Videogame Urbanism
Using Game Spaces to Challenge the Future of Cities
By Luke Pearson & Sandra Youkhana (You+Pea)
Excerpted from 40.3 Translate
Every day, millions of people travel to the virtual worlds of videogames, diving into intense escapist universes full of puzzles and adventure, battle royales and simulated societies. Yet beyond their entertaining properties, the synthetic nature of game environments challenges normative conceptions of space and our interactions with it. Games hint at unexplored possibilities for architectural design, and it is this potential that we are working to unlock through our practice and teaching. Around four years ago, we established a research studio called Videogame Urbanism at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, that uses game engine technologies to conceptualize and realize urban design projects. Our intention was to expand the field of media through which architecture and urbanism can be practiced by embracing the interactive nature of game worlds and their increasing familiarity to a large number of people. Our studio’s research examines how the future of cities and their regulations can be communicated to new audiences and challenged through game technologies. We use speculative game scenarios drawn from real world research that incorporate narrative as well as architectural theory into their structure. Using games as tools allows our students to question the forces and systems that shape contemporary urbanism, developing virtual worlds that challenge existing power structures. By incorporating real-world information and data sets into games, we allow players to directly uncover information about cities through play. Since its founding, Videogame Urbanism has produced over forty games (and counting) of varying complexity and scope.
The fields of gaming and mainstream architecture are drawing closer in many ways, such as the increasing incorporation of VR technologies in architectural visualisation. However, in our framing of games, we attempt to unpack their architectural qualities at a structural and cultural level that moves beyond simply representing a building for a client. Instead, we embrace the implicit relationship between encoded rules, interactive gestures, and audiovisual representation that underpins gameplay and game environments. Structurally, games have variously been described as embracing “failure,” [1] “repetition,” [2] “uncertainty,” [3] and “disunity.” [4] The coexistence of potentially conflicting structures within one aesthetic form allows us to echo the complexities of urban environments and their future in new and innovative ways. Much of both our work and our research studio’s teaching involves exposing urban systems to scrutiny by transforming them into game systems, allowing for a deeper critique of how cities are shaped and finding new ways to engage with these forces.
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Image 1 | Beyond ‘The Bubble,’ 2017. Digital screenshot drawing from game. Yingying Zhu, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
Image 2 | The Playable Planning Notice, 2017. Digital screenshot drawing from game. Zhibei Li, Shenghan Wu, Meiwen Zhang, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
The world of commercial games often exemplifies certain tropes and fantasies that reinforce power structures such as Call of Duty’s glorification of military might or Cities: Skylines, which lets players experiment with city building and urban planning but relies on American taxation and zoning models despite being developed by Europeans. While this can be problematic, gaming, even commercial gaming, is not monolithic—there is a whole new culture that has emerged through indie games that use the power of game mechanics to pose alternative and challenging questions about the way we approach and interact with the world. Games can subvert the strict boundaries between designers and clients, governments and citizens. They are a means to explore complex systems and make them intelligible, to provide experiences that give voice to those who may go unheard, and to dream about alternative ways of seeing our cities.
Games offer us the opportunity to make tools that provide direct feedback for designers and that non-designers can use, making them easily accessible for people without the means or voice to participate in the typical processes of architectural design. The students who created The Playable Planning Notice (2017) were responding to the UK planning system, which typically notifies citizens of impending changes in the city through laminated A4 notices placed on lampposts. The description of changes is often either very technical or frustratingly vague, such as “various works to various trees” or “erection of a plinth and statue.” The game allows players to prototype their subjective interpretation of real London planning notices through a building toolkit. While it has a visual resemblance to construction or “citybuilding” games, it is positioned as a social tool to increase the visibility of changes taking place within the city, far from the typical elevated overview and control of “god games.” [5] As Kars Alfrink argues in his call for playful soft urbanism, this hints at a future where “a gameful city promises increased autonomy and influence to individuals.” [6] We believe that this could be extended into the upper echelons of a democratic structure, creating tools for politicians to actually use.
Image 3 | Greatest Grids, 2018. Digital screenshot drawing from game. Mingpei Liu, Yingying Zhu, Yu Zhu, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
Image 4 | Playing the Picturesque, 2019. Photograph of installation at RIBA, You+Pea. Photograph (c) Tristan Fewings, Getty Images for RIBA
In addition to engaging with the processes driving the development of built and infrastructural fabric, games also offer the opportunity to explore the principles and aesthetics behind the design theories that have shaped our physical environments. In picturesque design, for example, routes that “never let the foot travel the path of the eye” emphasise the irregular and asymmetrical in the careful choreography of experience, with sham structures and follies that appear as buildings from one side but are revealed as facades or fragments on closer inspection. [7] As the picturesque moved from an idealistic treatment of landscape into an urban approach it came to structure large parts of central London, bringing the countryside into the city. Yet more even than the promenade along Regent’s Street and Portland Place towards Regent’s Park, it is contemporary videogame worlds that embody this picturesque ideal of a landscape experienced through views, movement, and time. Playing the Picturesque, our project for the Royal Institute of British Architects, used games to unfold the careful rules and structures that underpin the history of John Nash’s picturesque architecture and his subsequent designs for London. By constructing a series of physical follies attached to five game worlds designed around key picturesque sites, we created worlds of duration and temporality that had to be experienced to be fully formed. Through a one-to-one relationship between the viewer’s body and the virtual space, we challenged the typical “power-fantasy” narrative of amplified physical mobility and dexterity that is common to many first-person games, instead embodying the qualities of the gentle promenade to realise the virtual nature of the picturesque within the confines of a gallery.
For us, this is where the potential of using games as a device for architecture and urbanism ultimately lies, in being able to synthesise worlds while also designing messages in how people can engage with them.
The full version of this article appeared in -SITE 40.3: Translate.
Notes
Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games (Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press, 2013).
Torben Grodal, “Stories for Eye, Ears, and Muscles: Video games, media, and embodied experiences,” in The Video Game Theory Reader, eds. M. J. P. Wolf & B. Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003), 148.
Greg Costikyan, Uncertainty in Games (Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press, 2015).
Graeme Kirkpatrick, Aesthetic Theory and the Videogame (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 112.
Zhibei Li, Shenghan Wu, Meiwen Zhang, The Playable Planning Notice, 2017, videogame.
Kars Alfrink, “The Gameful City,” in The Gameful World, ed. Walz and Detarding (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2015), 556.
John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), 157.
Bio
You+Pea is the architectural design studio of Sandra Youkhana and Luke Caspar Pearson. Their work integrates videogame technologies into architectural design, exploring how games can engage new participants in the design of cities. Sandra and Luke established and lead the Videogame Urbanism studio at The Bartlett School of Architecture, where they promote the use of game technologies in architectural education. Recent commissions include gamebased exhibitions at the Royal Institute of British Architects, Somerset House, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. They have lectured widely on their work including talks at the Global Design Forum, Strelka Institute, New York University, and Shibaura House Tokyo.
