“In his book Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas suggests that Manhattan is part of a project “to exist in a world totally fabricated by man, i.e. to live inside fantasy.” This makes Manhattan a particularly appropriate study for games and level design.”
From a great Gamasutra article on “Manhattan as Muse: New York City as a Conceptual Tool”, by Duncan Brown, a former architect who now works for LucasArts [Gamasutra requires registration, but it’s free and worth it]
“Narrative is the story line that drives the character and game forward. New York has too many stories to tell. I am looking at a way to collect pieces and elements of level space that can be assembled to support an overall narrative and are rich in their own right. What I am trying to group together are the pieces that you could apply to an imaginary city to create game levels. I am trying to build a loose kit of parts of spatial components, large public spaces, and organizing frameworks that can be used to explore game ideas. They are just used as a starting point. (It would be worthwhile to have a database, like the Internet Movie Database, of game locations.) In abstract form they are archetypal and we can take them and translate them to other cities, other locations. So if you are in Chicago, you can think about events and infrastructure and implement them in your area. Those in turn might allow you to come up with ideas that you can apply to an action-adventure set on one of Jupiter’s moons. The purpose of this article is to be able to take a set of principles and apply them in your own immediate environment.”
Stirs up a heady brew of Rem Koolhaas, The Fifth Element, The Rockefeller Centre, The Alienist, the New York Subway, Metal Gear Solid 2, Grand Central Station, and The French Connection, hinting at the Guggenheim’s implications for level design; the essence of saturation and density in the city, amongst other things. Really, really interesting.
As is his idea of an axis of organisation on the Internet Movie Database ordered around location [I’m developing similar ideas on the music site I’m currently working on: organising music around location, amongst other axes]
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