Icon Magazine article on Videogames architecture

I wrote the cover article for this month’s issue of Icon magazine! Huge thanks to Priya Kanchandani for reaching out with this opportunity.

The article is an overview of spatial narrative, with a particular focus on titles that have been included in the V&A’s big videogames exhibition, such as Journey, Kentucky Route Zero, and The Last of Us. It’s a good time for “games as architecture” readings, with Heterotopias zine having provided an attractive home for architecturally-inclined games criticism, and architects such as my friend Claris Cyarron doing good work in the field. I felt quite gratified bringing that kind of approach to a magazine with a strong grounding in architecture, that wouldn’t normally cover videogames.

I mention Henry Jenkins “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” in this article - this is a foundation text that you always want to have on your Games Studies conference bingo card, but I still wish I was hearing more games critics talk about “narrative architecture”, and a bit less of the “ludonarrative” chatter, which often amounts to a petty game of “spot the dissonance”. I don’t know if this imbalance comes down to videogames exceptionalism (“we need our own word, for that special thing that only happens in our medium”) or whether it’s about people feeling intimidated by architecture’s status as this ancient art that goes back to the dawn of civilisation, and not wanting to be in dialogue with that institutionalised behemoth.

Another piece that I mention in this article, which I will never shut up about for as long as I live, is Samantha Allen’s article on the Borderhouse Blog back in 2013, which discussed the design of game spaces and player-characters' movement across them in terms of gendered constraints on the spatial possibilities of bodies in society. My affection for this article is only strengthened by the fact that you can’t even google it anymore, because the Borderhouse Blog is gone - you have to find the link in the Wayback Machine. Talk about the world having no space for you - marginalised writing on games has to fight just to exist on the internet. As I indicated in a Critical Distance post, this article is enriched even further by reading it in dialogue with another piece by Henry Jenkins, entitled “Complete freedom of movement”.

Claris Cyarron’s GDC talk on architecture is also well worth checking out. Claris is one of the world’s top experts on narrative architecture in practice: she’s formally trained in architecture, and has worked with a lot of game developers over the past few years to bring this narrative design approach to their projects.

You can get this issue of Icon through the Pocketmags app here: https://pocketmags.com/icon-magazine

Or subscribe to the physical magazine here: https://www.iconeye.com/magazine

And please keep an eye out for it in your local bookshops or art museum shops - please send me photos if you see it somewhere!