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Video games can provide a home away from home
BY LON R. GROHS, ASSOC. AIA
'orlds removed from the everyday hassles of the
construction industry
where budgets, punch
lists, and paperwork rule
lies another territory,
where astonishing buildings are created with nary a lawsuit
or insurance claim
even if their occupants do tend to be
subject to an unprecedented amount ofbloodshed and gore.
Video games today constitute a multi-billion-dollar
industry that depends upon a delicate balance offantasy
and reality: enough fantasy to constitute entertainment,
and enough reality to make the experience fully absorbing.
Architecture in this virtual environment serves the same
purpose as it does in the physical environment: it creates
a sense of place. But in a video game, it must also support a
story. In some games, architecture provides the backdrop for
the activities of the characters: the surreal environments of
Myst 4 allude to the mysterious nature of the gameplay. In
others, such as SimCity 4, architecture to a great degree ls
the game. And still others absorb the language of architecture to allow players to create alternate virtual lives on the
lnternet In MarsNext, you can become a certified citizen
of\tars and own a deed to a virtual residence. At Second
Lite, r.ou can orfll your dream house and yacht. One gamer
*p'emt
$36500 in real-world currency on
game Project Entropia.
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The technologies used in the creation of built architecture
and virtual architecture share the same DNA, with sometimes
surprisingly different results. As Michael Wu of Microsoft's
Bungie Studios notes, "It is easy to lose your way and get lost in
a virtual world. We don t feel temperature changes, remember
the effort of going up stairs, or notice the slight change in light
from one offrce to the next. Remove all senses except vision, and
suddenly you realize just how few cues there are."
As more architecture schools adopt courses in virtualenvironment design, we can expect that more designers will be
drawn to careers in the virtual world. And among those who are
committed to building in the physical world, we may see new
design sensibilities.'i{rchitecture doesn't necessarily express the
relationship between spaces visuallyi'Wu observes. "In fact it
would seem that most contemporary buildings let signage do all
the work. People have become accustomed to reading a directory
rather than the building itself. But in a game, a player standing
in front of a directory will get a melee attack from the back or
get sniped from the flank within moments." o
Lon R. Grohs, Assoc. AlA, is the director of architectural
visualization at Neoscape in Boston. He is a member of the
American Society of Architectural lllustrators and the New York
Society of Renderers.
luly.August 2oo5
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