Between video game and architecture industries, there are many possible, productive relationships. Video games offer a unique model for breaking down complex systems through

storytelling. Simultaneously architecture and its history enable game designers to really understand how cities and spaces came to be. This exchange of information is blurring the boundaries of ‘what belongs’ to the digital or physical world.

As architects, we often tell a story with our buildings. This storytelling evolves from the client’s mission, the building’s function and program, the site context, and often, its place in history. Narrowing down this message into a few sentences, a par-ti diagram, a sketch, before it develops to a complete story. This level of storytelling not only lies in the physical realm, but within the digital.

Certain components within architecture are challenged by the growing prevalence of video games, making them ideal settings for speculation. From a certain standpoint, video games are more or less architectural in nature, since they’re built environments, and similarly to an architecture project, games are ‘constructed’ and treated with different textures and materials.

“Architecture also helps to situate the player character in the story and surrounding culture of the world, to create a lifelike and immersive experience but also to signal limits – what we can and cannot do within the world.” You+Pea

Most video games foreground fantastical environments because they are designed to draw users into these imagined systems. The added value of a well designed built environment, is not how accurate the city is, or the high quality of the graphics, but in this story telling. The journey that a user experiences going from point A to point B.

After having done some research on the role of architecture in games, Sandra Youkhana and Luke Caspar Pearson of You+Pea architectural design studio found that even the most realistic looking game, “reshapes reality around a very specific way of seeing and engaging with space, in a sense that they are very tightly programmed pieces of virtual architecture, even when they are trying to look naturalisticor non-architectural. The question of user agency, time, and the ‘way of being’ within a space is called into question very directly...”

Virtual architecture is a mix between what is real, what could be real, and what is imaginary. In video games, architecture plays a bigger role than simply being a backdrop, it is a fundamental component that is needed to transcend players into another world that feels as authentic as our reality.

Architectural design possesses the power to keep us immersed within a virtual world, “even when we aren’t aware that it is all around us, tangible, and encapsulating us in even the most fleeting moments.”

Sources: youandpea.com
From Backdrop to Spotlight: The Significance of Architecture in Video Game Design | ArchDaily
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