We might be surrounded by the built world, but the work of many architects only lives on paper, designing buildings that no one will ever experience beyond a rendering or model. It feels like wasted talent. Videogames and the architecture inside them, on the other hand, straddle the line between paper and reality. While you can’t necessarily touch the city, you can viscerally experience it nonetheless.
A new videogame called HomeMake (raising funds on Kickstarter), takes you inside a glowing, sprawling world with the express purpose of exploring its architecture and winding streets. Traditional game play exists in the form of puzzles and getting from point A to point B, but by and large the point of HomeMake is to simply observe your surroundings.
It’s a slightly unorthodox point of view for a videogame, which is less surprising when you learn HomeMake is the brainchild of Harvard architecture students. Cory Seeger and Matthew Conway began developing the game after realizing the limitations of their craft. So much of what an architect creates is never realized; you can’t touch it, you can’t go inside. But in a videogame? At least there you can grasp some aspect of a design's emotional experience.
In HomeMake, the city is the protagonist. The land Seeger and Conway dreamt up is roughly modeled after Tokyo and its famous Shibuya district, where towering glass buildings glow with light. *HomeMake'*s world is set on an inverted sphere, creating a dizzying perspective that enables the avatars to run without ever hitting the impenetrable boundary that you experience in other videogames. You navigate the streets through a handful of different avatars, each of whom has its own way of seeing and experiencing the city. It’s a world in constant flux, an accelerated version of our own. “Cities change every day, but it’s not something you necessarily notice,” says Seeger. With each step your avatar takes, the city transforms. Buildings grow, shrink and morph; the streets switch angles.
Judging by gifs and video, the whole experience will be beautifully disorienting. The whole point, the team says, is to shake up the way you view the virtual world. And maybe even the world we live in. “I want people to say, ‘Oh, I never thought to look at the city like that,” says Seeger. “I hope they begin to have a greater appreciation and understanding of the space around them.”
HomeMake is still in development for Mac, PC and Linux. You can fund the Kickstarter here.
