PLANNING PLAY: Merging Architecture and Games
Games and architecture need each other. At their core, each field encapsulates an entirely distinct world view -separated by siloed vocabularies, specialized tools, and conflicting industry goals. But at bottom, both fields draw from the same sources of inspiration and vie for the same level of attention. The origins for both architecture and games reach back millennia to the cradle of civilization, and characterize different strategies to satisfy multiple levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But millennia may not count for much when clearing a collaborative path between seemingly disparate fields. Given these fields have so much in common, its surprising that more effort has not been given to link the two disciplines together in a more meaningful and productive manner. With advancements in psychology, technology, and our growing understanding of the ways in which media subvert and nudge us, a deeper knowledge of any one of these subjects force us to reconcile their converging complexities. We live in a time where the psychological effects of physical spaces can be modeled and simulated; those experiences can now be quantified and tested. Similarly, an experience considered fun, somber, or maddening can not only be playtested to isolate each of the desired effects, but those effects may be precisely timed to each player’s particular approach. The fields we distinguish as architecture and game design may have been born to separate homes, but their individual upbringings should not be reason to fractionalize their common kin interests. Technologically we are overdue to deal seriously with the glaring overlaps between these two fields, and both have much to gain by us doing so.
Academically and informally, architecture has attained a cultural status that cannot be overlooked, and proves its worth in each culture where it is taken seriously. Which is to say, all cultures who invest in it tend to reap the transcendent qualities that are a hallmark of the field. Indeed, many countries are readily identifiable by their famous architecture. By contrast, any academic conversation around games must first be qualified in a way architecture would not. We do not have to dig deep in the literature to discover the cultural bias against games of any age. When contrasted with the field of architecture, games are often seen as frivolous activities and are not intended to be taken seriously. Due to their reputation and even definition as “pleasant diversions,” academic conversations are divided into two separate expectations. In one expectation, games are serious endeavors because they are marketable distractions capturing wide attention and dollars from the pockets of many. But in another expectation, they are serious works that can broaden people’s world view and relationships in meaningful ways. This article will focus on the latter. Unlike books and film, games can physically change the way we interact with the world and with each other because they change our behavior.
It is these differences and more that make games different from other mediums and consequently more challenging to discuss seriously. It can be difficult to take games seriously when their purpose is to entertain and distract. Award ceremonies such as the prestigious BAFTA Award, DICE Award, or Game Developers Choice Awards bestow their prizes to games best able to emulate the traits of film and books. It’s no wonder these game conventions resemble film academy award ceremonies: They reward the familiar traits of the medium they aspire to emulate.
Each kind of game from basketball, to tic-tac-toe, to an organized debate enforces rules that govern interactions amongst players or with a system. Games enforce particular behaviors by establishing rules. In a game, if one changes the rules, they’ve changed what matters to its players. Books and movies tend to elicit reactions, but games tend to elicit choices. The trait of choice-making in games can charge our emotional centers every bit as much as the best movies and books can without it. But games have arguably already achieved an equivalent degree of emotional regard, mostly by emulating methods found in film and book story-telling. Games have already successfully reached that level of serious attention, and do not require further guidance. It is the interactive aspect of games and their ability to simulate which offer us an avenue of difference to explore them as a serious medium.
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| The Stanley Parable - A game of choices |
Let's be clear: Conversations focused on the how-to of game-making can get as serious as any design conversation can get; however, missing out on the “why” conversations avoid dealing with the fundamental reasons humans play games in the first place. When this distinction fails to become clear in articles on game theory, it is easy to fall into the trap of seeking answers in the most popular or successful game titles. Asking: “How did game X do that feature?” is a reasonable attitude to address design problems. But a strong theory of game design will ask the “why” questions that are not asked by the practice of game design. Answering: ”Why are games important?” would be best analyzed through theory, and not through practice. Practice demands a utilitarian response, where theory does not. For this reason, theory offers us a better framework to associate what we know with what we don’t.
Understanding why games are important can help us understand why they would be useful to other disciplines. Unfortunately, the tempting pursuit to analyze properties from the best-selling games to cut to the chase about what makes a successful game will not yield an answer to why games are important. We may better understand how to answer this question by framing it for a separate analogous medium such as books: The question of why books are important can be understood in a similar way. For example, a best seller novel may sell well because it is well-written and the content entertaining, but these are not the reasons why we are compelled to keep reading books. To answer the question: “Why are books important?”, we should consider their history, and why they persist nearly unchanged since their invention likely over 1200 years ago. The book “upgraded” the form-factor technology of the scroll which came before it, which was itself an upgrade of the previous clay tablet technology. In this comparison we can describe the book as a technology for recording thoughts and observations, since this primary use of the medium is conserved between technological iterations. The means we utilize today to perform the same functions of the traditional book have changed, and thus the book as technology has adapted accordingly (e.g. e-readers). In this perspective of “book as technology,” we can easily compare what makes the technology of the scroll similar to that of the book, and isolate the essence of what makes books important in our modern culture. In asking why books are important however, we also inadvertently describe why they are unique as a medium. They have been useful tools throughout history to convey a multitude of information from ideas to fictional and non-fictional stories across generations and borders. Arguably to this end, they have attained a level of cultural saturation unmatched by any other medium. This focus on books and how their related ancestral technologies have been used is a practical way to understand why they're important to us today.
A similar understanding of games' importance can be isolated too by looking at the ways they have been used throughout history. Games come to us by many form factors since their earliest inceptions. From likely early line scrawlings in the sand to compact portable board-game-boxes with hidden drawers for player pieces, games have traveled with merchants, and evolved in their complexity alongside the cultures that played them. Elements of chance, player turn order, and gridded boards have all been with us since the earliest days of gaming. The fact that these and many more elements of games are still around physically or digitally should reveal something about the utility of games throughout human history. Some games simulated daily life, such as the rules of the Egyptian game Senet. Other games mimicked aspects of sacred rituals. In each case, artifacts of these games all have one thing in common: They were designed to modify human behavior. Game pieces represented the players; grids were for moving and tracking those pieces more precisely; chance could be neatly and quickly simulated with the throwing of sticks, bones, shells, and dice. These artifacts aided in making real the abstract rules of behavior necessary to play those games. Still to this day we find games continue to achieve ever more complex levels of abstract human behavior, and thus might conclude this aspect alone is why they’re important as a medium separate from other mediums. But the metric used to measure commercially successful games in today’s market leads us to believe their value lies in their capacity to entertain and distract, rather than in their capacity to modify our behavior in more equitable ways.
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| The Egyptian game Senet - Circa 1551-1295 B.C. |
Games offer an entirely other dimension of interaction compared with other mediums like books, and yet most game “best-of” lists track only one metric when determining a game’s quality: “How fun was it?” With a game industry so concentrated on how fun its commodity can be, we have an extra hurdle to jump before discussing how games might be useful for other purposes beyond their “fun” marketability. As a result, there is quite the fractionalization of the study of game design principles in other fields. Fields such as psychology, economics, evolutionary biology, and mathematics have adopted their own names and identities purpose-built for their industry-specific game design theories. Regrettably, these principles lack a formal academic cohesiveness with one another across the different disciplines. The discipline of mathematics has a field of study known as “game theory,” which has little to do with evolutionary biology's game theory, which equally has little to say of psychology's game theory (or decision theory as it is also called). This fractionalization of studies around game design is a problem for the field of game design, which clearly has a foot in the door to all these specialty branch disciplines, but little else. This has left the academic department of game design stripped of its influence to connect future disciplines in a more cohesive way. Lacking a general-purpose framework with which to chart across other fields, leaves the field of game design fending off its only uncontested territory: Fun games to sell.
This is where architecture can act as a guiding light. Where other fields have adopted their own game-related theories tailored specifically for solving unique problems, architecture has only started to scratch the surface of game design integration. Where mathematics, psychology, and even evolutionary biology can be seen as fields with narrow focuses on their own methodologies, architecture can be seen as a generalist. Both in design and in practice, an architect must generally familiarize herself with each aspect of a building's construction, but also with the guiding forces that impact the design. Those forces can come from many different disciplines reaching far beyond concerns of form-making, to the psychological, socioeconomic, or historical impacts of the area and of the people that will be affected by the project. It stands to reason that architecture must tread regularly into other disciplines’ camps to understand a project’s broadest patterns. Conventionally an intellectually nomadic domain, architecture does not tend to establish principles that are limited to their specific use within the boundary of architecture itself. Architecture can be more of a framework, or philosophy by which to approach design problem-solving. Practitioners of architecture should be interested in establishing a knowledge of understanding which could provide a cross-disciplinary pursuit of game design principles.
Games as Tools
The game design industry, unlike architecture, is a field obsessed with its penchant to distract. While the industry of game design is relatively young, the practice of playing games and game design is as old as civilization. Our modern understanding of game design leaves much to be desired when compared to the modern understanding of architecture. But this is an unfair comparison, as the field of architecture happens to have enjoyed the focus of civilizations for millennia where games have not. Arguably in the 21st century, we still find ourselves contending with the dribbles of an infant field when discussing games and their history. Fields such as architecture have had several millennia's head-start for refining their craft and academic pursuits, and have matured in their methodologies and research. Architecture shares the cynosure of many different institutions, with both governments and academia backing a field bent on innovating and guiding new technologies. To be sure, game design has implemented its own share of innovations in recent decades, but these innovations and their academic pursuits have not necessarily come from the demands of game design practices. Games have not yet integrated principles of elegant design into their approach so consequently, the tools of game design have not prioritized those necessary qualities of design. To speak of pervasive architectural technologies such as B.I.M. (Building Information Modeling), or green roof systems, you speak with an architect. To speak of pervasive gaming technologies such as virtual reality or ”heads-up displays”, depend on the context whether or not you seek answers from a game designer.
The software-driven video game industry has diversified itself into other fields. The highly exportable and transformational nature of technologies originating from the video games industry unsurprisingly lend themselves to becoming fundamental fixtures of other industries. Sometimes technologies originating from the games industry underpin advancements in unrelated fields to such an extent that these technologies become solely identified with those unrelated fields. A prime example may be the common use of real-time 3D computer graphics which having originally been cultivated for games, are now ubiquitous in many unrelated fields from brain-scan imaging, to structural engineering. Their connection to game design technologies are shed completely. Awareness of technological advancements by games for games are lost on the general public’s understanding outside the gaming industry, such as advancements made in 3D graphics or digital user interface design. The field of game design stands to gain much by owning the conversations around its own innovations.
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| Nintendo Virtual Boy - An early virtual reality technology designed specifically for games |
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| Unreal Engine - A popular video game development tool |
As of this writing, the video game industry is expected to pass 130 billion dollars in 2020 (Reuters). Which would make it more profitable than the film, television, and music industry. Games as a medium are more popular today than they ever have been. People of all ages, race, gender, and national origin are able to find a game that interests them more now than at any other point in history. Business models for gaming likewise have extended to accommodate the varied form-factors and play-styles different games might demand of players. And these evolving economic incentives continue to drive the feverish demand for games and in-turn their continued advancements. For example, advancements in multiplayer games catalyze expanding numbers of players to persuade their friends and family to join them. The increasing popularity of games means a wider audience to critique and study them. Which means that ever since the ”golden age of arcades” in the 1980s to the rise of free-to-play internet titles in the first half of the 21st century, the surge of new games have launched us into a renaissance period of video games innovation.
With all this attention being placed on gaming, advancements made specifically with respect to video game technology has afforded a renewed experimental spirit across the disciplines. The technology has advanced to a point where it is considerably easy for non-game designers to utilize it for other purposes. In the case of architecture, overlaps in the use of game technology to design interactive levels for play for example, have already been utilized to design interactive models for presentations. At some point in the last decade, games have crossed the threshold of being strictly amusements for diversional pleasure, to becoming tools for design and simulation for real world applications outside the game industry. But let's be clear: It is the tools of game development, and not game design principles themselves that have been adapted to these other uses. Gaming technology and the tools used to build games is highly exportable, and can be easily transferred into the workflows of other disciplines, but the game design principles by which those tools were designed for do not always transfer as readily. We find that while the tools can be transferred, often the design principles behind those tools are not.
Uncaging those game design tools and principles purpose-built to solve game design problems can provide new insights to those adjacent fields that are willing to explore them. We do not yet know the problems of the future, but as we shall see in the case of architecture, both the tools and design principles born out of gaming can be brought to bear on today's most complex architectural design problems.
21st Century Design
For decades, both industries have enjoyed a market of dedicated application tools optimized for use in their respective domains. The process of video game development and architecture are different enough that each domain remains separate from one another with very limited interaction except in a handful of cases. Successful interaction that’s broken the mold between the disciplines in projects of recent acclaim tend to involve the other discipline on an advisory basis, or in limited capacities for the duration of the project. Successful video games such as Thekla’s The Witness hired landscape architecture firm Fletcher Studio and architecture firm Forum Design Studio to help develop conceptual plans and details of the game’s world areas. Each studio’s designs were used early on in the development of the project, and broadly influenced the course of development for the game, but it is evident their participation ended once the real production began. It is there when the architects left the room, and the game level artists, digital prop artists, and programmers took their seats to pick up where the architects left off. The line of collaboration with architects drawn in the sand, at least for video game development, has been drawn as far as this. What role should an architect play in a larger video game development team, and should we be inclined to accept this precedent as the limit of collaboration allowed?
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| The Witness - By Thekla Inc. |
At the moment, an architect’s greatest contribution to a video game project is at the conceptual phase, since that is the phase which most plainly resembles the conceptual phase process within the practice of architecture itself. This makes it easy to introduce an architect to the process of video game development. Even still, the likely role an architect plays in a game development project would not be that of a design team member, but as an expert consultant. While the expertise needed on a games project to refine the art direction and gameplay do not look like the traditional skills of an architect, these apparent differences of disciplines are simply differences of technique rather than of principle. The design expertise of architects and game designers share a rich heritage of form making and set design; it is the process and the deliverables that are different.
An architect acquainted with the core tools of the game designer, can be very helpful in refining the details of the built environment. For example, any game sequence where the setting incorporates buildings, city scapes, or structures which should appear habitable, can be developed or refined by an architect to meet the needs of gameplay. The constraints of gameplay on design would not be foreign to an architect game designer. Where the details of light, material qualities, circulation, or scale matter in a particular design, an architect can have more than just an opinion on the issue, they can develop memorable designs that merge those details into cohesive functional forms that can still contribute to the needs of gameplay. In the world of architecture, the constraints of building codes, local municipal zoning ordinances, and accessibility requirements often-times force a cohesive design to morph into something less so, and in turn present new design challenges to address. This often completely upends an otherwise well-aimed design to fit the corrected regulatory molds. A good understanding of the restrictions of game mechanics would be handled no differently by an architect having to meet the usual restrictions imposed by local authorities on any design project.
We know this because design restrictions found in game design are not unique to game design. Often, the role of architecture in games is to act as a false-front to the playable space, not unlike the backdrop to a stage set, providing impenetrable boundaries bordering the playable area. Other times, architecture may play an integral role to the gameplay itself, such as providing a means to elevate the player above the play space. A tall office building might fulfill this bit of staging quite nicely, given the set and setting of the game. A player at the top of such a building would then command an elevated view of the play area and would have attained a new means to navigate that play space. In both of these cases, architecture’s purpose in the game has been restricted to serve the player’s objective and set dressing, but little more.
While restrictions like this exist for all sorts of practical reasons, game designers employ many techniques to construct game level geometry that meet the needs of gameplay. The pursuit of gameplay trumps much else in the effort to craft a successful game. Often the bitter choice to sacrifice aesthetics for necessary game mechanisms can appear as a binary decision: Do the beautiful aesthetics and imagery stay, or do we scrap them for something that keeps the flow of gameplay? Either way, the expertise of an architect might make that trade-off a bit more palatable with a plethora of equally aesthetic but tenable options, and a little less binary.
Here we have a reductive use of architecture because the presence and appearance of the building suggests its place in the world would have been used for something other than the purpose the player is suggested to exploit. Neither of these examples would restrict the architect-turned-game designer from providing valuable input. Rarely would we say a game “uses” a building in the same way the building was dressed-up to appear. Most buildings in games are impersonations of functional ones, and most details necessary to construct them in the real world will matter little to the player. For example, what use does a game designer have for paying close attention to the use of expansion joints within their brick walls? Especially when digital brick does not expand and contract when digital sunlight hits it. Most concerns of architects don’t make sense in the context of a virtual building.
Obviously, the concerns of architects and game designers are different. One concerns itself with entertainment, and the other concerns itself with the physical construction of buildings and their obligation to public safety. But an eye on the entertainment value does not necessarily limit the way architecture needs to appear in games. After all, the purpose of realistic or stylized architecture in games is to suspend the player’s disbelief that it may not be a fully realized structure. Sometimes this alone requires the appearance of architecture in games to look as noticeably close to the real thing as the art budget will allow. This is of course is a common practice throughout other fields of entertainment. Theater pioneered the use of the backdrop and the stage set to imply the setting and mood of a scene. This squarely lands the use of architecture and the need for a backdrop under the language of show business. The architecture serves to progress the story and gameplay above all else. In the physical world, buildings are an end to themselves and are not merely part of a larger narrative outside their walls. Game designers tend to weave buildings and the spaces between them into a comprehensive narrative, making buildings a means to the story’s bigger end, rather than as an end to themselves. Designing architecture in this way is not necessarily a reductive use of it, as the function of the spaces are serving the player beyond their means as impenetrable borders to the playable space.
When considering the effects of game design principles used in architecture, there is a limited crossover between the two fields. Most of what has been explored has much to do with the need to utilize the gaming technology for typical architectural processes, such as in graphic presentations. There are many architecture firms and services offering interactive walk-throughs of their models for clients to explore. These often take the form of sit-down experiences with a game controller, or mouse and keyboard where the client or presenter walks through a predetermined set of spaces. Often, time constraints truly limit the entire model from being polished to this point, and special attention is paid to the primary spaces and aspects of the project which need to be highlighted for the client to green-light the design. This particular use of gaming technology utilizes some game design principles out of pure necessity and accident.
One common game design principle utilized in architectural presentations is that of the golden path. When the architectural model takes the form of a playable interactive game level, the presenter may choose to control the view for the client, only going down the paths predefined beforehand and restricting the client’s total impression of the design. But should the design team choose to allow the client to control their own path through the building model, a different approach must be taken to handle which paths are the “correct” ones. One path must be followed so there is a clear beginning and ending to the presentation. Any deviating paths should dead-end, or return to the main, or golden path. In this case to save time, the design team may elect to limit the number of possible paths the client-player may choose to wander down. Cleaning up the model to optimize the presentable play space, and removing the content of areas that will not be visible by the client-player is critical to allowing such models to run on a desktop computer. Additionally, extra barriers along the path may need to be developed to prevent the client-player from wandering into these unpolished parts of the model, that would otherwise be accessible in the completed building. In this way, architects unintentionally adopt game design conventions to restrict player movement. The challenge of course is to provide a convenient barrier that does not break the suspension of disbelief in the completeness of the model. Here an invisible wall might do as a utilitarian measure, but there is not much in the way of player experience and play testing thereafter to ensure such an element would be so plainly ignored and simultaneously understood as a barrier to the remaining undeveloped parts of the model.
Games tend to solve the problem through a multitude of convenient believable barriers. Game developers work very hard to avoid making their games appear perfectly clean and new. Most game story settings require some narrative history be provided to convince you that the world existed before you, the player-character, entered it. That exposition may come in the form of destroyed cars blocking the road in the case of a zombie apocalypse, or fallen rocks in the case of a mountain pass. But why craft a path that cannot be reached? Game designers know all too well that the narrative must often fit within a larger world to remain believable. There must be some consistency within the extents of the world, and within the extents of the playable area. The visible narrative setting may be far more expansive than the actual playable area, and this illusion of distance and choice can make a game feel much larger than it actually is; both in virtual space, and in a symbolic “narrative space.” So the need to create paths that cannot be traversed by the player becomes a common trope of the game design toolbox. These sorts of paths may need to appear usable or previously useable by other inhabitants of the world, while remaining inaccessible to the player.
Our architectural presentation example described above contends with the opposite problem. The world is built, and it is already believable, and the player can traverse down any chosen path. But since the architect intends to restrict the movement of the player, a separate requirement to “make the world feel lived-in” is both unnecessary and not the correct framework to convince the client to green-light the design. One solution that follows in the footsteps of a game designer, is to consider believable barriers that might be found in a completed building. Maybe we’re viewing the building as it is getting installed with equipment and furniture, and as such some previously unpacked furniture might be blocking paths to other areas of the building. These may be reasonable barriers in real life to an owner visiting the active construction site of their project. Conversely, the model could reflect an imagined phase of construction, where certain construction entrances are blocked off with tarp, scaffolding or with unfinished walls. This showcases exactly which parts of the building are not intended to be explored, and the client will not waste effort wondering which paths they can travel down.
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| Prepping an architectural model as a playable level in Graphisoft’s ArchiCAD |
Not all game design principles find a use in the field of architecture, but this is one example of how a shared principle of game design could be utilized in the current practice of architecture. I point this out because it is important to acknowledge the overlaps in the way architects and game designers perform their craft, and note that both fields reach into the same toolbox of design whether they realize it or not. It’s no secret there are universal design principles used by designers of all stripes, but even then, techniques and methods go unshared between game design and architecture due to their perceived incompatibility. We must find new ways to use the abundance of data that can be collected in a digital environment, and learn to integrate that data into the process of design for the physical world. The tools to do this are being explored, but have yet to mature into useful principles of design. It may be easy for designers to neglect these efforts as curiosities for now, but they neglect a powerful means to improve people’s lives through a more effective use of design. What we consider well-crafted gameplay for the purposes of mere entertainment, may very well turn out to be our road map to a design for the 21st century.
Conclusion
Both games and architecture have been around for thousands of years, and there are good reasons to explore their overlap. But it should be painfully obvious by now that this effort is stunted because of common perceptions of games as frivolous distractions. Whether or not this is true matters little to their usefulness as design tools for architecture. Taking games seriously is about acknowledging their usefulness in modifying behavior moreover than their capacity to entertain; and an understanding of why humans play them in the first place will help us discern their greatest purposes. Any overlap with games and architecture cannot be taken seriously, if one does not first take games seriously.
Like most advanced softwares, the tools of video game designers have continued to evolve into ever more generalized uses beyond solving the concerns of game development, and are beginning to be explored by architects and other designers curious of the technological potential. Due to the advancement of software standards and the lowering costs of computing, tools previously reserved for one discipline have now opened up to all for manipulation and experimentation. There are new ways on offer to develop architecture, as the tools of video game creation provide new means to visualize and simulate building projects in ways never before available. In the wake of such integration, architects have a responsibility to explore them to achieve a better understanding of the ways their designs might be used.
However far these evolving tools permit the cross-pollination amongst disciplines, they will sow the seeds of collaboration, which can only lead to improved ways of doing design. However, this mixed environment of repurposed tools only gets us so far. What we have yet to see is the mixing of design philosophies which tend to come with the mixing of tools. Using a video game design software for the practice of architecture is the first step, but neglecting to use those game design aspects towards an improved approach of architectural design is missing the point.
A merging of principles is on order between games and architecture. Where this article has focused on mostly the designs of video games as opposed to board games or sports, the characteristics of all types of games differ profoundly with the assumptions of architects. Architects fundamentally have different expectations of human behavior within their buildings. In games, players are encouraged to find the correct path to move in the world without apparent signage or direction. They can identify which behaviors are necessary to accomplish a task without instruction. Players are able to accomplish this in games not because they are extraordinary people, but because they have been conditioned by game design principles. Clearly there are other design principles guiding human behavior that games have been able to tap into and embrace, but that architecture has yet to grapple with. Games are guiding human behavior in a way architecture has not yet figured out. This should be reason enough for architects to pay attention to game design.
Likewise, the state of gameplay innovation could be described as a one-hit-wonder on repeat. The usual practices have left game designers with few places to turn for inspiration within their own field. Game designers are incentivized to develop as many details as necessary to convey the reality of the player’s world. And we might consider these scenes well-designed when they afford fun game play, fit within the fiction of the world, or encourage the player to explore further. But goals like these which account for successful game design in today’s market, do not prioritize elegance in their implementation. Superfluous accessories are jammed into the player’s path, and interesting but irrelevant details pepper walls throughout a level all in the name of entertainment. It should be clear that this is not the methodology of elegant design, but rather the methodology of show business. Design principles governing good architecture tend to restrain a designer from adding superfluous details. The strategies which govern the fields of game design and architecture could not be more different in this respect.
But as is often the case, the differences of two disparate fields we may come to find, might be two sides of the same coin. How humans behave in designed spaces of the physical versus that of the digital have little to do with how the spaces were designed, and more to do with the rules that govern their behaviors. Both architects and game designers design for a certain set of behaviors, but game designers have built tools to explore many alternative behavioral patterns which inform their designs. The software tools used for that experimentation have now begun to fall into the hands of architects, where capacity to further refine design methods have been overlooked in favor of access to the most superficial aspects of these game engines. Few excuses remain against architects adopting game design principles into their workflow, and attitudes against such practices continue to shutdown avenues of further understanding.
Game designers more than architects have understood for a long time behavioral design and how to craft an experience. Architects in turn, have understood principles of elegant design and style. Where each discipline’s goals may not appear to align with one another, design principles from both fields are indeed compatible and can be explored together with today’s digital tools. Acknowledging that compatibility could unlock a touchstone of design quality unmatched by today’s means. For designers curious enough to explore, what awaits them might both be a new way to plan and a new way to play for all of us.
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