Blog: New Ventures and General Thoughts

These last couple weeks have been a bit all over the place for good reasons.  After a year and a bit of doing primarily freelance work I got offered a job which I am enjoying a great deal.  It has allowed me continue my work within the heritage sector while continuing to grow my people skills; of which I’m interacting with from lots of different national backgrounds.  In essence, this work is very similar to my small local museum, just on a much larger scale. 

This job has required me to commute for a relatively large distance (~3 hours a day) but it has allowed me to have time to think about new topics and ways to discuss ideas through the duality of architecture and video games.  Well, I would say that but there has been a couple other things on my mind thou.  First of all, I have ~160 years of maritime history to learn alongside local history which has occupied a decent amount of time and secondly I’ve kind of been tripping over thoughts I’ve already brought up.  To give an example, commuting has got me thinking about the occupation of space in transit which I’ve pretty much talked about 3-4 times at this rate so it’d probably be best to leave that alone for a while.  So what I thought I would do is give a couple ideas I’m working on with some brief notes and we’ll go from there.  As the title suggests, think of this as a typical blog over regular stuff.

Facades

I’m currently working in the area of Greenwich which has some great pieces of architecture nestled within its borough.  One piece I have a particular interest in is the maritime museum which has a fantastic façade with its pronounced pillars and wings accenting the main building.  This got me thinking about two things: the grand buildings made in games full of design and intricacy that are primarily used to wow the audience and the everyday building that fills sandbox city games like grand theft auto.  I’m more inclined to talk about the everyday buildings but I need to play some recent titles like GTAV or Watch_dogs to build up a better assessment. 

Transitions

This one is a bit more abstract but pretty much I’m thinking about the process of moving from one space to another.  This was somewhat influenced by the recent play through of Dark Souls by Extra Credits as the game does doors pretty well with its overbearing doors requiring effort from the player to open.  I’ve got a selection of games I would like to talk about this so I will probably be looking to do this next. 

Layered design

In terms of video games, it would probably be better to say “verticality” but I felt that would associate the subject with tall structures.  What I was thinking about was the different between architecture being built on top of each other and the spaces in-between them, creating new experiences.  This was inspired from my travels on the Docklands Light Railway which tends to travel on a multi-layered track which is visible to the everyday traveller.  A game like Deus-ex: Human Revolution comes to mind when talking about this as its hub towns feature a great deal of these concepts, but as with these other subjects I would like to get some more knowledge of the subject. 

So that’s everything to do with me at the moment.  Things have been really busy recently and I wanted to write something to make sure I didn’t just stay mute for two weeks.  Hopefully this will give an insight into my thought process and see what’s to come.  

The Joy of Exploration: Coins, Badges and a Jumping Puzzle Drydock Scratch

This is somewhat becoming a running theme with me where I plan to write on the Monday and don’t get to it until Friday, but having IRL commitments does put a spanner in the works unfortunately.  I had planned to write something a couple days ago on my next topic, but I didn’t want to jus rush it out and not give it a proper post.  Because of this, I want to take a little bit of time talking about an early morning playing Guild Wars 2 last Tuesday. 

As I have mentioned in the past, one of the biggest draws for me in MMO games (as well as single player games) is the feeling of exploration when going into new games or pieces of content.  It’s a factor that can potentially save a game with mechanics that I’m not fond of or that I have great difficulty with.  Finding out “What’s around the next corner?” or “What’s over the next hill?” ties into that natural curiosity which can come from both physical actions and in-game.  As it may come across, I’m quite the curious person and as such would like to travel the world, experience other cultures and learn new languages; so on a similar level when I find myself finding a large cavernous area I never knew existed in GW2 I want to just forget my previous intentions and explore. 

This area in question features in the Silverwastes (one of the new maps brought out during living story season 2) where after clearing a skritt camp taken over by bandits, I find myself under the map with a large ship precariously positioned over a dark void of nothingness.  This area signalled the start of the “Drydock Scratch” jumping puzzle.  

For those who aren’t aware of, a jumping puzzle is a platforming mystery that tasks the player with reaching an end chest through a series jumps, leaps and logic solving through item collection.  These puzzles can vary in size, from single structures like “Under New Management” to multi-staged monoliths like “Hidden Garden” and can sometimes have a polarising view from players due to the potential pitfalls and lengthy retries.  I for one love these puzzles, so being met with this challenge even in the early hours of Tuesday evening / Wednesday morning pushed sleep to one side as I took in my surroundings.

Progress for this puzzle started off slow, seeing a number of potential places to go and a cavalcade of golden badges littering the surrounding area giving me a mixture of confusion and intrigue.  This mixture of feelings kept with me as a chose a path and started to encounter large rock formations, more badges and milestones which somewhat informed me that I was going in the right direction; even thou I could see a number of other opportunities to take whether they be intentional or not.  Being an engineer and having access to a rifle, the combination allows the player to use a ‘leap shot’ ability which has allowed me to skip parts of puzzles in the past. 

I continued on, finding more milestones and gaining a bit of verticality when suddenly I was met on the top of a mesa-like formation overlooking the map of the Silverwastes.  At first my thoughts were that of relief as it seemed I was making clear progress to a goal, but on the other hand a sense of still being overwhelmed by the land mass.  I continued into my ~20-30 minute journey when I started to see other players below me going about their events defending one of the forts for the meta, only for it to hit me what this meant.  Pressing M to see the map I noticed that I was half way across the map, a sizeable distance from where I started covering a lot more land than what a normal puzzle would present itself with.  This made me think “how far does this thing really go?” as I spend the next 30 minutes continue to explore this ‘map within a map’ collection the golden badges and trying to figure out how to get around, before realising that it was rather late and I was needing to get up in just a few hours.  Although I didn’t find the finishing point on this occasion, it entertained me for this hour period and that is one of the many ways in interact with this medium of games. 

This feeling has similar reactions when it comes to other game genres.  RPGs have that ‘one More quest’ 4x’s have ‘just one more turn’ and multiplayer shooters just one more round’.  In this jumping puzzle, it was ‘just one more badge’ or ‘just one more milestone’ and I’m happy that I was able to experience this piece of content very naturally beyond the thrall of day one explorers or through the use of companion guides detailing every turn.  I’ll probably look to have another stab at it tomorrow but for now, that was a pretty cool thing you did there. 

Next time, “running up that hill” physical and mental hills and viewpoints from architecture.

Returning to the MMO Space: Guild Wars 2 and my Experience of the Previous Week

Resuming play of an MMO can be met with a number of reasons; social circles and renewed interest from your peers; lack of interest from current titles available to the player; new content via an internal patch or external expansion would name a few.  For me, I’ve experienced a mixture of these factors alongside keeping up to date via YouTube channels and livestreams via Twitch and in short, this last week has been really enjoyable for me getting back into the world of Tyria.  The new areas create an interest mix of verticality and meta-events and although the most recent story arc (Season 2 Living World) has come to its conclusion as of January 2015, I’m looking to set aside some time to go through it all sometime in the next couple of weeks.  With all this being said, my observation of the playtime I’ve had has brought up a number of topics I’ve discussed previously that I want to bring up in a retrospective manner. 

Initial playtime: Exploration

After getting to grips with the changes made to the UI, I travelled to the new areas of the Maguuma wastes which feature heavily in season 2 of the living world.  I first entered the Silver wastes, not knowing much about the zone and roaming around getting an eye on the environment; being quickly met with a cavalcade of events situated at a fort in the south / south-eastern part of the map.  For the next hour or so, my gameplay was exploration through combat which felt frantic but natural in the journey, leading to a boss battle similar to the marionette event of season one where I had previously stopped playing.  In this short period, I had re-learnt my favoured profession (Engineer) to a workable fashion and explored the entire zone reinforcing my desire to keep playing and see what was next. 
Dry top (the second new zone to explore) for me was an unguided journey through the vast verticality that the zone presented, much to the enjoyment of myself.  Exploration and finding new stuff has always been a draw for many players of MMOs (and all types of games to a certain extent) and for me this is no exception.  Seeing a distant treasure or high platform and figuring out the path to take up there without a guide can be an experience met with both enjoyment and frustration but for me it’s all a part of that casual sense of seeing where the road takes you.  I still need to explore the entirety of this area, but I’m looking forward to seeing what it has to offer. 

Mid-week playtime Experiencing Content and Changes

After a couple days playing in the PVE world, I rocked up into the PVP content of both structured PVP (sPVP) and world vs world (WvW) to see how I would fair in such an environment.  I had previously partaken in these game modes in a casual sense with a desire to try different builds and see how they worked, but had an mind-set of being a responsive player in terms of the play/counter play.  To go back to our spectrum from last week, I was moving from the ‘casual’ sense of initial exploration into a more centred position in which I wanted to perform well.  My first couple games went very well with very few deaths and good contributions through kills and capping, but as I met more skilled players my lack of current experience showed.  That being said, I do have a feeling that I would want to get better and maybe in the future be involved in an organised pvp team.  Whether reality will allow that is another thing (as the last time I was massively involved in pvp was WoW some 7-8 years ago, when I was in my teens) but there is definitely a view of mine not just to use pvp as a means to get rewards and grab achievements. 

Mid-late week playtime: Achievement Points and a dip into min-maxing

When I was playing last year, I had a sizeable achievement point score that very few of my guild mates had.  At that point, it was a combination of playing since the 3 day head-start and purposely hunting specific achievements to improve my score but if you were to say I was ‘hard-core’ into something that was the closest I got to.  Now I have returned, my point score is naturally far behind those who kept playing so there is pretty much no way in which I can compete with people who have double my score.  That being said, achievements in a sense of completing challenges set in specific areas or gameplay modes still interest me so I have been slowly racking up the points getting around 500-600 in a week (which is close to what I averaged in a month depending on the content).  This is of course bloated due to a number of ‘fluff’ achievements that I’ve got this past week, but I would say that this is my ‘endgame’ in a roundabout way. 
I have done a small amount of min-maxing in terms of ‘if I’m in zone x and achievement y is here I should do it’ but I’m not going out of my way to make sure this happens.  Where I currently sit is positioning my alts in specific areas to gather materials and the likes on a daily rotation while I continue to have the bulk of my playtime on my main characters (which are currently my engineer and warrior).  However, I am using the warrior rather than resource gathering to get a couple weapon and enemy type kill achievements so in a roundabout way I’m still min-maxing but it’s through natural play and not specifically choosing an area that gets the job done in the fastest way possible. 

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed my time in Guild War 2 over the past week and as long as it keeps my interest level at this point I can see myself playing for the foreseeable future.  If I have something to learn from my original playtime, I would say that I should take on a wider range of the spectrum between ‘casual’ and ‘hard-core’ as a means to not burn-out on content as well as being involved in what the world has to offer.  My week of playtime has featured this range of play style and taught me a little about my gaming habits from a teenager into an adult so here’s to future and finding more weird architectural theory crossovers to talk about.  

Free to play, PC gaming habits and general thoughts on money

*Sorry for the lateness of this post I wanted to post this last week but life has a way to happen.  hope you like this*

As the holiday season comes into vision, one naturally draws their attention to the custom of giving and receiving gifts in the spirit of Christmas.  This experience can be met with a number of different emotions; from having the best idea for a trove of wonderful gifts accustomed to each person to having no idea and finding yourself mass buying a selection of DVD’s and other media.  I kind of sit in a mix of these mind-sets where I have an idea of some nice gifts I’d like to get for people, but limited funds to truly make it happen.  This has been the case for a couple years, but the gifts in question have been able to add a little something special to the occasion; like a nostalgic piece from childhood or framed photo to immortalise a moment in history.  I've gotten a certain joy out of these experiences and I've noticed a similar action when it comes to my spending in the PC gaming space. 

I have wanted to build a new PC for a number of years now but due to financial commitments this has been pushed to the side.  My current build is a mix of year one university parts and year two upgrades, putting the general age of the machine at around 6-7 years.  As you may imagine, it has a long start-up time of ~3 minutes and there are many, many games that cannot be played well let alone even run.  The most ‘intensive’ games that I've played on this machine have been Witcher 2 (minimal spec ~15-20 fps) or Far Cry 3 (minimal spec 25-30fps), but I’m still getting a lot of enjoyment out of my time spent gaming.  Utilising a number of power options from software like Game booster (which is called something else now in its new update I can’t remember), tweaking the config files (with thanks to pcgamingwiki for some of that) alongside the collection of new titles not being graphically intensive, I've been able to continue to broaden my gaming scope while not breaking the bank with a new build. 

On the subject of costs, these tiles in question have generally been in the £15 or under bracket (with some of the cheapest being like 89p!) which has allowed me to avoid the £40 new releases from the AAA developers which in the past I would be buying up on release.  Of course, I have the massive sales given by online storefronts like Steam, GoG and Humble store; but it’s surprising how far you can get on little or no money.  On top of this, there is the wide range of free to play titles that offer gameplay with no upfront cost, allowing the consumer to try and consider whether they’d like to play more and possibly invest money into the experience.  Over the past two years, my most played games have been dominated by the free to play space, with Dota 2 and Warframe taking the second and first spot respectively.  Both these titles have clocked around 1000 hours from myself (well, according to steam stats but in game losses about 10%) which in the past games which have hit this ‘milestone’ come under the mmo genre like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2. 

This section of my gaming time has been an interesting review into the price vs. amount of content on offer which is of course highly subjective.  £15 for a 4-6 hour game like Transistor can be good for some and inadequate for others; alongside a full price yearly release like Call of Duty can be justified via its multiplayer content to some and for others holds little interest from an innovation stance.  For me currently I have a rather tight budget on gaming expenses so expensive titles aren't really viable, but from this it’s allowed me to be more ‘investigative’ in finding interesting gaming experiences for little or no cost.  One could consider this an ‘invention brought out of necessity’ kind of mentality, but of course in a more relevant manner. 

One last thing I want to discuss on the subject of gaming habits via spending is that of a very small, but useful self-generated income for games particularly via Steam.  I have taken time to sell trading cards for the games I own as well as items from free to play games I don’t have an interest in keeping.  Although most items sell for an extremely minute sum of 10p or less, they can add up overtime and give you a nice little wallet on the side to pick-up a couple games when they go on sale.  Being able to sell Dota 2 cosmetics for £1 to £10 has been a nice maker and as such paid for this passing year’s summer sale purchases, which in turn got new cards to recoup some losses (and so on and so forth…)

I hope you find this an interesting perspective into the thoughts of gaming on a budget and that maybe someone finds this useful to get a couple more games from this season’s sale.  

Warframe, Futurism, and Archigram

As I have mentioned on a couple posts, I have been playing Warframe for around two years on and off.  It has been a surprising choice for me as before playing Warframe, I was never really interested by third person shooters and the initial experience felt a bit limp.  As updates have been applied, the range of content and the general user experience has been improved greatly (with some minor hiccups along the way) and these days it’s the closest I get to a ‘monogame’ while keeping to my ‘try something new every day’ ethos.  I’ve wanted to write something about this game for a while, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it.  Do I write a traditional review with my time spent playing this game; create a reinterpretation of my ‘Japanese Architecture and Roguelikes’ piece and discuss the nature of the construction of levels; or do I try to look at the aesthetics and what they mean to me?  This last question came up recently and it’s the basis of the discussion today. 

People of many different professions and ideologies throughout history have considered what the future holds for us as a species.  Much like a scientist looking forward to new technologies and forms of energy, an architect may consider how we’ll reside or a sociologist in how we interact with each other.  This can be invoked by a single action / inspiration and in turn spark a cultural shift for example; Modernism of the 1920s and its white-cubists structures was a significant change from the earlier Arts and Crafts movement of the Victorian age with an intention to create a style to unify people through architecture (aka the international style). 

Villa Savoye a Poissy, 1928-31, Le Corbusier.  Photo taken February 2009

A little bit earlier than this movement, Futurism took the lead in the ideology of ‘looking forward’ towards new technologies and design choices that could be produced.  Originally starting in 1909 Italy, a group of writers and artists (later adding architects) felt like the current trends in design where outmoded by the fast pace of change; with such things as cars and aircraft greatly improving one’s ability to traverse the world and experience more ideas.  They were also influenced by materials, particularly glass concrete, and steel which in turn can be considered as a significant influence for the design eras that followed, like Modernism, Brutalism and Deconstructionism. 

With this taken into context, there is a certain comparison that one can make when it comes to the aesthetics of Warframe’s environments alongside a range of architecture eras which prominently revolve around this evolution of futurism (futurism as an on-going design rather than directly the era itself). 

Grineer

(Grineer Ship interior with Volt Warframe.  Screenshot taken October 2014)

With the heavy industry aesthetics and reduction of the ‘frailty of flesh’ ethos presented by such people like Ruk, their tile sets do a great deal to present this to the player.  The Grineer tile set design features exposed piping; machinery whirling as steam rises; and filtered lighting with a generally darker materiality.  At a first glance, this could be tribute to a dystopian civilization which makes sense due to the nature of Grineer Hierarchy, but I feel like there’s a nice mix of 19^th and 20^th century influences.  There’s the Victorian industrial revolution mentality of wanting to ‘show off’ the engineering (akin to Paddington station or Crystal Palace); 1940-60s Brutalism with its harsh materiality and strong presence aesthetically; and 1970-80s Deconstructionism shifting the Victorian ideology into Spartan art (such as the Lloyds building in London or Pompidou centre in Paris). 

Corpus

(Corpus Ship Interior with Volt Warframe.  Screenshot taken October 2014)

Corpus, in my opinion, has a more traditional future aesthetic with a ‘sci-fi’ feeling akin to books/TV/movies.  Its colour pallet revolving around the blue / green hue mostly reinforces this aesthetic giving a clean, clerical mood behind the techno-religious cult it presents.  I’ve not been too sure about which particular architectural styles it reminds me of, but if I was to settle on something I’d say that the modern day glazed spires of the world (such as The Shard of Glass or Gherkin in London) present this design; alongside a high-art monument ideology akin to Neil Leach’s “Nest and the Pillar of Fire” where architecture is closer to art, giving reason to its existence by existing. 

Orokin

(Orokin tile set with Volt Warframe.  Screenshot taken October 2014)

The mysterious Orokin at first glance gives the impression of a church or similar holy structure; with its vast light levels and open spaces coinciding with flying archways.  Even thou it is clearly in the vast future, to me this feels a bit like Gothic architecture and its strong play of light to reinforce a feeling of piousness and grandeur.  I briefly did a post on the consideration of gothic in the past which you may want to look over, but this style resonates with me while I interact with this particular environment

With all this being said, when it comes to the future of architecture, there is one area I feel could be experimented with on both a visual and theoretical level.  This is the world of Archigram and its take on what the future holds. 

Archigram (or architectural comics sometimes referred to as) was an architectural movement started during the 1960s which discussed the medium in relation to its connection with popular culture.  Its ideas were for the majority created on paper via conventional methods (pencil to paper) or collage / montage which followed an ideology of being modular and adaptable.  In its early years, it was influenced heavily by pop-art, which gave way to strong, bright colours and unconventional design which look striking even today.  One particular example (A Walking City, 1964) features large, bug-like structures carrying its population around connected to others via a series of tubes for transport against a backdrop of a conventional city like New York, producing a nice contrast between the two. 

In summary, the future is always an interesting thing to consider from both a technological/scientific and artistic/aesthetic manner as they naturally seep into each other.  Many people have considered what the future will look like and Warframe presents an interesting range of architectural design choices across the ages.  That being said, I would be interested to see what could be accomplished taking a page from Archigram and marrying culture with technology.  I hope that this piece has been an interesting look into the world of architectural futurism and I shall see you next week


Links / further reading
* Warframe Digital Extremes (2012-ongoing), PC, PS4, Xbox One
* Archigram Not a great website, but gives examples of Archigram.  Otherwise, a quick google search will present many examples
* Leach, N.  Dark Side of the Domus.  This maybe slightly abstract in this context, but you may find it interesting 

Antichamber - Perspectives, Viewpoints and Voids

This week has brought up some unexpected events that have kept me rather busy.  Although I like to push for the beginning of the week publishing, I do take priority on IRL tasks.  I’m looking into organising a staggered topic next week (as in mid-week release) to make sure they aren't too closely published.  With that out of the way, onto a game I started playing again this week…

*This will feature minor spoilers regarding the progression of Antichamber from a mechanic PoV.  Avoid the subject on Block Manipulation if you’re looking to read with spoilers in mind.*

Antichamber by Alexander Bruce is a first person puzzle game which conveys a totally new way to consider mechanics via viewpoints and perspectives in my opinion.  Its ability to confuse and mind-bend is fantastic; taking concepts you would be accustomed to in traditional puzzlers and juxtaposing it within its ‘modernist’ aesthetics (Modernist as in architectural imo).  I originally picked up this title in early 2013 putting around 4 hours into the title making slow progress; to a certain point where my thoughts couldn't comprehend any direction of specific mechanic to act on.

To briefly define the types of mechanics, I would say there are two main forms it takes on; room viewpoints and block manipulation.  The rooms as a puzzle work in terms of how you enter / look/ move/ leave a space, creating a multitude of possibilities to the user.  For example, an early room features a ‘gallery’ space with cube exhibition pieces in a 3x3 manner with gaps between them.  As you look around the exhibitions, the objects change from faces; to abstract sculptures and paintings; to moving pieces and a hidden passage.  The great thing about this passage is that logically, it pushes you into the middle of the gallery space, but in truth it’s an entirely new space with a multi-coloured maze.
The second mechanic (blocks) comes into play when the player receives a block manipulator a short while into the game.  This originally has simple applications akin to something like portal (taking object from point A to B) with blue blocks; evolving into a mix of geometric creation and multiplication in the green phase; and extruding blocks into shapes / passageways with yellow.  There is one later stage (red) which I haven’t got it yet, however at the time of writing I am very close to attaining the power and may add an addendum to this piece.
By bringing together these two forms of mechanics, it allows the player to experience a new way of thinking and put focus on the finer details rather than the larger pictures (possibly macro vs. micro in some roundabout way).  One can naturally do this in architecture and many have when it comes to judging our spaces and the play of interaction between them.  This can be represented in a couple ways in architecture, in particularly perspectives and voids.

Perspective can be thought in both a theoretical and practical way, but naturally they come together to form a similar understanding.  On one hand we have the tools of architecture (Sections, Plans, Elevations, Isometric, and Axonometric) which give us clear understanding of what they intend to be e.g. a front elevation shows of the façade of a building.  The other hand presents the idea of feeling / emotion / general thoughts when we look at an object from a number of different viewpoints.  A couple examples of this would be the English country garden and its folly’s or the Holocaust memorial site in Berlin, Germany.  The latter example I feel has a particular corroboration with Antichamber; as the Spartan, blocky pathways present a number of different viewpoints and perspectives creating a number of different thoughts for the user.  With this being said, if I was to add to Antichamber, I would like to play with the idea of light as the memorial does to possibly add a new layer of mechanics.  Although perspective is at the forefront of this experience, the minor details granted through the play of voids makes it brilliant to study.

One may naturally see voids as ‘non-space’ that does not dictate design or consideration and to some extent they would be correct.  In our everyday lives, we interact with voids as a means to get from point A to B.  Such examples like underpasses, alleyways, corridors, etc typically fall into this category where the edges of ‘places’ intersect with each other.  However, we interact with these voids and as such create spaces from them, whether it is interactions with other people or the area around you.  Graffiti (although generally given a negative social impact) is a great example of the interactions of voids and places like London’s South Bank have benefitted greatly from the user of this art form.  Theorists like Michel Foucault discuss this matter as a means of ‘other spaces’ in which he states:

“We are in the age of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, the near and the far, the side by side and the scattered.  A period in which, in my view, the world is putting itself to the test, not so much as a great way of life destined to grow in time but as a net that links points together and creates its own muddle.”

If we are to take a theory like this, one can see a connection to Antichamber with its rooms and connections between them.  On the surface the connections are a mix of stairwells, elevators and corridors; but on reflection expand into multi-layered sections where walking creates one outcome and jumping creates another.  Antichamber is of course a very abstract example, but it can be something to study in the architectural and gaming world to produce interesting ideas with areas which may not get a lot of attention.  To use an even more up-to-date example, P.T (Silent Hills Playable Teaser) I feel plays with the idea of voids and perspective to create its eerie horror that brings the player into a world of uncertainty and fear.

Like with many things in our subconscious we don’t give them a second thought, but the practice of non-space can be something to open a world of new design possibilities in both the real and digital world.  In your own journeys, take a moment to consider these places between buildings and think about what it means and how it interacts with its surroundings.  I hope you enjoyed this piece and please feel free to discuss theories / suggestions.

References
Antichamber – Alexander Bruce (2013)
Foucault, M. (1967) Of Other Space: Utopias and Heterotopias