Archinect - News

Watch an urban planner play SimCity with real world commentary

2018-08-17T14:45:00-04:00

In this extended short, City Beautiful takes on the old school classic SimCity from the perspective of a professional planner 20 years later. Along the way, City Beautiful provides pertinent observations of game play versus reality.

Urban Design Ph.D student Dave Amos circles back around to the game that sparked his passion as a kid playing computer games. An advocate for sustainable living and diverse cities, Amos plays through the old school SimCity game providing relevant insights learned over the years in his career.

Win a copy of Joseph Choma's “Études for Architects”, a book of pedagogical design games for architects

2018-08-08T12:25:00-04:00

Design Topology Lab founder and architectural educator Joseph Choma is back with a new pedagogical book called “Études for Architects”, which comes a few years after his acclaimed “MORPHING: A Guide to Mathematical Transformations for Architects and Designers”.

If you're a new student to design or maybe you want to refresh your skills, this book features a series of pedagogical games that architects can play as a means to design. Thanks to publisher Routledge and Joseph Choma, Archinect is giving away five copies of the book to our readers!

Photo courtesy of Joseph Choma.

Written in straightforward text and featuring explanatory diagrams, the book's learning objectives include: computational thinking and making; introduction to design as an iterative, reflective, and rigorous process; ideas of continuity and discontinuity; and understanding the bias and constraints of analog and digital tooling. It also includes compelling examples of student work to e...

You can now play Tetris with Soviet-style housing blocks

2018-04-18T14:13:00-04:00

If you've been around the 'architecture-can-be-fun-too'-focused internet for a while, you may remember Sergej Hein's semi-viral gem of a video, Berlin Block Tetris, which was exactly that: an animated version of the video game classic using building blocks that resembled socialist-era residential high-rises.

Lithuanian designer Lukas Valiauga has now taken the idea to the next, interactive, level and created the mobile app Tower Block Game.

Tower Block Game by Lukas Valiauga

"This game is a playful tribute to a not so playful reality of monotonous and bleak cityscapes built out of same prefabricated concrete blocks," the app description explains. "Very specific for Eastern-Europe but evident everywhere else, too. These relic tower blocks usually mark failed social programmes and neighbourhoods planned as clumsy as some failed building block game… On that note, build and demolish one for yourself!"

Tower Block Game is available for Android from the Google Play store.

Not much of a gam...

Pokémon Go is forcing us to grapple with 'virtual usage' zoning

2016-08-11T13:22:00-04:00

“if augmented reality really catches on, and an internet environment overlaid on our real world surroundings becomes common, what will be the rules around using that augmented space?" [...] Could you sell, lease, or subdivide the digital rights to your own home, yard, or lobby? Could you extract a toll, tax, or commission from virtual usage?

Referencing multiple, international cases of private property disputes over the mega-popular Pokémon Go game, Geoff Manaugh floats the idea of zoning regulations for virtual and augmented reality instances.

As players wander through public and private spaces alike to catch 'em all, they inevitably trespass on certain stakeholders ideas' of what's allowed in that space—especially if the 'Trainers' are profiting financially in any way from occupying, say, a suburban front yard.

As these disputes proliferate (whether from Pokémon Go, or the next AR/VR game to takes its place in popularity), Manaugh's piece poses the following: What rights do virtual entities have to be in those spaces? What rights to property owners have to keep Snorlax from napping in their hammock?

More AR/VR on Archinect:

Moscow's own version of Pokémon Go will let you "catch" famous figures from Russian history

2016-07-25T13:46:00-04:00

Moscow City Hall has announced the launch of its own version of online game “Pokemon Go.” Russians will be asked to find and "catch" historical figures in the streets of the capital via an app called “Know Moscow.Photo.” [...] people will be able to catch and take a selfie with [...] Yury Gagarin, Alexander Pushkin, Pyotr Chaikovsky, [founder of the first Russian university] Mikhail Lomonosov, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte and the tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich,” [...]

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.)

What SimCity 2000 teaches us about urban planning today

2016-06-15T13:58:00-04:00

Although the game was simulating an environment from 1989, urban planners these days still run into problems trying to get officials to think about their city in the long run. Climate change and sea level rise is a very crystalline example of the way city officials get in their own way and set themselves up for larger obstacles later on [...] Playing SimCity 2000 nowadays is a strange but wonderful way to realize what defines a city is not what it currently is, but what it could be.

More on simulations and gameplay for city planning:

"Cards Against Urbanity," the hilarious and surreal urban planning game

2015-10-21T19:59:00-04:00

[Cards Against Urbanity] works like this: One person plays a card that poses a question or fill-in-the-blank, like “The Mayor got in trouble for crowdsourcing ________”. Each other player plays a card that they think represents the “best” answer, like “The poor door,” “NIMBYs,” or “A stress ball shaped like Richard Florida.” The first player chooses their favorite answer, many laughs are had, and at some point, if at least one player is sober enough to keep score, one is crowned the winner.

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:

California Water Crisis? Now there's a board game for that!

2015-06-23T14:12:00-04:00

What would you do about the drought if you were Jerry Brown? A new 2-3 player board game by Bay Area-based graphic designer Alfred Twu allows you to play the politics of water in California. Twu specializes in designing games that try and have fun with complex issues. Currently, he is developing one called “California Housing Crisis” that deals with San Francisco’s runaway housing costs, and he previously designed a fantasy map for a U.S. national high speed rail system that went viral.

Have an idea for how to address the drought with design? Submit your ideas to the Dry Futures competition!

Play "Inside the rent", and become a virtual developer in NYC

2015-06-09T13:24:00-04:00

Different policy debates come into play throughout the game and the player is tasked with making choices that will affect the final rent – for instance build in high-cost neighborhoods, pay workers prevailing wages, expend public money to subsidize the building, or to give in and accept higher rents than desired.

The rent is too damn high, but so are a lot of other development costs. In this simulation game by NYC's Citizens Housing Planning Council, players go through the steps of planning a NYC rental in the current economic climate – complete with housing shortage and gentrifying neighborhoods.

After choosing a site, players must set targets for rent, construction wages, amenities, building size – and as they outfit their property, they see costs go up, and whether their target rent will actually yield a profit. Or (gasp!) whether they'll need to apply for government subsidies. According to the CHPC, the figures used in the game "are based on interviews with developers, appraisers, architects and underwriters, and are current as of 2015."

Play Inside the rent here, and see if you can fix the housing crisis. My $4,000 / mo 2BR in a new Harlem mid-size only exists thanks to government subsidies and minimum construction wages. If you're interested in other real estate development-based games, ...

For a limited time only, you can play PAC-MAN on Google Maps

2015-04-06T18:39:00-04:00

Welcome, Player 1! You can now play the classic arcade game PAC-MAN in Google Maps with streets as your maze. Avoid Blinky, Pinky, Inky, (and Clyde!) as you swerve the streets of some famous places around the world. But eat the pac-dots fast, because this game will only be around for a little while.

There are even Google Maps-specific bonus-point icons, along with the classic fruits. It's a highly addictive way to learn your way around an city's streets.

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.

Florida Researchers to develop virtual reality game using architecture to teach math to middle-school students

2013-09-30T19:25:00-04:00

Florida State University College of Education's Fengfeng Ke, an assistant professor in the Educational Psychology and Learning Systems department, is creating a computer game called Earthquake Rebuild that encourages creativity in design and uses architecture to teach geometry and other math skills. Ke and her team of fellow educators have been awarded a $549,937 National Science Foundation grant to support the creation of this game-based learning platform.

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.”

Tilt-tables and Google Maps make a game out of environments

2012-04-28T17:17:00-04:00

How much have books or film influenced your sense and recognition of place were you've never been before? And how about games, as developers push for more accurate and realistic map models? How will the ability to interface with all aspects of real-world data affect our future perception of space and place?

Built using Google's Start Here technology.

SXSW 2012: Can Physical Architecture And Interaction Design Achieve Transcendence?

2012-03-12T14:10:00-04:00

The way to find the sort of transcendence Coulter is looking for is to achieve "flow" [...]. Simplistically, flow is when someone becomes one with an experience, whether that be contained in a game or a building. This type of flow is present in "Snake the Planet!", which merges interaction design and architecture.

The Modern Architecture Game, by NEXT Architects

2012-01-30T12:16:00-05:00

Containing almost a 1000 questions, the Modern Architecture Game provides the base for an evening full of insights in the world’s most famous architects, buildings and trends of the Western architecture, all through the roll of a dice. The goal is simple: To reach the heart of the board before anyone else. This is done by moving your way through questions of six different categories: Visuals, Architect, Project, Style, Influence and Quote.