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).
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