Architectural Video Games : Crowdsourcing Design Futures

Can video games serve as design tools?

What if the future of architecture and urban planning can be found in the digital landscapes of role-playing games? Today, designers are looking for inspiration and accuracy through civilization simulations and MMORPG’s (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games.) These increasingly complex digital worlds contain economic, energy and growth algorithms that are being translated back to the real world. Users from all over the globe can plug into the same world and build collectively.

Minecraft rendering of Paris.

In exploring solutions to solve urban planning problems, architects like Jose Sanchez have found that games are powerful tools for experimentation...

"Games do not need to be a mechanism only for entertainment. They have the power to immerse players into simulated narratives and allow for a collective thinking through virtual communities. More than 90 per cent of our cities are done by non-architects. The United Nations is using games like Minecraft to re-think neighbourhoods and disaster zones. I think that Block'hood is opening a door for the field of architecture, one that many other disciplines have started exploring." Jose Sanchez. (Source.)

Block’hood, designed by Sanchez, is a computer game where the user is challenged with creating a neighborhood with sustainable environmental, social and economic networks. Using a catalog of 96 “blocks” - the user can create and combine architectural elements needed for housing, trees, bushes, wind turbines and photovoltaic panels.

A New Scale of Design Engagement

"As architects, we have been trained to think of local scales: small, medium, large and extra large. But today we face global issues and we need new tools to address a new kind of scale: a planetary scale. By using games, we can engage a global audience in the problems that architecture is facing." Jose Sanchez. (Source.)

The OG Block

SimTown is a town planning computer game that arrived on the Windows ‘95 scene in, you guessed it, 1995. The strategy game challenged users to create a functioning town environment with proper amenities and infrastructure. This was perhaps one of the earliest examples of imagining city-making as a game.

Will Architecture & City Planning Become A Game?

Two decades later, visualization tools like Microsoft's Hololens have begun taking game-play to the next level. Hololens blends Minecraft with real-world environments. As this fluency between digital and physical matures... what effect could that have on design professions?

• Will architecture become a crowdsourced game?

• Could design problems be solved in the same way as defeating Level-9 Bosses?

• Might cryptocurrency enable a new globalized design problem solving machine?

Time will tell...

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