Luke Pearson Worlds That Are Given: How Architecture Speaks Through Videogames

Home , Katamari, The Last of Us

Contemporary 3D videogames implicitly involve the transmission of architec- Luketure to new audiences. While therePearson are games that expressly deal with the built environment, such as Cities: Skylines or the architect-designed Block’Hood, the nature of game spaces built in 3D game engines such as Unity or Unreal provides a constant architectural feedback loop with the game player as they are always engaging with a virtual inhabitable space. Videogame environments Worldsconstitute a meeting point between a representation That of architectural space and Are Given: the underlying logics that control how our avatars engage with that space. As Michael Nitsche has argued at length, video game space is composed of a series of layers that together synthesize the world.1 They utilize virtual geometries that are often constructed using the same programmes architects use to design buildings, such as Maya, 3D Studio Max, or even Sketchup. Virtual cameras build Howon established modes of conveyingArchitecture space developed in architectural draw- Speaks ing, such as perspective and isometric viewpoints. And players often utilize a plan-elevation minimap to orient themselves in 3D space. These virtual cameras typically follow the inputs of the player, but the developer will have decided how user inputs will affect the world. Ultimately, as McKenzie Wark points out, a game “presents worlds as if they were not just for you to look at but for you to act upon Throughin a way that is given.”2 Videogames

264 Following Wark’s assertion, videogame spaces can be seen as architectural fan- tasies that incorporate the player’s behavior into the fictional space. By collapsing the world and the action allowed within it, games have the potential to not only represent architecture, but also to represent the decisions made by the designers that establish what our behavior may be within architecture. In some respects this potential puts the videogame form in a quandary. This hints at a future for game worlds as the ideal medium for architectural speculation—places to test both new worlds and construct new models of being—in one representational environment. But at the same time, many games (for example the Assassin’s Creed series, Watch Dogs or Dying Light) are derived from existing architectural situations or established fictional tropes that can tend towards the familiar or generic. Games theorist Jesper Juul admits that “there is some extent to which the settings of games can be somewhat unimaginative” and that they have still not fully escaped their lowbrow designation.3

1 Michael Nitsche, Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press, 2008). 2 McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2007), Note [199]. 3 Jesper Juul, Half-Real (Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press, 2005), p.20.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00041 by guest on 26 September 2021 Wark and Alexander Galloway have both described game spaces as “allego- Luke Pearson rithms,” where the intuitive allegorical world meets algorithmic rules, making the game an allegorithm of reality.4 Invoking the allegorical is perhaps Wark’s way of addressing the use of established architectural images in games, following Craig Owens’ argument that “the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them.”5 This confluence of allegorical and algorithmic structure frames games Worlds That Are Given:as a remarkably different application of computation to many of those currently shaping architectural discourse in education and practice. In Walter Benjamin’s comparison of the allegory to the ruin, he argues, “allegory is in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things.”6 The ruin as a purely physical object is an emblem in dialogue with the lost historical events that shape it. As Susan Buck-Morss says, “precisely the fact that their original aura has disintegrated How Architecture Speaksmakes them invaluable didactically.”7 The aesthetic of games is also one of fragmentation, where the comparative meaning of objects is established on the fly and can constantly change. Some objects will slip in and out of “ruin” status as allegorical meaning negotiates with overtly displayed game logic. This produces temporal spaces with transitory meanings requiring an active participant in the Through Videogamessimulation to fully form the world. Of course, most game worlds are not created to form part of an architectural 265 canon; they are entertainment media. Yet by comparing the way they treat space to the thoughts of eminent architects and theorists of the discipline, we can discover how architecture speaks through them. Even when their worlds tend towards the generic on the surface, the videogame form still suggests a potential for using advanced computation to manifest concepts and create speculative, narrative, and fictional architectures that are expressed through user participa- tion. In this respect, attempts to discern new architectural regimes in the pop-cul- tural form of videogame worlds is not too dissimilar to Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour’s work on Las Vegas, where they argued they were interested in the “method not content”8 of how the city’s fantasy architecture operated. While the surface presentation of game spaces may often employ established fictional tropes, they themselves have instigated new tropes regarding our relationship

4 McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2007), Note [030]. 5 Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism”, October, Vol.12 (Spring, 1980), p.69. 6 .Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: NLB, 1977), p.177-178. 7 Susan Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge MA & London: MIT Press, 1989) p.159. 8 Izenour, Scott Brown, and Venturi,Learning From Las Vegas (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1977), p.6.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00041 by guest on 26 September 2021 Luke Pearson Worlds That Are Given: How Architectureto space—which can Speaks often be rather eccentric. Graeme Kirkpatrick has pointed Throughout inVideogames his work on game aesthetics that to “fully experience the form in a game we have to draw it out […] with our hands.”9 Puzzled parents might see a recog- nizable Paris flash by inAssassin’s Creed Unity without a full understanding of the elaborate choreographies that their child is enacting on the controller to formal- ize that world architecturally. This relationship between hand, eye, and system might speak to new, radical forms of architectural experience—even when the surface of the world is highly referential.

In the following examples, I contrast a series of concepts from the world of architecture to the mechanics of videogame spaces. Alongside this I present a series of small diagrammatic drawings derived from screenshots that delineate this relationship. I work from the scale of an object up to a universe itself to under- stand how games might communicate spatial experiences that unwittingly speak to long-held concerns of architectural theory. Each of the architectural thinkers I have chosen has influenced the limits of the architectural profession and outlined new means through which architecture can speak. By contrast, although none of these games are expressly designed to explore the concepts I have compared them to, their mechanics resonate with architectural ideas. In this regard, each of them offers clues as to how the videogame form might be co-opted by archi- 266 tects to produce new forms of conceptual space. So what messages might we be receiving when we sit down, take a gamepad in hand, and dive into a contemporary game space?

Speaking through game objects. The Last of Us, or “What do you want, brick?”10 – Louis Kahn (Figure 1) Louis Kahn famously said “you say to a brick, ‘What do you want, brick?’ And brick says to you, ‘I like an arch.’”11 For Kahn, the nature of brick leads it towards certain behaviors and, by association, forms. But in the architecture of videogame worlds, material affordances are lost and even purposefully subverted. The physical properties of an object are encoded through the game engine. As such brick is liberated from the arch and can elope towards other meanings. In The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013), set in a post-apocalyptic United States overrun

9 Graeme Kirkpatrick, Aesthetic Theory and the Videogame (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p.100. 10 Quote attributed to Kahn in: Oliver Wainwright, “Louis Kahn: the brick whisperer,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/feb/26/louis-kahn-brick-whisperer-architect accessed 20 June, 2017. 11 Ibid.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00041 by guest on 26 September 2021 Figure 1: Space navigated through throwing bricks in The Last of Us, drawing by author using screenshots from The Last of Us (2013) by Naughty Dog, 2017, digital drawing.

by plague carrying “infected” humans, cities are rendered as overgrown and deserted ruins with detritus collecting in alleyways, between burned out cars and hastily evacuated shacks. Within this, the player finds points of luminosity, objects glowing like jewels. In game worlds, such a glossy sheen usually con- notes significance. InThe Last of Us, the glow belongs to trash: bricks and bottles that become our savior, used as weapons, and to distract the infected. Having completed the story of the game, the brick is not Kahn’s brick but something else, an artefact of self-defence and navigation. It is perhaps closer to the 267 Situationists and the “beach beneath the street” of Parisian cobblestones hurled by rioters in 1968 in that the brick has structured a spatial happening rather than a built form. Yet the symbolic heft of the cobblestone comes from its reappropria- tion and removal from its original context—Haussmann’s boulevards. By contrast, designers carefully placed this digital brick to facilitate movement through the game world in the face of obstacles. This movement becomes predicated on seeking out individual bricks rather than ripping one from a multitudinous surface. The brick’s nature has been doubly changed. Furthermore, altering the difficulty of the game changes the efficacy of the brick’s ability to distract, as enemies become more or less alert. The brick’s spatial relationship to the mechanics of the game is mutable. In videogame architecture, what a brick wants to be can change and this is not seen as an inconsistency because as Kirkpatrick points out, “video games offer us experiences in which simulacra proliferate, we engage with objects that are never quite what they seem but which, nevertheless do afford us experiences that are coherent on their own terms, that is, as video game objects.”12 In The Last of Us, it is no longer Kahn’s brick, it just wants to be lobbed. Thrown through the air, perhaps the brick is actually speaking to us and saying, “I like an arc.”

12 Graeme Kirkpatrick, Aesthetic Theory and the Videogame (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p.72.

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Figure 2: Reyner Banham Loves Los Santos: a recreation of Banham’s 1970s documentary in Grand Theft Auto V,stills from film by author usingGrand Theft Auto V’s‘Director Mode’ by Rockstar Games (2013), 2017, digital drawing.

Speaking through game vehicles. The automobile as an ethic: “Los Angeles is the language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality there to a unique degree”13 – Reyner Banham. (Figure 2) While Kahn spoke of materials and objects leading to architectural form, Banham demonstrated how the automobile shaped the morphology of cities, specifically Los Angeles. Banham’s enthusiasm for the Angeleno landscape can be seen in Grand Theft Auto ,V which is not only the world’s bestselling videogame and 268 a collection of rather clumsy satires, but also a love letter to the urban form of Los Angeles. Yet as discussed by Ian Bogost and Daniel Klainbaum, GTA games tend to work with “an emphasis on how cities are perceived rather than on their objective realities”14 to produce “equivalent, yet abstract representations of key Los Angeles spaces.”15 Los Santos—Rockstar Games’ deviated LA, has never matched the true form of the original city, instead emphasising its atmosphere through a compressed and twisted cityscape. But following Banham, the car is the key link between the worlds. The huge range of vehicles open to the player in Los Santos has the effect of instigating a landscape of pure movement. While we use analog sticks on the gamepad to control the player and the car, one simple press of the button departs or carjacks another vehicle. This is the next stage of Banham’s “language of movement.” Condensing the stealing of a car into one-button-press trivializes it as an action. Rather than sticking to the domain of our own personal car, nearly every car is available. The car becomes everything

13 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2009), p.5. 14 Ian Bogost and Daniel Klainbaum, The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto: Critical Essays, ed. Nate Garrelts (Jefferson NC and London: McFarland & Company, 2006), Kindle Edition for iPad, Loc. 3130. 15 Ibid., Loc. 3210.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00041 by guest on 26 September 2021 and nothing. Or rather nothing as a singular vehicle, but everything as the ethic of a city designed around total mobility. Beyond its visual similarity, GTA V’s mechanics emphasise Banham’s conception of the spirit of Los Angeles as a city of movement. Los Santos is not accurately mapped to LA, but driving through something that looks so similar—under the auspice of mechanics that turn it into a total zone of movement—is intoxicating. All this contributes to the notion that we are in some form of ur-LA, where beyond the verisimilitude of the game’s visual presentation of a city, it speaks to us as the mechanics elevate Banham’s “autopia” to new heights by turning vehicles into a collective resource that give themselves over utterly to the mobility of the player even in their disposability.

Speaking through game cities. Dishonored’s Dunwall, or “architecture is defined by the actions it witnesses as much as by the enclosure of its walls”16 – Bernard Tschumi. (Figure 3) While GTA V’s mechanics institute the ethic of the car upon the city, some games are even more explicit in communicating their rule systems through the design of the city itself. When Bernard Tschumi talked of architecture as a witness, he was calling for a return to examining the program of architectural space, arguing that “there is no architecture without action, no architecture without events.”17 269 Videogame spaces are always programmatic, they are created to host actions and events, and in some cases this relationship is manifested most clearly in the forms that the worlds take. Tschumi might have been foreseeing the city of

Figure 3: Architectural Advertisements for Dunwall, drawing by author using screenshots from Dishonored (2012) by Arkane, 2017, digital drawing.

16 Bernard Tschumi, Advertisements for Architecture, 1978. 17 Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge MA & London: MIT Press, 1996), p.122.

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Figure 4: Hope versus reality of SimCity’s systems, drawing by author using promotional screenshot for SimCity (2013) by Maxis and screenshot of Magnasanti by Vincent Oscala built on SimCity 3000 (1999) by Maxis, 2017, digital drawing.

Dunwall that forms the backdrop to Dishonored (Arkane, 2012). Dunwall is an 270 amalgamation of London and Edinburgh designed in steampunk style. The city is made up of a series of zones that emanate out from the players headquarters, sited in a pub. As players control the protagonist Corvo Attano in his attempt to unravel a conspiracy, they may choose to sneak their way to objective points or fight their way through massed ranks of guards protecting those who control the city. As this takes place, the game tracks the “chaos” created by players through their actions, all those moments of violence and death caused (wittingly or other- wise) by the “hero.” As players create chaos, Dunwall changes. People, including allies, become more hostile. The city takes on a darker hue as the gloomy British- esque weather sets in, while the rat population proliferates, scuttling around the player as they stalk through the lamplight. The urban simulation of Dunwall reacts to the actions it witnesses, it is architecturally defined by those actions. If players take “good” moral actions, they will miss this shift into darkness and not fully draw out the formal possibilities of the city. In this case, as Tschumi reminds us, “to really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder.”18 Dunwall’s architecture provides many secret pathways and routes for the player to avoid combat, but reading it through Tschumi’s argument that “actions qualify spaces as much

18 Bernard Tschumi, Advertisements for Architecture, 1978.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00041 by guest on 26 September 2021 as spaces qualify actions,”19 we might feel that the city is truly defined by all those 271 changes that occur in its fabric as we transgress the game’s moral compass.

Dunwall carries ideology within its fabric, but it is experienced as part of a heroic journey conducted in first person. By comparison theSimCity series has long provided the template for city building games, ostensibly as a procedural approximation of a particularly American urbanism built around the grid system. The games seem rather unconnected, yet they both hold ideology within their structure which actions foreground. If Dunwall is more fully experienced through its transition to darkness, then SimCity’s endgame—a fully self-sufficient city— gives us another example of ideology bubbling to the surface. Architecture student Vincent Oscala used countless calculations in order to create a perfect, self-sustaining city in SimCity 2000 that he called Magnasanti. (Figure 4)

As Magnasanti ticks over by itself, it speaks of the possibility of designing smart cities that can maintain a responsive perpetual motion in relation to the data and information they receive. Yet Magnasanti is actually controlled by well-known mechanisms of control: regimented top-down urban planning, ultra-hardcore law

19 Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge MA & London: MIT Press, 1996), p.123.

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and order and social privation. It is a totalitarian hellscape. Seen from a distance, the density of the city appears more akin to the Kowloon Walled City—a block 272 of pure metropolis. Yet there is none of the variegation of that structure. This is because, as Daniel Lobo points out, this Sim city is developed under the rubric of segregated zoning techniques, homogeneity and faith in capitalist growth that, he argues, “is a reflection of the most extreme tendencies of development in the USA.”20 Magnasanti is achieved by taking the game to its extremity, to the point at which the city plays itself under these tendencies. Dishonored and SimCity are utterly different games, but they speak of game cities that are formed as spaces for events to take place and that can only be formally complete by means of the actions the player takes within the mechanics instituted by the designer.

Speaking through game planets. The rolling and scaling Katamari ball, or rather “there are 360 degrees, so why stick to one?”21 – Zaha Hadid. (Figure 5) While Magnasanti represents SimCity’s American grid reaching its zenith, game spaces have long played with the mechanical possibilities of different dimensions

20 Daniel G. Lobo, “Playing With Urban Life: How SimCity Influences Planning Culture,”Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2007), p.208. 21 Simon Hattenstone, “Master builder,”The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/feb/03/architecture.artsfeatures accessed 25 March, 2017.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00041 by guest on 26 September 2021 Figure 5: The scaling and rolling of a Katamari ball up to a planetary scale, drawing by author using screenshots from Katamari Damacy (2010) by Namco, 2017 digital drawing.

and spatial orientations from Portal (Valve, 2007) to Perspective (DigiPen, 2012). During her life Zaha Hadid regularly challenged conventional conceptions of 273 orientation as she created geometries that belied her desire to use all possible angles. By comparison Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004) demonstrates an urban morphology under a spherical logic that continuously rolls and grows. In Katamari games, the city literally “sticks to” all the surface protrusions of a strange nobbled ball as the protagonist, a 5cm tall prince, rolls the ball around the level. Objects become bonded to this sphere, growing in size, scale, and complexity. But unlike Zaha’s sinuous manipulation of angles, the Katamari is a multitude of singular objects that have an impact on the shape of the ball and ability of the ball to roll. As the sphere grows larger, buildings and even skyscrapers stick to it, destabilizing the ball and the city itself. Geometries clash and intersect as they cling onto the gravitational field of the rolling orb. Formally they recall the architecture of Zaha’s friend Lebbeus Woods, whose Horizon Houses could be rotated into different configurations, manifesting his obsession with architecture that challenged gravity. The objects in the Katamari ball are ultimately removed from the ecumene, which Berque discussed as “the relationship between humanity and the earth’s surface,”22 and instead gather in a spherical object-to-object relationship constituting a rolling mass of modernity. In the end, we zoom out to a planetary scale and the earth’s continents get stuck to the ball as it rolls, tearing the earth’s surface off and leaving

22 Augustin Berque, “L’Ecumène”, Spazio e Societa, Issue 64 (1993), p.33.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00041 by guest on 26 September 2021 Luke Pearson Worlds That Are Given: How Architectureit as a giant blue orb. AsSpeaks with many other games Katamari Damacy exposes the Throughcontingency Videogames of gravity and materiality in virtual worlds. Years before Christopher Nolan rolled a city up in his Inception, the Katamari games demonstrated that game space cities could be rolled around, from the scale of a domestic setting all the way to a planet as if all the objects created by humanity had decided to operate under a different set of rules. The game space allows for the new gravity of the ball to dominate, allowing us to roll all our manmade objects into the future.

Speaking through game universes. The case of No Man’s Sky or “I believe that if I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it.”23 – Giovanni Battista Piranesi. (Figure 6) While our little prince rolled up the city beyond the earth and into the stars in Katamari Damacy, Hello Games’ 2016 game No Man’s Sky marketed itself on a near infinite, algorithmically generated universe with “Every Atom Procedural.” By using procedural generation techniques, they were able to generate 18 quintillion planets within the game world—theoretically allowing players to never encounter the same element twice. In practice, digital assets such as creatures, flora, and fauna found their way onto different planets with new colors and often slight, perceptible modulations. Many railed against the perceived limitations 274 of this system—and given much of the negative feedback that followed the release of the game, perhaps it is indeed mad to attempt the design of a new universe. Despite its issues as a game, No Man’s Sky and its procedural universe demonstrate the potential power of the videogame medium for thinking about space. If Piranesi were alive today, perhaps he would be making videogames, for here is a medium where he could work in the commission of a universe. On the other hand, his capriccio works, such as his Carceri etchings with their impossible spaces occupied by strange paradoxical objects, might have foreseen game worlds where objects can take on many different meanings. We might also recall Archizoom’s No Stop City that used an ever-repeating grid system to distribute congregations of furniture and symbolic objects in a never-ending world, a precursor to the procedural systems regularly used in games today. When Tafuri wrote about Piranesi’s Carceri, he called them spaces where “not men but only things become truly ‘liberated.’”24 Spread across 18 quintillion planets, things are indeed liberated in No Man’s Sky, but the feeling for many players on encounter- ing the same plant in a different color for the fifth time, was not necessarily mutual.

23 “Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778),” Met Museum, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pira/hd_pira.htm accessed 14 August, 2016. 24 Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and The Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970 (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1987), p.32.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00041 by guest on 26 September 2021 Figure 6: Familiar flora and fauna inNo Man’s Sky, drawing by author using screenshots from No Man’s Sky (2016) by Hello Games, 2017, digital drawing.

How Architecture Speaks Through Videogames As we shift from object, to city, to universe in scale, we can see how architecture speaks through videogames. If we return to Wark’s conception of game worlds as places “to act upon in a way that is given,” we can read game spaces as media that present architecture to us not only as representations of spaces, but as mechanical systems that can mimic, interrogate, or disavow the real-world relationships to archi- 275 tecture we carry. Both work in combination and so when a game engages us with architecture, it is not in the same voice as a drawing, book, or film.

While the games I have examined are diverse, they all represent moments where the spatial design of videogames has coalesced with long-held fascinations of architectural thinkers. There are, of course, countless other comparisons that could be made. William Chyr’s forthcoming Manifold Garden draws from the aesthetics of Frank Lloyd Wright and M.C. Escher while using the inhabitable game space to explore spatial paradoxes and impossible architectural condi- tions. The Dark Souls series references gothic architecture in its world building, but the menace of its environments comes through its famously difficult combat mechanics. Games such as Plethora Project’s Block’Hood or Paolo Pedercini’s Nova Alea use the medium to tackle issues facing modern cities by engaging players with architectural, economic and ecological mechanics. These approaches suggest a future where games will increasingly be drawn into architectural design processes. And they can do this because games create spaces of action, event, and program at every scale. This practice highlights the architectural qualities of the videogame, where conceptual, virtual spaces become inhabitable through logical structures, enumerated through the choreographies of the player. With every press of the button, flick of the eye, and wobble of the analog stick, architecture speaks to us.

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