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Senseable City Lab :.:: Massachusetts Institute of Technology This paper might be a pre-copy-editing or a post-print author-produced .pdf of an article accepted for publication. For the definitive publisher-authenticated version, please refer directly to publishing house’s archive system SENSEABLE CITY LAB Article Space and Culture 1–24 Spatial Design and Placemaking: © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Learning From Video Games DOI: 10.1177/1206331217736746 journals.sagepub.com/home/sac Ricardo Álvarez1 and Fábio Duarte1,2 Abstract Spatial design and placemaking are fundamental to create a vibrant urban life, whereas video games are designed primarily for temporary amusement. However, they both share the same essence of creating large-scale artificial environments for human interaction as their fundamental value. Video game developers have been successfully using spatial design tools to create virtual environments to engage players and build narratives, understanding, and appropriating many characteristics of what makes a place tick. In this article, we argue that spatial design and placemaking could learn from video games development, by incorporating features ranging from storytelling and multiple viewpoints to participatory practices and flexible design. Keywords spatial design, placemaking, video games, design strategy It is probably a bit awkward to think that spatial design and placemaking could learn from video games development. These activities would seem to have nothing in common. Spatial design and placemaking create a vibrant urban life, whereas video games exist primarily for temporary amusement, something like an amuse-bouche to higher art forms. Spatial design gave us the Paris of Haussmann; video games gave us Pac-Man. However, they both share the same essence of creating large-scale artificial environments for human interaction as their fundamental value. While one may dismiss video games as trivial, researchers have been studying them to understand how game developers use spatial design tools to create virtual environments to engage players and build narratives, and how planners can use video games to teach spatial design and planning. Jesper Juul (2005) defines video games as a combination of real rules and fictional worlds; and Gordon Calleja (2007) argues that motivational attractors sustain long-term and moment-to- moment engagements, which involves the placement of the camera, active and inactive moments, and spatial configurations. On the other hand, Kurt Squire (2006) discusses how video games have been used in classrooms throughout the United States, including urban planning; and Henry Jenkins (2010) proposes transmedia storytelling approaches integrating entertainment experiences across different platforms and projects. Within this context, the combination of video games characteristics and spatial design practices is at the core of this article. We argue that in just a few decades the video games industry has been able to understand and appropriate many characteristics of what makes a place tick; and simulate spaces that are at times eerily grounded, and for lack of a better term “perceptually real.” Video games development is not seen here as an appendix of more traditional spatial design methods, but as a parallel framework and toolset that has been in continuous development by the interactive entertainment industry and which could inform spatial design and planning. Furthermore, we argue that video games represent a cultural activity that places humans at the center of parallel 1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA 2Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil Corresponding Author: Fábio Duarte, Senseable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 9-209, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Email: [email protected] 2 Space and Culture and interactive realities that operate following a coherent set of rules. This set of rules that are matrixial to space (the centrality of the human body and mind in shaping the interaction with space, the multiple interdependent variables that shape space and social interactions) makes video games a fruitful realm to think critically about spatial design and placemaking. We make no attempt at stating that spatial design, placemaking, and video games development are at the same level of complexity or maturity. They are not. However, the spatial design and placemaking knowledge that has been digested and internalized by the video games industry in such a short amount of time is astounding (particularly during the last decade). Following the history of the video games industry, we highlight the development of complex design tools, which encompass technological as well as social aspects of spatial design and placemaking. Indeed, some of the toolsets used in video games development are often more powerful and flexible for designing urban forms than the ones urbanists use (Indraprastha & Shinozaki, 2009). We conclude the article by summarizing the key aspects that make video games development a source of inspiration and knowledge for spatial design and placemaking practices, arguing that a cross-pollination of sorts between these practices would do both sides well. Video Games and Spatial Design Exploring how games can inform design practice, N. John Habraken and Mark Gross (1988, p. 151) point out that “games enable us to study design actions by providing an environment that is manipulable and well bounded,” where many actors’ behaviors and actions influence the resulting design. Although their research concentrated on board games, some categories are present in video games as well, such as variable physical organization, control distribution, territorial organization, program, multiplayer action, and in-play development—in which not only the initial creator determines the overall design outcome but also the players themselves. More recently, Koutsabasis (2012, p. 358) argued that the design community’s increasing interest in virtual worlds is due to similar qualities: “communication, embodiment, presence and copresence, 3D visualization and interaction, and increased user engagement.” Video games development makes clear that spatial design and placemaking is not simply a matter of building realistic environments. Space does not simply rely on form, but on how its qualities trigger people’s responses, which ranges from behaviors to affections. Jorge Gil and José Duarte (2008) make the point that video games “encode urban models that become understood through play.” The video games industry slowly built its strength in the complex approaches to spatial design. As Steven Poole (2000) puts, the inner life of video games—how they work—is bound up with the inner life of the player. And the player’s response to well-designed video games is in part the same sort of response he or she has to a film, or to a painting: it is an aesthetic one. (p. 11) More than two decades ago, Will Wright made quite a splash with his game SimCity (Maxis, 1989), which became the seminal work for the “City Simulation” genre. The game was very forward looking for its time, presenting urban scenarios for virtual mayors, such as a crime ridden Detroit, an earthquake in San Francisco, a nuclear plant meltdown in Boston, or a coastal flooding in Rio de Janeiro due to global warming (Figure 1). Its simulation software revealed an underlying logic of a machine city that emulated both urban planning and socioeconomical dynamics within its hypothetical scenarios using a multiagent-based software (Weinstock & Stathopoulos, 2006). The game prompted discussions both in amateur and academic circles regarding the value of these simulators in city development and management processes. Likewise, the game and its future iterations have been used to teach students to grapple the complexities of urban planning, which involves several interrelated parts and interacting variables, and which have immediate formal and social reflections in the city (Gaber, 2007; Minnery & Searle, 2014). Álvarez and Duarte 3 Figure 1. Boston Scenario, SimCity, Maxis, 1989, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Maxis. Although powerful, SimCity is often used in the planning realm presenting the player’s engagement from a third-person perspective, as someone who acts as a strategist. Daniel Golding (2013) states that a viewpoint from above, rather than a viewpoint from below, from a first-person perspective, where the player (and the designer) would behave more a tactician. Advocating for a first-person perspective, Golding (2013, p. 127) argues that “individuals encounter the city not as a concept, but as an immediate experience.” This change in perspective alters the game’s narratives, giving room to multiple characters and unexpected events. Spatial characteristics, the ludic aspects of the game, and narrative functions, all working in tandem to create a sense of place closer to the players/designers’ actions and intentions (see Picard, 2014). However, at the time of SimCity’s commercial release, technology was not nearly powerful nor mature enough to be used for serious work: an almost impossible task for a software package that came in a single floppy disk and ran using 512 kB of memory. The idea of it, however, remained intriguing; and though it was this piece of software the one that framed the initial interest from urbanists, the reality was that the video games industry had been experimenting with spatial design for quite