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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. 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 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 , 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 a bit of time.

The Genesis of Interactive on Screen Spatial Representation Early Experiments in Spatial Design To say that the first video games were limited in their spatial design would be an understatement. Early games consisted mostly of some pixels crudely arrayed in a single screen. Computer hardware constraints and limited processing power forced their design approach into minimalist territory (Figure 2), where only the essence of an object was used, and nonessential forms and features were removed. 4 Space and Culture

Figure 2. Pong, Atari Inc., 1972, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Atari Inc.

Figure 3. Pac-Man, Namco, 1980, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Namco (on the left). Álvarez and Duarte 5

Figure 4. Q*Bert, Gottlieb, 1983, video game. Source. Image courtesy of . . . ?[AQ2]

With simplified visuals came lean principles of interaction maximizing the choices that the player could make in such primitive environments using basic input devices. Games such as Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) or Q*bert (Gottlieb, 1982) could create endless permutations of move sequences within their abstract worlds, using just a joystick that could be pushed in only four directions (Figures 3 and 4[AQ1]). The discipline of economy in screen “real estate” used for player movement has become one of the defining cornerstones of game design since the early ages of the industry.

Storytelling and Genius Loci: Early Efforts in Place-Based Narratives Since the early years of video games, the industry started to borrow archetypes from other media forms, particularly film—what is at the center of Jenkins’ (2001, p. 93) transmedia storytelling, by which “storytellers will use each channel to communicate different kinds and levels of narrative information.” This was done in order to bring some sense of identity to what were often indistinct images, while capitalizing the mental association with already established intellectual properties. Some efforts were more successful than others. While a game such as Pitfall (, 1982) was able to channel the iconic characteristics of an “Indiana Jones” type adventurer into a successful franchise, others like E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Atari, 1982) were abject failures that became an embarrassment for everyone involved, with millions of copies buried in the desert in New Mexico (Kent, 2000). The visual limitations of early hardware created frustration in some game developers, who in the late 1970s and at the beginning of the 1980s kept trying to convey richer worlds that simply could not be displayed graphically at the time. Crucial among these efforts were the ones led by , a company founded at MIT, which sought to bring deeper storytelling techniques into video games (Briceno et al., 2000; Maher, 2013). Their first game Zork: The Great Underground Empire (Infocom, 1980) narrated place details using only text (e.g., the game begins with the following words, “West of House: You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door”). 6 Space and Culture

Figure 5. Section of Level 1-1, Bros, Co., 1985, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Nintendo Co.

This level of detail in place description and gameplay choices, unheard before in the industry, showed players and developers the possibilities of imagining larger and richer world’s. Zork, Zork II (Infocom, 1981), Zork III (Infocom, 1983), and Planetfall (Infocom, 1983), created the Adventure and Role-Playing Game (RPG) genres and demonstrated that a grounded sense of reality required both finer granularity and detail in spatial representation, and humans needed variation of choice in order to buy into a parallel reality. Malgorzata Hanzl (2007, p. 297) argues that RPG has been “a useful tool in consensus building programmes for decision making and planning professionals.”

The Rise of the “Side-Scroller” Genre: Linear Systems and Design Tools In 1983 Nintendo Co., Ltd. launched the Famicom System in Japan. The system arrived to in 1985, renamed as the Nintendo Entertainment System. Bundled with the system came a little-known game at the time called Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo Co., 1985), which became one of the greatest selling games in history (Tassi, 2016). The game was a revolutionary piece of software that introduced a side-scrolling effect of lateral movement, which allowed game levels to grow dramatically in size and complexity. The game gave birth to what was later known as the “side-scrolling” games genre, a name derived from emakimono (scroll) pictures in Japanese art, where the sequence of movement is often unveiled as the scroll unfolds (Figure 5[AQ3]). The Nintendo Entertainment System was well equipped for depicting this kind of scrolling graphics. Video games spaces, once confined to a bounded area, acquired an infinite space with unknown possibilities. Overnight the system became flooded with scrolling games, which typically came in side and top-down perspectives, although isometric views were also used. Scroller games brought linear systems design skills to the industry. Games were usually divided in levels, where each level was generally a variation of a linear system with moving obstacles and enemies. Section drawings were used for creating these levels. Additional layers were added, which moved at different speeds in order to simulate parallax effect and add a sense of 3D depth to the levels. The added layers also gave the freedom to do linear design in different planes, where the foreground was used as the “play” level, and the background was used for design motifs that created visual variations of places related to the game’s theme. Soon more intricate designs appeared. Games such as Metroid (Nintendo Co., 1985) or Castlevania (Konami, 1985) diverted from the traditional linear form of the classic side- scroller and started to incorporate multiple stacked levels, which would require maps for navigation due to the intricacy of their design (Figures 6 and 7[AQ4]). These games experimented with the notions of rhythm, spacing and sequence, and their relation with human interaction, while presenting the player a high density of activity and form. They would represent the apex of linear spaces in a 2D plane. Over the decade, hundreds of side-scrollers would proliferate to become the dominant form of spatial design in video games. Álvarez and Duarte 7

Figure 6. Upper levels segment, Castlevania Harmony of Despair, Konami, 2010, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Konami.

Figure 7. Complete layout map of Super Metroid, Nintendo Co., 1993, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Nintendo Co. 8 Space and Culture

Figure 8. Over the top world map of : A Link to the Past showing Hyrule Castle as the center of the world, Nintendo Co., 1991, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Nintendo Co.

Bigger Worlds and the Introduction of Nonplayable Characters As virtual worlds grew in size and complexity, they began incorporating nonsequential place- based activities where the depiction of monumental architecture was often used as identity drivers and storytelling devices. Many of the worlds depicted would also show actual division of activities in their spatial design. RPG’s would integrate paths, courtyards, markets, upper- scale areas of town, shanty towns, temples, factories, and even administrative and palatial environments. Architecture became another component of transmedia storytelling, in which stories flow across media, and inform and enrich each other (Jenkins, 2003). Gradually maps and navigation principles, along with iconographic representations of places and streamlined interfaces became fixtures of the video games landscape, to help the player manage these worlds. An overhead or isometric perspective used to facilitate navigation became part of the visual language of the genre (Figure 8[AQ5]). Even more importantly was the introduction of nonplayable characters (NPCs) as inhabitants of virtual worlds. Populating towns and cities throughout games, NPCs would interact in very specific manners with players. Since settlements are rarely vacant places, NPCs became crucial in driving the perceptive density of activity toward the game user, allowing places to become “alive.” Álvarez and Duarte 9

Figure 9. , Core Design, 1996, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Square Enix (left).

Figure 10. Resident Evil, Capcom, 1996, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Capcom (middle).

Figure 11. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Nintendo Co., 1998, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Nintendo Co. (right). 10 Space and Culture

Figure 12. First-person view in Mirror’s Edge, EA DICE, 2008, video game. Source. Image courtesy of (left).

Figure 13. Third-person view in Sleeping Dogs showing different levels of immersion due to different camera perspective, United Front Games, 2012, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Square Enix (right).

The Development of 3D Worlds as Interactive Playgrounds Learning to Synthesize Interactive Spaces in Three Dimensions Economies of scale made the incorporation of low-cost 3D graphics processing to video games systems possible in the second half of the 1990s, which eventually displaced 2D sprite-based machines out of the market. General consumer game consoles such as the PlayStation by or the Nintendo 64 by Nintendo Co. could render 150,000 or more texture mapped fully shaded polygons (a is the basic geometric shape out of which 3D models are made in ). Overnight, worldwide demanded new types of experiences from Álvarez and Duarte 11 their virtual worlds. The had to respond by evolving some of the foundational disciplines on which it was based.

The late 1990s represented a period of experimentation regarding the development of a new vocabulary for the industry. Again, spatial complexity increased dramatically, since now developers had to think in terms of camera points of view and Z-Axis use while devising multiple levels of immersion through varied forms of visual inputs to the players, and haptic interaction feedback from them. Initially, many games simply recreated a 2D experience but instead replacing parallax layers for polygons to a sense of depth using polygons. However, some seminal games such as 3D (, 1992); (ID Software, 1993); Mario 64 (Nintendo Co., 1996); Tomb Raider (Core Design, 1996); Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996); and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1996) started laying the foundations of interaction in 3D environments (Figures 9-11[AQ6]). These games understood the relevance of camera perspective to make it immediate, palpable. First-person perspective games allowed for the player to see the world through the eyes of a digital , while a third-person perspective usually used an over the shoulder camera that allowed the to see the game character in relation to the world; furthermore, fixed cameras angles were also used in order to control their cinematic experience. Camera perspective deeply affected design decisions. First-person games tended initially to be more claustrophobic experiences filled with corridor structures and frantic gameplay, whereas third- person perspective games were much more expansive, with larger levels overall and a slower pace (Figures 12 and 13[AQ7]). Initial 3D spaces in game design, however, remained far from real in terms of both proportions and detail. Early 3D chipsets remained too weak to display high-quality believable worlds. Most game worlds remained fairly linear in nature and had little emergent elements, giving them an artificial feel. Those few games that intended to simulate high-density open- ended urban environments such as (DMA Design, 1997) and SimCity 3000 (Maxis, 1999) still used 2D sprite-based graphics or top-down perspectives to hide the lack of graphical detail (Figures 14 and 15[AQ8]).

Creating Tangible and Hyperreal Spatial Interactive Simulacra By the turn of the millennium several companies were trying to represent realistic looking spaces in 3D form. A new generation of systems had the computational power to make it feasible. However, the leap from designing abstract 3D spaces where the developers had a lot of creative liberty versus creating a believable virtual city that people who had a lot of points of comparison could judge, was a daunting one. First, from a design perspective game developers had to learn to properly scale their designs to more human-related sizes. Second, they had to learn to systematically capture the visual and spatial design elements of a place, and combine them into coherent urban typologies. Third, they had to figure out how to populate and recreate a sense of randomness in their worlds, while maintaining an optimal experience flow; in short, simulate staged chaos and serendipity. Most important of all, they had to learn how to manage the drab places that often populate cities and mingle them with points of high interest to the player. This was crucial in order to ground believability in their environments while meeting their primary goal: to entertain. To do this, they had to increase the density of activities and landmarks per area of coverage in the game space vis-à-vis the natural heterogeneity of activities and landmarks per a similar area in a real city. They had to learn to distill the core identity pillars of a real place and amplify them. Experience intensified in essence. 12 Space and Culture

Figure 14. Top-down camera in Grand Theft Auto on the left, DMA Design, 1997, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Rockstar Games (left).

Figure 15. Sprite-based graphics using isometric perspective in SimCity 3000 on the right, Maxis, 1999, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Maxis (right).

The first major breakthrough in the industry was a game called Shenmue (, 1999), that modeled an interactive and detailed 3D representation of Yokosuka, Japan (Figure 16[AQ9]). Equally important, the place was populated by NPCs with particular agendas and roles. The player controlled avatar could walk down the market and hear NPC’s talk gossip or argue over the price of fish. Although only small parts of the city were open to the player, the game followed the RPG’s tradition of infusing a diversity of activities into their environments. Shenmue allowed gamers to enter stores, pray at the local Shinto temple, play games in the neighborhood arcade, train at the dojo, go work at the docks, and feed stray cats. Sega’s team of developers understood that in order to ground a place it needed to look lived in. They even simulated day and night cycles to alter the rhythm of the city. For the time being, Shenmue became the gold standard of simulated urban design. Álvarez and Duarte 13

Figure 16. The city of Yokosuka up close in Shenmue, Sega, 1999, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Sega.

Other games also tried to emulate city environments up close. (Bizarre Creations, 2000) allowed players to race supercars highly detailed portions of London, Tokyo, and San Francisco; whereas Jet Set Radio (Sega, 2001) portrayed a stylized cartoony version of Tokyo, where gangs of skaters would compete among themselves for the control of turfs. Cities were rapidly becoming playing fields in screens around the world. The second breakthrough came from England, when the highly controversial Grand Theft Auto III (DMA Design, 2001) was launched only 2 years after Shenmue. The game creates a fictional city named Liberty City (modeled after New York). Unlike Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto III actually scaled back the detail shown on screen, but this loss of graphical flourishes allowed for a dramatic increase in size, and activity density (Figures 17 and 18[AQ10]). The city was enormous; it had a game world that was designed to release players to do their will on it (hence, its genre was labeled a sand-box games). Few things were scripted; almost everything was procedurally generated in real-time. Virtual citizens would react in unpredictable manners, cars would roll through the streets, while the weather randomly changed and affected everyone. Liberty city was divided in three major districts, which encompassed various typologies, from industrial zones, to high-rise office buildings, an airport, and residential zones, with corresponding linkages and landmarks as well as changes in social groups and ambiance.

Temporal and Regional Aesthetics Integration Throughout the history of video games, the industry borrowed identity elements, as psychological and narrative anchoring devices, from different media, such as films, books, and photography. As Jay Lemke (2009) exemplifies,

in the course of gameplay, you will read printed texts, view and interpret static images of a wide variety of genres, experience in many cases video scenes that have been pre-rendered and are triggered by some pattern of action, and hear music and sound-effect. (p. 196[AQ11]) 14 Space and Culture

Figure 17. Main streets map of fictional Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto III on the left, DMA Design, 2001, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Rockstar Games (left).

Figure 18. Grand Theft Auto III screenshot on the right, DMA Design, 2001, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Rockstar Games (right). Álvarez and Duarte 15

Figure 19. Architectural, urban, and motif integration combining Art Deco and Mesoamerican aesthetics in Remaster, Studios, 2015 (originally designed by LucasArts in 1998), video game. Source. Image courtesy of Double Fine Studios.

With the advent of more intricate stories and worlds, designers understood the need to increase both the complexity of the inspired elements as well as their level of synthesis. A good example is Grim Fandango (LucasArts, 1998), whose story arch melded a noir comedy ( inspired by the film Casablanca) with the Mexican Day of the Dead festivities. Stylistically, it required mixing inputs from both the Art Deco and Art Nouveau along with Mesoamerican iconography and Mexican folklore, incorporating cultural iconicity into the spatial design process (Figure 19[AQ12]). Other developers opted to follow a vein of realism. The second half of the first decade in the millennium saw an explosion of both closed and environments in the virtual space that would closely mimic real-world spaces as settings. Developers would apply much of the techniques used in games like Shenmue and Grand Theft Auto III but with a higher level of detail. Gamers had the option to live segments of cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, or Tokyo. Actual art and topographic assets were often used in their development, but they were typically tweaked, and some spatial features were modified to enhance playability (Figures 20-22[AQ13]). Of particular interest was the effort used by game developers to recreate diverse urban settings at different historical time periods, creating a set of activities that intensify their spaces and characterizations of virtual citizens based on historical figures to ground the proper representation of place. Games such as the Assassin’s Creed franchise (Ubisoft, 2007-present) partake in what essentially is urban historic and archeological research. Several cities such as Ancient Rome, Constantinople in times of Suleiman the Magnificent, Boston during the Revolutionary War, or France during the Revolution have been carefully recreated using actual historical documentation such as maps, literature, and art (Figure 23[AQ14]). These games also engage in a discussion of virtual versus actual reality by making the player travel through time and experience the past through a (VR) like device called the “Animus,” which is used as a plot device to drive the games narrative and lore forward. Games such as L.A. Noire (Rockstar, 2011) or the Mafia series (2K Games, 2002-present) recreate places such as Los Angeles in the early postwar period or New Orleans during the Civil Rights Era to explore historical, social, and political dimensions through their narratives and interactivity. 16 Space and Culture

Figure 20. Screenshot of Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 showing fictional Kamuro-Cho versus Google Streetview caption of Kabuki-Cho in Tokyo, Sega, 2010, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Sega.

Figure 21. Game map and Google map comparison of the same site, Sega, 2010, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Sega. Álvarez and Duarte 17

Figure 22. Favela Heights multiplayer level in Max Payne 3, Rockstar Games, 2012, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Rockstar Games.

Figure 23. In game representation of Paris France at the time of the French Revolution in Assassin’s Creed Unity, Ubisoft Montreal, 2014, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Ubisoft.

Perhaps the most advanced “sand-box” urban simulation at the moment is Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar, 2013). The game recreates a fictional city named “Los Santos,” which is based on modern Los Angeles and encompasses an area much larger than any in the series. It is so large that the in-game topography varies from desert to mountains to suburbia to high-density urbanscapes and even underwater. The game also recreates many of Los Angeles’s iconic destinations, such as the Hollywood sign, Venice Beach, or the Mann Chinese Theater in minute detail, not just architecturally but in terms of social activity, from both other players and NPCs (Figure 24[AQ15]). The urban design recreation of Los Santos also utilizes the full range of urban elements such as paths, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks, which are used to help the player navigate such a large synthetic world, while anchoring a memorable “image of the city” (Lynch, 1960). 18 Space and Culture

Figure 24. Examples of interactive activities possible in Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar Games, 2013, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Rockstar Games.

Perhaps what is most interesting is that the main storyline missions are there mainly to provide a narrative grounding to the place. The real content of the game is provided through the wide variety of emergent real-life activities that have been “gamified” and which the player can do outside the traditional game “missions.” A player’s avatar can wake up in the morning, do a yoga session, or go to the gym in a fictionalized Venice Beach. The player can walk around the city, drive a car, or ride a bicycle while enjoying music broadcasted from 1 of the 19 in-game radio stations (each with their own unique DJs and fake advertising ads). He or she may spend the afternoon shopping or in a movie theater, walk their dog, watch multiple TV channels, get drunk, make money though stock trading in the in game financial markets, or go scuba diving. These activities can be coherently interlinked to form larger playing sessions where the players weave their own emergent narratives. For example, a player may go shopping for a parachute, drive toward a helipad, pilot a helicopter, and perform a skydiving jump into the central business district of Los Santos creating a particular story from his daily activities which they can share through channels such as YouTube, Twitch, and Instagram. Emergent narratives such as these can be created both in single and multiplayer sessions and are critical in providing a sense of “life” to the place; one that does not stem only from the visual simulacra, but from the large amount of activity variations that the player can interact and experience. Users also expand their emergent narratives by using modification tools (commonly referred to as “mods” in the PC gaming community) that give them full access to the and assets in order to experiment with the play dynamics and level designs. Many of these experimentations become so popular with users that developers often opt to integrate them into the games via online distributed patches in order to increase the longevity of their user base.

Álvarez and Duarte 19

Figure 25. Side by side comparison of real Daley Plaza in Chicago versus socially recreated version using , Mojang, 2009, video game. Source. Socially created image on Mojang’s platform.

Toward a Future of Virtual Urban Possibilities Social Participation in Virtual Placemaking A more recent phenomenon is one where a community of users uses digital platforms to collectively design a place. In this instance, the game developers do not create any digital worlds per se, but instead release technologies that allow users to do it themselves. These technologies serve as digital building blocks that combined can create vast digital landscapes. The potential of using virtual spaces, including video game environments, for collaborative design has been discussed for many years now (Hanzl, 2007; Maher, Simoff, & Gabriel, 2000). Indeed, the crowdsourcing approach of design has proved to be a powerful device of agency; communities of millions of users have in recent years flooded the virtual space heralding exciting possibilities for participatory urban design. Perhaps there is no better example at the moment than Minecraft (Mojang, 2009), an online platform developed by a single person, Markus “Notch” Persson, who released it initially free in 2009 (in unfinished alpha state). With more than 100 million copies sold, people use the commercial release to create, share, and modify spaces. Minecraft is essentially a social platform of programmable virtual that allows users to model environments and modify behaviors to essentially code their creations into a wide variety of scenarios. Many of these scenarios have become large-scale virtual cities that are community designed, negotiated, and built. These are used as a form of representation, amusement, or simply as a vehicle for acquiring social recognition. 20 Space and Culture

Figure 26. User perspective on VR rock climbing simulator The Climb, Crytek GmbH, 2016, video game. Note. VR = virtual reality. Source. Image courtesy of Crytek GmbH.

These processes of social construction have also been used to recreate existing places. Minecraft “Loop” project seeks to model 35 city blocks of the iconic Chicago Loop area, one of the densest neighborhoods in the city. The project is a collaboration between many Minecraft players that coordinate themselves using a variety of in-game and online tools. The team has already modeled 15 city blocks with a good degree of accuracy and representation both at the hyperlocal as well as at the urban scales (Figure 25[AQ16]).

Relearning Spatial Synthesis for Immersive Virtual Reality Simulations Right now, the video game industry is going a similar process to the shift between 2D and 3D graphics. Immersive VR technologies, once described by Sutherland (1965) as “the ultimate display,” are now feasible due to advances in semiconductors, microsensors, and digital display technologies. Several systems, such as the Rift and HTC Vive head mounted displays are commercially available at consumer prices. These systems are capable of projecting a that envelops the user with enough 3D depth and synchronization with our natural senses that a real feeling of presence is created. Presence is often difficult to describe, but for the purpose of this article, we will describe it as a sensorial stimulation that leads to the user’s brain achieve a state where it is momentarily convinced to be somewhere else different from its actual physical reality. Video games are strategically poised to take advantage of VR systems, given that their central activity is to simulate synthetic worlds using transferable technologies and a methodological approach in creating spatial design. However, although it is technically possible to process and render current 3D games in VR, more often than not the experience leaves much to be desired, since they are designed to be consumed on 2D screens. The biggest difference is that experiences are greatly intensified when being consumed through head mounted displays and can become overwhelming to the user. Additionally, immersive stereoscopic images of synthetic realities displayed on VR systems at 1:1 scale and realistic 3D depth require a greater cognitive effort from users to absorb all the information transmitted. Current human–machine interface design, such as joysticks, gamepads, mouse, and keyboard, has been optimized through the years to work with 2D displays and impose artificial barriers against more natural modes of interactivity. Álvarez and Duarte 21

Figure 27. Representation of Constantinople at the time of Suleyman the Magnificent in Assassin’s Creed Revelations, Ubisoft Montreal, 2011, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Ubisoft.

Figure 28. Telemetry map showing tracked user behavior and movement trajectories in Assassin’s Creed Revelations, Ubisoft Montreal, 2011, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Ubisoft.

For example, while climbing has been an established activity in games for decades, to the point where it is hardly exciting, games in VR such as The Climb (Crytek, 2016), which is a “mere” rock climbing simulator, are able to generate a larger emotional impact for the user (Figure 26[AQ17]). Games such as The Lab (Valve, 2016) create a series of short experiences aimed at showcasing VR’s capabilities for spatial exploration, emotional manipulation, and narrative development. In a sense, the video games industry is right now in the process of creating a new language for the medium; but the tools and methodologies of video game creation alongside the immersive quality of VR—which brings a greater sense of depth both at the microscales and macroscales—and the enhanced immediacy to the environments brought by video games, increases their potential of being at the forefront of simulating spatial experiences and prototyping variations of designs. 22 Space and Culture

Conclusion: Flexibility by Design Modern game engines use a “WYSIWYP” (“What You See Is What You Play”) approach to design, focused in giving creators immediate feedback to their design choices. The interactivity provided to users during the design process is a powerful nonreplicable, nontransferable advantage. Unlike traditional tools currently used in the planning profession that produce static or noninteractive images, video game engines have the capacity to actively engage users by playfulness and interaction, using telemetry modules to monitor players’ behavior data, which is used as feedback for design refinement.

The most popular commercial and proprietary game engines, such as Unreal (), Unity3D (Unity Technologies), Frostbite (EA DICE), and CryEngine (Crytek GmbH) include play telemetry and design prototyping tools. While they were initially experimented in the development of games such as Unreal (Epic Games, 1998) and Half-Life (Valve Software, 1998) in the late 1990s, these tools were kept in place as these companies began commercializing their engines. Most games today do not go to market without extensive design and play testing. Developers begin testing both gameplay mechanics and level ideas very early in the design process and utilize an iterative logic throughout the full development cycle to improve game subsystems, level design, and to optimize “fun” and emotional intensity within games. Perhaps more important are their multiplayer and social interaction tools, by which state of the art game engines are capable of supporting thousands of users simultaneously in real time, making large-scale testing of design scenarios possible by analyzing their behavioral patterns and social dynamics in-game. Massive online multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft (, 2004), Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment, 2016), Destiny (, 2015), the series (, 2003-present), and the Battlefield series (EA DICE, 2002-present) are some of the industry’s most popular intellectual properties with millions of subscribers and monthly players. Game engine developers have followed market demand and over time migrated their prototyping capabilities to be used and tested over a large population of online synchronized users. The utilization of these tools has been a game changer for the industry and we think they hold a great potential in the field of participatory urban design (Figures 27 and 28[AQ18]). The purpose of this article was to give the reader a general overview of how the video games industry has learned to manipulate synthetic spaces across microscales and macroscales in general and urban simulations in particular. We also argue that spatial designers—including architects and urban planners—can benefit from the knowledge regarding spatial legibility, place anchored narrative design, the role of NPCs and elements of randomness needed to make the space alive and forms of interaction alongside participatory and flexible design methodologies. All of these were gradually integrated in the processes and technologies that have been created by the video games industry as a byproduct of its evolution. As the complexity of the synthetic spatial simulations grew so did the capabilities of the tools required to make them. Moving from the technological restrictions imposed by early computer systems, today game developers use state of the art design, modeling, programming, and simulation tools with fast prototyping environments and pipelines. In order to make photorealistic real- time simulations possible, modern games engines utilize highly optimized 3D graphics alongside various types of modular subsystems, ranging from realistic weather simulations to traffic management, from procedurally generated behavior of crowds and building typologies to real-time physics of material properties and light. These subsystems can be configured into a wide variety of experiences that portray cities at different scales and different purposes oftentimes integrating them seamlessly, from the microscale that focuses on recreating interactions on the ground to the macroscale that focuses on showcasing full urban dynamics at city scale, as utilized in games such as Assassin’s Creed Unity (Ubisoft, 2014), Grand Theft Auto 5 (Rockstar, 2014) and Cities XXL (Focus Home Interactive, 2015; Figure 29[AQ19]). Álvarez and Duarte 23

Figure 29. Syntheticaly modeled city in Cities XXL, Focus Home Interactive, 2015, video game. Source. Image courtesy of Focus Home Interactive.

In the end, it is clear to us that there exist many potential synergies between the video games development and the planning profession. As stated early in the article, this is an industry that has learned a great deal from the disciplines of architecture and urban planning, and which created a parallel scaffolding of tools and methodologies that stem from its technological roots in the process. While some architecture studios do utilize video game engines to showcase their work in an interactive manner, we think that designers and planners could also utilize them to improve communication of design choices, achieve greater social participation, simulate environmental conditions and effects of planning decisions, and ultimately bring a greater deal of flexibility into design practices. We think the stated potential benefits merit further research on the matter.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Senseable City Lab consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Author Biographies[AQ21] Ricardo Álvarez is a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—Senseable City lab.

Fábio Duarte is a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—Senseable City lab, and professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil.