Thing that’s been on my mind: parallels between badly designed modern mansions and spaces from 3D videogames of a developmental era. When that era ended or what the timeframe for a discernible transition to greater verisimilitude are unknowns to me. It’s not just that developers can cram more convincing detail into sites today, but also that the spaces usually better conform to what we expect designed space in real life to feel like. The thing is that modern mansions, ugly or not, are in a sense designed to stand outside of real life, just as their inhabitants are by virtue of their economic status, residential locations, and ideological persuasions detached from The Common Person/experience
A YT channel called Casas de los protagonistas de los GTA features four videos, all of them uploaded four months ago. I found it by searching for videos of the Vercetti Estate/Diaz’s mansion from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I’m sure accolades of ~INCREDIBLE REALISM!~ were lobbed VC’s way in 2002, but now, seeing the player run around and inside the mansion’s premises, my only thought is how uncanny it feels – how overly large one stretch is, how curiously labyrinthine transitional portions are, the awkward positioning of one feature (eg the exterior pool) to another (the mansion itself). Certain details’ absence or type do enhance this uncanny sensation, but they are secondary
Some of this material stands outside of the language I have readied for describing designed space, but that only makes it more interesting imo. The discomfiting quality of kitschy mansions’ arrangements and ornaments, and the spaces of particular videogames ostensibly appealing to conceptualizations of realism, seem to float around a liminal area that’s maybe closer to the imagined spaces of vivid dreams than anything else. They are simultaneously “not quite” and “not even close” – an ambiguity that’s not really intentional but a consequence of technical limitations, naiveties, paraphrases, and outright bad design (the question of bad design and good design gets a little different when you’re talking about a videogame mansion, though). Anyway not sure what any of this means and I need to sleep
It gets into the reasons why these ugly mansions are… ugly
I think a lot of the things that make these virtual mansions uncanny and uncomfortable are also found at the roots of repulsion to these gaudy physical homes. Graphical limitations exaggerate a lot of the odd proportions and lack of presence, and low-resolution textures under flat lighting prompt a feeling of fake-ness.
I’ve just spent this past week at Disney World, whose design is like the overweening gross mansion translated to the videogame form and then back into reality, losing coherence and fidelity each time, like running things back and forth from Japanese to English in Babelfish. When people talk about “theme park” game design, they don’t know how right they are.
one other aspect - OK, two aspects - that should be brought up are
controls
the ability of people/players to navigate space
first one is “easy” - if your controls/movement is wonky, make sure there is always enough room to limp your body around. Doesn’t make for great environment, but at least you are not shot 15 times because you managed to be trapped by a tiny toy on the floor that blocks your way™
second one is a bit more tricky … moving around in frogger can feel wonky today if compared to, say, the snappyness of controls that games like Ikaruga sport, where tiny corrections to your position directly translate into that correction. So one aspect is expectation of how your alter ego controls/moves.
Then there’s the camera(-angle) issue that plagued quite a lot PS2 games. Some games made you become obsessed with controlling the camera, because letting the game “figure it out” always felt like giving the game a chance at fvcking w/ you without any chance for recovery. Positioning guys in black suits against red-blackish-backdrop with fixed camera already sounds like a (gameplay-)disaster to happen, and my recollection of VC is that the last mission was a bit … uh, not the best™. So by giving the player some space to move around in, the cam at least gets an honest chance at straightening out somewhere.
Then there’s the need to trick the player into following the predefined path2glory™ to nicely trigger the necessary progression of story sequences that built up to the ~grande finale~.
Blinking arrows (in best SNK/Irem Brawler 90ies style) aren’t cinematic, so space itself must lead you to end up at the point where camera zooms and points to where the next batch of bad guys/your final target is. And all that should go unnoticed …
and last but not least, if no loading shall take place between indoor/outdoor-world, space inside can pretty much only be structured as fine as the engine depicting outside space lets you, i’d think?
maybe someone from the dev crowd can chip in and talk about how interior space can be scaled up to provide more detail in comparison to outdoors, without breaking things™. Just a feeling I have that this will have had a say when designing some places in the game (the ship, e.g.)
Everything I’ve read about Disney World makes it sound like an anesthetized nightmare of the Hyper-Unreal (I’m sure there’s at least one Eco essay out there about it). And having half of the experience be waiting in long lines… It could be interesting if you just avoided all of the rides though and took it in as a modern utopic project (a utopia where, of course, we are all still voracious consumers), or at least a large place in America designed to exclude cars
Yeah, I think this is partly explained by Gironika’s comment about controls. You can have a perfectly verisimilitudinal virtual space and still sense something off about your experience of moving through it if there is an observable discrepancy between its kind of realism and the way your avatar moves. You can see this in the embedded video – Vercetti is basically a frictionless unit who shuttles his body through places (or, rather, whose body is shuttled through places) and strangely, smoothly pivots if he needs to reorient mid-run. I haven’t played any of the GTAs since Vice City so I don’t know how much character-feel changed in 4 and 5 relative to the earlier 3D games, and – if it did change a lot – what that did for your perception of spaces’ believability. But Shenmue, or Shenmue 2 anyway, actually never clicked for me as a space-navigator because Ryo’s conrtols felt overly fussy and belabored. Just trying to enter a pachinko parlor was one of the most difficult things to execute in my time with the game
GTA 4 and 5 sell themselves on the weighty physics and concomitant animations (5 slightly less weighty than 4, after complaints) and I guess they mostly work. It feels more like you are kind of pushing slash leading a guy around rather than directly controlling a guy, but that kind of distance isn’t off the mark if you consider the games’ aesthetic goals (again, more pronounced in 4 than 5, which wanted to split the difference too much and ends up being not very satisfying for any particular purpose if you ask me).
GTA 4’s stair-descending animation was one of those moments where I thought: “ok, another little thing videogames managed to solve in the pursuit of immersion” I was pretty impressed at the time.
