Minotaur plays Ludius Loci YIOU WANG
Ludius player Loci
of or related to place
Yiou Wang
Minotaur, the player character
shelter, play, work While it has been speculated that architecture’s origin is the primitive hut – a human-built structure for shelter, security, comfort and a territorial demarcation from the landscape, what this leaves out is the existence of mazes and labyrinths, types of architecture that historically emerged in almost every civilisation, but which are largely under-discussed in the discipline. The maze differs from the labyrinth in its multicursality – having multiple paths, while a labyrinth is a unicursal structure. Because multicursal structures encompass more complex spatial relationships and emergent scenarios, 1 for every maze there is a Minotaur, a bewildered, intelligent, explorative space user. The maze with its Minotaur produces a game that precisely fits Friedrich Schiller’s definition: the voluntary act of overcoming unnecessary obstacles. Unnecessary obstacles. Unnecessary, in contrast to satisfying necessities such as safety, utility and productivity. Instead of efficiency, the maze takes the longest route from the starting point to the destination. Instead of security, the maze introduces potential threats due to myopias. Instead of being built to solve human problems, mazes are problems to be solved. When architecture deviates from shelter, comfort or function, its relationships are modified. The architecture of play may not at all times be human-serving, but it serves foremost the play experience, the emergence of indeterminate interactions, ambiguity and mental stimulation. Unnecessary obstacles necessary to play hinge on architectonics of space. To overcome obstacles and barriers, the space user must produce extra work. Play and work are two sides of the same coin. This essay tells the story of my 2023 M Arch thesis project Ludius Loci – a series of speculative spatial productions; medium: a video game that rethinks architecture beyond shelter, comfort and goodness to humanity. Instead Ludius Loci is a complex game system where architecture, user, time and enemy interweave a progression of unscripted events, emergent scenarios. For play architectures and their Minotaurs, their life is in their movement, exploration and interaction, mediated by space.
virtuality and mixed ludology One of the main innovations of Ludius Loci is the mixed, integrated ludology that is achieved only in its chosen medium – video game. Virtual architecture allows for the creation of dynamic and mutable spaces, engaging the senses and generating meaningful stories. 2 Similarly, in the realm of games, diverse typologies engage the space-user in agential ways. Alea (chance), one of classic big four of game mechanics proposed by Roger Caillois, is embodied in the random composition that incorporates architectonic syntax, such as Crossword (2023), the first game of Ludius Loci . Mimicry (simulation) is present in the role play. Agon (competition) and ilinx (vertigo) in Ludius Loci are interrelated concepts: agon , contention, is embodied in the maze structure, competing against the player avatar in various confrontational ways, creating disorientation, making navigation difficult. Agon also happens at an intra-architectural level where forces of growth and decay in turn shape the structure. In a virtual space where the free movement of the occupant, and the process and effort of traversing consists most of the gameplay, it is an open-world game. The design logic is driven by the process of navigation instead of global formal logic. Comics as a side quest is directly linked with the real-time graphic render pipeline of the game. As the player navigates through the unknowns, experiencing and leaving traces in space in ways that go beyond static representations, they can snap photos in the real time along the journey and create their own graphic novel at the game’s end. This interactive mechanism links two contemporary art forms, challenging the traditional methodology and aesthetics of representation as static and designer-focused, towards a user-focused, real-time interactive representation.
1 Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. The MIT Press, 2010. p57 2 Gerber, Andri, and Ulrich Götz, editors. Architectonics of Game Spaces: The Spatial Logic of the Virtual and Its Meaning for the Real. Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2019.
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on site review 44 : play ©
Yiou Wang
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