[HN Gopher] Building virtual worlds: video games and autobiograp...
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Building virtual worlds: video games and autobiographical
architecture
Author : tazeko
Score : 34 points
Date : 2021-05-17 11:10 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.architectural-review.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.architectural-review.com)
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Yawn, i suppose they never heard of second life
| xgulfie wrote:
| No mention of VRChat either, this author clearly lives in the
| art world and is looking in rather than actually being
| knowledgeable
| Animats wrote:
| Or the whole metaverse thing.
|
| Or the issues of how do you organize worlds where everyone
| can build so they're not a total mess. An important issue in
| architecture.
| noumenized wrote:
| I'm surprised this article didn't mention Worlds(.)com or even
| Second Life.
|
| For those unaware, Worlds(.)com is an old virtual chat platform
| from 1995 that still exists today. I imagine it was a lot like
| VRChat back in the day in terms of its aesthetic and user
| experience, without the VR and with lower graphical fidelity. Its
| regulars today are, to put it lightly, very weird and sometimes
| unsettling people, but that's a topic for another time.
|
| Worlds stands out in that many of its worlds are user-generated
| and still exist decades after they stopped being used. Exploring
| Worlds feels like you're exploring virtual ruins, where users
| made the kinds of worlds they would spend time on after work with
| fellow users.
|
| You have virtual bars and clubs, virtual gardens, virtual BDSM
| dungeons, and even some secret areas. For example, there is a
| room only accessible by going behind a waterfall in another area,
| and it is a dark chamber with 2 floating roses in the middle,
| where Nights in White Satin plays. You get the sense someone made
| this for their partner. There is a "Hall of Fame" area with
| photos of the old users who spent time there, which prompted me
| to wonder how many of them were still alive.
|
| The reason I was reminded of Worlds, outside of the obvious
| connection to the subject matter, is because of the article's
| idea of virtual space as a mechanism to experiment with identity.
| Worlds to me feels like a living, breathing, almost
| archaeological example of autobiographical virtual architecture.
| Impassionata wrote:
| Pathologizing hobbies, even as a joke, doesn't really make for a
| great start.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| There are two problems: (1) hardly any History of Art and
| Architecture people play competitive multiplayer games, which
| are far and away the gaming zeitgeist, (2) you can't be taken
| seriously in a History of Art and Architecture program taking a
| positivist or normatively-positive approach to video games.
|
| There are a million interesting things you can say about
| architecture in video games! There are more people that can
| close their eyes and visualize the exact locations of the
| plants in Counter-Strike's Office map than there are people who
| can visualize any other building anywhere in the history of the
| world, other than their own homes. And it would be really
| interesting to just talk about the design of levels as spaces
| for _killing_ in a _fair way_ , as opposed to say, architecting
| a museum or a school.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _taking a positivist [...] approach to video games._
|
| As a member of the Positivist school of video game
| philosophy, I think that the only valid statements about
| videogames are those that can be reduced to empirical fact.
| whateveracct wrote:
| i'm not so sure competitive multiplayer games are "the gaming
| zeitgeist."
|
| They're popular, sure. But honestly they don't appeal to many
| or most gamers.
| teej wrote:
| Fortnite as of 6 months ago had 25 million daily active
| players.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Fortnite isn't really comparable to the list of top Steam
| games in my replies though.
|
| Like Brawl Stars is also super popular, but it isn't
| exactly a "competitive multiplayer game" like dota. Most
| people play it casually without a huge care of W/L.
| vkou wrote:
| https://store.steampowered.com/stats/
|
| Sorted by active users: 860,000 - CS:GO
| 480,000 - DOTA 2 173,000 - Source SDK Base 2013
| Multiplayer (Mostly a multiplayer GTA mod) 146,000
| - Apex: Legends 130,000 - PubG 112,000 -
| Rust 93,500 - Destiny 2 88,400 - GTA V
| 76,000 - Rocket League 67,000 - R6:S 62,000
| - Football Manager
|
| I think it's pretty clear that competitive multiplayer
| games are the gaming zeitgeist (On the PC). Rust, Destiny
| 2, GTA V + mod, and Football Manager are the only titles in
| this list that are really played in a non-competitive
| manner.
|
| Now, its true that in terms of copies sold, competitive
| multiplayer games are not quite as dominant.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Yeah I'd say it's been the PC gaming zeitgeist for a long
| time now. That's fair.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _You can tell that Clive Riordan, the villain in Edward Dmytryk's
| Obsession (1949), is a thwarted and disturbed person because he
| owns an elaborate model railway._
|
| ...
|
| _[In Animal Crossing] They could also pay a visit to 'Joe's
| Train Town', a basement room featuring an array of model railway
| sets. This touch was presumably meant to evoke Biden's old-
| fashioned decency and pioneer spirit, while expressing a vaguely
| greenish, vaguely leftish regard for mass-transit infrastructure;
| I took it as confirmation that anyone who aspires to be Commander
| in Chief must have a Riordanesque streak._
|
| What? Biden famously commuted on Amtrak to work for _decades_.
| That 's what this was meant to evoke. That the author is so out
| of touch as to assert this nonsense above does not really instill
| in me any confidence in their ability to analyze pop culture and
| its relationship to the real world.
|
| Is the rest of the article this off base?
| prox wrote:
| This is indeed a big oversight and if the article had been
| proofread it might have held some merits, but reading and them
| skimming this is more an awkward collection of observations,
| loosely jointed by some similarities.
| isaiahg wrote:
| "A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about
| except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality and lives in a
| world of illusions."
| dharmab wrote:
| For a more informed analysis of architecture in games, Jacob
| Geller has done several video essays on the topic:
|
| The Shape of Infinity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm5Ogh_c0Ig
|
| Games, Schools, and Worlds designed for Violence
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usSfgHGEGxQ
|
| Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mexs39y0Imw
|
| Gaming's Harshest Architecture
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkv6rVcKKg8
|
| The Architecture of Fumito Ueda
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLphTtVZfvw
| noumenized wrote:
| Came here specifically wanting to post these links! Seconding
| this recommendation; I've never come across a single content
| creator that manages to tie together so many disparate concepts
| into a cohesive whole the way Geller does. You can almost
| forget that architecture is one of his main themes because his
| analysis covers such a wide breadth of topics but manages to
| make them all relevant to his central theses.
| tines wrote:
| Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
|
| I may be running afoul of Poe's law here, but I'm going to take
| this essay at face value. The premise of the essay, from what I
| can tell, is that games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons are
| played by men and women who are fantasizing about being a little
| dictator over their own island which they control completely,
| because deep down they feel powerless and they can take their
| feelings of impotence out on the inhabitants of a virtual world.
| Or at least that these ideas are inextricably linked to such
| games.
|
| To me, this is like saying that people who make paintings of
| landscapes that don't exist are repressed miniature autocrats,
| because, unsatisfied with the world as it is, they have the
| neocolonialist compulsion to bend the world around them to their
| wills, and they express this in art. It's also akin to saying
| that people play first-person shooters like Counter Strike
| because they fantasize about joining the army and conquering
| foreign lands to take them as their own. I'm sure Minecraft is
| probably political to people like this as well, because
| apparently "there is no such thing as an apolitical video game".
|
| Stripped to their essentials, games like Animal Crossing are
| fundamentally about building. Humans like to build. There's
| nothing wrong with building things per se. I wonder at the
| unwillingness of some people to contemplate creativity without
| seeing politics, neocolonialism and oppression everywhere,
| _especially_ in virtual spaces where these real-world
| externalities specifically do not exist. You can shape an island
| without murdering and evicting indigenous peoples! You can build
| machines without having to think about whether you're destroying
| the planet, because you're not! Shouldn't these be what we strive
| to enjoy, instead of demonizing as neocolonialist and regressive?
| To say that "because others have destroyed to build means that
| portraying building _without_ also portraying destroying is bad"
| is patronizing and infantilizing, and belies a view of our fellow
| humans as being incapable of handling even slight nuance and
| complexity.
|
| To be clear, I can see the value in comparing and contrasting
| something like Animal Crossing to real life, where, for example,
| they really did commit genocide to build the "New World". But
| saying that a work of art is infected by all the evil that anyone
| has ever done, or that independent concepts, like the history of
| colonialism and building a house on an island, cannot be
| separated is a road that leads to madness in my opinion.
|
| To be sure, there probably really are, as the article describes,
| Riordanesque people who play these games, but saying that these
| messages are baked in to the media themselves is Quixotic. There
| are no enemies here to fight.
|
| The author pretending like they can peer into the mind of the
| Platonic ideal Animal Crossing gamer to reveal their
| neocolonialist tendencies is, to be kind, an unsupportable line
| of thinking. As a person who has played these games myself, what
| else can I say but "No"?
| Animats wrote:
| _Animal Crossing are fundamentally about building._
|
| Animal Crossing is fundamentally about getting out of debt.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > As a person who has played these games myself, what else can
| I say but "No"?
|
| The core of this is that the author may have clocked 100 hours
| into Animal Crossing. Or maybe 0 hours.
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