Trigger Happy
can never compete. If architecture is frozen music, then a videogame is liquid architecture. Indeed, the United Nations has funded the development of a “virtual tour” of Notre Dame cathedral, which uses the engine (the computer code which draws 3D environments) from the first-person shooter videogame Unreal. And new technology pushes this virtue further: the PlayStation2 game Dark Cloud (2000) actually allows the player to build his or her own world, and then to explore it by walking among the constructions. This revolutionary type of videogame certainly provokes and feeds the imagination.
Meanwhile, of course, we may still wonder at the spaces designed by others. Personally, I have found some of the breathtaking environments in Tomb Raider’s worlds—particularly in the second game, featuring the huge rusted ship sunk into a vaulted cavern at the bottom of the sea—to be moving in the aesthetic as well as dynamic sense. (Notice, by the way, that this sort of pleasure also depends on the game enjoying a properly designed tempo—you can only look around and smell the flowers, as it were, when there is no immediate threat in the game.)
Such videogames at their best build awe-inspiring spaces from immaterial light. They are cathedrals of
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