Going from Chris Delay's Subversion to Viktor Antonov's work on The Crossing stopping at Geoff Crammond's The Sentinel along the way, it's an interesting continuation of a topic that we'd love to see more written about.

Procedural Destruction and the Algorithmic Fiction of the City [BLDG|BLOG, via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

The Architect's Journal have posted a list of what they feel are the top 10 examples of architecture in video games. The list itself is partly tongue-in-cheek, so we can forgive its alarming lack of knowledge of gaming environments (no Ico?), but its point is not to authoritatively catalogue the best buildings.

The point is more likely to simply get you thinking about architecture. To stop thinking of the environment in a game as a level, and appreciate it as a building. Its design, the materials used in its construction, that sort of thing.

May sound a bit naff to many of you, but you want games to be considered art, this is part of the deal.

Top 10: The architecture of computer games (part I) [AJ, thanks Greg!]

I suppose one question here might be: what would a videogame look like as designed by Vicente Guallart? Would it look like Fracture? If Vicente Guallart and Behrokh Khoshnevis teamed up, would they have created Celestial Impact? But a more interesting, and wide-ranging, question is whether designing videogame environments is not something of a missed opportunity for today's architecture studios.

After all, how might architects relay complex ideas about space, landscape, and the design of new terrains if they were to stop using academic essays and even project renderings and turn instead to videogames?

It seems like you can take your ideas about terrain deformation and instant landscapes and nomadic geology and you can license it to LucasArts, knowing that tens of thousands of people will soon be interacting with your ideas all over the world; or you can just pin some images up on the wall of an architecture class, make no money at all, and be forced to get a job rendering buildings for Frank Gehry.
So would more people understand Rem Koolhaas's thoughts on cities if he stopped writing 1000-page books and started designing videogames – games set in some strange quasi-Asiatic desert world of Koolhaasian urbanism?

He also muses that this is perhaps mistaking 'popularity for engaged comprehension.' Would the pay off be worth having an architect collaborate on level, terrain and building design? There are certainly enough creative landscapes and architectural styles in games to provide interesting fodder for discussion or study — would formally trained architects actually add to that in a meaningful and recognizable manner?

Tactical Landscaping and Terrain Deformation [BLDGBLOG]

... I look back all the way to the dawn of mankind: to ruins, and Greek architecture, and Mycenean architecture, all the way up to the architecture of the Crusades, and castles in North Africa, and the Romanesque and Gothic and Baroque and Rococo - even to neo-Classical and art deco and Bauhaus and Modernist. I mean, there are bits and pieces here and there that make a strong impression on me, and I blend them - but that's the beauty of games. You don't have to be stylistically pure, or even coherent. You can afford a certain eclecticism to your work. It's a more forgiving medium. I can blend elements from the Potala Palace in Tibet with, say, La Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí's cathedral. I really take a lot of liberties with whatever I can use, wherever I can find it.

You can find more examples of Dociu's work at his website or BLDGBLOG's Flickr photostream.

Game/Space: An Interview With Daniel Dociu [BLDBLOG]

The richly illustrated texts in "Space Time Play" cover a wide range of gamespaces: from milestone video and computer games to virtual metropolises to digitally-overlaid physical spaces. As a comprehensive and interdisciplinary compendium, "Space Time Play" explores the architectural history of computer games and the future of ludic space. More than 140 experts from game studies and the game industry, from architecture and urban planning, have contributed essays, game reviews and interviews. The games examined range from commercial products to artistic projects and from scientific experiments to spatial design and planning tools.

"Space Time Play" is not just meant for architects, designers and gamers, but for all those who take an interest in the culture of digital games and the spaces within and modeled after them. Let's play!

The table of contents is, at first glance, a lengthy and fascinating list of topics that really do span a broad range. You can see for yourself at the Space Time Play site [via The Ludologist]

... After sleeping on the question for a few days, this occurred to me: if we judge landmarks by their visual impressions, we tend to ignore what games are about, a large part of which is interactivity, and the player's understanding of the way things work within that game world. If locales are really going to be game landmarks, rather than fanciful imitations of real-world places that you could experience as well in non-game media, then the impression they leave needs to happen through gameplay; they need to be memorable because of the things they encourage to happen within them, not (just) because of the way they look.

So what makes a gaming landmark for you? I had a hard time thinking back to any sort of iconic structures, but I have plenty of games that have created such a strong sense of space that they would be included in my personal 'gaming landmarks.'

Landmarks, of sorts. [Braid]

World of Warcraft privileges architecture as a spatial experience. It is concerned with the ability to move through space, constructing architecture as a series of solids and voids. When we interact with the architecture we are alternately channelled and impeded. The architecture encompasses us, organizing our activities into discrete zones and structuring the way in which we move between activities .... The architecture has what architects call program, so that Ironforge can be divided into circulation space and activity space. This is space that works on a personal level, an intimate experience, where we guide our avatar through the intricacies of the game world looking through their eyes.

Some interesting questions are posed at the end of the Terra Nova piece, most notably "In WoW (or in any other MMO), are there places where you get lost where you'd prefer to have a mental map? Are there places where your mental map is too clear and you'd prefer to get lost more often? Which spaces are too big and which are too small?" The line can be very fine between 'too linear and confining' and 'too expansive and frustrating' - but where is the line drawn?

The Image of the Undercity [TerraNova]

There's an office, where Bartlett holds real-time business meetings, a home theatre where she can watch movies with friends, outdoor areas for cocktail parties, even a dining room - yes, you can mimic eating in SL. But why would you want to eat? The more I explore, the more I find myself asking similar questions. Why put stairs in a house when you can fly? Why put a roof on it when it never rains? Why mimic a Barcelona chair when you never need to sit down? Why build a house at all?

It's an interesting and different take from the stuff usually presented about Second Life.

Buy! Buy! Buy! [The Guardian]

If you've never made it to architect Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater (aka the Kaufmann House) in southwestern Pennsylvania (I have), now you can take a tour of it with your Half-Life 2 install.

Anyone interested can download the map here. Michael McWhertor

This postmodern housing structure sits in Madrid and was designed by architect Blanca Lleo, who seems to be either way into Legos or Tetris. I say, Tetris. Comments from the peanut gallery? Brian Ashcraft

More Here [Cathode Tan]