Virtual Architecture and Video Game Design

The most obvious departure point to begin the discussion of the aesthetics of virtual architecture would be video game design. While nearly all video games are user oriented, the buildings, maps, etc that make them up are first element to give them shape and define how the user interacts with them. Without them, there would be nothing. I have chosen to discuss a handful of video games to represent various genres that have laid the foundation from which countless others have emerged as well some that may be a little more obsure. These games include, the 'Tony Hawk' pro-skater series, the first person shooters, 'Golden Eye', 'Doom', 'Halflife', 'Halo', 'Arctic Fox' and 'Wolfenstein 3D', adventure games 'Tomb Raider', 'Tenchu' and the 'Grand Theft Auto' series, the horror games 'D' and 'Bio-Shock', the puzzle game 'Myst', the RPG's 'Final Fantasy 7', The 'Warcraft' franchise and 'Panzer Dragoon Saga', as well as the fighting game 'Bushido Blade', and the 'Sims' franchise from 'Sim City', to 'Sim Ant', to the current manifestation, 'The Sims'. Each of these games has made major contributions toward defining the significance of a user's experience of VA that represent increased levels of sophistication occuring in tandem with technological advancements that made the games possible.

The structure of this study will happen chronologically, with games from each genre being listed and described successively, beginning with the first majorly released game first person combat game, Arcticfox, which was released for the Amiga console in 1986 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcticfox]. Arctic Fox was essentially a stripped down commercial version of the software used by the military to train cadets for combat in urban areas. From this game we can begin to define the rudimentary issues related to VA in the world of video games. The virtual environment creates and defines the context for action within said environment. The succes one has in the game is directly related to how effectively one's immersion in a virtual environment supplants the actual one in which the user's body is actually in (which was afterall the entire point of the military's interest IN virtual reality to begin with).

The first games which set about the task of not only desiging environments in a virtual world, but actually creating that world at the same time were the Role Playing games known as the Final Fantasy series. In the Final Fantasy games, the immersion with the environment in the games is established

The effects that one's psychological engagement with such an environment has on their experience of the 'real' world.

It is these games that have laid the ground work for the concrete aesthetics of this new discipline.