenon, but it does draw at the root of game writing and therefore it connects to this phenomenon (directly/indirectley).

Experiencing Environments

View more presentations from Martin Nerurkar

cities through algorithms

BELOW: I stumbled upon this article online that focuses on a wonder in gaming that I found curious. The generating of cities made using mathematical algorithms. By definition an abstraction of real world architecture to gaming architecture is taking place, which brings up several questions, as to how on earth somebody could pull something like this of? and how convincing it could be? Apparently the benefits of such a thing, saves valuable time and resources, and often yields very interesting results compared to creations made by artists. These algorithms use hundreds of parameters, and sometimes by simply altering these parameters, very unique fiction can be created. What I am personally interested in is the implications of such a phenomena on the physical game world itself. Using AI and allowing the player to explore and interact with NPC's, how does the change of parameters affect the actual behavior of people inside the world, or what it could imply… I'm not just talking about road networks, and traffic changes, (although that in itself is interesting too) bur rather the way it would influence social encounters. Take Paris for instance, it is no shocker that the center of the city is the busiest and perhaps safest area, and that the slums exists radially in the outskirts. As the city grows so does its epicenter and once slums are now middle-class residencies. How can an AI be configured to simulate such a phenomena through changes in parameters. After all what would make a city more real than for the player to feel tendencies to stick to busier streets rather than slums, and allow for the NPC's to behave like real people in large cities do. A simulation of AI in relation to the changes of parameters within a modeled city. In a way, this phenomena could carry on what "The Sims" tried to do, attempt to model the behavior of people in spatial environments more realistically then previous games (GTA, MAFIA, lA NOIRE etc.) have done. On the other hand such a simulation would never truly mimic the spontaneous behavior of people in reality, but it can always be used as a tool, especially in architecture.

Source Here

  
Procedural Destruction and the Algorithmic Fiction of the City
 

[Image: From Procedural Modeling of Cities by Yoav Parish and Pascal Müller].

Note: This is a guest post by Jim Rossignol.

In 2001 Yoav Parish and Pascal Müller spoke at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, California, to present a mathematical city. Their presentation contained an algorithmic approach for modeling city-like topologies. The results were remarkably realistic, and were one among a host of city-like generative systems to appear at the start of the decade.

Another, Jared Tarbell's Substrate (pictured) remains a fantastic example of how a mathematical approach to generating apparently urban patterns can also be artful.

[Image: From Jared Tarbell's Substrate].

But it was looking at the work of Parish and Müller that inspired game designer Chris Delay to develop his most recent project: the cryptic (and as-yet-unexplained) Subversion, of which little is known, other than it relies on large, procedurally generated cities for the backbone of its game world.

Having already been burned by the problems of creating content "by hand," Delay set out to let algorithms do the work of building buildings in his new game. Not only that, but he was determined to create an artistically interesting experience without artists.

[Images: From Chris Delay's Subversion].

Of course, videogames have long been the home of procedurally generated landscapes where numbers and mathematical equations played the role of the visual designer. Early paranoid classic The Sentinel made use of these techniques to create an astonishingly atmospheric 10,000 levels in simple vector graphics, from just a few kilobytes of data. Other games have used similar techniques as a shortcut to creating solar systems and vast fractal landscapes.

But when it came to cities, well, it took a long time for anyone to take up the challenge.

[Image: From The Sentinel by Geoff Crammond].

Rather than opt for procedural techniques, game designers usually elect to build their cities by hand, often with startling results. The re-imagined contemporary New York that features in last year's Grand Theft Auto 4 required a small army of well-paid artists and designers to hand-craft the entire world. Their accomplishment is unmatched, but the cost to the company behind the project is in the tens—and perhaps hundreds—of millions of dollars. To build up a living city from blank polygons is one of the most expensive possible projects in game design.

Delay, whose project is being undertaken with a tiny budget and by just a handful of staff based in Cambridge, UK, does not have the luxury of vast content teams. His vector-drawn city is far less realistic than Rockstar's textured, heaving metropolis, but there's nevertheless a beauty to it. It's a kind of mathematical map of the essential urban environment: there are roads, sidewalks, and a no-man's land of corporate moats around great skyscrapers...

Identify the key equation that define urban patterns, and you, too, can summon a city into existence.

Delay has begun to show off how his cities emerge from the ground up in a series of videos, and he spoke to me about the process.

"I started out with road layouts, and then began to modify the parameters," he explained. "Sometimes you'll get lovely radial, spiral patterns, or you can tell it to create a really rigid Manhattan-style grid." One set of numbers delivers the block logic of American cities, another is rather more like the spirals of Medieval European sprawls. The two merge to create something even more believable. "Every subsequent layer builds on the previous layer," Delay points out, "so the very next layer looks for the spaces between layers, and makes judgments about 'is this likely to be a skyscraper, or to be a house?' Then you zoom in, and carry on. You do another procedural generation process for each layer of detail, filling in that world."

[Image: From Chris Delay's Subversion].

A few weeks after speaking with Delay I attended Thrilling Wonder Stories—a seminar at the Architectural Association in London, curated by Liam Young and BLDGBLOG—where I watched conceptual designer Viktor Antonov explain how he had created a science-fictionalized Paris (for a now-cancelled videogame called The Crossing).

Antonov approached the problem by altering just a few parameters in the standard architectural model. For instance, Antonov had noticed a few fundamental details about how the mid-nineteenth century neo-classical core of Paris had been constructed: big street-level floors, smaller attic spaces, complex chimney stacks. By increasing the emphasis on the lower floors, and stretching them out—and by emphasizing the height and complexity of the chimneys—Antonov was able to create a thematically consistent science fiction Paris.

Simply by altering a few basic architectural parameters, he said, you were able to fictionalize the city, whilst at the same time retaining its fundamental identity. His designs were still recognizably—even mathematically—Parisian, in other words, but they were also otherworldly.

[Image: By Viktor Antonov].

This idea instantly connected back to Delay's project: what parameters would we need in order both to understand and create a science fiction Edinburgh, or Sao Paulo, or Vancouver? Identify the necessary fantasy logic within a procedural city-building system and you could recreate cities with their alternate identity in an instant. An accelerated future Moscow, or a retropunk Venice, instantly sprawling out of the monitor.

And perhaps this is not such an outlandish thing to aim for—especially when you consider the speed at which procedural city projects have been appearing across the tech landscape. Could one of these cities potentially be refitted to allow for this type of radical tweak?

Projects like Shamus Young's impressive PixelCity, or Marco Corbetta's Structure seem ripe for such strange fictions. Corbetta's system is particularly impressive in its verisimilitude: he aims to create a basic engine for rapidly generating the kinds of cities that games like Grand Theft Auto 4 require, and consequently doing so for much cheaper.

Could Corbetta's engine come with a Paris or a Barcelona preload, which could then be put through Photoshop-style filters for alternate reality logic in its architecture? A stronger skyline, weirder street furniture.

[Image: From Marco Corbetta's Structure].

More exciting, at least for the thrill-seeking gamer in me, is the fact that Corbetta is aiming one notch higher than any of his peers: he's aiming to make these cities procedurally destructible. His site contains a demonstration video of neatly arrange office interiors and a domestic library being blown to pieces with a machine-gun. What good is an imaginary city if you can't go inside the buildings? What good is a virtual downtown if you can't go crazy with a bazooka? Corbetta's work preempts these questions.

Further, it conjures visions of massive demolition exercises in parallel worlds—entering an Antonov-algorithm for neo-Rome, where gladiatorial escapades see us going through the walls of the coliseum and into the randomly generated plazas beyond.

That, perhaps, is the greatest promise of procedural cities: that soon they'll be real enough that their destruction will seem like tragedy.

Gamasutra Article

Gamasutra Article Here

BELOW: An article I found online that highlighted some major areas of interest that tie in the role of architecutre plays in video games. This article was written in 2002. We have since come a long way, its good to see what conclusions notable people have come to see in gaming, how far we have come, and how valid they are today... The Role of Architecture in Video Games By Ernest Adams GamasutraOctober 9, 2002 This month's column began life as a lecture I gave to the Ars Electronica  festival of electronic and computerized art, in Linz, Austria. They requested  the topic, and although it sounded a bit odd at first, the more research I did,  the more interesting it got. This month's column is a short version of that  lecture. My audience was mostly artists and a good fourth of them had never  played a videogame in their lives, so I had to include a lot of background  material about game design that isn't included here. Why Humans Construct Buildings The most popular PC game of all time, The Sims, was influenced and  partly inspired by the work of an architect, Christopher Alexander's book A  Pattern Language. It has more to offer us than perhaps we realize.  As I began thinking about the role of architecture in games, I started off by  making a list of reasons that humans construct buildings in the first place: To protect people, goods, and animals from the weather. To organize human activity efficiently (factories, theaters, offices,  sports arenas) To conceal and protect goods and animals from theft (warehouses, barns,  shops, storage facilities). To offer personal privacy (toilets and private houses). To protect people from other people (fortifications, military  installations, prisons). To impress, commemorate or simply decorate (civic monuments and religious  buildings). If we look at these functions with respect to games, however, some are  meaningful and some are not. Weather, the primary reason for constructing most  of the buildings in the world, is irrelevant. If it exists in games at all, it's  usually cosmetic. Privacy, too, is normally immaterial -- most games don't let  you take your clothes off anyway. It is useful to organize human activity in games, but buildings aren't the  most efficient way to do it. There's no real need to visit a building called the  "Town Hall" in an online game when you could just send email to whoever works  there; but the building provides a convenient metaphor for the functions that  the Town Hall provides. Theft, likewise, may or may not be possible in games; if  it is possible, a building provides a convenient metaphor for concealment and  protection -- a way of indicating that an item is inaccessible to thieves. In  Age of Empires, once a resource is placed in the storage pit, it's protected  from theft. The storage pit is really a magic place that converts resources from  being vulnerable and unusable, to invulnerable and available for consumption.  The game could call it anything it likes, but it calls it a building. It's not  much like a real building, though: it never fills up, and if you burn it down  you don't lose the contents. The Treasury in Dungeon Keeper was more like  a real treasury: it could get full, and people could steal money out of it if it  wasn't guarded. Two functions that do translate over directly are military activity and  general decoration. Just about all wargames make use of constructed edifices as  a means of concealment and protection for troops, and any game that tries to  create a sense of place uses architecture to define how that place feels to be.  In short, buildings in games mimic the real world when necessary or  aesthetically desirable, but this is not always the case. There are no buildings  in chess. Games do have a problem portraying outdoor spaces. Because of the limitations  of looking at a monitor, we can't create sweeping vistas or panoramas that feel  like the real thing. If you've ever tried to photograph the emptiness of a  desert or the Great Plains, you'll know what I mean: an essential part of the  experience is the sense of being surrounded by vast open space. Players sitting  in a room, looking at a CRT, never feel that way. Another part of that sensation  comes from the sheer length of time it takes to get anywhere. Most games allow  you to move pretty fast -- no more than a few minutes to walk from one side of  the world to the other so, the sense of scale is diminished. And of course  aerial perspectives reduce the impressiveness of everything: the Great Pyramid  is no big deal from 5000 feet up. We're not very good at natural objects,  either. In 3D games, straight lines are cheap and curves are expensive, so we  tend to avoid curves. But look at an oak leaf: it's nothing but curves. With  thousands of leaves per tree and thousands of trees in a forest, there's a good  reason why we leave forests alone. As a result, most 3D games tend to feel  rather sparse and sterile. Bauhaus, yes; botanical gardens, no. The Primary Function of Architecture in Games The primary function of architecture in games is to support the gameplay.  Buildings in games are not analogous to buildings in the real world, because  most of the time their real-world functions are either irrelevant -- the  real-world activity that the building serves isn't meaningful in the game -- or  purely metaphorical. Rather, buildings in games are analogous to movie sets:  incomplete, false fronts whose function is to support the narrative of the  movie. Movie sets create context and support suspension of disbelief. They also  diverge from the real world for narrative purposes. Consider New York as seen in  a movie by Woody Allen, who loves the place, versus New York as seen in Taxi  Driver. Sets are part of the story; they can make a place seem more (or less)  beautiful, dangerous, tacky, etc. than it really is. Gameplay (in non-social  games) consists of challenges and actions taken to overcome them; architecture  supports the gameplay by helping to define the challenges. There are four major  ways in which this happens: constraint, concealment, obstacles or tests of  skill, and exploration. Constraint: In board games like chess and checkers, there are no  boundaries except for the edge of the board. The challenge of the game is  created by the rather arbitrary rules governing how the pieces may move. In  representational games, we want units to move the way they would in real life,  not according to some artificial rule; but most of the time we don't want them  moving anywhere they like. Architecture establishes boundaries that limit the  freedom of movement of avatars or units. It also establishes constraints on the  influence of weapons. As a general rule, projectiles do not pass through walls  (no matter how flimsy) nor do explosions knock them down, nor fires burn through  them. Concealment: Few computer games are games of perfect information, in  which the player knows everything there is to know about the state of the game.  Architecture is used to hide valuable (and sometimes dangerous) objects from the  player; it's also used to conceal the players from one another, or from their  enemies. Obstacles and tests of skill: Chasms to jump across, cliffs to climb,  trapdoors to avoid -- all these are part of the peculiar landscape architecture  of computer games. Some of them can be surmounted by observation and logic,  others by hand-eye coordination. Exploration: Not quite the same as overcoming obstacles, exploration  challenges the player to understand the shape of the space he's moving through,  to know what leads to where. Mazes are of course one of the oldest examples of  such a challenge. If the game doesn't give the player a map, he may have to rely  on his memory to learn his way around. In recent years we have started making  better use of subtle clues: sunlight coming through a window means that we're  near the outside; a differently-shaded patch of wall indicates a secret  door. Persistent worlds like Everquest use buildings for a variety of social  functions as well, of course, but as those are largely obvious and symbolic, I  won't address them here. Some time ago I came across the website of Canadian game designer Peter Lok  (http://www.dragonridge.com/). Included on his site was a  sketch of a long ventilation shaft leading from the roof of a building straight  down into an equipment room on the ground floor. The sketch included the  following notation: Shutters that open and close. Must jump down when open and fan is  on. When closed you plummet and shutters are electrified. Have 2 sets of  fan/shutter. Must land on ledge above fan. Blades will kill  you. Equipment room with ducts and access doors to  labs. Considered as real-world architecture, this is isn't very sensible. The fans  must blow out rather than in (that's why you don't plummet if you jump in while  they're on). You might need two fans in order to move a given volume of air, but  why would you need two sets of shutters? And why in the world are the shutters  electrified? Above all, the remainder of the building is undefined. Like a movie  set, it's just a false front, a container for the ventilation shaft and the  equipment room below. As game design, however, it's perfectly functional, though not entirely  obvious to the inexperienced gamer. It supplies constraint (the player starts on  the roof and must go down the ventilation shaft to get to the equipment room);  an obstacle challenge (the fan blades and electrified shutters which, reading  between the lines, we can tell must go on and off at intervals); and an  exploration challenge (the player doesn't know what's at the bottom of the shaft  until she gets there). Here's another example of how game design diverges from reasonable  architecture. Notice the strange and wasteful design of this building complex  from Quake. This building is designed to be explored, not used. Figure 1. A map of a building in Quake. Or consider this oddly-shaped valley from the Militia level in Counter-Strike. The building at the end is fairly rational, but the shape  of the valley itself is optimized to create combat challenges through constraint  and concealment. It's designed with lots of things to hide behind, allowing  small numbers of snipers to cover the whole valley -- in both directions. Figure 2. The Militia map in Counter-Strike. All these things are examples of the environment supporting the gameplay,  even if they're rather peculiar in real-world terms. The Secondary Function of Architecture in Games If architecture were only about supporting the gameplay through constraint,  concealment and so on, it could all be bare grey concrete. But architecture has  a secondary, and still highly valuable role to play: to inform and entertain in  its own right. It does this by a variety of means: Familiarity. Familiar locations offer cues to a place's function and  the events that are likely to take place there. If we see a kitchen, we don't  expect to find a blacksmith making horseshoes. We rely on players to use common  sense about the function of certain kinds of familiar spaces, and it's cheating  (a conceptual non-sequitur) to violate their legitimate expectations without any  explanation. If you can crawl through the ventilation ducts to get past the  security guards, it's not reasonable to meet another security guard inside the  ducts -- unless you've made so much noise that one has gone in to  investigate. Figure 3. Gabriel Knight is waiting for the maid to finish  cleaning this hotel  room. Allusion. Game architecture can make reference to real buildings or  architectural styles to take advantage of the ideas or emotions that they  suggest. There's a vast amount of material to borrow from in the real world,  from the ruinous spiritual grandeur of Stonehenge to the gruesome expediency of  the gas chamber at San Quentin. Figure 4. Soul Reaver is a game about a vampire that eats  souls, so a cathedral has powerful  connotations. New worlds require new architecture. To create a sense of  unfamiliarity, create unfamiliar spaces. This has the disadvantage that it robs  the player of a frame of reference, and can create confusion rather than  emotional resonance. To avoid this problem, you can name the buildings when  necessary. Among the buildings in Figure 5 is the Brothel for Slaking  Intellectual Lusts, a place where you can pay scholarly prostitutes to talk to  you about philosophy and art. Figure 5. An aerial view in Planescape: Torment. Note the  extreme variety the of buildings and the lack of cues as to their  function. Surrealism. I complained about pointless surrealism in my first "Bad  Game Designer, No Twinkie!" column, but architectural surrealism does have a  point if it's connected to the gameplay. It creates a sense of mystery and more  importantly, it warns the player that things are not what they seem. A surreal  landscape tells him that the game may require extreme lateral thinking or  strange leaps of logic to win. Figure 6. Myst had a strong surreal element in its  architecture. Atmosphere. To create a game that feels dangerous, make it look  dangerous. The city street in The Longest Journey, below, looks like the  concrete canyons of Manhattan with their looming high-rises, dim light, and  graffiti. The rose window of the cathedral, partially hidden in the background,  suggests a place of sanctuary nearby. Figure 7. The city of Stark, from The Longest  Journey. Comedic effect. Not all game worlds are familiar, dangerous, or weird;  some are supposed to be lighthearted and funny. Note the Disneyesque bulging  walls and off-kilter windows of Planet Threepwood, below. This isn't so much a  building as an architectural joke. Figure 8. Escape from Monkey Island. Architectural clichés. Games, like other forms of popular media, often rely  on clichés and stereotypes to set a scene and establish player expectations  quickly. These are a sort of variant on familiarity, without the benefit of  being informed by real-life examples. The scene from Dark Age of Camelot below  includes all the necessary elements to suggest a sort of Lego-land medievalism:  you have your dragon, your symmetrical castle complete with banners, your Olde  Worlde half-timbered building, and even your mystic runes graven in stone. This  place may not look like any place in the real world, but thanks to Hollywood and  earlier games, we know exactly what's supposed to happen here. Figure 9. Dark Age of Camelot. Conclusion Architecture -- meaning both landscapes and structures -- is what turns the  bare grid of the chessboard into the living world of the computer game. Its  importance is on a par with character design in creating the player's visual  experience. Character design tells you who you are; architecture tells you where  you are. But more than that, it also tells you what might happen to you there,  and even sometimes what you ought to be doing. Perhaps there will come a time  when student game artists in college routinely study Viollet-le-Duc and  Vitruvius, Gaudí and Gropius. I hope so. Our games can only be the better for  it. Copyright © 2002-2003 CMP Media  Inc. All rights  reserved.

"Waste in Transit"

 Architecture Depends Here

In his book “Architecture Depends” Jeremy Till brings up a notion about architecture that has always since disturbed me; “Waste in transit” –p.67. The notion that at the end of the day, architecture is dependent on time and that given that certain amount of time, a building will eventually fulfill its uses and become obsolete. Buildings are thus durable goods. There have been architects which would take this notion to the extreme, such as Cedric Price; an architect who would famously demand for the demolition of his buildings (as few of them as they were); convinced that they too have lost touch with time. 

In games, where the entire lifespan of a game is nothing like the real world, the architecture revolves around “events,” and entire sequences and worlds are created for as little as a couple of seconds never to be seen again. Time is different in games, because of our computers need to load information for scenes separately, because a game must eventually end, and most importantly because we are easily bored and enjoy changes of scenery (to enhance the adventure or feeling of progress). This is one of the primary differences between real world architecture and game architecture that we often overlook. Time; the fourth dimension.

What does this imply? Architecture in games can become very specific; ignoring the cosmetics (facades/textures) the physical geometry is made to become very unique to the plot and the movements of the player. And just like authors of stories alter the level of imagination of their readers, game developers may alter the linearity of paths and destinations, but the overall form of the levels is usually found to be much more specific (especially in brief first person shooters). This is because the game works around brief encounters and events.

This also means that players develop an intuition of spaces they may enter. I for one know, that a large open space in the middle of a map for instance, may in seconds turn into a very difficult encounter or fight scene. 

The point to all this is, waste in transit is very different in games, time is completely obscured, if anything alluded to represent time in real life.

However, although I am busy highlighting the difference between real architecture and game architecture by introducing the element of time. Just to add a little bit of food for thought; to long have architects tried and failed to make adaptable buildings that last thousands of years, only to find that after even 50 years these buildings seem so outdated and dull. Perhaps architects should worry less about how to make their buildings last a thousand years in making them very general and more about how to make their buildings very specific if only for a couple of years, buildings that do exactly what they nead to do, for the present. We can never predict the future, and thus it is pointless to try and create buildings that depend on the undependable. If there is a lesson to be learned from gaming, perhaps buildings should also begin to revolve around “events.” This is much more easily said than done, and completely ignores the economic and global implications, but bear in mind the refurbishments and headaches involved around modernizing very old buildings (I’m not talking just about listed or very important historic buildings). If we today, have succeeded in reaching a stage that we are quickly replacing our cell phones, planes, fridges and automobiles, perhaps the next frontier is in buildings. Where the building revolves around a current time, not a prediction of what it could be in the future.