Space is the Place: An Interview with Jim Rossignol

“Over the last 3 years we have been developing a number of projects that encourage play, exploration, and an understanding of space (location, lat/long, architecture, cities etc).

Some of these have been ludicly based, most entwined with some narrative.  A mixture of psychogeography, history geekiness, and a yearning to all be urban planners. A function to move away from “Pervasive games” as parlour game, or humorous activity toward a way to explore space, tell a story, design a future.

As part of this work we asked Indiana Hamilton-Brown (a writer from the South-East) to think about, write about and cause to think a little deeper on space, play, games and architecture.  We are going to post his thoughts on our blog as we publish them.

The first is a conversation with one of our friends, Jim Rossignol.”

Toby

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Jim Rossignol is a games critic, blogger, and author of This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities; Rossignol’s book is “a wonderfully literate look at gaming cultures”, according to The New Yorker, but also a interesting exploration of the impact of place on gaming. This is my discussion with him following up on some of the themes of his book, namely that of the relationships between places, spaces and games.

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Indiana: For much of gaming’s history the environment has been a largely static entity in gameplay, although it shapes the way we interact with games, few games have truly explored the ways the player can shape the environment. However with the concepts of ‘destructibility’ and ‘viscerality’ coming very much into vogue with certain sections of the mainstream development community, with games such as Battlefield Bad Company 2 putting these features as some of their unique selling points, do you think we will see a shift towards less static game worlds in general? How do you feel the approach to developing and discussing spaces will have to change, if decay is to be incorporated rather than shunned?

Jim: Game design has been pushing against the boundaries of static, unchanging environments for a while now. One of the first ever game technology demos I witnessed was in mid-2000, when the “Geo-Mod” engine for Red Faction was first shown to journalists. The demonstration showed buildings being knocked down by explosions, glass shattering, and great craters being put in built surfaces by bombs and missiles, all in real time. It was a video game technology that, predictably, was focused on destruction, and it was also a technology that did not survive contact with the realities of game design. It ended up as a superficial layer over the top of two rather soulless, linear games. It was only the third game, Red Faction: Guerilla that reworked the goal destruction as being intertwined with guerilla attacks on infrastructure—defining destruction of structures as fundamental to progress—thereby making the demolition technology suddenly take on significance as the pulse in the overall rhythm of the game.

What Guerilla’s designers understood was that the challenge for technologies that have attempted to make their architectures and landscapes manipulable at the hands of the gamer, is to make the interaction non-trivial to the experience. Most games struggle with that. But not all. An early example would be Bullfrog’s Populous in which the player—acting as a God—could raise or lower land at will, literally sculpting the Earth and using geography and geology in their battle with rival deities. That’s being echoed again this year in From Dust.

The true issue for game design is to understand why a dynamic environment, rather than a static environment, is useful to creating an interesting game.

With this in mind it’s interesting to examine why game environments are static: it’s because the more static a rendered environment is, the more beautiful it can be—and beauty is interesting after all. If an environment can’t be deformed and rebuilt on the fly, then it can be far more detailed. That’s just the way that mainstream game technologies work but they don’t have to work like that—there are voxel solutions that allow dynamic remodeling for example—however that is how the majority of technology handles the demands of looking realistic with a limited amount of memory or CPU time.

Anyway, when the constraint of looking realistic is taken away, something marvelous happens, as we’ve seen in Second Life. For all its problems, the world there was totally dynamic and could be imagined and reworked as its inhabitants saw fit. Taken even further, with Minecraft, and we have something that gamers actually enjoy. With the world abstracted to the level of cubes, suddenly the materials in that world can be added and removed on a whim, and the entire environment becomes dynamic and manipulable by the player.

I’d hope that the two trends can eventually meet in the middle—that we’ll steer away from sterile, unchanging beauty of static environments, without losing the artistic aspirations of these kinds of designs, and merge it worlds in which materials can be repurposed, and environments remodeled as the player plays their game.

Indiana: Similarly an idea previously confined to mainly architects appears to be beginning to take hold in game design, that of algorithmic architecture, most recently in Frozen Synapse and Subversion. The concept of procedural generation is not new in games however in this dramatic holistic focus alongside the change from static environments in both games, we see the possibility for games designers—particularly smaller developers—to radically expand the limits they can realistically create. Do you think we will see a shift in the way developers approach game spaces if only through pragmatism?

Jim: Procedural generation has always been an extraordinarily powerful tool when creating games. The game Midwinter made by the British game designer Mike Singleton in 1989 is a prefect example of this. The game featured a space of 410,000 km^2 of terrain, and the game itself was just over 200k of data. What it allows designers to do is to create spaces—particularly terrains—algorithmically, saving time on designing things by hand. What we’re not going to get, of course, are more games like that. I think what we’re seeing is another sort of evolving three-way balance. As with static vs dynamic environments, we’re seeing the power of the tools being increased by technology, while at the same time designers are finding a balance between what they need to do by hand, and what mathematics can automate for them, within those new tech constraints.

So while few people would find Midwinter’s vast, blank undulations convincing or interesting today, careful use of procedural systems underlying the creation of worlds can and will provide major feats of creation cut down to just moments. EVE Online, for example, had its entire galaxy created procedurally.(It was a program based on crystallization processes that was only ever run once: to create that initially galaxy structure, which was then manually tweaked by the designers both before and after the game’s launch.)

Procedural systems are certainly not a content-creation panacea, but they are a way for game design to more ambitious than it might otherwise have been. We’re going to see increasingly complex topics for generation too: cities and urban infrastructure will be the next wave, as we’re already seeing.

Indiana: Contrasting this indie pragmatic innovation, in the recently released L.A.Noire we’ve seen the archetypal AAA approach to game spaces with an entirely hand crafted approach; strong funding allowing the designers to attempt a simulacra—of 40s LA. With such investment going into the milleu of the player do you think we could ever see games spaces designed entirely by architects? Will we see Richard Rogers try his hand at Brink level or Gert Wingårdh reinvent the way we experience Quake?

Jim: Perhaps, but the truth is that many talented and qualified architects are ending up in game design precisely because there is no work for them—at least no interesting work—in real-world buildings. When game environments look as good as they do in Brink or Guild Wars 2, what use are “real” big name architecture firms?

Indiana: Mirror’s Edge was highly praised for its excellent aesthetic and modeling of its cityscape, I think its focus on the physicality of your interactions and its exploration of the city forced the game to have a much more integrated city design, as the players could truly explore the space rather than simply being shepherded by it, which gave the environment its own distinct character. Do you think that a trend away from static environs and towards modeling the physicality of not only the players interaction with the environment but the environment itself will promote a more integrated approach to in game architecture, and more importantly will this bring any benefit to the players?

Jim: It would be a mistake to think that this wasn’t always the case, I think. Game environment design has always been about accommodating the movements of the player. A more sophisticated movement system, such as the one in Mirror’s Edge simply requires a different set of parameters for level design. I don’t believe that it represents a more integrated approach to architecture than, say, the design of a Quake level. Creating the perfect capture-the-flag map for Quake’s supernatural movement physics is just as involved a design task as designing something for a “free-running” game character.

Indiana: The shift to a more DLC focused business model has allowed the the industry to become much more modular in the way it creates games content, can you envision a reappraisal of some the ideas of 60-70s avant-garde architecture, in regard to games design, with players free to bolt on modular components to their levels etc in a sort of Little Big Planet ‘soft’ modding? For virtual space is inherently flexible in a way physical space cannot be yet few games seem to encourage toying with this flexibility outside mods; will we ever see a post modern approach to game spaces?

Jim: I hope so! I think it would demand some considerable vision from a studio to create something like what you are suggesting. Not that it’s not easy to imagine such a route. You could imagine, for example, a city create as the basis for a set of games, all with the same themes. I touched on this in references to Brink’s “Ark” recently. With that world’s art and culture defined, why not drop in different modes of gaming to a single world. A GTA-like game sandboxy story, a Mass Effect-like RPG, a racing game, a management game, all alongside the original multiplayer shooter concept. Borderlands has a whiff of it with its DLC. If they’d thrown in a racing game and maybe some more RPGy elements, it might have done just that.

As for the notion of a sort of cut-and-paste attitude, well, that might well be possible. You’re seeing it, I think, in things like Garry’s Mod. If and when those sorts of systems find their way into mainstream games—which as you suggest, they have done to some extent in LBP—then we could get truly modular, post-modern sorts of games.

Indiana: You have spoken on the increasing preservation of property and the problem this poses to architects wishing to create radical new designs, do you think that the blank slates of virtual spaces could be a fertile new outlet for architectural designs that are just too radical to be realistically implemented?

Will we ever see an architect propelled to fame through their work in games? Could games springboard architectural design to a wider audiences?

Jim: There are certainly some designers that the world seems to be taking note of because of their work in games—Viktor Antonov for example.

That is only like to increase as the architectural vision of games becomes more ambitions; and it will. I think would I would like to see are the buildings found within game worlds migrating back into the real world. Perhaps we could have some architectural cosplay—put up City 17′s citadel in an Eastern European town, for example.

Indiana: An interesting utopian off shoot of this is the possibility architects could game spaces as test beds for new designs, eg MMO cities being used a models for the new mega cities. Indeed thinking upon the possibilities of future games design, it is interesting to note the possibility of an EVE like MMO set in one city; a reinvention of Brink as an Archigram fantasy. Will these new possibilities in creating game spaces influence the way we play in future? Or perhaps the game spaces influence the way we live?

Jim: There was a beautiful survey result some time back—I don’t have the link to hand but it’s been raised on BLDGBLOG by me and others in the past—in which a number of architects they felt that LA should look like the dystopian vision laid out in Bladerunner. They felt that was architecturally desirable in some way. I think that’s a measure of how deeply potent images of what an built environment could be like push themselves into our consciousness. When a fantasy is powerful enough, we want or expect reality to cohere with it, even if that’s evidently problematic. It seems logical that game environments, if compelling enough, will provoke the same kinds of responses.

I don’t believe there are any games that are sophisticated enough in their modeling of a city’s inhabitants to truly act as any kind of testbed, but I also don’t imagine that such a thing is too far away. GTA4′s metropolis might be little more than smoke and mirrors with talking mannequins patrolling the streets, but there’s no reason why the same thing in tens years might not be a genuine simulation of a “living” city. It’s all about the complexity of the models that games require, and as mentioned elsewhere in this interview it’s simply a need for the right balance of technology, creativity, and commercial application to come to bear for this to happen in a way that might have utility in modeling real-world architectural situations.

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Indiana is a free lance writer and artist based in the South East of England. He co-authors the blog TCFTD, writing game critiques which have been featured on sites such as Critical Distance and Gamasutra, and can be seen twittering away here to any one who’ll listen.