Archinect - News

Prison Architect and the moral dilemmas of a prison simulator

2013-05-09T11:38:00-04:00

“Part of the research I did for that game is I went around to Alcatraz in San Francisco because I wanted to have a level where you break into a prison,” Chris Delay, one of Introversion’s co-founders said in an interview. “I started working on how to simulate a prison and how it was going to work. It was then that it occurred to me that building a prison was quite good fun, and that it shouldn’t be, but it is.”

Three guiding principles for a fine fake metropolis

2013-03-27T11:56:00-04:00

The wizards at Electronic Arts seem to understand cities as market-driven algorithms. Input people, rules, and resources, and the results are stability, growth, and wealth...SimCity’s engineers have repeated the same mistake made by countless potentates, forgetting that cities are forged both by master builders and the people who hack their grand plans.

When Electronic Arts released the newest version of SimCity Justin Davidson decided to take the plunge and explore what the game could teach about urban planning and running a city. The effort helped him to identify three guiding principles for creating a successful SimCity ; 1) Money Equals Happiness, 2) Zoning Is Destiny, 3) Transit, Schmansit.

History in the making: How Constantinople was built for Assassin's Creed

2011-11-18T13:59:35-05:00

Games gurus and architects have much in common: both design the movement of people through space. Assassin's Creed: Revelations, set in 16th-century Constantinople, writes that similarity large. To furnish the video-game's levels with verisimilitude, art director Raphael Lacoste and mission design director Falko Poiker turned draftsmen. They made a research trip to the city (today's Istanbul) to collect images that could be turned into computer graphics.