San Andreas is a real city. It is at once as real as the street of any southwestern desert sidewalk I’ve walked down with an orange sky hanging overhead. San Andreas can never be real, it can be made of real places but it can’t exist.
As technology marches on, and boy does it march, we’re looking forward to the future of digital cities. Now with the kind of buzzword shit that means “you can follow a guy into an alleyway and he wont disappear” being simulated. Even more walking high-fives. These cities will be made of wider streets, taller buildings. Simulated pipes that drip with oxidized rainwater.
In the 1:1 scale of the future I wonder how the videogame city will live. Real cities aren’t really designed, fuck we’ve been at this for a few generations now and still haven’t figured out traffic. You build more roads, they fill up with more cars. Not in videogames, the puerile land where there are just enough cars to make things seem busy but not enough to frustrate players.
What will the first 1:1 videogame city be? Where one step takes you exactly as far as it does in real life but down pavement of calculated geometry. Real cities? They kind of suck: you don’t hang out in a real city for the reasons you do in real life. Alleyways don’t hide mystery over the age of 16 unless someone’s got a secret neighborhood cafe in them.
That’s a joke. Don’t go into alleyways for cafes, because cities are more than all of those. Real ones are, anyway. They’re moods and temperatures, living things built out of memory and community. Videogames cities? Something else entirely.
It’ll probably be New York, huh.
A videogame city is a “place” made up of tiny little places. A sea of handcrafted islands. San Andreas is much smaller than the lengths of San Diego, but it is stacked full of tiny little moments made for the heart. San Andreas is a city intentionally built so you can get lost only to turn around a corner you don’t recognize and be somewhere familiar. It is being on the wrong side of town too late at night.
We expect all of the wrong things from our videogame cities. Could there be a hyper-real point to imagining a place so dense with clutter we hope it leaves the same imprint as all of these old places in the world? Will seeing New York, as Spider-Man, in 1:1 glory give me any more an understanding of what it’s like to be there, to be from there or to even go there than the hyper-specific caricature we work with now?
There’s this problem of specificity in open world games, city games. Cast the net too far and you get people like me: dirtbags who spend the whole game staring at the two-color map circle in the corner. Being silently steered along by geometry until we end up at the story scenes or the shooting scenes. A videogame city that has no mood or soul: it’s window dressing. Something deeper and thinner and more like paper.
A videogame city with nothing? Well, it’s made to pull out. There’s no point to the landmarks because real landmarks are that way because of history and culture. You can’t make it important to players? Might as well be the grey primitive that gets dropped right into 3D modeling software.
We’re only largely staring at the map anyway; silently humming along while the marketing company and software studio says how important the volumetric lighting and reflections really are. They help bring the space to life; they fill in the gaps left behind the artist.
This is the Cold Hollow Feeling too of our make-believe cities that try to go Too Real. Why Saint’s Row can really look like a city but still resemble a theme-park and have to lean into it. Too much clutter, too much of all of the things art school tells the eye makes a place feel “lived in” and the magic vanishes right before our eyes. When the magic is gone, it has to get replaced with neon paint.
A bad city in a videogame reveals itself to you in ugly shades. Usually whatever three or four make up the minimap. Sure, a developer will toss you a bone and throw you something like “onscreen GPS directions” but those are just there for the tourists: the people who don’t plan or need to think about sticking around. If you can’t interact with a place by looking at it, meeting it halfway? What’s the point of even engaging in the tourism in the first place. Staring at the bottom corner of my screen.
Every once in awhile a blissful article comes by. An inspiring novelty: How To Play Videogame With Map Off For Immersion. Always a specific example. A Zelda or San Andreas even; the inspiring want for digital places that don’t require tourism pamphlets. We’d hope the people making these things would be capable of making spaces begging to be engaged with, not celebrating when it’s the exception.