The Functionality are excited for another Friday Feature by Alexei Othenin-Girard. We're always curious about where imagination meets urbanism and the Alexei is exploring how video games are allowing us to remap and understand cities in a different dimension.

Cities have a logic to them, a logic built of human ingenuity and need; we usually experience them in the horiontal plane.  Cities become labyrinths if we imagine their vertical plane. Stripped of that logic, playing Assassin's Creed 2 is a disorienting experience and revelatory experience.  "Venice" and "Florence," as constructed by the designers, are simulacra of their namesakes. Extendeding the pedestrian alley's and streets into verticle jungle gyms. They have scalable walls and rooftops that are just begging to be leaped from.  "Free Running" allowes players the freedom to explore the city vertically, through this ability the designers open up possibilities previosly unavailable to those inhabiting the cities today and inherent in the verticle dimension of the cities themselves.  

Using "scalable walls and jumpable roofs," as a design goal, the designers built a city that no human would ever recognize as being "real."  It looks beautiful. Individual buildings and streets are designed such that any given view is clearly reminds us of postcards of their real life namesake.  But the gestalt never coheres.  The streets run into nowhere, the market squares hang off of them like fruit rotting on the bough.  The local landmarks are gorgeous, certainly, but lumped haphazardly together, or scattered randomly in the outskirts.  One of the most striking failures of the games digital city planning is the lack of boundaries between wealth and ghetto.  This collage of a socio-economic spatial agenda seems naive when one consider's the stringent caste system that still applied to renaissance life; this was a time when the clothes really did make the man.

Reconsidering how to map a city in multiple dimensions presents a significant design problem for Assassin's Creed's designers.  The game has an excellent mapping function, but I found myself constantly lost in the city.  Dizzied by identical alleyways that led into streets that connected with no planning logic, I had a tremendous amount of trouble finding my way around.  Absent a main thoroughfare, merchant's area, or any of the other signs usually associated with city life, Florence or Venice become a maze of near-identical byways and avenues all leading to nowhere.

Video games give us an environment in which we can play with the fundamental aspects of how people build their lives, how they respond to and alter the space around them.  As games become more sophisticated, they let us explore visions of places that couldn't or wouldn't exist. Perhaps one day a team like the Assassin's Creed team will include had someone with a deep understanding of cities; someone who could make a Florence that would satisfy both the needs of the design and the basic human logic that informs city spaces.