#fff An Architectural Approach to Level Design - Chapter 6 Building Exciting Levels with Dangerous Architecture
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Humanity’s survival instincts is a key to pleasurable design:
- Archietcture: the adherence to spatial principles that humanity has historically identified as safe creates the feeling of pleasure.
- Games: utilize the emotional release after overcoming danger as a source of pleasure.
SURVIVAL INSTINCTS AND GAME COMPLEXITY
Gamespaces create dramatic tension by addressing both the survival of player avatars and historic notions of safe spaces.
Gamespaces: not only levels meant to maximize mechanics, but also spaces for creating dramatic tension and offering choice.
Modernist architects dealt with buildings as places for enacting the actions of living, with Le Corbusier famously arguing that the house was “a machine for living.” Architect Robert Venturi argued that the modernists perhaps did this a little too well. In his book, he says that while the modernists succeeded in creating simplified plans, they did so by solving only certain design problems while ignoring others. To Mies van der Rohe’s maxim “less is more,” Venturi retorted, “Less is a bore.”
The house was the machine for living, the game level should be the machine for living, dying, and creating tension by exploiting everything in between.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
- Self-actualization: creativity, morality
- Self-esteem: recognition, respect
- Belonging-love: friends, family, spouse
- Safety: security, stability, etc.
- Physiological: food, water, sleep, etc.
“Bad Spaces”: Vulnerability as a Game Mechanic
- Architects should strive for pleasurable spaces through the contrast of safe and unsafe architectures that ultimately favor safety.
- Level designers can be much more heavy-handed with utilization of dangerous elements.
Enemies can be an important element levels and should be carefully planned as part of the experience of gamespaces.
“Bad spaces” in games are ones we design to put players in specific and exhilarating danger. Creating contrasts of safe and dangerous spaces from scene to scene, or even within a single scene, is one way to create gameplay complexity and “juice” level design.
Vulnerability as a Game Structure
Vulnerability-based design:
- Players are confined to a small territory of a large map by powerful enemies or an environmental obstacle they cannot cross.
- As players explore this limited space, they can find enhancements that allow them to move outside the territory.
- Pattern repeats throughout a game.
Vulnerability in Individual Game Challenges
a way to implement risk–reward gameplay.
PROSPECT AND REFUGE SPATIAL DESIGN
Refuge: an intimately sized space that was shielded from view and from which humans could look out onto prospect spaces to evaluate threats. Constrast to prospect spaces.
The ability to evaluate threats is important when discussing prospect and refuge spaces, as it is this relationship between refuges and prospects that allows us to create gamespaces with this concept.
Creating Paths with Refuges, Prospects, and Secondary Refuges
- Primary prospects: the prospect we are looking out onto from our refuge.
- Primary refuges: the refuge we currently occupy.
- Secondary prospects: prospects far away.
- Secondary refuges: refuges in the distance.
Placing refuges along the path can impact pacing.
Example: cover to cover in fps, hiding spot to another in stealth game.
Prospects and Refuges in Architecture
Prospect and refuge spaces are used to create a sense of public–private contrast:
- spaces for private actions are placed in enclosed refuges
- public gathering or circulation spaces are larger prospect spaces
Architectural refuge spaces are often on a different horizontal plane than prospect spaces:
- higher to provide an advantageous view
- lower to provide a cloistered hiding space
Ceiling height: lower ceilings create the feeling of greater protection.
Prospect spaces are understood as uncomfortable for humans to linger in, and their uses are typically movement-based, while the uses of refuge spaces in buildings are typically static.
Le Corbusier’s architecture: largely prospect dominant
His five points of architecture:
- Piloti: thin concrete columns that form the structure of a building, typically arranged in a grid.
- Free façade: since the façade is also non-structural, it can be designed freely without the need to have structural elements.
- Ribbon windows: long horizontal windows that let in large amounts of light and air.
- Open floor plan: unrestrained design of interior rooms since none of the walls are structural.
- Roof terrace: a flat roof that can be utilized by occupants.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture: largely refuge-based
low, broad ceilings, natural materials, expansive views of the outside consistent with the Prairie School style of architecture.
surrounding by trees as a tendency toward concealment
Prospects and Refuges in Video Games
In stealth subgenre, enemies could become important architectural elements and the level itself a spatial puzzle.
Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye shows how wide spaces, views from above, and open planning can create a prospect-oriented space. These types of spaces are common in the multiplayer maps of firstperson shooters.
Refuges, on the other hand, factor greatly into games where the player must search for hidden passages and secrets
Prospects and refuges within level design can be utilized to create vastly different gameplay experiences within one set of gameplay mechanics.
2D platformer adventure game: normal exploration space and vast empty boss rooms.
A unique prospect–refuge experience used in HalfLife 2: the prospect space itself is actually dangerous to the player avatar.
Hot Lava: players must cross a beach under which dangerous alien insects live without touching the sand.
The beach is the prospect space and the rocks are the refuges. Unlike the typical employment of prospect and refuge, everything is open.
SHADE, SHADOW, AND AMBIGUITY
The lighting conditions of these spaces are not so clearly defined.
Hildebrand suggests refuges’ low lighting conditions offer concealment from exterior dangers located in the brightly lit prospect.
But transitions from light to dark are “not so pleasant.”
Architect Christopher Alexander advocates for lighting conditions as a device for pulling occupants through space.
For complexity:
Venturi praises formal and functional ambiguity, where one architectural element or space can serve multiple functions under different conditions.
In game design, one finds this type of ambiguity in level mechanisms that have multiple uses, especially if those uses contradict one another: dangerous in one version and useful in another.
Lighting has a similarly ambiguous meaning.
Lighting is also an important element of emphasizing points along a path.
How the contradictory elements of light and dark create dramatic gameplay experiences?