Archinect - News

City-building games highlight humanity's grim toll on nature

2019-04-29T17:37:00-04:00

Two recently released video games are updating the SimCity model to better incorporate the complex relationship humans and cities have to nature and its precious resources.

The first, Islanders, has users generate a city on an island with a limited amount of resources. Users are given a set of building-type choices—lumber mills, farm plots, mansions, fisheries, and so on—that they then put down somewhere on the island. Ultimately a game about land use, points are generated based on how optimal the placement of each building is. For examples, homes generate the most points near city centers, while fisheries generate the most points near clusters of homes.

20 Minute Metropolis, on the other hand, is a game much more focused on speed. Users are given 20 minutes to try to build the best city they can. While players are given a finite amount of resources (stone, wood, metal and plastic) to build up their cities, points are gained from making parks.

Both games are about striking a bala...

SimCity's lasting impact on architects and city planners

2019-03-06T15:25:00-05:00

Along the way, the games have introduced millions of players to the joys and frustrations of zoning, street grids and infrastructure funding — and influenced a generation of people who plan cities for a living. For many urban and transit planners, architects, government officials and activists, “SimCity” was their first taste of running a city.

"It was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns and cities were things that were planned, and that it was someone's job to decide where streets, schools, bus stops and stores were supposed to go," writes Jessica Roy for the Los Angeles Times.

Happen to look for a real life urban planning opportunity? Check out our Archinect job board for available positions.

Watching a real Architect tour his dream house built in "Minecraft"

2018-09-11T14:12:00-04:00

While normally used by online gamers to create a generated world for exploration and combat, the world-building computer game Minecraft has been noted for its architectural capabilities. BlockWorks, a design studio in the UK, uses the game as a design tool to create materials for marketing, media, and education; a competition in Australia a few years back invited students to design a national park using the block-building program; and Bjarke Ingels has proselytized at length that the architecture field should become more like the game as well.

Providing an online platform to build the world we want to inhabit, Minecraft's great distinction is its offer of complete freedom from real world constraints—there's no clients, no engineers, and no financial restrictions. Testing those limits, architect and designer Andrew McClure of Nomad Design set out to build something using Minecraft. Educated on the program by his young cousin, McClure picked a site in the desert, laid out a foundatio...

Gamespace Urbanism: understanding reality through simulation

2017-12-29T12:18:00-05:00

The following examples show how gamespace can become the stage for a social, political and ethical critique: from a nondescript city under the effect of gentrification, to a barren luxury estate and a set of playful and absurd buildings for London. These examples suggest that, rather than allowing architects to indulge Piranesi’s power-hungry ideal, games could work as a means of showing how dysfunctional reality really is.

In her essay Gamespace Urbanism: City-Building Games and Radical Simulations for Failed Architecture, Federica Buzzi looks at a new crop of indie city-planning computer games that promise fresh potential for simulation and exploration of radical urban scenarios — and subsequent social, political, and ethical critique: "Beyond critique and virtual entertainment, the question they open up is whether games can be used as reliable systems to study and solve actual and theoretical conflicts."

Take a virtual reality tour of "different planes of the digital and physical universe"

2017-01-20T10:40:00-05:00

You don't need a blacklight for this one: Morphogenesis, a full-length virtual reality experience that transports the viewer through elaborate, thrill-inducing shapes, will definitely take you out of this world, at least for a few minutes. The geometrically derived immersive spaces it generates come with their own audio soundtrack, adding a certain eerie/cool dimension all its own. Check out the trailer for this creation from two San Francisco-based Fulbright Scholars:

Raphael Sperry, President of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, on the "hauntingly real" computer game, "Prison Architect"

2015-11-11T12:45:00-05:00

space and building costs are just as much of guiding principles in designing real prisons as they are in Prison Architect. [...] "Prisoners themselves are generally not included in the conversation where the prison construction budget is allocated to different priorities, so their needs come last and cell size is generally set at the legal minimum," Sperry said. "The legal standard only bars 'cruel or unusual punishment'—a cell can be punitively small as long as it doesn't cross that limit."

More on the discussion around prison architecture:

SimCity and beyond: the history of city-building games

2015-10-16T13:28:00-04:00

Cities are everywhere. Billions of us live in them, and many of us think we could do a better job than the planners. But for the past 26 years dating back to the original SimCity, we've mostly been proving that idea false. [...] And now, here, I'm going to take you on a whirlwind tour through the history of the city-building genre—from its antecedents to the hot new thing.

Related on Archinect: