Architecture Games

The basic function of architecture games is to support the game play. Buildings that you see in games are not comparable to the buildings in the real world, because most of the time their real-world functions are irrelevant. The real-world activity that the building serves isn’t meaningful in the game and is purely metaphorical. Instead, buildings in games are comparable to movie set buildings, as these are incomplete, false fronts whose function is to support the narrative of the movie. The responsibility of the movie sets is to create context and support suspension of disbelief. They also cause an aberration from the real world for narrative purposes. They can make a place appear beautiful, dangerous, tacky, etc. than it actually is. Architecture online games consist of challenges and the consequent actions taken to overcome them. The architectural games support the game play by enabling us to define the challenges. The various ways in which this happens are constraint, concealment, obstacles or tests of skill, and exploration.

If we talk about constraints in architecture design games, in board games like chess and checkers, there are no boundaries except for the edge of the board. In such games the challenge is created by the rather arbitrary rules governing how the pieces may move. In online architecture games, we would want the units to move the way they would in real life and not according to some artificial rule; but most of the time we don’t want them moving anywhere they like. Boundaries that limit the freedom of movement of avatars or units and constraints on the influence of weapons are established by architecture.

There are some free architecture games that are of perfect information, in which the player knows everything there is to know about the state of the game. What hides the valuable and sometimes dangerous objects from the player in the architectural games is the architecture. It also conceals the players from one another, or from their enemies.

Architecture online games use architecture to create chasms to jump across, cliffs to climb, and trapdoors to avoid which can be surmounted by observation and logic, others by hand-eye coordination. In architecture games exploration challenges the player to understand the shape of the space he’s moving through and to know what leads to where. One of the oldest examples of such a challenge is mazes. The player may have to rely on his memory to learn his way around, if the game doesn’t give the player a map. Architecture has enabled players to make better use of subtle clues: sunlight coming through a window means that we’re near the outside; a differently-shaded patch of wall indicates a secret door. These as a game design supply constraint as the player will have to start from the roof and will have to go down the ventilation shaft to get to the equipment room; an obstacle challenge as the fan blades and electrified shutters, reading between the lines, and an exploration challenge as the player doesn’t know what’s at the bottom of the shaft until she gets there.