Archinect - News

Sim Nimby: Meet the city building game that doesn’t allow players to build

2022-11-11T12:15:00-05:00

A new desktop city-building game has been launched which takes aim at the slow pace of housing construction in U.S. cities. Sim Nimby was developed by Brooklyn-based copywriters Steve Nass and Owen Weeks as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on what they view as 'NIMBYs' (Not In My Backyard neighbors) opposing new urban housing developments.

“We have people living on the street or people paying ridiculous amounts in rent for tiny apartments, and people are complaining about preserving their views and worrying about the local character?” Nass told Bloomberg in a recent interview on the game, which the pair planned one evening while in a New York City bar. “The idea for it came up in conversation, like, ‘Oh, what if we made a city-building game that’s run by NIMBYs?’”

Sim Nimby's interface. Image credit: Steve Nass and Owen Weeks

The game draws inspiration from the SimCity video game, where users construct a city environment while confronted with absurd obstacles such as alien invasions. In...

Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design finally gives MoMA the chance to showcase its growing video game collection

2022-11-04T11:54:00-04:00

MoMA’s acquisition of games is the responsibility of the Architecture and Design Department, which is focused on objects that are celebrated for their function. Paul Galloway, who has served as the point person for the museum’s video game acquisition efforts, says these multimedia objects are a natural fit for the most omnivorous section of the museum.

The show is open now and runs until July of next year in MoMA's first-floor gallery. Galloway and his co-organizers Paola Antonelli, Anna Burckhardt, and Amanda Forment say their department collects along four central criteria — esthetics, space, time, and behavior — though curatorial efforts to acquire "museum-ready" media are sometimes limited by intellectual property restraints concerning the game maker's original source code.

"It’s a show about interaction design, and video games are some of the purest, clearest examples of interaction design," Antonelli said in a preview. "Games are such complex acquisitions because when you acquire video games, you don’t just go ahead and buy them, you acquire a relationship because you want to make sure that… 50 years from now, curators will still be able to show these games without being bogged by intellec...

A VR game allows users to 'save' a digital model of the Notre Dame Cathedral

2022-06-21T14:03:00-04:00

Assassin’s Creed Unity is a 2014 video game set in Paris in 1789 that includes a surprisingly detailed digital model of the cathedral [...] The video game version of the cathedral wasn’t detailed enough for that kind of forensic research, but the makers of the game did find a way to put their version of Notre-Dame back to work. Today, Ubisoft is releasing Save Notre-Dame on Fire, a virtual reality game set inside the cathedral on the day of the fire.

"We’re using real elements from the architecture to create something that’s interesting for the player. We have all the immensity of the real Notre-Dame," shares Ubisoft's SVP Deborah Papiernik with Fast Company. The game was released in unison with a new movie directed by Enemy at the Gates director Jean-Jacques Annaud that depicts the real-life heroism of the Paris Fire Brigade, which managed to salvage an incredible amount of church relics, bells, and other artifacts in process of preventing a nearly total loss of the structure.

In an effort to help people understand the value and importance of the Cathedral's rebuilding efforts the game acts as a form of "edu-tainment' reports Nate Berg of Fast Company. Ubisoft's VR game release follows their $565,000 donation to the rebuilding effort back in 2019.

Decentraland is playing host to six-figure deals as architects begin to embrace the metaverse

2021-12-13T18:55:00-05:00

As part of the design community’s incorporation of talent into the nascent, ever-growing world of blockchain technology and digital architecture, more spaces are cropping up that have the potential to do outsized business opportunities with ramifications in the metaverse and beyond.

One of those spaces is the relatively new Decentraland, a 22-month-old 3D platform that currently plays host to over 90,000 parcels of land subdivided into individual 9-square-mile plots which can command prices as high as $2.43 million as the cost of digital land has boomed in unison with the rise of NFTs.

Metapurse HQ. Image courtesy Voxel Architects.

Thus far, Decentraland has featured some headline-grabbing projects, including a functional digital twin of the auction house Sotheby’s London headquarters. The display of NFT art has become one of the most predominant forms of building in the metaverse, followed by gaming, retail, and other forms of entertainment like blockchain casinos that have users li...

Shaped Touches by Sean Lally features an interactive video game for the Venice Biennale

2021-07-22T20:03:00-04:00

As part of this year’s Venice Biennale, architect Sean Lally of Switzerland-based Sean Lally Architecture has paired a physical installation with an immersive simulation video game.

Shaped Touches is an investigation into the ways architecture and space can be perceived, showcasing the inherent subjectivity of the craft. The project is centered around climate change, specifically the impact it will continue to have on the way future environments are experienced. Using a virtual platform, Lally provides unfamiliar and potential perspectives to its users.

“Architects are in a position to foreshadow the opportunities and implications these pressures will have on shared public spaces,” reads the project description. “Shaped Touches offers a proposition for how architecture will define its shape and the relationships of people and communities touching that space.”

Within the video game, players explore a design space. Every minute, the game restarts in the same space but with new senso...

Parametric design, Escheresque geometries, and architectural narrative all wrapped into a video game

2019-10-22T13:05:00-04:00

Architecture's influence in video game design has reached new heights over the years, providing architects and video game designers the ability to blend digital computation, mesmerizing graphics, and unforgettable worlds gamers can explore and get lost within.

Manifold Garden is one such example. The video game is the result of a seven-year effort by its designer William Chyr. This visually tasteful and mesmerizing puzzle game was released on October 18th and explores complex geometries, "unusual physics," and mind-bending architecture.

Manifold Garden game place screenshot. Image courtesy of Manifold Garden

Although Chyr doesn't have a background in architecture, his passion and interest in the field helped him create the geometric worlds in the game. In a press interview with Thomas McMullan of Alphr, Chyr shared, "Ando was the original inspiration. I can't have curved surfaces in the game – they all have to be 90-degree corners – because you can only fit along six gravity planes. ...

Graphics update for Minecraft has been canned...

2019-08-16T14:00:00-04:00

Minecraft has come a long way since its introduction a decade ago. It remains one of the top paid mobile games in Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store, while Minecraft: Education Edition has become a popular way to teach kids things like computer coding, engineering, architecture, urban planning and math.

The popular sandbox video game, Minecraft, known for enabling players to craft worlds, structures, objects, and pretty much anything one can imagine within its framework, has been due for "a major update since 2017."

The "Super Duper Graphics Pack was expected to bring more lighting effects like shadows and fog, new motion for some game elements like leaves, and new textures...," but Microsoft deemed the endeavor to be "too technically demanding."

It looks like players will have to enjoy the game in its current state for the time being.

Faculty members from Cornell's architecture department develop virtual reality program for popular video game company Epic Games

2019-06-27T13:56:00-04:00

Faculty in the Department of Architecture have received a cash gift from Epic Games Inc. in support of their work on Virtual Places, a project that is adapting the company's virtual reality (VR) gaming engine, Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), for architectural and urban design.

Three Cornell professors used virtual reality to create and expand on their research project Virtual Places. The study of architecture and video games is a growing focus. Within academia and practice, VR is a tool which helps unpack architectural ideas for learning as well as creating visualization possibilities for clients. Epic Games Inc., a video game and software development company known for creating the popular online game Fortnite, selected Professor Henry Richardson, Assistant Professor Timur Dogan, and Assistant Professor of the Practice Martin Miller as winners of a cash prize out of a pool of invited finalists for the international competition.

Image of Rockerfeller Center - taken from Virtual Places: Real Time Experiential Design and Visualization of Urban Spaces. Image courtesy of Cornell AAP

According to Richardson, "Virtual Places was launched this spring with a research seminar called Gaming Architecture. Both upper-class undergraduates and graduate students 'stress t...

Soviet architecture is the star of a new immersive indie video game called It's Winter

2019-03-14T21:15:00-04:00

It’s nighttime and you find yourself in a small, dark flat in a nondescript suburb in Russia. You look out of the window and see the courtyard covered in snow, illuminated by street lamps and the cold neon glare of storefronts. You turn on the light switch and look around your apartment. This is the melancholy start of a new immersive game made by developer Alexander Ignatov and poet Ilia Mazo.

The setting and landscapes of video game worlds add to the overall gaming experience, particularly free roaming games. Called a "sandbox" in the gaming community, the mission-less free to roam game allows the player to wander throughout the virtual world. Without a plot or mission to accomplish, gamers are allowed to do everything and nothing in the game It's Winter. Left with very little to dictate gameplay, the immersive gaming experience created by developer Alexander Ignatov and poet Ilia Mazo immerses players into a mundane suburban Russian tower block.

It's Winter game play still, Image © Alexander Ignatov and Ilia Mazo

According to the developer the "post-Soviet and sad 3D game" has nothing awaiting the player. "There is no chance to get out, no room for adventures, nor a breathtaking plot.” All you have to do is experience the precisely detailed, pixelated mundanity of the world around you." The only thing players are left with, however, are the detailed building interiors a...

Do architects make better video games? Cue Shedwork's Sable, 2019's beautifully anticipated video game

2019-01-11T19:20:00-05:00

Captivating audiences with their brief presentation at last year's 2018 E3 Expo, the game's development team Shedworks featured a strikingly captivating trailer that showed a world filled with beautiful desert landscapes, eye-catching color palettes, and of course beautiful renditions of towering architecture. Taking much inspiration from classic graphic artists like Jean “Moebius” Giraud and games such as 80 Days and Sunless Sea, the overall plot of the game revolves around a young character named Sable and her exploration of a world whose history is unknown. Sable's lead designer uses his architectural education to create a world that expressed a way for gamers and enthusiasts to understand architecture through exploration.

Sable - game play screen capture Image © Shedworks

When developing the game's overall concept lead designer Greg Kythreotis explains it was important to build something artistically evocative. Much of the game c...

Disappear Here: architecture and video games

2018-11-13T13:24:00-05:00

North London video game developer, Shedworks, have developed a specially commissioned film for our exhibition Disappear Here: On perspective and other kinds of space, in collaboration with Sam Jacob Studio. We spoke to Greg Kythreotis, co-founder of Shedworks, to find out more about how the video came about and the processes behind it.

RIBA interviews Greg Kythreotis, co-founder of video game studio Shedworks; talking about his involvement in the current Disappear Here: On perspective and other kinds of space exhibition at the RIBA Architecture Gallery in London, the collaboration with Sam Jacob Studio, and potential overlaps between architecture and video games in respect of the 'perspective' theme.

"Whilst the history of perspective and architecture are incredibly intertwined," Kythreotis explains, "I also think that, by virtue of historically being rendered on a screen, video games also have an incredibly rich history of exploring perspective. Whether orthographic, more realistic renderings or complete distortions and warpings of perspective, I would love to see the overlaps between mediums be explored in even more depth."

Gaming the neighborhood: One-to-One #32 with Jose Sanchez, co-creator of Block'hood computer game

2016-08-01T15:35:00-04:00

Architect Jose Sanchez is the co-creator of Block'hood, a city-building computer game that runs on real city data. Under his practice, plethora-project (covering architecture and indie game development), he focuses on how play can initiate design practice.

In Block’hood, players build cities out of 80 preset block types, and are rewarded for thinking “ecologically” and creating diverse cities (check out some screen shots in the gallery below). Sanchez wanted the game to be accessible to everyone, not just urban planners or architects, and to ultimately be both a learning tool and fun in its own right. Sanchez's interview is part of our special August focus on Games.

Listen to One-to-One #32 with Jose Sanchez:

iTunes: Click here to listen and subscribe to the new "Archinect Sessions One-to-One" podcast
SoundCloud: click here to follow Archinect
RSS: subscribe with any of your favorite podcasting apps via our RSS feed: http://onetoone.libsyn.com/rss
Download: this episode

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Defy gravity in the works of FLW, Tadao Ando, Louis Kahn in this upcoming video game

2016-06-27T20:44:00-04:00

Frank Lloyd Wright, level designer? That’s what artist William Chyr was thinking, from the moment he crossed the threshold at the Robie House...It was a rare IRL architectural excursion, as Chyr has been immersed in building the digital levels of Manifold Garden, his first-person 3D exploration game in which you defy gravity in order to walk up walls, fall through windows, and launch yourself from one side to the other of an infinite stepwell, [while] solving increasingly difficult puzzles.

Alexandra Lange interviews video game designer William Chyr on his upcoming game, “Manifold Garden”, which is due for a January 2017 release on PlayStation 4. “Chyr has slowly incorporated more architectural references,” Lange writes, ”stretching back through the centuries and including built works by Frank Lloyd Wright and Tadao Ando, and unbuilt works by Louis Kahn, Anne Tyng, and Arata Isozaki.”

You can also watch a 16-minute gameplay demo right below. (Just be careful if you have motion-sickness.)

Console narratives: how games incorporate architectural storytelling

2016-03-16T12:58:00-04:00

Dark Souls and Bloodborne both put the player in decaying worlds and invite them to peel back layers of history. From the ruins of Firelink Shrine and its relationship to the Undead Church above it, to the various connections between Bloodborne’s Central Yharnam, Old Yharnam and Cathedral Ward, Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team of environment designers imply much of the game’s narrative through the clash between one architectural style and another; between one layer of history and the next.

Perhaps you're ready to take a break from diving and dodging through problematic MEP in Rhino to enjoy the scripted unfurling of these (non-deadline driven) complex spatial narratives, some of which are inspired by the work of real-world firms like Herzog & de Meuron.

What's new in architecturally-related game design? This, for starters:

This studio illustrates Minecraft's architectural capabilities to create imaginary worlds

2015-08-17T16:34:00-04:00

The BlockWorks studio proves, yet again, that architects can use Minecraft as a design tool to produce rather magical results with impressive detail. The team of architects, designers, and animators envision mystical cubic worlds in response to what they refer to as "Briefs", which include commissions from YouTube personalities, gaming networks, museums, and film studios as well as original submissions to actual Minecraft design competitions.

Although the designs are largely fictional, BlockWorks draws inspiration from real-world buildings from throughout history and even structural details by today's starchitects. As expected, the team's growing portfolio is pretty spectacular, and surely retains one's attention for a good amount of time.

You can check out more of BlockWorks' projects in greater detail on their website. Also, sneak a peek at some their project trailers below or on their YouTube channel.

All images via. H/T Kotaku Australia

Primary school kids could design Australia's next national park via Minecraft

2015-04-24T20:50:00-04:00

Australia’s next national park could be designed on the video game Minecraft – and by primary school children – if a new venture by the [NRAMLR] goes to plan. In a move worthy of Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation, pupils from the Adelaide Hills area have been invited to design their 'perfect national park' using the block-building game, with $8.9m allotted to bring the winning student’s design to life.

How video game engines may influence the future of architecture (and everything else)

2015-03-05T13:47:00-05:00

Epic Games, the company best known for Gears of War, has a very different plan for this generation of video games — one that expands far beyond what games are typically assumed to be. [...] In this future, or present if you ask Sweeney, lessons learned from one field, say an architect designing a virtual building, can be applied to games or film, and likewise. Sweeney believes the potential application of the engine across all fields increases exponentially as information is shared.

The issue of homelessness in SimCity

2015-02-09T19:19:00-05:00

The issue of homelessness in SimCity was recently taken on by an article at Vice News’s tech blog, Motherboard. The article focuses on Matteo Bittanti, a professor at Milan’s IULM University, who became increasingly interested in homelessness in the game. [...] Bittani was so interested in it that he began compiling quotes from SimCity users intent on dealing with the virtual homeless, ultimately publishing them in a 600 page, two volume mega-book called “How to get rid of the homeless”.

Do video games belong in fine art museum collections?

2015-02-09T15:33:00-05:00

The popularity of video games shows no sign of waning, and museums have ramped up their interest in the medium. [...] “Sorry MoMA, video games are not art” was the headline on Jonathan Jones’s blog [...] after New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced the acquisition of 14 video games, including 1980s classics “Tetris” and “Pac-Man”. “All hell broke loose in an interesting way,” said Paola Antonelli, a senior curator in the museum’s department of architecture and design [...].

Artist creates game "Maze Walkthrough" featuring the best Sci-Fi corridors in film

2014-12-23T18:23:00-05:00

I’ve been collecting corridors from sci-fi movies for almost 3 years now as part of an artistic project. For ‘Maze Walkthrough’, I’ve selected some of those corridors, made 3D reproductions of them, and built a virtual maze putting them together. The final result is a desktop application that puts the user inside the maze, allowing him or her to navigate and explore it, kind of a FPS video-game without the shooting.

How video games have the power to change real lives

2014-08-08T13:46:00-04:00

But the intricate fantasy environments imagined for games like GTA V may well prove more useful than they seem. Now the technologies and tools developed by this multibillion dollar entertainment industry are making changes in the real world. John Isaacs, a lecturer in computing at the University of Abertay, is one of those exploring the possibilities of game engines. In 2011, he developed an urban mapping application for his PhD project.

Monument Valley, a video game about impossible architecture

2014-01-07T17:32:00-05:00

For a few years I’ve thought about how one might design a game where the architecture was the central character. I’m particularly fond of temples, palaces, mosques, monasteries and other buildings which combine exquisite artistry with a potential for exploration and mystery. The main problem was how to make an interactive experience out of this.

Equator launches architecture competition that will be conducted inside of the video game Minecraft

2013-07-15T14:08:00-04:00

Swedish architecture firm Equator, in partnership with Mojang – the creators of Minecraft, invited players of the popular video game to submit their ideas for an architecture competition that would be held within the game itself. The Minecraft design competition, which runs until July 31st, is in line with a 2023 housing project by HSB Stockholm in Kungsbroplan. The housing company is holding an architectural competition for the project and wants to see ideas related to the future of housing.

Equator and Mojang invite all minecrafters to a Minecraft Competition July 1 to July 31.

HSB Stockholm has chosen a site, at Kungsbroplan in Stockholm, for its future project in 2023, where they want to see new ideas about housing in the future.

But a good city is not just about housing, it should have other exciting features as well. Therefore, we at Equator and Mojang would like to invite all minecrafters to a Minecraft competition where you`d get the chance to come up with ideas about how Stockholm could look like in 2023.

The Minecraft challange is to design a tall building on the chosen site with housing and your amazing ideas! Come up with ideas about what you`d want to see in Stockholm 2023.

From July 1 to 31, there will be a server: ksf.so opened for all interested minecraft builders.

On August 8, Equator chooses three winners who will get fine Mojang prizes. The ideas of the three laureates will be presented in the Equator Stockholm architectural proposal fo...

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.

Berlin Block Tetris

2009-10-16T17:27:00-04:00

Aaaand here's yet another Berlin-related post: Berlin Block Tetris from Sergej Hein on Vimeo.

Sergej Hein: "It´s kind of a parody about the former socialist building style. They use to build whole cities, without any change in House design or room layout to create cheep housing for workers (we call them Blocks). In Soviet times you could easily wake up at a friends place in another city and still feel like you are in your flat as the furniture was the same as well...

I was living in a Block on the opposite side of the street in Berlin 2 years ago. Living there remind me of my early childhood in Riga where we had nearly the same Blocks.

I think Alexei Paschitnow, the inventor of Tetris, had kind of the same Idea as me in spring 1984. I bet he was looking out of the window of his Block in Moscow and thought how do soviet architects actually plan this buildings?"