Sunday, May 19, 2013

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Disappointing Cities of Tomorrow!



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.

No comments: