![]() But crucially, as a medium they also provide the platform for architects to extend such practices into the future. Games remind us of the historical moments when utopic architecture held a mirror up to society. Yet in doing so, they reestablish the importance of utopian, synthetic world-building practices that first revolutionized the architectural discipline in the 1960s and 70s. Videogames foreground fantastical environments because they are entertainment media that are designed to draw players into imagined and novel systems. While having been adopted as a tool for architectural and social engagement, Minecraft’s popularity grew based on a gravity-free, near-infinite environment with its own complex fictional material economy. This can produce deviant, unprecedented, and explosive ways of structuring space. The generative meets the narrative and symbolic in Dead Cells (2017), with themed areas (biomes), the constituent spaces of which are assembled randomly each playthrough.ĭespite this architectural potential, games as entertainment media have no prerogative to solve spatial or social issues. No Man’s Sky (2016) has pushed the boundaries of “procedural” systems, where unique game worlds and the architecture that resides within it are assembled through an algorithm. Players become commandos-cum-architects where the rapid and precise building of enclosure is as potent a weapon as the crosshairs of the virtual gun. One of the most recent gaming phenomena, Fortnite (2017)-ostensibly a “last player standing” shooter game-has players recycling building materials with a giant pickaxe and rapidly fabricating structures in the landscape to hide themselves or access new areas while holding architectural blueprints in their hands. Beyond often-referenced titles like Minecraft (2009), SimCity (1989), or Cities: Skylines (2015), architectural space regularly operates as both backdrop and protagonist. Many contemporary videogames are inherently architectural, dealing with the depiction of constructed space and actions that take place within it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |