I am interested to know why there isn't more interest in game design, specifically environment or 'level' design among the architecture crowd. Designing levels for Half-Life and its mods was how I first got interested in architecture and have yet to meet anyone in school or now in the profession who has a similar background. Yet, designing environments for video games is in almost every way similar to the things we consider when designing a space to be built in the real world: lighting, movement, thresholds, aesthetics, changes in section, setting a mood, visual effects, acoustics, materials (textures), etc.
What the medium lacks in the ability to touch and to smell and to wholly experience it seems to make up with an ability to be fast and reckless and disregard structural and mechanical and feasibility concerns. The same thing can be said for set design in the movie or television industries, the difference being that a video game level can be designed from start to finish by one person (although admittedly this is becoming more difficult as the complexity of levels continues to increase as technology allows). And that level can then be distributed around the world and be downloaded and played by thousands of people if it is well done and made for a game with a strong mod community.
The amount of time it takes for someone interested in architecture to go through school, get accredited and then to gain the experience necessary to design something from the ground up and to get it built is 10+ years. Level design seems to be an opportunity to get perhaps a purer form of your design experienced, critiqued, and possibly enjoyed by people in a much faster time frame and yet I have met no one with a similar hobby.
Any thoughts?
Myst's landscape/architecture/atmospheres inspire me. along with halo and other similar futurapocalyptic environments. yet i have a tendency to become more obsessed with finding flaws/dead spots/and other strange virtual loop holes rather than the actual designs themselves
..i feel that aside from structural surrealism, the notion of time (or the nonexistence of time) plays the biggest part in separating virtual from the real
brer, i just took a class where we modded in half-life and second-life. although, my class of three were all novices at this sort of programming, but all had a great time and came up with some interesting things....
if you've ever been to secondlife, you should check it out. it's amazing what people come up with. the majority of it is by no means exploratory or critical, but, well, just see for yourself.... and you can stop by my place if you want...
khmay, time in the gaming enviroment is interesting, but i like the inherent issues with embodiment. exploring the difference in the options of perception, 1st person, 3rd person, benefits? drawbacks? how does this affect the architecture? before we become entirely immersed in a gaming environment, how do we create an architecture that doesn't neccessarily have an implied body? i've been racking my brain over this for a bit.
so that's designing for the gaming environment, and it does become a useful tool to convey things about your project for presentation... but we can be more reckless, faster, etc with a pen and pad of paper.
however, if your project become interactive, the interactive model becomes neccessary...
...but doesn't the hl engine rock, the physics are fun to use.
anyway, keep modding, it's gauranteed to come in handy.
I made a few maps for Half-life back in the day. Like...1999. That's really how I learned how to use 3D programs and texture and light. They weren't good maps, but I learned a lot. I get so annoyed when people rag on games because they are "nerdy" or "lame." It's not the games, it's the guys that almost fail college for playing the games that are lame. But casual gaming is fun and, in my case, I learned a lot. Like I've said, while my actual design is pretty bad, I am fairly technically proficient and a lot of that knowlege came from games and map building.
making real time 3D work is one hell of a challenge! Personally, I didn't like it.
There are tons of architects that leave architecture to pursue a career in video games. They just don't post on archinect!
As far as effeciency, the cost to do something in real time effectively is waaaaaay higher than a glossy 3D animation (at least with current technology). Someday this will change, but not in the near future.
I've given it thought, but I've never actually designed a map for a game. But I do draw a lot of inspiration from places in video games, especially RPGs. Midgar from FF7 is a great example.
When we were kids, me and my brother would always try to "make a game"... We would write adventure games, first they were in pencil and paper drawings and kids writing, like "choose your own adventure" stories, except they were really short and written in pencil and the books were stapled together all jaggedly cut out with a scissors and crooked...
And later we wrote this graphical adventure game coded in "basic A", similar to "king's quest"... Nothing very advanced, basically just "if then' statements, just a command prompt with a story and you could type in what you wanted to do, you could key in N,W,E,S to move from one scene to the next. But we would draw pictures for all of the scenes in first person perspective like "what you see", but using letters, it was on a greenish screen monochrome IBM AT running DOS (which was a step up from the commodore 64). The only sound we knew how to make using basic was 'beep", so the title screen was just a series of beeping blocky letters that popped up one after another drawn with "o"s that spelled Q,U,E,S,T. It took way too much time drawing each picture so I think in the end there were only like 6 or 7 scenes, and we quit, so you couldn't win, but you could do stuff that would get you killed... Like "you fall down the well and die."
Later there we got this really advanced first generation "microsoft mouse" and a first of its kind sound card installed on our computer... It came with a "piano" program that you could click on with the mouse and hear sounds, and another program where you could type in words and the computer would say whatever you typed in a robotic sounding voice. Later we learned how to create our own windows icons by drawing pixel by pixel using the paint program that came with our mouse. Later on, we had a more advanced wiwndows and we made a game out of windows icons embedded within windows icons, drawing an image of a city on the desktop and have places to go which were just folders within folders and little icon characters like a sort of treasure hunt mystery game with clues... That's like the really low tech zero programming knowledge way for a kid to "make a game".
My brother is now a computer programmer and I'm working in architecture.
there's a program out there that will convert a 3DS file into a playable game enviroment (throught Unreal engine?). This is interesting, because after 100% CD's, I can't to convert our project into a playable game enviroment and frag all my coworkers.
Designing digital environments is big now and going to be bigger soon. As mentioned earlier in the thread, second life is a user crafted world where people interact and form real relationships while in an electronic world. MMORPG's and things like myspace are going to be getting closer to one another, and new worlds will be designed to interact in. These environments are going to become much more "real" than they are now. So while designing video games is a field that is pretty small right now, electronic interactive environments are going to be integrated into every facet of life pretty soon. Someone has to design that stuff. Hopefully people pay attention and are able to do it well asap.
Maybe... but only when these environments can exist outside of a stationary terminal or digital screen... mobility of the computer is what will make these environments more real...
This is nice! [http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2006/08/frank-lloyd-wright-architectual.html]Walkthrough[/url] of the Kaufmann house using the Half Life Engine.
Excellent start of a thread... and a thesis :) On Saturday, I presented many of the points mentioned above and a few more that help me to begin grounding my thoughts and future aspirations in researching architecture culture and game theory. The precedent that I presented and used as a base for the project tests was Buckminster Fuller's "World Game" concept. Back in 1927, his ideas related to "the lightful" which developed into his 4D / 4D Timelock concept. Eventually, the now famous Dymaxion moniker was founded on these previous thought process. By 1962, World Game was presented for the first time--a single platform for managing the world's resources to bring equality to humanity. His GeoScope project and initial sketches for deploying the "lightful dwellings" are very close to an interface that we are all currently enamored with... Google Earth. My thesis, which in my opinion still needs a lot of work, argues for the evolution of the 4th generation cinematic, being taught at schools like SCI-Arc, toward this gaming / simulation model. The social agenda of modernism combined with the interface capabilities of what has been coined "post-spatial" society are worth much deeper consideration in architecture. Here's my 8.5x11 project description:
Coversion | Interactive Architectural Solution Networks
Steven R. Fuchs, Jr (steve@virtual-architect.com)
In contrast to the static puzzle we’ve come to know as architecture, this thesis argues for the creation of a massively participatory, network platform that radically challenges architectural expertise—a dynamic game which seeks to go beyond urban simulation toys like SimCity. The strategic goals of this thesis are to promote shifts from private to public ownership of restricted and/or poluted land assets, to assist in environmental & humanitarian relief, and to encourage multiplicity in design and architectural solutions similar to Buckminster Fuller’s lifelong World Game project, which sought to manage global resources to equalize humanity.
Goals
So what is a dynamic game? A dynamic game is a form of interactive play in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game pieces in the pursuit of a goal.
The goal of the console is to aid the underdog / downtrodden in taking socio-political positions—empowering them to take action in elaborating on or making universal what has been previously “restricted code†(Jameson, 1971). By unrestricting code, a direct correlation can be made with open-source software.
The goal of the game is to aid the preloaded communities of the Johnston Atoll in securing the islands as a place of public ownership—loosening the grips of government and developer stakeholders. Players will go beyond looking at the cinematic; they will be affected by playing the game and embrace active participation.
Web 2.0
So what is a massively participatory, network platform? It’s a social network interface that colors gaming technology to harness the power of multitudes—encouraging players to be more socially responsible through the strategic design of democratic and active participation in architectural solution spaces.
In their first conference opening talk, Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle summarized key principles they believe characterize Web 2.0 applications: the Web as platform; data as the driving force; network effects created by an architecture of participation; innovation in assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers (a kind of "open source" development); lightweight business models enabled by content and service syndication; the end of the software adoption cycle ("the perpetual beta"); software above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of The Long Tail (aka aggregation).
Arch 2.0
There is a radical shift happening in the practice of architecture and the protocols by which architects operate as both strategists and service professionals. Key to the understanding of this new shift is that architects should modify their expertise to fully encompass curatorial strategies--giving more thought to temporal / time-based acts of architecture. With the emergence of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) attitude and the Web 2.0 content platform, architects will become what have been called Game Masters. Mahesh Senagala, in his essay The Emergence of Time-like Parametric Worlds, compares this new paradigm shift happening in architecture culture.
Summary
Just as my thesis sets up a playing field to operate in over the lifetime of a developing discourse, so too does this gamespace create a setting and interface for Arch 2.0 to happen. There is much more for me to tackle in this area and by no means is this a complete final project. This is the creation of a jumping off point for a lifelong investigation—a thesis. What I’m showing to you today are my thoughts on strategizing Arch 2.0 though the reprogramming of a heads-up display (HUD) interface and the creation of a modified gamespace within the first-person shooter genre. Combined, these two elements aid architects in becoming DJs of the asynchronous data flow that Buckminster Fuller alluded to nearly 80 years ago.
----------
Again, this is a starting point for me. Any thoughts on precedent, references, technique or otherwise are appreciated. My "tests" conducted over the Summer were exploits of Google Earth and Crytek's Sandbox Editor (from the 2004 game Far Cry).
Video Game Design, Mods, and Architecture
I am interested to know why there isn't more interest in game design, specifically environment or 'level' design among the architecture crowd. Designing levels for Half-Life and its mods was how I first got interested in architecture and have yet to meet anyone in school or now in the profession who has a similar background. Yet, designing environments for video games is in almost every way similar to the things we consider when designing a space to be built in the real world: lighting, movement, thresholds, aesthetics, changes in section, setting a mood, visual effects, acoustics, materials (textures), etc.
What the medium lacks in the ability to touch and to smell and to wholly experience it seems to make up with an ability to be fast and reckless and disregard structural and mechanical and feasibility concerns. The same thing can be said for set design in the movie or television industries, the difference being that a video game level can be designed from start to finish by one person (although admittedly this is becoming more difficult as the complexity of levels continues to increase as technology allows). And that level can then be distributed around the world and be downloaded and played by thousands of people if it is well done and made for a game with a strong mod community.
The amount of time it takes for someone interested in architecture to go through school, get accredited and then to gain the experience necessary to design something from the ground up and to get it built is 10+ years. Level design seems to be an opportunity to get perhaps a purer form of your design experienced, critiqued, and possibly enjoyed by people in a much faster time frame and yet I have met no one with a similar hobby.
Any thoughts?
Myst's landscape/architecture/atmospheres inspire me. along with halo and other similar futurapocalyptic environments. yet i have a tendency to become more obsessed with finding flaws/dead spots/and other strange virtual loop holes rather than the actual designs themselves
..i feel that aside from structural surrealism, the notion of time (or the nonexistence of time) plays the biggest part in separating virtual from the real
brer, i just took a class where we modded in half-life and second-life. although, my class of three were all novices at this sort of programming, but all had a great time and came up with some interesting things....
if you've ever been to secondlife, you should check it out. it's amazing what people come up with. the majority of it is by no means exploratory or critical, but, well, just see for yourself.... and you can stop by my place if you want...
khmay, time in the gaming enviroment is interesting, but i like the inherent issues with embodiment. exploring the difference in the options of perception, 1st person, 3rd person, benefits? drawbacks? how does this affect the architecture? before we become entirely immersed in a gaming environment, how do we create an architecture that doesn't neccessarily have an implied body? i've been racking my brain over this for a bit.
so that's designing for the gaming environment, and it does become a useful tool to convey things about your project for presentation... but we can be more reckless, faster, etc with a pen and pad of paper.
however, if your project become interactive, the interactive model becomes neccessary...
...but doesn't the hl engine rock, the physics are fun to use.
anyway, keep modding, it's gauranteed to come in handy.
I made a few maps for Half-life back in the day. Like...1999. That's really how I learned how to use 3D programs and texture and light. They weren't good maps, but I learned a lot. I get so annoyed when people rag on games because they are "nerdy" or "lame." It's not the games, it's the guys that almost fail college for playing the games that are lame. But casual gaming is fun and, in my case, I learned a lot. Like I've said, while my actual design is pretty bad, I am fairly technically proficient and a lot of that knowlege came from games and map building.
the people who call video-gamers nerds are the same idiots who cant remember how to open www.hotmail.com or how to print to save their lives...
It's so true. hahaha
making real time 3D work is one hell of a challenge! Personally, I didn't like it.
There are tons of architects that leave architecture to pursue a career in video games. They just don't post on archinect!
As far as effeciency, the cost to do something in real time effectively is waaaaaay higher than a glossy 3D animation (at least with current technology). Someday this will change, but not in the near future.
I've given it thought, but I've never actually designed a map for a game. But I do draw a lot of inspiration from places in video games, especially RPGs. Midgar from FF7 is a great example.
When we were kids, me and my brother would always try to "make a game"... We would write adventure games, first they were in pencil and paper drawings and kids writing, like "choose your own adventure" stories, except they were really short and written in pencil and the books were stapled together all jaggedly cut out with a scissors and crooked...
And later we wrote this graphical adventure game coded in "basic A", similar to "king's quest"... Nothing very advanced, basically just "if then' statements, just a command prompt with a story and you could type in what you wanted to do, you could key in N,W,E,S to move from one scene to the next. But we would draw pictures for all of the scenes in first person perspective like "what you see", but using letters, it was on a greenish screen monochrome IBM AT running DOS (which was a step up from the commodore 64). The only sound we knew how to make using basic was 'beep", so the title screen was just a series of beeping blocky letters that popped up one after another drawn with "o"s that spelled Q,U,E,S,T. It took way too much time drawing each picture so I think in the end there were only like 6 or 7 scenes, and we quit, so you couldn't win, but you could do stuff that would get you killed... Like "you fall down the well and die."
Later there we got this really advanced first generation "microsoft mouse" and a first of its kind sound card installed on our computer... It came with a "piano" program that you could click on with the mouse and hear sounds, and another program where you could type in words and the computer would say whatever you typed in a robotic sounding voice. Later we learned how to create our own windows icons by drawing pixel by pixel using the paint program that came with our mouse. Later on, we had a more advanced wiwndows and we made a game out of windows icons embedded within windows icons, drawing an image of a city on the desktop and have places to go which were just folders within folders and little icon characters like a sort of treasure hunt mystery game with clues... That's like the really low tech zero programming knowledge way for a kid to "make a game".
My brother is now a computer programmer and I'm working in architecture.
there's a program out there that will convert a 3DS file into a playable game enviroment (throught Unreal engine?). This is interesting, because after 100% CD's, I can't to convert our project into a playable game enviroment and frag all my coworkers.
....can't <wait> to...
the $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ is in video game design
Designing digital environments is big now and going to be bigger soon. As mentioned earlier in the thread, second life is a user crafted world where people interact and form real relationships while in an electronic world. MMORPG's and things like myspace are going to be getting closer to one another, and new worlds will be designed to interact in. These environments are going to become much more "real" than they are now. So while designing video games is a field that is pretty small right now, electronic interactive environments are going to be integrated into every facet of life pretty soon. Someone has to design that stuff. Hopefully people pay attention and are able to do it well asap.
Maybe... but only when these environments can exist outside of a stationary terminal or digital screen... mobility of the computer is what will make these environments more real...
This is nice! [http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2006/08/frank-lloyd-wright-architectual.html]Walkthrough[/url] of the Kaufmann house using the Half Life Engine.
Where is Fuchs? This is his thesis.
Excellent start of a thread... and a thesis :) On Saturday, I presented many of the points mentioned above and a few more that help me to begin grounding my thoughts and future aspirations in researching architecture culture and game theory. The precedent that I presented and used as a base for the project tests was Buckminster Fuller's "World Game" concept. Back in 1927, his ideas related to "the lightful" which developed into his 4D / 4D Timelock concept. Eventually, the now famous Dymaxion moniker was founded on these previous thought process. By 1962, World Game was presented for the first time--a single platform for managing the world's resources to bring equality to humanity. His GeoScope project and initial sketches for deploying the "lightful dwellings" are very close to an interface that we are all currently enamored with... Google Earth. My thesis, which in my opinion still needs a lot of work, argues for the evolution of the 4th generation cinematic, being taught at schools like SCI-Arc, toward this gaming / simulation model. The social agenda of modernism combined with the interface capabilities of what has been coined "post-spatial" society are worth much deeper consideration in architecture. Here's my 8.5x11 project description:
Coversion | Interactive Architectural Solution Networks
Steven R. Fuchs, Jr (steve@virtual-architect.com)
In contrast to the static puzzle we’ve come to know as architecture, this thesis argues for the creation of a massively participatory, network platform that radically challenges architectural expertise—a dynamic game which seeks to go beyond urban simulation toys like SimCity. The strategic goals of this thesis are to promote shifts from private to public ownership of restricted and/or poluted land assets, to assist in environmental & humanitarian relief, and to encourage multiplicity in design and architectural solutions similar to Buckminster Fuller’s lifelong World Game project, which sought to manage global resources to equalize humanity.
Goals
So what is a dynamic game? A dynamic game is a form of interactive play in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game pieces in the pursuit of a goal.
The goal of the console is to aid the underdog / downtrodden in taking socio-political positions—empowering them to take action in elaborating on or making universal what has been previously “restricted code†(Jameson, 1971). By unrestricting code, a direct correlation can be made with open-source software.
The goal of the game is to aid the preloaded communities of the Johnston Atoll in securing the islands as a place of public ownership—loosening the grips of government and developer stakeholders. Players will go beyond looking at the cinematic; they will be affected by playing the game and embrace active participation.
Web 2.0
So what is a massively participatory, network platform? It’s a social network interface that colors gaming technology to harness the power of multitudes—encouraging players to be more socially responsible through the strategic design of democratic and active participation in architectural solution spaces.
In their first conference opening talk, Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle summarized key principles they believe characterize Web 2.0 applications: the Web as platform; data as the driving force; network effects created by an architecture of participation; innovation in assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers (a kind of "open source" development); lightweight business models enabled by content and service syndication; the end of the software adoption cycle ("the perpetual beta"); software above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of The Long Tail (aka aggregation).
Arch 2.0
There is a radical shift happening in the practice of architecture and the protocols by which architects operate as both strategists and service professionals. Key to the understanding of this new shift is that architects should modify their expertise to fully encompass curatorial strategies--giving more thought to temporal / time-based acts of architecture. With the emergence of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) attitude and the Web 2.0 content platform, architects will become what have been called Game Masters. Mahesh Senagala, in his essay The Emergence of Time-like Parametric Worlds, compares this new paradigm shift happening in architecture culture.
Summary
Just as my thesis sets up a playing field to operate in over the lifetime of a developing discourse, so too does this gamespace create a setting and interface for Arch 2.0 to happen. There is much more for me to tackle in this area and by no means is this a complete final project. This is the creation of a jumping off point for a lifelong investigation—a thesis. What I’m showing to you today are my thoughts on strategizing Arch 2.0 though the reprogramming of a heads-up display (HUD) interface and the creation of a modified gamespace within the first-person shooter genre. Combined, these two elements aid architects in becoming DJs of the asynchronous data flow that Buckminster Fuller alluded to nearly 80 years ago.
----------
Again, this is a starting point for me. Any thoughts on precedent, references, technique or otherwise are appreciated. My "tests" conducted over the Summer were exploits of Google Earth and Crytek's Sandbox Editor (from the 2004 game Far Cry).
yeah, I did my thesis on this in '99. quake 2 engine. it was a blast - architecture and real time cinema. and you got to shoot stuff.
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