Machines for living
Part II.
Wait, How is a Game a Built Environment?
Before we can understand how video games are virtual built environments that teach us how to navigate society in a certain way, we must first define what constitutes a built environment, and how physical structures embody and reproduce cultures across the globe.
What is a built environment?
In “The Built Environment and Spatial Form,” Denise Lawrence and Setha Low review the history of anthropological concern with the built environment, which they define as “an abstract concept [...] to describe the products of human building activity,” and refers in the broadest possible sense to “any physical alteration of the natural environment" (Lawrence 1990:454). Similarly, built forms can be building types “created by humans to shelter, define, and protect activity,” and can be bounded without necessarily being enclosed. This also includes landmarks and shrines, which might not shelter or protect activity, but still define it. Architecture encompasses all built forms, usually on a larger scale and “self-consciously designed and built by specialists” (Ibid).
Lawrence and Low also find a great number of associations between partitioned spaces within a structure and particular social groups with their own patterns of behavior, and that the increasing social complexity of society as a whole can be seen in the increased “partitioning and monofunctional uses” of the spaces within built forms (462).
From a more utilitarian standpoint, built forms are the product of a social process that seeks to mediate human relations with the natural environment and accommodate behavioral requirements (463). As social behaviors change, a corresponding change in built form arises. Sometimes, the reverse is true: a built environment can create new modes of engagement with the self and the other.
Lawrence and Low go on to explore a symbolic approach to the built environment: as expressions of culture, built forms can embody and convey meaning between groups or individuals, as well as “reaffirm the system of meaning and the values a group finds embodied in the cosmos" (466). Proof for these connections often require a demonstration for how the said built environment “corresponds to ideal conceptions of social, political, and religious life" (466). Some theories emphasize how ritual practices — which “enact and reaffirm the social structure by renewing social ties and reiterating normative and symbolic meanings” — triggers meaning in the space in which the ritual is performed (474).
In Victor Turner’s theory of liminality, both permanent and temporary features of a built environment can be “critical symbolic elements” during the performance of such a ritual, since they act as markers for participants’ “collective transcendence of ordinary reality” (Ibid). These symbolic elements can also embody more complex meanings.
Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls Online, 2014.
In short, a built environment can be interpreted as encompassing any product built by humans in an attempt to shelter and define human activity. The result of this process can give rise to partitioned social groups with their own patterns of behavior, and the built form itself becomes a site for meaning-making as rituals to reaffirm an existing social structure are performed at its site. The structure changes as social and behavioral needs change, and vice versa.
Next, we'll take a look at how three house societies (re)create culture:
Tukanoan longhouses - Colombia/Brazil
Stephen Hugh-Jones’s exploration of Northwest Amazonian architecture suggests that the longhouses constructed and inhabited by eastern Tukanoan-speaking peoples provide them with a way to conceptualize their own social structure (Hugh-Jones 1995:226). The autonomous community of families that live inside a single Tukanoan longhouse — a group of brothers with their wives, children, unmarried sisters, parents, sometimes even long-term visitors — find “a compromise between unity and division” through spatial expression: visitors sleep at the front of the house, residents towards the rear; the headman (father or eldest brother) has a compartment towards at the very back of the longhouse, while unmarried youths sleep out in the open, near the front door (230). The communal hotplate at which manioc bread is baked by the women is situated in a private space towards the rear of the house (as it is cosmologically likened to the growth of a child in a mother’s womb), but meals are eaten in a public space near the center of the house, so as to maintain group cohesion and to showcase the male-provided fish and meat (231). The nested imagery of the house and its many functions also seek to replicate Tukanoan creation myths, allowing the maloca, during dances and rituals, to take on the significance of the cosmos (234). The house is both inside and outside, interior womb and external face, a single building and a community.
This dual reading is a conceptualization of two kinds of social relations — one that sets individuals and groups apart and presents the community as a male-dominated unit; and another that integrates individuals into one, nurturing womb-like family (245). This ambiguous, androgynous house — with its linear design and paired columns, instruments, ornaments — masks the tension inherent in alliances such as those between men and women by making the division starker than what is supposedly experienced by its inhabitants in Tukanoan society.
A similar duality between segregated and communal living can be seen in the Dayak longhouse in Borneo; while the families within the longhouse live within their own compartments, the walls have gaps large enough for light and sound to filter through clearly (Buchli 2013:79). The aural and visual unity, combined with strict rules of propriety, allows for a guarded privacy within a communal space, reaffirming the house society as a respectful, problem-solving entity (78).
Kabyle House - Algeria
Pierre Bourdieu’s case study of the Amazigh people of northern Africa revealed how cultural binaries and attitudes about men and women are embedded in their architecture: The interior of the Kabyle house is divided into a “dark” and “light” space, where the low/dark/feminine/haram (sacred and forbidden) is opposed to the high/bright/masculine/thajma’th (place of assembly) (Bourdieu 1970:155). The central beam of the dividing wall between these two spaces also carries its own host of meanings, particularly as the protector of family honor and fertility (156).
One of the most important fixtures within the Kabyle house is the weaving loom, which sits in front of the wall across from the door, as a symbol of male protection. An honored guest would be asked to sit in front of the loom, while a dishonored guest would be made to sit before the “wall of darkness” (153). Likewise, a young bride on her wedding day would sit before the loom, behind which her umbilical cord is buried, symbolizing her maidenhood entirely in relation to her male family members, and the protection they are supposed to provide for her throughout her life (Ibid).
Bourdieu argues that, although there is an apparent symmetry in the structure of the Kabyle house, the female-coded space is subordinate, both physically and symbolically, due to its nature as an “inverted reflection” of the male exemplar (169). He does not believe that the symbolic value attached to these symmetrical yet hierarchized spaces can ever be entirely understood, “unless one is aware that it owes its function as a magic frontier to the fact that it is the place of a logical inversion” (168). This magic is dispelled as soon as a man chooses to reaffirm himself as a man, by stepping out into the world and, ironically, turning his back on ‘nature’ (170).
Maya Monumentality - Central America
Susan Gillespie found that, within Maya culture, passive activities such as sleeping, resting, and sitting are seen as powerfully centering, and create a point of stillness and focus “about which the cosmology of the world emerges" (Buchli 2013:80). Monumental forms — solid and enduring, rather than physically large and imposing — were produced by immobility, a quality that was associated with ruling power in Mesoamerica and was utilized as a way of representing “a concentration of creative, supernatural or political power”; ancestors could only be petitioned for help once they had been immobilized within their house, usually buried under their own bed (80).
Because of this focus on an immobilizing center, Maya structures create a center in relation to the cardinal points, and its inhabitants place their own combed hair into the cracks of the house’s walls in order to further their co-identification with their house. The idea of an immobile, monumental house is so present in Maya cosmology that modern-day graves are topped with a roof thatch, and miniature house models are also considered places of divinity through their connection to the ruling house (81).
Built environments can facilitate unique and culturally-relative ways of sleeping, eating, moving, performing, and conversing in areas both communal and private, male and female, immobile and transient.
Classical anthropology leaves little room for the inclusion of digital spaces; although entirely human-made, the virtual worlds inhabited by hundreds of millions of people have been woefully neglected in the academic sphere.
Physical level designers see themselves as more-than-architects; an interview with Philip Klevestav, a principle artist for Blizzard Entertainment, designs immersive virtual environments that communicate with the player (Stouhi 2020). It is not enough for a building design to merely look good or be architecturally sound, but it must also “fit in” with the rest of the environment:
“In a fast PvP [player vs. player] game like Overwatch I think gamers will focus a lot on how readable spaces are. If we add too much visual noise and clutter it becomes very difficult to navigate and see other players, if there isn’t enough detail scale will become difficult to judge.”
Elements that influence the “readability” of a space include shape language, composition, materials, contrast, lighting, atmosphere and color (Ibid).
Video games also make heavy use of semiotics; because Overwatch’s stages are based off of real-life locations, cultural references such as food, types of transportation, and regional celebrations or holidays must be worked into the level design; Klevestav has to build assets for each stage that serve as well-known symbols that signal to the player where (and when) they are (Ibid).
Although Egypt in real life is full of diverse structures and environments, the “Temple of Anubis” stage incorporates traditional (and widely-known, bordering on stereotypical) signifiers such as obelisks and half-human, half-animal statues to signify the place it is modeled after, as well as blue-hued, floating technology to signify the vaguely-futuristic time period.
Games such as Overwatch are part of a larger, globalized culture, and rely on anaphora (specifically certain recycled tropes and imagery) to communicate with the player and facilitate an entirely different sensory experience than if the stage was a gray, featureless plane.
Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed II takes place within a highly detailed reproduction of late 15th-century Venice, Florence, Forli, and Moteriggioni; in-between missions to take down Pope Alexander VI, who is apparently evil, the player can collect codex entries (short blurbs of information or lore) by standing next to relevant landmarks and characters.
Video games are, by their very nature, a built environment; their structures are infused with even more "humanness" than built forms in the real world, since every aspect of the experience of playing a game — the story, the visuals, the textures, the user interface, the points systems, the physics engine, the structures you investigate and customize, the characters you play as and interact with, the music, the sound design, the voice acting, the haptic feedback — can be controlled and crafted by a team of humans who infuse their creations with an intent and purpose that is designed to elicit a very specific response from the player, uninterrupted by any other limitations or materials. The virtual register is, in a sense, the purest form of architecture, as it is designed solely for architectonic reactions. In a time when the majority of the Western world is secure, immobile, constrained, the “cosmology” games seek to replicate and represent is the real world itself — if not through a facsimile of existing buildings and cities, then through the carefully-written simulation of socialization and relationships that give our lives meaning, or through the fantasy of being able to break the rules — and those who habitually inhabit these worlds become practiced in a kind of virtual literacy.
Microsoft Game Studios's Mass Effect, 2007.
From an anthropological point of view, video games facilitate a duality of being that teaches us about the norms of society and gives us the experience of breaking them in a safe and self-contained environment. Simultaneously identifying with a character and maintaining awareness as a player, participant and observer, emic and etic, creates an entirely new mode of experiencing and learning in a way befitting the 21st century.