Abstract:

As the most ubiquitous interactive medium currently available, video games have become a powerful tool in both recreating the past and projecting the future of the built environment to a diverse global audience. Similar to their counterparts in other media, video games creators’ decisions influence their audiences’ perceptions, understanding, and expectations of their own environments. The increasing immersion and fidelity in video games only serves to accelerate and establish these perceptions. From their inception, video games have embraced the challenge of establishing context for its players by drawing upon tropes and iconography in conveying a range of conditions, from historic precedent to science fiction. Over the past two decades a greater appreciation has emerged from the popularity of video games steeped in historic contexts which has spurred a wealth of interest in archaeogaming, essentially the use of archaeology of and in video games. Though such an examination is a promising field that examines players’ immersive experience of a re-created past, there is a dearth of examination on their experience with the projective futures found in video games. Within archaeological discourse, video games set in past eras serve as a venue depicting interpretations of historic evidence to current audiences; in architectural design discourse, projective video games serve as inspiration for future design directions and possibilities. This paper outlines the three commonplace eras of future architecture: near-future, apocalyptic, and far-future. Using examples from the current portfolio of video games, the authors posit the influences this medium has on emergent designers of the built environment as evidenced in recent student work.

Keywords:

Video games, architecture, archaeology, digital media.