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 design- ers 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. Thresholds 46 Scatter! 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 in Assassin’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 contem- porary 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 videog- ame 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-whis- perer-architect accessed 20 June, 2017. 11 Ibid. Thresholds 46 Scatter! 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. In The 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.