One of the more curious aspects of the city-based game, which has blossomed in this console generation, is the dichotomy between those games which strive to emulate a real city and those which do not.
The genre heavyweights, the Grand Theft Auto games, boldly embrace cities which, whilst clearly inspired by real cities, are very much their own creation. By contrast, many of its competitors, such as the True Crime series, Driv3r and The Getaway, choose to set themselves in ‘real’ cities, pursuing accuracy in both name and geographical layout.
This realness is a powerful marketing draw. It is an effective differentiator. Handled correctly, it can easily be made to imply a superiority in quality, derived both from the impressive numbers it generates (”25 square miles! Recreated from thousands of photos! Hundreds of developer man-hours!” etc), and the notion that accuracy is quality.
Assessed strictly from a design perspective, does the suggestion that real is better stand up? What benefits do these ‘virtual real cities’ and their real layouts bring? Are there disadvantages? There are two ways of looking at these questions, because there are two ways of looking at environments: as spaces and as places.
Place is about people and their relationship to a location - how they use it and what it means to them emotionally. A city is more than just a collection of anonymous buildings and streets. It is the restaurant where Jane had that embarrassing blind date; it is the park where Dave paced nervously before his big interview.
These memories are not just very specific personally, they are also very specific geographically. When a game’s city is real, it can tap directly into this emotional reservoir in its audience. What would previously just be ‘a thrilling car chase’ becomes ‘a thrilling car chase along my normally dreary daily commute’. This heightens the sense of escapism. A player is not just doing things they couldn’t do in real life, they are doing them in places that they know they definitely couldn’t do them. With the amplified escapism comes an amplified sense of fun.
This direct, personal bond isn’t the only emotional relationship people have with a place. There is a second, indirect bond formed by experiencing a place through the eyes of others - the lens of a friend on holiday, the pen of a writer, the viewfinder of a cinematographer.
These latter bonds are every bit as powerful as those of the former type. Consider the contrasting depictions of New York offered by Sex and the City and 9/11 news coverage, or of Paris by Amélie and La Haine.
Cultural imprints like these are important tools for city-based games. As before, they offer opportunity for deeper escapism, but in ways that are much less personalised. It might not be my staircase in my home that I stand atop of, proudly defending, but it is Tony Montana’s, and having walked a mile in his shoes, it feels worth defending.
Since they are less personalised, these bonds are also much less geographically specific. Recreating the Las Vegas Strip is much more about capturing the visceral overload of colour, glamour and decadence than replicating its precise topography.
This means that unlike the personal bonds, secondary bonds can be tapped into both by games with real cities and those with fictional cities. Witness what Vice City borrows from Scarface’s Miami, or The Getaway from the London of Snatch.
As well as being easier to utilise, these secondary bonds can also be much more useful to a city-based game. Most people have built a stronger bond with New York through watching films than by visiting, let alone living there. Unless a game is targeted specifically at an audience directly familiar with a city, the game’s city will be communicating with its players via these indirect experiences.
Since real cities can use both types of bond, they would appear to have the upper hand. However, by calling themselves real, cities limit the extent to which they can pursue their cultural portrayals. The further a game leans on them, the closer it moves to a vision of its city that might be at odds with a player’s personal bonds.
The Getaway: Black Monday asks a player to commit mass killing in the name of law enforcement. It’s difficult to accept the game’s London as real, knowing what the reaction of the real London would be to their actions. Similarly, Jim Rossignol protests about True Crime’s portrayal of New York: “It’s that caricature of graffiti and ultra-violence that Mayor Giuliani worked so hard to erase, and that videogames and cheap thrillers insist on hyping up as a lawless gangster genocide zone.”
In this sense, real cities risk sliding into a form of Uncanny Valley for cities. They are portrayed as very realistic, they look very realistic and yet, there’s something about their mannerisms, about the subtle details, which creates a jarring, unpleasant sensation of unreality in the back of an audience’s minds. If they look familiarly real, there’s an expectation they should act familiarly real too.
Applied to characters, one way around the Uncanny Valley is to use cartoon representations. The same holds true for cities. GTA’s Liberty City is clearly meant to be a New York - a caricature of the city. Since it does not claim to be the New York, its gangster overtones are more easily accepted and it does not suffer the same negative reaction as True Crime’s version.
After enough time in a game’s city, the importance of prior emotional bonds may fade and be superseded by bonds formed by events in the game’s story. The other aspect of the city, however, remains prominent throughout - its space. The layout of its roads and buildings, and everything in between, has a powerful shaping effect on all gameplay that uses those spaces.
While a real city provides a ready-made blueprint for this space, saving design time for a game’s developers, it is not necessarily the case that this space is well setup for gameplay.
The connectivity of a city is vitally important. A player should be able to drive in an approximately correct direction and successfully arrive at their destination. They should not discover just before arriving that they made a wrong turn several minutes beforehand and be forced to backtrack extensively. This is easily achievable in a handmade city layout, but may also require some significant work when using a real city.
The pace of the game experience is also a function of a city’s layout. In film, the cut is an important pacing tool. It brings together disparate times and places, to increase the density of the narrative. Real-time games cannot mould time and space in the same manner, and moreover, time is largely in a player’s hands. They control the progression of time by their movement.
As Ken Birdwell observes, these factors transfer the concept of pacing to a concept of experiential density. “Since we couldn’t really bring all these experiences to the player (a relentless series of them would just get tedious), all content is distance based, not time based, and no activities are started outside the player’s control. If the players are in the mood for more action, all they need to do is move forward and within a few seconds something will happen.” An important tool in controlling this density is spatial compression.
A fictional city can freely structure itself to take advantage of this. A developer can remould the layout of an inspiration city to present a “greatest hits” of that city, shorn of its more repetitive or mundane contents, in the same way that a director spares her audience the more repetitive or mundane contents of her characters’ lives.
Dan Houser notes that, for the Grand Theft Auto games, a major design goal is “to have things feel as diverse as possible, as this creates a sense of life”. This spatial compression plays a major role in achieving this. For example, GTA: San Andreas takes the hundreds of streets of San Francisco and reduces them down to dozens to create San Fierro. In 10 minutes of game time, a player can go from watching the sunset over the bay, to the gentleman’s club in the hills behind the city via nightclubs, the airport, a hippy boutique, a rundown construction site and a quick jaunt in the countryside.
By contrast, a real city is constrained by its real geography, limiting the scope of any compression. Chris Roper says of True Crime’s New York “There aren’t a whole lot of standout or memorable spots in the city, though. As you cruise down the streets, you’ll just fly past random building after random building.”, further noting that “It’ll easily take you 10 minutes or more to drive from one side of the city to the other, even in the fastest cars. … It’s awesome how big the city is, but you’ll quickly learn that it can make driving it a daunting task.”
There are undoubtedly other factors involved, but I find these to be the most important in distinguishing virtual real cities and virtual fictional cities. Real cities offer a link to an audience that fictional cities cannot, but in doing so they must avoid becoming cargo cult cities. The geographical blueprint presents a head start at the drawing board, but can easily become a hindrance to pacing and gameplay.
A game’s specific requirements will determine which type of city is superior. Some real cities are likely to prove better candidates for virtualisation than others, possessing the suitable connectivity and density. Ultimately, design cannot be separated from marketing, and the decision will be driven by both. For a particular regional audience, a real local city offers a powerful connection that may well trump the other issues. For a wider, less-specific audience, a fictional city can maintain a strong emotional connection and be better optimised for the needs of a game.
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