All of us as children have played with Lego blocks and built their dream home cities while challenging our curiosity, creativity, and puzzles. We tend to get away from these physical games in this digital era and look for similar gaming options on our phones or tablets. There are several gaming options available for architects and design enthusiasts to let their imagination run wild and look for unconventional methods for the real world through these games.
Let’s find out how these video games can be utilized by architects to rethink architecture.
1. Experience your design
The most crucial task while designing any space is to create an unforgettable experience for the users. The 3D modeling software’s help in the volumetric analysis and imaging of the structure. With gaming software’s one can easily walk through their designed space to get experience and rectify the minute detailing that would have been out during the design process.
David Fletcher while renovating South Park, San Francisco used a game engine to test run the landscape design. They would walk through their virtual design to understand their working and since then his office has been using these game engines to enhance his design process.
2. Test your interior
Interior design in it itself is a very fast field with too many good materials, fabric, furniture options to select from which tends to become a tedious process. Design Home by Glu Mobile is an ultimate virtual home décor adventure, players can hand-pick the furniture and décor from real brands and design all types of rooms. Players can also compete with their friends and participate in daily design challenges with their unique designs. The best part about the game is that you can turn your favorite designs into reality by purchasing these pieces from the app itself.
3. Increase your 3D & 2D imagination
In many instances, it is difficult to correlate a certain space in 2D & 3D, Sandra Youkhana and Luke Caspar Pearson have designed a videogame to integrate gaming technologies into the architectural world. Projectives is an exciting 4-player multiplayer game where one player operates in perspective, another in the plan, next in elevation, and last with the gallery of flat images. The main objective is to combine all the viewports and form a perspective representation of the room.
4. Find solutions to your MEP problems
Inspired by the American documentary Crumbling America, INFRA is an infrastructure-based video game. A structural engineer protagonist roams around the fictional city of Stalberg trying to save the damaged structures. With just the camera and flashlights in hand, the player solves the electrical and mechanical puzzles to fix the labyrinth of debris and the architectural deficiencies.
5. Plan your own dream city
SimCity is the most popular game for building self-powering cities. The players are supposed to create their own neighborhood and city on a given patch of land. Different zones are allocated within the city for smooth functioning like residential, commercial, and industrial. The main objective here is to keep the citizens happy.
6. Don’t miss out on sustainability
The self-Sustaining neighborhood is the prime need of today. Block’hood is an interesting game designed around resource management with the primary motive of designing neighborhoods without destroying nature. Players design by placing 1m^3 blocks with a different natural resource while considering zoning, access, and circulation problems.
7. Experience your landscape design
The Witness is an exciting video game set on an island with a majority of landscaped areas. Architect David Fletcher was appointed to conceptualize the landscape design and create an efficient user experience by solving clues coming from patterns in terrain, plants, and abandoned buildings. To get the exact experience of the volcanic island, Fletcher and his team had researched several islands. David was impressed by the fact that could walk around the model to experience the orchid with green trees to showcase it rained sometime back. In this process, he could easily see details left out while designing and work on them to enhance user experience.
8. Improve your public transport
With the rising traffic congestions in all cities, Cities in motion lets you develop and enhance a fully functional transportation system for the cities in Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, Tokyo, London, and many more. In this game, you design the metro train, trams, boats, buses, and helicopters to allow smooth functioning of public transports.
9. Think out of the box
The architectural practice also involves designing spaces like hospitals, railway stations, prisons, etc. The prison architect is an engaging construction and management 2D game. The player is supposed to build and run the prison while looking after both the inmates and the workforce. The game begins by building the cells and ancillary facilities along with infrastructures like plumbing and lighting.
10. Design homes in water
With land shortage being a serious issue of the current time, Project Aura lets you develop buildings and colonies on the water surface. The game is set in a post climatic disaster with a planet submerged in water. These colonies are protected by giant domes due to the exposure to several external challenges from the outside world.
