Since I was young, I’ve lived a bit of a rudderless
life. Drifting from city to city with my
parents as a kid, bouncing around the Midwest and Western Europe in college,
rapidly cycling through different American cities on both coasts over the last
half-decade of my life. I’ve spent a lot
of time walking around cities, getting a feel for areas, learning how cities
flow and what makes each of them special.
Most recently, in Brooklyn I’ve come to see how the sprawl of a
neighborhood speaks on the character of the people who live there, from the
desolate midrises that pocked the concrete in Flatbush to the sloping
Brownstones of Crown Heights, which form their own queer horizon against oddly
plentiful trees. Cities are made up of
microcosms like these, spaces within spaces contained of their own character
and purpose, grown not to fulfill specific needs but to support the whim of a
general populace.
This can be difficult to recreate. Authors, artists and musicians struggle to
capture the essence of a city. Some of
them do so quite well. Map designers in
video games, however, have a unique challenge: they’re not only attempting to
convey a certain kind of atmosphere.
They’re also attempting to present players with the ability to have
experiences within that environment that develop that ethos, all the while
ostensibly moving the game as a whole towards a goal. There are games that do this incredibly well,
don’t get me wrong. In terms of
recreating the present day, GTA IV, for all its narrative problems, is actually
quite adept at presenting neighborhoods and environs. In terms of weird past-era or fantasy realm
settings, there’s a bevy of titles that do incredible things with cityscapes:
The Elder Scrolls, dating back to Morrowwind, has managed to give us pulsingly
organic cities throughout its history as a series. Assassin’s Creed has done so as well, particularly
in its first incarnation, where seemingly nondescript settings grew into sprawling
masterworks of subtle map creation.
Thief: Deadly Shadows is the most conventional game I can think of that
creates a cityscape effectively, but there’s something tremendously alive about
the manner in which TDS’ nameless city writhes and unfolds (though there are
hints of this in previous Thief games, where sprawling environs make up the
settings of missions, and truly remarkable markets, museums and residential
streets come to life).
But I can’t really say the same for futuristic games at
all. Mass Effect is a particularly nasty
offender, especially ME2, where cities are more or less a set of sterile
interlocking boxes you use navigation panels to jump around. Deus Ex, particularly the Human Revolution entry
in the series, creates a series of cityscapes oriented primarily around the
missions that populate them. There’s
never an “A-ha!” moment, or a moment where you wander into a part of the city
disconnected from a plot. The cities of
Deus Ex are not masses of humanity wriggling their way into relevance, but are
plot delivery systems where every seemingly random bit of life ties into a
greater overarching plot (often in a ridiculous or grating manner).
This really dawned on me when I was playing System Shock
2. Admittedly, System Shock 2’s city isn’t
supposed to be a place where we spend much time. It’s the game’s starting area, primarily
aimed at teaching you how to navigate in a safe space and to guide you to a
series of tutorials. But it’s also an
opportunity to generate a specific image of humanity at a moment in time, and I
genuinely believe that it fails in that effort.
It’s an airless, guileless space that (technical limitations aside) is
filled with dead payphones and dumb, shut in gawkers and hawkers with no lives
beyond you.
Compare this to the Von Braun: a resplendent example of how
to design a series of maps. The Von
Braun is an intense, almost magical example of how you can make a space seem
very, very real in a video game, creating a sense of constant life in a
lifeless, airless space. While creeping
through the corridors of the Von Braun of late, I’ve been counting beds,
surveying quarters and considering just what went in to making this ship what
it was. There’s a functionality to all
these spaces that exceeds the constraints of the game’s mission statement and
overarching plot even as it works to fulfill the needs of these various masters
of game-dom. But you’re shot into the
Von Braun through one of the most un-city like cities ever.
It’s clear that develops know how to make sci-fi settings
that feel lifelike. Red Faction:
Guerilla’s Mars, the aforementioned Von Braun, the varied cityscapes of Star
Wars: The Old Republic (omitted from this discussion for their ostensible presence
in our past, my nerdlings). But when it
comes to actually rendering a near future or distant future city, it seems like
developers aren’t up to task. The end
result is frustrating: it takes the shape of glimpses of a city, of
artificially closed off boxes that constrain movement and deny the very
existence of the worlds they’re ostensibly there to imply things about through
their operation.
Perhaps this division comes from the meticulous research and
effort that goes into crafting historic or fantastic cities. Assassin’s Creed draws heavily on reference
material, as do The Elder Scrolls and Thief.
These references are relatively obvious, and constitute a rapid
shorthand for “city.” Thief immediately
presents me with a resonant image of Victorian England. Assassin’s Creed is saturated with its
reference material to delightful excess.
The Elder Scroll’s reliance on old European cultural tropes is evident
to anyone who’s spent time backpacking across the continent – it’s a wonderful
milieu of traditional British, Roman, Irish, and Norweigan tropes of building
(though Morrowwind turns those on their head quite delightfully in its
fantastical rendering of many of its cities).
Or perhaps it comes from the fact that these games are,
first and foremost, all about exploring areas, whereas the games I’ve mentioned
previously are all, at their heart, shooters.
Spaces are generally designed to accommodate the action of gunplay, not
to foment careful exploration. You’ll
notice I haven’t mentioned Call of Duty in this post, largely for that reason:
Call of Duty’s cities are arenas, first and foremost, cities second.
But there are examples of future cities being done
right. Or rather, a single example comes
to mind. Half-Life 2’s world feels
incredibly populated, even as you’re constantly thrown about within it, and
spend the bulk of the game outside of these cityscapes. Perhaps that sensation owes something to the
very real eastern European cities that Half-Life 2 draws its architecture
from. During a train stopover in
Katowice, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash if I’d been handed a zero point
energy field manipulator and asked to hold off Combine forces in a tremendously
climactic battle.
Reference, then, might be key. Cities require reference. They require people, real or imagined, to
become real things, and a city of imagined people may feel untrue, since
imagining a city of people is something of a heroic feat.
Or it could be that I have unrealistic expectations of map
designers. That could be very true as
well.
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