30 years have passed since the launch of the first installment of SimCity , one of the first video games in the genre of city building. The relationship of this title with urban planning is evident, since the players receive a blank map and must gradually incorporate buildings and basic services until building a city that works in an organized way and that makes its citizens happy. But although in most cases the relationship between video games and cities is not as obvious as in SimCity , urban environments are always very important in the experiences and memories of the players.
Konstantinos Dimopoulos is one of the video game professionals who has paid the most attention to this topic. In collaboration with the artist Maria Kallikaki, she has written a book, entitled Virtual cities and scheduled for publication in September, which brings together maps of 40 video game metropolises, some as popular as the sinister city of Silent Hill , the Kamurocho district of the saga. Yakuza or the post-apocalyptic New Vegas from Fallout: New Vegas .
Nobody was expecting this, but it's time for a belated #PortfolioDay! So ... I'm Konstantinos - a game urbanist, designer, writer, and lecturer.
I plan cities, design urban systems & sims, consult on, and create spaces for games. I am also the author of the Virtual Cities atlas. pic.twitter.com/83SQEiZ6WI
Videogame urbanism, in statements from Dimopoulos to Verne , is the discipline that applies "geographical planning, knowledge and experience to urban video game spaces. It is not only to transfer the scale of a city to graphic design, but also make those environments immersive, credible, and memorable, while serving the narrative and mechanics of a game. " In short, the job of the video game developer is to create a logical city, whether it mimics a medieval village or a fantastic city.
SimCity is, therefore, the game that marked a before and after in this matter. Will Wright, creator of the franchise, was thoroughly informed to give his game maximum realism. Its great reference was the book Urban Dynamics , by Jay W. Forrester (1969), which uses a computer model with which it defines the elements that control the balance of population, housing and industry of a city. In conclusion, this book simulates the life cycle of a city and predicts the consequences of the solutions he proposes to maintain the prosperity of the city.
Will Wright achieved his goals, as evidenced by the fact that the quotes to this video game are so recurring to talk about contemporary urbanism. For example, an article published in the American media Slate highlighted how this game allows us "to understand all the systems involved in urban life and discover how to manage the information they provide us." However, the title also presents some shadows. An article by Failed Architecture explains that traditional city-building games, more than anything else, illustrate how urban planning should not be in the future, since they only allow the creation of technocratic, totalizing cities and in which the environment Natural is presented as a commodity.
This was demonstrated by Vincent Ocasla, an architecture student who analyzed the SimCity algorithm and built an urban core of six million inhabitants in 2010, the maximum allowed by the game, called MagnaSanti. Despite the fact that his city could be considered successful in terms of the video game itself, Ocasla stated in an interview in Vice : "In the city there are many other problems hidden behind the mirage of order and greatness: the suffocating air pollution, the high rate unemployment, the lack of fire stations, schools or hospitals, the rigidity imposed on the lifestyle of citizens ... It is the price that sims pay to live in the city with the largest population. It is a sick and twisted target " The project became part of a virtual exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and called Design and Violence.
Beyond the city building genre, other video games have paid a lot of attention to the design of their urban environments, and not only from an aesthetic point of view. "The first step in developing a living and credible city would be to keep in mind that all things, regardless of how strange and exotic they seem, must make sense in a coherent way, and that cities are not only shaped by their built environment , but also for their life, their activity and their functions. (...) Cities are entities created over hundreds of years, and are affected by billions of decisions, both large and small, "Dimopoulos tells us. .
There are classic video game cities that are great samples of an excellent virtual urbanism. For example, the City 17 scenario of the Half Life 2 title sports an effective and witty design, despite having been released on the market in a distant 2004. The title includes many details that connect with the narration and introduce the player to a specific setting and mission, such as the imposing presence in the city center of the La Ciudadela building, headquarters of the invading and antagonistic organization of the game, La Alianza.
Other monuments or settings important to the plot, such as the train station where the protagonist, Gordon Freeman, arrives at the beginning of the game, facilitate orientation while continuing to provide information about the alien occupation, the city's transport systems and the poverty and oppression suffered by the population. Wherever we look, past architectural styles coexist with outsiders, installed for the surveillance of the population. This causes the player to be immediately immersed in the space where the adventure takes place, despite not having the same level of detail as current productions.
However, taking advantage of the recent release of the Final Fantasy VII remake , we analyzed this franchise to understand what kind of decisions those who create video games face to represent urban environments. In the original version of Squaresoft (1997), Yoshinori Kitase and Naoki Hamaguchi designed the city of Midgar as an immense structure divided into eight sectors or districts that obtain energy from the so-called Mako reactors, installations that absorb the vital energy of the planet.
In the center of the city is the powerful Shin-Ra corporation, the company responsible for the extraction, whose presence contrasts with the slums located below the capital. Although the video game character moved in recreated scenarios with still images and hardly any camera angles, it is enough for us to see how in the design of the city the critics of greedy capitalism and the inequalities that Final Fantasy VII wants to tell us about tried to collect. .
For the remake of the game, released on April 10, twenty-three years after the original version, Kitase and Hamaguchi faced the challenge of updating, expanding and solidifying the attributes of that Midgar. Her decisions are perceived from the very introduction, in which precise cinematics set forth details about Midgar's history and everyday life. In this video we see the desertification of the surroundings of the metropolis, the multiple works that invade public space for the sake of modernization and the economic differences between the city's districts. They are elements prepared so that the player can situate himself in the story and in the environment that he will explore in the first part of the game.
In a statement from Hamaguchi collected on the PlayStation blog, the co-director of the game claimed that, beyond the introduction, they had produced a map of Midgar for the new version. "We have not done everything with the same quality or the same level of detail as the areas that you can visit in the game, but we have made a map of the entire city and what is going to go in each of those areas." On a small scale, they investigated how it was possible for the city to work, finding out data such as the real size of the pillars that must support the weight of the sectors or where the tunnels should pass if it were a real metropolis. They also updated the lighting in the city and used up to a hundred synchronized computers that simulated the calculations necessary to know the reflections of each object. Thus, the city and its elements were rescaled and adapted, so that the final design is credible.
As is often the case with major releases, players have received the iconic capital's renewal with conflicting views. Many players praise the work of the Square Enix team, while others consider that, beyond its presentation, the graphic renewal should have penetrated the same in the individual and collective stories. Walking through Midgar we find that, for example, the culture, interests or opinions of the people who inhabit it are hardly reflected, showing only as proof of the city's social inequalities. Despite everything, the classic metropolis that conquered the public in its time now also does so because of its level of realism.
But there is still a long way to go. Konstantinos Dimopoulos, in response to a question about the future of specialization, tells Verne that "a combination of better tools and an ever-evolving body of design knowledge and techniques will lead us to even more fascinating game cities."
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