Kitsch and the Gaming World

So over the past weekend I went away with friends to celebrate (well, anti-celebrate) the end of summer and start of the academic year.  Currently this isn’t a significant time for me, but a number of the revellers for the weekend work in the educational system.  On our way back home in the car, I ended up looking out the window thinking about how to discuss this topic in a state of quiet contemplation.  After some miles had passed, my friends commented on my quietness to which I replied “Just thinking about how to connect Kitsch and gaming through the medium of architecture.  Got a couple ideas running around my head…”  This was met with a confused ‘rrrright..’ so I took a little time to think how to word it better.  With that said, I came up with a hypothesis of “Toys R us is like Call of Duty”. 

So, here we are today.

Kitsch has a number of different definitions depending on who you talk to and what subject it’s relevant to.  In product design, it usually refers to ‘tacky’ objects that don’t seem to have much purpose but itself (similarly art is sometimes defined by having no purpose but itself).  In architecture it’s referred to buildings that are ‘built not designed’ where a structure could be placed anywhere and the considerations of place aren’t observed.  With this, one may that it’s not particularly architecture and just buildings, but it has its place for this discussion.  Here are a couple examples of kitsch in architecture:

• ·         Out of town shopping centre/mall: Generally speaking a large concentrated area of shops / services accessible by a central concourse away from the Central Business District (CBD).  The shops will have a large array of stands, displays, corridors and the sorts but the building will generally be a warehouse-style shell of the building. 
• ·         Modern housing estate / mass-produced estates: Due to the nature of modern housing construction, a large amount of housing estates follow a ‘paint by numbers’ design choice. In short, estates kind of find themselves built like ‘terrace1.1 here and 2 terrace 1.2 here’ fitting together. 

The overall concept from these examples is a base foundation to work on from which personalisation can be produced.  I feel there are two ways this can be compared with in gaming; genre definitions and game engine use. 

• ·         Genres naturally follow particular trends to be defined into the said genre.  For example, FPS’s will always have you in a first-person view; an RTS may involve base building; and an RPG will usually have xp and levelled combat.  To follow these traits religiously, one can consider it similar to building not designing a product.  Even within genres, sub-genres like modern military shooters (like MoH and CoD) can have their own trends like shops vs. houses vs. office blocks. 
• ·         A game engine (like Unity or the Unreal Engine) has an appeal to be used ‘out of the box’ to create a game.  The by-product of this is that the default textures and colours maybe used; giving the commonly used ‘grit’ colour scheme of browns, metals and washed-out pallets.  This could be considered similar to the shopping centre idea with a warehouse giving a shell for the shop to build on. 

This comparison may paint a picture of bad / lazy design, but I feel that it’s interesting to review the undertones of popular culture in gaming.  Just because you follow the kitsch design, doesn’t mean you can make the most of the environment to personalise.  Architecture can go beyond bricks and mortar, becoming something beyond its foundations.  For example, Spec-ops: the Line does everything a ‘paint by numbers’ third-person shooter would do, alongside being a complete deconstruction of the genre and military shooter sub-genre. 

So, in a roundabout way, that’s how Toys R Us and Call of Duty can be compared.  Kitsch design, building vs. designing something, and the fundamentals of what is design can find itself traversing art mediums.  I hope you find this interesting and look to find comparisons in your local built environment. 

Extra resources:

*Spec-ops the line (2012). Yager Development, 2K Games (deconstruction of genre kitsch)

*Venturi, R. Scott Brown, D. Izenour, S. (1977). Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form.  MIT Press. USA.  (not directly kitsch but interesting discussion building vs. design)