Architects Are Playing With the Future of Design in Video Games
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…
