Game worlds can be blueprints for the real world, liberating spaces where rules can be reinvented and the invisible made visible
Earlier this year, a group of cowboys in the video game Red Dead Online, the massive multiplayer version of Red Dead Redemption 2, escaped the game. This wild bunch, called the Grannies, found a spot against a precise cliff on the edge of the game’s vast map where, with persistent effort, they could cross over into the unknown. Instead of a void, they discovered that the world kept going and going, and the farther they traveled, the stranger their surroundings became.
As they ventured away from the finely detailed American frontier of the game, textures for the stony earth broke down. The landscape became filled with unnatural, angular formations. Eventually, they reached a body of water, somehow both above and below the ground, running in caverns measureless to humans, where they all, in the end, drowned.
This breakdown in realism of the Red Dead Online world is “the heart of what games are,” says Gareth Damian Martin, a game developer and editor of the games and architecture publication Heterotopias. “If we just pretend that they are convincing, then we’re agreeing to a voluntary blindness. They’re never convincing.”
Over a video call, Martin tells me that the Grannies’ fateful expedition is a reminder that games are intrinsically architectural, because they are built spaces. They are constructed. That includes the landscapes as much as the buildings. The virtual ground is a texture. The virtual clouds are in a skybox. Virtual bricks don’t sink—at least, they don’t have to. They can float. They can fly. They can bend and ripple because the rules that make up video games are malleable, and virtual bricks are tricks, made to look like stone.
For architects, the sheer scope of this artificiality means video games can be both playgrounds and testing grounds. “In games, there is the idea that an object has a visual solidity and a material solidity, and it doesn’t have to have both,” says Luke Pearson, a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. “It takes you right back to the start of having to construct a space. You have to invent your own rules and logic for how things work.”
Pearson and his colleague Sandra Youkhana run the Videogame Urbanism studio at Bartlett. They investigate the future of cities through video games, teaching students how to use virtual worlds to interrogate the ways they think about materials. “We want to push beyond the idea that the future of game technology in architecture is only in making photorealistic, VR representations for developers to look at penthouses,” Pearson says.
At a time when it’s perfectly normal to segue from navigating the real-world walls of a city into the fantastical vistas of a game, the realms of architecture and games are arguably closer than ever. There is growing interest in pulling one into the other. Architect and film director Liam Young recently called on young architects to apply their skills to designing digital environments “that a billion people play in every day” instead of cutting their teeth designing “rich houses for rich people.”
“You see these evolving, wonderful worlds that are being created in the digital realm and then the parallel of real buildings becoming blander and blander.”
For Pearson, games can be a way to unlock real-world architecture — not because it’s possible to virtually model real-world structures, but precisely because the rules and assumptions about what can be done with construction are unsettled. Like the Grannies’ journey beyond the limits of Red Dead Online, things get interesting when looking at what’s happening behind the stage sets, at the invisible architecture. “One use of games is to visualize buildings,” Pearson says. “But I think the more interesting thing is to think about what might structure how we engage with buildings. What are all the unseen things in this building that are making it work?”
When I first arrived at Bartlett for our interview, I had to sign in. It took only a few seconds, but in that time, I tumbled through an array of different power dynamics facilitated by the building around me: the seated guard behind the desk, the lights above my head, Pearson descending the stairs to collect me, the barriers, the locked doors. A game could recreate these elements, modeling photorealistic walls and doors, but it could also explore the underlying experience of them — the hidden politics of the space; its codes in both meanings of the word.
“In a game, you walk through a space, and things happen. You interact with things, and things interact with you,” Pearson says. “It’s all regulated by code. We find it interesting that game engines allow us to not only represent architecture but also design systems for how you can be within that architecture, what your capability is, what level of access you have.”
One game by Yu Qi and Ziyi Yang, students of Pearson and Youkhana, foregrounds this power of perspective. Titled Kintsugi City, after the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by drawing attention to cracks and fissures instead of hiding them, the player moves through a vision of Tokyo, rotating, scaling, and distorting a set of architectural fragments. It depicts the Japanese metropolis less as a cohesive whole and more as a constantly reconfiguring set of experiences, stitched together by the viewer at ground level.
It’s the kind of physically impossible thing that would only be created in a game space. So what happens when you turn back to using concrete, stone, and glass? Architect Catrina Stewart had only just finished her postgraduate degree in architecture when she was invited to work on a game with graphic designer Luke Whittaker. The result was 2014’s BAFTA-winning Lumino City, a puzzle game set in a fantastical city, created physically with paper and cardboard and filmed as the set for the game. “I come from a family of toymakers, so play has always been a big part of my life,” Stewart tells me over the phone.
After working on Lumino City, Stewart was keen to bring what she had learned into her practice, particularly how game spaces can be used suggest narrative. She gives me the example of Salmen House, a property at the end of a Victorian terrace street, commissioned to be rented out. Instead of designing it to simply blend in with the other houses, her practice, Office S&M, created an otherworldly salmon-pink statement.
“We’d experienced a lot of rented accommodation and felt it was often designed to be as bland as possible,” Stewart says. “The idea is that people come in and make it their own, but no one does. Often, people aren’t even allowed to paint the walls. So we started thinking about stories and how a building could be more responsive to the people living in it.”
Stewart mentions comments made in recent years by the influential architect Peter Cook, a member of the radical 1960s group Archigram who has decried what he calls the “biscuit boys”: architects who use the same biscuit-colored brickwork in their buildings. “It feels like there are these two parallel worlds,” Stewart says. “You see these evolving, wonderful worlds that are being created in the digital realm and then the parallel of real buildings becoming blander and blander.”
Virtual bricks don’t have to sink. Real brick generally does. Importing the elastic, malleable nature of game architecture onto our city streets has its limitations, but Stewart suggests that learning from the most architectural of media’s inventiveness doesn’t need to. As Pearson says, in a game, you have to invent your own rules. What codes prop up the stage sets, and what would our world be like if everything, from the cities to the clouds, were constructed? What choices would its architects make then?
