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. — CNET

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. — Cornell University

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 Calvert Journal

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

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. — Curbed

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. — Alphr.com

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. — The Guardian

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. — theverge.com

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”. — thisbigcity.net

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 [...]. — theartnewspaper.com

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. — prostheticknowledge.tumblr.com

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. — theguardian.com