Architect and Architecture

Those of you in the know are probably aware of my fixation with computer games. I haven't been able to play like before though, with real world jobs and school works getting more intense by the day. Yet I still like it enough to manage to play some whenever I can afford to do so, and I'm certainly guilty of some recent sleepless nights spent on playing the Nameless Mod for the pc game Deus Ex (I'm still so impressed by the one gigabyte modification that I plan to do a full-ish review on my blog at certain point in the future, barring any major catastrophe).

Although I should say, my relationship with games doesn't seem to resemble experiences a lot of my contemporaries seem to share with the medium. It's not really that I enjoy the normal leveling or the adrenalin rush that comes as part of the experience. I certainly enjoy the experience when occasion arises, but thrill of playing computer games isn't enough to keep me up at night. If it was just about dodging bullets and jumping over ravines I would have all but completely given up the hobby entirely (or rather, I would never have gotten acquainted with the medium in the first place). As such, I can't understand the degree of fixation some people seem to have toward what we now refer to as 'arcade' games, the kind of classics that came with the very beginning of the art of making video games itself synonymous with long-dead titans like Atari and Spectra ZX. Maybe Alfred Hitchcock was right in obsessing over the obsessive nature of human beings as the primary vehicle in lot of his works. Maybe Pascal was wrong in concluding pleasure as the primary vehicle of human endeavor. Maybe it's all about satisfying that life's constant unspoken problem that comes as part of being a conscious being.

I play games for their immersion. I love some of the stories in the games. They needn't even be complex. I'm not looking for Nobel-worthy wordsmithing in games. Even simplest plots, when used honestly and effectively in conjunction with variety of other elements like characterization, visual effects and beautiful sound, bring the world alive... I play games because good games have the tendency to bring its own world alive through most marvelous means available to the medium, which tend to be some complex juxtaposition of light, sound, and audience participation. I guess you can say that I like games for the same reason I like to read stories. There's something about such experiences that stirs the heart and makes me feel like a human being, not just another animal that happens to walk on the face of this planet. As such, the kind of games I like are not usually the most popular of the games, though interestingly all masterfully crafted games young and old tend to share the quality I just described regardless of their genre and play mechanism. Immersion through any medium isn't just about exploring and looking at pretty things however. Good engines of immersion offer something more than that, a certain feeling of almost spiritual stability and yearning.

As I play around with games, I've come to discover something about the experience that I found interesting enough to warrant some quick note for future reference (and fleshing out?). I've come to consider computer gaming as an exercise in recreational architecture. Sometimes it's more like a stage design rather than full-on architecture, but from what I'm seeing the gap between theoretical/recreational architecture design and in-game world design is narrowing, and I believe they will merge to something new in the near future as the computer technology that forms the backbone of the artistic design of computer games become more powerful and flexible through the evolution of developer oriented SDKs and growing divide between a game creator and computer programmer. Indeed, we are looking at a growing number of computer/video game directors who are only proficient in ethos of computer programming, as compared to the hacker geniuses that gave birth to the likes of Id software and first generation of truly mass-market consumer friendly gaming experiences.

Aside from treating the virtual medium as tool of architecture, architectures present in game worlds themselves always fascinated me. They were the pinnacle of the manifestation of the impossible, their impact magnified many-fold by the nature of the computer game as a virtual reality. Escher could always draw twisted dimensions on a flat sheet of paper and people would wander through it using their eyes and imagination. If Echer was alive today he would be crafting such worlds using the computerized medium, and the audience would sit in front of a screen and literally walk through the ever recursive halls of the creator's imagination, as long as they aren't caught by some clipping bug that so frequently haunts complex geometries of the virtual world. A popular example would be the Combine Citadel in the eponymous game, Half Life 2 from valve software. The very ominous presence of the building that you see in the beginning of the game sets the mood of the entire game universe throughout, it's design and enormous scale impacting the user as a continuous source of psychological burden and morbid fascination. Other examples would be most larger scale 3D mmorpgs out there. Games like lineage 2 frequently placed heavy emphasis on elaborate and grand architecture within their landscapes, perhaps to compensate for the relatively lackluster content on other ends of the medium like the story and characterization (both of them issues that haunt most if not all mmorpgs today). I used to play mmorpg called Ragnarok Online a few years ago. I've played it so much that I've practically been to every single map on the game server, and there was this particular location I would always 'hang out' in the game world when I'm not off to some labyrinthine corridor killing undead monsters (which still is the best way to level fast in that game btw, the priests trump over most other classes in face-to-face combat over there). It was a library located in a floating magical city called Juno. The city of Juno would always be enveloped in perpetual autumn due to its altitude. At the edge of the city was a huge library of multiple levels at the center of which was a huge book one must read if he/she was to transcend, which is a method used in that game to let characters of maximum level ascend to more advanced classes. Me and some people I know within the game would frequently go out on a monthly field trip of sorts to the most architecturally significant yet dangerous areas within the game universe, series of trips that became ever more life-threatening due to the fact that monsters in mmorpgs like to invade and inhabit the most elaborate architectures imaginable.

I'm probably not the only one who have fond memories of such experiences. Kids in Korea and Japan frequently meet up in some game world on holidays and visit interesting locales, as one would sometimes visit six flags or Disney Land on holidays. The effect on the children seem to be more or less similar, except for the severe lack of exercise reliance on such outing would have on the children. There is a lesson here, and it's not that game designers should take architecture classes. I'm more of the opinion that architects need to learn from some of the game/level designers out there in developing real world or even theoretical architecture. Architecture being the crossroad of applied sciences and art, its practitioners are frequently constrained by the imaginary need to forcibly insert some socially relevant message into their works. Such behavior is dangerous in practice of any discipline, as it is simply another version of the teenager too busy to follow the trends of the 'popular kids' to get anything real done. Architecture needs to be artistic in the sense that it imparts aesthetic pleasure on the people and the creator. There is a slowly emerging genre of writing that is referred to as 'architecture fiction.' It's born of the awareness that an architecture is in the end nonlinear narrative of the people living inside of it or at least interacting with it at some level. It's something good game designers had been aware of for ages. As long as there is a good level of interactivity and exploration between the user and the game world it inevitably tells a story, sometimes even the ones it's original creator never intended to tell. And by subjugating architecture to the limits of the 'reality,' the architects of the world are risking telling the same story over and over, disguising their lack of creative talent to the fallacies of the world like so many other failed artists of mediums. By taking the architecture out of the hands of the real world needs and placing them in the virtual medium, where the architecture's only job is to tell a compelling tale in a suspended world with flexible laws of physics, architects will be able to tell the most compelling stories ever written in the history of humanity, something that doesn't even need words to compel the audience's hearts.

I am ranting on as usual, and I'm not sure how coherent all the things written above are... I guess leisure free-write has its share of faults.

All I'm saying is, architecture is the story medium of the modern age, and will continue to evolve towards that path aided by advancement of virtual and real technologies that makes architecture manifest. And in such a world, what better way to tell a beautiful tale then building an architecture of the worlds of imagination?