15 minute read
Minotaur plays Ludius Loci
YIOU WANG
Ludius player
Loci of or related to place
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.
1 Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. The MIT Press, 2010. p57
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.
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.
excess
Excess in tectonics liquifies boundaries between the inside and outside, taps into the realm of desire, and creates meaningful, sensuous and affective disruptions to conventional expectations or established norms. 2 In the three games of Ludius Loci, excess is ubiquitous, creating multiple paths with different, unforeseeable outcomes. Just as an avatar in space isn’t a mere scale figure on a 3D render, architecture in video game isn’t a mere digital representation of architecture because it offers unique qualities that go beyond representation. Misunderstanding, risk, confusion, blockage and repetition can all be part of a game experience, which corresponds to everything with which Deleuze argues excess is associated. 3
Excess encourages the sense of growth and vitality in architecture, which a conventional approach deems immutable. The play experience with an aesthetics of excess is as a process of dynamic making, vocabulary, responsivity, affect, confusion and disruption. Producing an excess of paths, many of which lead to an impasse, and by consequence an excess of emergent scenarios, is the nature of multicursal mazes.
Excess is defined in two ways: tectonic abundance of forms and geometry, and elements of ambiguous function or usefulness. Rethinking excess in architecture challenges conventional notions and pedagogies in design which dismiss excess, preferring minimalism, efficiency, reduction and utility.
3 Grosz, Elizabeth A. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. Columbia University Press, 2020
2 myopias and 3 degrees
The maze cultivates in its player a spatial and mnemonic myopia. Myopia is defined as a spatial condition that requires nontrivial effort from the occupant to traverse their most immediate surroundings. In a spatial myopia, the player cannot rely on spatial cues – such as the difference between two doors, the uniqueness of a staircase – to navigate or to precisely self-locate in a space. In a mnemonic myopia, on the other hand, the player cannot rely on memory to navigate a space, such as in my 2021 video game Moving Maze.
Depending on the type of myopia, mazes can be classified into three tiers. The first-degree maze is one where the player can navigate through spatial cues, including signs, differences in objects and furniture, differences in array and composition, or audio cues (no myopia). In the second-degree maze, spatial cues are ambiguous, so the player can only rely on memory for finding the way out (spatial myopia). In a third-degree maze, there aren’t visual cues or mnemonic devices reliable for navigation. Architecture in mnemonic myopia is a system of flux, of ongoing transformation, emergence or expansion. When Theseus navigates Daedalus’ maze in pursuit of Minotaur, Ariadne’s thread acts as a materialisation of mnemonic cues, which turns the maze from a third-degree to a second-degree maze. Ludius Loci experiments with second and third-degree mazes.
player
Ludology and architecture converge at their shared focus on the user of the space, who metamorphoses from an architectural occupant to a player. In architecture, we focus much on the occupant’s social role – age, gender, family structure, vocation, lifestyle etc. – but in games, the social role is downplayed; we are more focused on the POV of the player as they problem-solve and traverse the virtual world. An avatar is a digital representation of the player. Compared to scale figures that are used as a tool secondary to architecture, the player avatar is more active, agential and symbolic as it embodies role play and synthesises a set of qualities of an imagined space-user. The identity and design of the avatar closely relate to the global context of gameplay. By positioning the space-user or occupant as an active, mobile and player-controlled avatar, rather than an objectified, passive scale figure, we emphasise the quality of multi-agential interactions and world-building as a subjective, personal journey.
pov
‘I know they accuse me of arrogance, and perhaps misanthropy, and perhaps of madness. Such accusations (for which I shall exact punishment in due time) are derisory. It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose numbers are infinite) are open day and night to men and to animals as well. ... Another ridiculous falsehood has it that I, Asterion, am a prisoner. Shall I repeat that there are no locked doors, shall I add that there are no locks?’ 4
4 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The House of Asterion’, from Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. 1962
The player of Ludius Loci is the estranged antagonist from Greek myth, Minotaur (Asterion). Despite the popular narrative that the Cretan Maze was built to imprison him, the maze is the only known home from his point of view. The hidden peculiarity of Minotaur’s POV is that he is both an inhabitant and an escapist. It may not seem like a confinement, but an assemblage of architectural elements that together liquify their differences or boundaries, creating repetition and circularity in both space and time. 5 In one sense, the maze is his intimate home; in another dimension, it is confrontational.
5 Grosz, Elisabeth A, and Peter Eisenman. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. The MIT Press, 2006
1 CROSSWORD: spatial semantics
The first game, Crossword, is a part-to-whole maze that transforms the individual (part) into a collective unity. A local-to-global system of elements operate in space with rules, like rules in language. Generative architecture propagates linguistically like a crossword puzzle.
Each element is one of the architectural conventions, doors, windows, stairs, rooms, corridors, columns – all have meaning in regards to user interaction. Such conventions codify the ways the player of places may interact with them, hence an interplay between elements, movement and forces.6 This is the spatial production.
The crossword infinitely expands as Minotaur travels. It is an architecture of space and time. The crossword formed by architectural parts explores the notion of architecture as a linguistic assemblage of dynamic elements, growing from one point into an aggregation, following certain joining rules. It involves a departure from conventional design approaches that prioritise rigid massing, and instead focuses on processes of the crossword. Through the propagation of simple elements, complexity of the system emerges.
2 VOLVELLE: spatialised fate
What is a volvelle? It is a diagram that can be applied at the foundation of every medium.
Volvelle is an ideal maze, because it is adapted from a temporal model. The wall-stair complex interferes with Minotaur’s navigation by alignment and misalignment, producing occult experiences for Minotaur.
There are always two characters in divination practices: the querent who asks questions and the transmission which can be a character or a medium. In cases of the western horoscope, the medium is the volvelle - a circular calculator with infinite variations.
Minotaur navigates through a circular maze with walls, stairs, and doorways, acting like a querent, and the maze, a transmission in occult practices. In polar coordinates, linear spatial orientations don’t work: the only directions are centre and periphery. Between the centre and the periphery, there is a porous in-between. A maze. Born at the centre, humans never cease to move outward in a meandering randomised pattern.
The concept of navigating in space is analogous to the concept of fate in time. This volvelle maze layers conventional architectural elements such as a doorway, a corridor, and a wall, but it also creates a continuum of scales that the virtual querent always has to size their body to see if they fit, or move in ways such as jumping or crawling. The maze is an active agent exerting influence on the behaviour of the virtual querent. The maze is the medium of transmission. It is the question answerer, as much as it is the riddle itself.
3 BABELS: growth and decay
Babel towers belong to another type of architecture. An architecture that remains forever unfinished. The state of unfinishedness creates a sense of lifelike presence. A metabolic unfinishedness.
The invisible enemy of architecture is the force that erodes and decays, the embodiment of entropy, decay and destruction. It is the weather, thermal expansion, fire, natural disasters, organismic decomposers that batter the architectural structure. It is the force that turns an architectural structure into ruins that is architecture’s enemy, but by the same force, new lives and new constructions are created. The force that erodes and decays is the same force that grows. It beautifully echoes the mathematic concepts of the selfduality: the force that influences a system or structure that has the property of being equal to its opposite or reverse force, the force of decay is, in the example of fungal growth that gradually fractures a stone, a self-dual of the force of growth.
This level is an open-world game featuring towers structures in different states of growth and decay, where growth creates solids and decay carves voids. Those forces are curves. Spiral, waves, and hyperbola. Their numerous permutations and combinations are the unseen forces that drive the solid and void. They are the genotypes of the architecture. The phenotype is generated by time. Remember when I was walking in the matrix of towers? Those babels can appear in numerous phenotypes with just a few genotypes. What Deleuzian becoming signifies, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, is a shift from one’s former identity in a difference of degree, rather than a difference in kind. 7
7 Grosz, Elizabeth A. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. Columbia University Press, 2020
the architecture of the game
The notion of differences in degree is crucial to my understanding and production of maze and architecture games. Different parts along the uneven edges of one structure may exhibit different porosity with different accessibility, but in a maze there should be differences in degree, in order to create spatial and mnemonic myopia. In an animated architecture, the temporal differences are a gradient of transformations in which any two adjacent frames look logically and visually similar. Simple transformations of identical parts, or merging in-between states between different parts, are not only a self-reference but a system of potentials.
In the process of design and play, the maze represents a new mode of architecture that challenges the traditional mastermind notions of design, rule compliance, and space. Virtual architecture is not simply a matter of digital representations of physical buildings, but rather an experiment in creating new spatial logic with emphasis on space as a production, rather than a product. Spatial production is the dynamic interplay among multiple agents, including designer, occupant and other architectural parts, in an evolving sequence. Virtual architecture has the potential to create not only new forms, new ways of interaction, but also new thought and cultural meanings.
In Ludius Loci, player of places, loci is a pun with double meanings. It signifies that this project seeks to establish an architecture of three loci, loci of emergence, loci of circular time, and loci of computational heterogeneity.
Emergence resonates with a continuity of before and after, with expanding complexities unfolding in a modularisation of architectural parts. The model of becoming, according to Bergson and Deleuze, involves dispersion, where an entity is in a different place-time than it originally was by a movement of complication. The crossword maze is a dispersion space, and player on the other hand, their movement, if frozen in solid, will show a dispersion pattern in space. The player and the maze become connected again by their shared gaming properties. In Borges’ retelling of the myth of Minotaur, House of Asterion, Minotaur narrates how the bodies of the sacrificed youth, when they lie down still, turn into markers of his infinitely intricate home maze.
Ludius Loci is my spatial play in which I have been a player. It is the immaterial legacy of my obsession with mazes. It is an archive of my dreams of mazes, my practice of fulfilling the duty in the Borgesian prophecy of maze makers in the world. As a bag of digital games, it is an interface where my maze making obsession can be shared by others, designers and non-designers alike.
All three parts of Ludius Loci, player of games, in very different ways speculate how a maze is conceived as an agential aggregation of tectonics of mobility, where the occupant is treated as a curious discoverer, and where space, in turn, is in a state of becoming.
YIOU WANG is a multidisciplinary artist and architect working in the field of new media, encompassing CGI, game, immersive and interactive storytelling. Yiou holds a Harvard GSD MArch; her thesis, Ludius Loci, a series of single player adventure games of architectonics, can be found at Yiou Wang’s itch.io
