Meaning to a city?

“Ahab’s whale was also just a whale.”

                There are many interesting and intriguing things spoken about regarding games and attitudes towards them and architecture in general.  The analogy between video games specifically and the cave made in Gamer Theory is a very apt one, but beyond video games themselves, this seems to be a stretch of the analogy.  To live or spend (as the gamer) most of the time in a video game is an attempt to escape the real life for a world where there is more sense or control or obvious purpose.  But this does not make the real world unfair or objective-less.  This seems to help illustrate that the real world is exactly that, real and not a game.  There are no re-spawns, no restarts, no guide books, and no cheating.  In a sense, real life is perfectly fair and balanced.

This is, if meaning must be applied to a project required, part of the basis for my city and game.   As the author of a novel, I am basing the city on the city I dreamed up in the book, called Verona (no relation to the actual city).  The novel was original and mostly simply an attempt to tell a story of good having to stop bad guys, very basic stuff.   But it was also a way for me to imagine what a world with a different set of rules would be like.  A way to get out of what is termed “ordinary life” and pretend to live an “extraordinary life”.  The novel, and by extension the city and game, or not metaphors or analogies or attempts to make more of them than what they are – they are simply representations of my fantasy world.

In this fantasy world, magic is alive and well, and the laws of physics can be played with and manipulated by those born with the ability to use magic.  So, while the city itself means nothing beyond being a city, I did try to show what would happen if both magic and science were used to create a city (since this world of mine has people who cannot use magic, they would naturally learn to use the rules just like we have in our real world).  This city is built on a grand scale.  In my rough map of the city, it run nearly fifty miles long by almost thirty miles wide.  It is supposed to be a visual representation of what is possible if we could do these crazy and magical things.

A question I had both while writing and even more so now as I begin to model and create this city is “how would a common person respond to these awe-inspiring things”?  We in the real world are used to a certain scale to our surroundings.  Things make sense and almost always have some sort of purpose to them that is functional as well as aesthetic.  With this city, I want to create grand for the sake of being grand.  In this world, hubris is something people aspire to have rather than a warning of danger.  What would happen if the people who had the power not only used the power, but exploited it and then did their best to top and outdo those who had come before?  The result would be something of a scale that us here in the real world would be blown away with.  Could we even recognize these structures as buildings if we were to be dropped into the middle of this fantasy world? What would be the result of being exposed to such things from birth?

I believe both of these later questions have the same answer:  there would be massive exploration.  Much like the concept of flanueurism, people would simply walk around these things and take them in.  When the grandiose becomes common place, what is next?  This is a city that is not only old, but unconcerned with the problems of most people.  It is unconcerned with usual goals and objectives and scoffs at the thought of a need for a larger purpose.  It exists to prove that it can, not to help or give order to anything else.  It

Do to this I envision game-play as nothing more than navigation through the city.  Exploring the size and scope of the city is simply a way for the player to come to enjoy and inhabit something that cannot be seen in our world.  It does not have any outside meaning other than being fantasy.  Like all games, it is simply a way to observe and enjoy something strange and unknown.  Because the game in my mind is simply an extension of the stories I have mapped and planned in my head, I also envision placing story bits that may not show up in written form for the player to find spread about the city.  This however is not an objective of play, but simply part of the exploration.  As with the real world, there is no goal except what the player brings to it.  The goal may be to find the end point, or to collect all of the information bits or it could just be to see all the buildings and figure out what is what.  In the end, it is all up to the person experiencing the game to bring meaning to it.