buzzcut

Far Cry 2

Nov
06

The increase of computing power in game consoles (and by proxy games
on personal computers) has allowed for the both the increase in the
graphic detail of game environments as well as the increase in their
size and scope.

Far Cry 2 pushes the art of level design forward offering 50 square
kilometers of game levels featuring a unparalleled level of
deail–especially in the foliage.

A big part of the fun of this game is feeling like you are in the
middle of some mid-continent African bush war. And despite its Soldier
of Fortune meets Disney;s Animal Kingdom aethetic, it’s a reasosnable
fun game to play.

What I find the most interesting is that the included level editor not
only allows you to create settings as rich and evokative as those in
the game, but that with very little effort, you can make a place that
feels real and compelling. Why? Graphic detail is one. But more
important–trees and bushes. Plop down a couple of ramshackle
buildings on sand and it looks like a game. Pile on a forest of trees
and ferns, drooping vines and creeping ground cover and you have an
oasis that a National Geographic photographer could love.

Posted by email from buzzcut blog (posterous)

New York Mystery House

Jun
17

What does it take to get your Upper East Side 5th Ave condo in the New York Times? How about an architect who decides to build in a Da Vinci Code mystery right into the design and not tell the client:

Mystery on Fifth Avenue – NYTimes.com

But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough, whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.

A couple of notable points about this project and the article:

1. The fact that the client couple had children seemed to make the mystery and play acceptable, even though most of the puzzles and the prizes were focused on the grown-ups.

2. The design of the mysteries and secrets was such a compelling project that the project architect was able to engage 40-some co-conspirators in the process. Design at play and the design of play is so special that people want to participate, even if for free.

3. This article assumes this kind of fun house is unusual. And while not common, it turns out that the design of fun houses remains a consistent thread throughout the evolution of the home.

4. Once the mystery was solved, the family moved. Is the home as a game a disposable artifact, something meant to be enjoyed then discarded?

SimCity: Super Size Me

Apr
18

Close to twenty years since the original was released, SimCity remains a peculiar outlier in the videogame landscape. And why not? A game nominally designed around the job of city planner or urban designer and one that tiptoes delicately around the notions of objective, goal or win condition, it’s a wonder that the game ever sat on the shelves next to titles such as Doom and Civilization.

But rather than quibble about whether SimCity is, in fact a game, or should, on it’s merits, be considered one, instead we should accept that it has flourished in its evolutionary niche as something fun to do on your computer.

Unfortunately, the success of The Sims and glowing promise of Spore has taken more than some of the developer’s attention away from its oldest child. So, it doesn’t really surprise that other developers will rise to the challenge of updating the city-building game for the 21st Century. That’s what fuels the thrill in the following announcement:

CITIES XL – Home

Monte Cristo is pleased to announce CITIES XLâ„¢ for Windows today. In this next-generation take on the city building genre, realism will be pushed to the limit with cities that are bigger, more realistic and more sophisticated than ever before. CITIES XLâ„¢ will expand upon all the features that make city builders fun and interesting, while also letting players take their game online, as they interact with others in a massive online environment.

The game is not due until next year. But screenshots and the sheer audacity in scale make this one to watch. Will Cites XL revolutionize the SimCity genre? Is planning education about to go through another wave of enthusiasm for simulation in the classroom beyond the creaky GIS and Google Earth used today?

Will it even be any fun to manage the urban densification of an entire planet with friends?

One way or the other, playing with cities is going to get more interesting soon.

Millenium Falcon

Apr
15


While this certainly does not qualify as an example of fun architecture, this is a great example of people having fun with architecture.

Life Without Buildings speculates that, contrary to the claims of the Star Wars designer that cooked up the plans for Han Solo’s starship, The Millennium Falcon wasn’t inspired by random foodstuff.

Life Without Buildings: Otto Wagner and the Millenium Falcon: an architecture blog

However, I’m more inclined to believe he was flipping through the pages of an Otto Wagner book and came across his 1880 design for the central offices of the Vienna Giro und Kassenverein competition.

Raw speculation or brilliant insight?

For me, the question is: Are certain forms naturally fun? Maybe more precisely, any form can be imbibed with a cosmic fantasy.

Space Time Play Review

Apr
03

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Space Time Play
Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level
Edited by Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz and Matthias Böttger
2007 Birkhäuser
496 pages

www.spacetimeplay.org


Book Review

(Disclosure: I contributed two small 300 word reviews to this book. To that end, I guess this review is biased. Still, I think the book is important and has not been reviewed widely enough. So, here’s a good faith effort to share this publication).

Space Time Play is jumbled, incomplete, overreaching and at times, simply confusing. It is also one of the most important books to emerge in recent years in the worlds of videogame theory, urban planning and environmental design.

Subtitled “Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level” the book stands out as the first systematic effort to connect numerous strands that appear to unite videogames with urban planning, architecture and landscape architecture. Weighing in at close to 500 pages, the book surprisingly barely achieves a rough sketch of what could be said on the topic.

And here lies the central dilemma of Space Time Play. The magnitude of the insight into the game/environment relationship overwhelms the scope of the project. By locating an unexplored nexus in both game studies and the environmental design disciplines, the STP editors have achieved something remarkable. But unable to contain the richness of the insight within the binding, the book groans along, bursting at the seams, context slipping out with the project feeling more like a prototype than a finished work,

But what a prototype it is!

Firing an initial shot in 48 point type, the editors ask: “Why should an architect care about computer games? And what can a game designer take from architecture?” These questions summarize a bold theoretical move, suggesting simultaneously that games have something to do with architecture (here read as the stand in for all environmental design disciplines) and that architecture has something to do with games. Conceptually this does not argue for a methodological borrowing in one direction, such as to suggest that game designers might make more interesting worlds if they would just talk to a planner. Instead, the suggestion is that some hidden linkage exists that ties games to architecture and architecture to games. The connection is organic and inherent, not synthetic or external.

In scope of the material produced, the argument deserves scrutiny.
Ranging from formal analysis of game topologies and theoretical musings on the nature of narrative and the qualities of spatiality to descriptions of games about reality and reality-based videogames, over and over the 60+ essays try to connect to the dots. And while the success of any individual essay depends on the matrices you use to measure it—relevance to architecture, relevance to urban planning, relevance to videogame theory, relevance to game design, etc.—together they present a complex, interwoven description of interactive space, conceptual spatiality, the mediated society, the places of play and play in places.

Most troubling about the book is not the wild collection of essays drawn from fields as diverse as game studies, professional game design, urban planning, cultural studies and architectural theory, but rather the manner in which handled. For example, Espen Aarseth’s indispensable essay “Allegories of Space” notes that it is an abridged version of the original, truncated presumable for reasons of space. However, Daniel Lobo’s “Playing With Urban Life” is similarly edited down from its original, but there is no reference to its source or length. Both essays deserve a place in this collection, but it hurts the book’s utility for the academic researcher if they just “have to know” whether a particular piece of writing lives on in some other form, in different detail.

Similarly, a mixed bag of citation completeness across the essays (some clearly follow an academic discipline of citation unknown to other authors happy to throw out ideas in a casual fashion) and the lack of a comprehensive bibliography overlook simple resources that would significantly improve the usefulness of the collection.

Providing a thematic thread and some visual variety, the book also packages together over a hundred mini-reviews. While focused primarily on games–Katamari Damacy, The Sims, World of Warcraft and others– these short summaries also veer into film, urban games and even a few board games. While there is no strict tie between the subjects of the reviews and the longer essays, the reviews provide a sort of regular beat throughout the book, providing a certain cognitive tempo. In short, while the quality and insight of the review ranges from the thoughtful (Defender) to the obvious (Kingdom Hearts), their regular appearance throughout the book gives the feeling that this goulash of content is simmering toward some clear conclusion.

Which, while it desperately shoots for, does not quite reach.

But you can’t blame the editors for trying Mark Wigley’s book closing essay, “Gamespace” poetically sums what we know and what we don’t know about the play places we call games. Besides, it would be hard to find a more respected architectural theorist to add an additional dash of credibility to this work. Wigley argues for game space unique and attractive nature without closing off discussion with any sort of summary statements about their specific properties.

As a book that has launched a new frontier in scholarship, this open-endeness seems healthy and inspiring.

And, as the editors have their final words, in bold type on the last page of the book, issued as both a call to arms and a declaration ofthe book’s broader intent: Let’s Play!

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