[News] That all the cities you build in video games are square has an explanation and it goes back to the Wild West

[#Steeven.™]

Ordinance of lands, cities and ancient civilizations? We review a little history to understand how we create cities in video games.

Has it ever happened to you that you are playing a strategy title, or a city builder, and you simply stop to plan or admire your work? If you are not new to the genre, you will already know that you have to take into account an infinite number of variables, ranging from the organization of residential districts to the configuration of industrial zones, passing, of course, the layout of roads and roads, and different accessory elements that depend a little on each game (they can be basic resources, security, cosmetics, etc).

It may sound a little weird, but just seeing how everything is structured and interconnected in a virtual city, one that has been chiseled from our own optimization and spatial understanding, is one of the most authentic sensations the genre can convey. of the strategy. Deep down, it has a lot to do with the expression capacity of each player; The fact that no two cities are identical reveals a lot about ourselves, our personality and how we understand the world around us.

 

The Land Ordinance and our spatial organization
However, almost all of our digital construction activities have one element in common: the tendency towards the perfect grid, an easily testable approach that has its origins in the evolution of human cities and, more specifically, in the Land Ordinance of 1785. What is this and why should we care? Good question; In reality, the Land Ordinance is a law that was promulgated by the United States Confederation, just a short time after its birth as a sovereign nation, and that would mark the expansion and territorial division of the country towards the Wild West, lands of incredible nature and animistic natives who tried to resist the invasion. Be that as it may, we all know the result: today, the US extends from coast to coast, and although on the side closest to the Atlantic, which corresponds to the original 13 colonies, it is easy to appreciate the European influences at the urban level, As we move towards the Pacific, the effects of the Land Ordinance can be seen very clearly.

Broadly speaking, the law proposes a super-grid organization of the territory, a division that prevails both at the state level (look at the limits of the states, delimited by square and square) and in the individual plots themselves. If you want to freak out, grab Google Maps, turn on layered or satellite view, and compare any big city in Illinois or California to old town on the East Coast or New England. The difference is huge; It's almost like a trip back in time, an intercultural leap from European to American architecture, in which you go from narrow, winding, "distinctive" streets to an organization totally outlined in almost perfect squares... laid out in a somewhat neurotic and like mass production, to be honest.

 

Almost all of our digital construction activities have one element in common: the trend towards the perfect grid.

This also happens in video games, obviously. In some it is more evident than in others, and in many of them it is simply an acquired habit, a self-imposed habit that leads us to structure our cities obsessively, counting the size of the buildings point by point and working in connected rectangles and squares. by roads that surround them.

We have a clear case of this in the recent IXION, which does not get rid of the Ordinance of 1785 no matter how much its leaders are French; in it, we put ourselves in command of a space station to try to find out what the hell has happened to humanity and what the future holds for our species. More pertinent is to verify that its internal division, in the districts that make up the Tiqqun station, is completely divided into perfect little squares, and that the buildings, regardless of the curvilinearity of their contours, occupy a specific number of squares on the map. I remember my first few hours in the game and I can't help but think about all the time I spent trying to quantify the space to organize everything in the best possible way: the optimal route of resource collection, which areas were best to stack houses and where you had to position the containers for greater production efficiency…. You know, that kind of thing.

When I moved to the second district, I prepared myself thoroughly and tried to put into practice everything I had learned, all those little errors in positioning and construction that had caused me quite a few headaches. Before I knew it, it turns out that I was already organizing all the land in the sector in very marked grids and rectangles, measured to the last consequences so that they perfectly fit the number of buildings that I intended to place there. In the end, this is just an unconscious and purely personal reinterpretation of the Land Ordinance of 1785, which sometimes works on us in inscrutable ways, without our realizing it. It is indisputable that the very configuration of the space proposed by Bulwark Studios with IXION ends up giving rise to conclusions similar to mine, but the most interesting thing of all is that it is not the only case, and that it is not always something forced, imposed by the molds playable.

Let me explain: have you played Cities Skylines, Airborne Kingdom, or any installment of the irreverent and charismatic Tropico franchise? The first and the last give you more construction options, without a doubt, it's not for nothing that we talk about some of the best city builders on the market. And yet, if you take a look at the vast majority of user cities, you will find that tendency to the perfect grid that I was talking about before, like an invisible law that operates in our brain whether we want it or not. No. In Airborne Kingdom, the result is even more obvious because, as in IXION, the game cannot be separated from its grid-like spatial organization, which leads you, slowly but inexorably, to design quadrilateral neighborhoods, both to respect the area of influence of the effects of the buildings to be able to mentally "grasp" the space that the title offers you. You have examples like these, so I'm going to stay with a selection of great games: the sensational Dyson Sphere Program, Anno 1800, Banished, Rimworld…. Crazy.

From the ancient city to the modern city: the player experience
However, cities were not always like this. A long, long time ago, in civilizations somewhat, somewhat distant, when a few millennia had already passed since the domestication of agriculture and from the passage of our lives as hunter-gatherers to sedentary lifestyle (what a scam, to all this), many Urban planning exercises focused on an important social nexus and spread around it, forming a kind of sphere, or three-dimensional waves

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I find it very interesting that the evolution of a player can be analogous to the historical evolution
The key was always in the cosmogony of civilizations, in the way in which each society understood the world around it. For example, in Mesopotamia, the cities changed from an irregular layout to a grid pattern over time (probably the great influence of the Land Ordinance and, therefore, how we make cities in video games), while in Ancient Egypt the space was structured with the temples and palaces in the center, so that the city orbited as a kind of network around it.

Here it is quite difficult not to think of the outstanding Frostpunk, in whose snowy wastelands all the buildings are located around a huge heat generator that, of course, always remains in the center. It makes sense, doesn't it? In a frozen post-apocalyptic world in which fire is the greatest treasure, the protagonist of the last cities of humanity is not religious, social or governmental, but something much more practical, much more tangible: it is simply not freezing to death. Actually, apart from the wonderful ideas of 11 bit studios (which are already preparing Frostpunk 2 and the very interesting The Alters), I find it very interesting that the evolution of a player in the city builder genre can be analogous to the evolution of the cities in the historical plane; Many of us go from the initial chaos, when we are not very clear about what to do, where to put what and why, to a state of "greater strategic awareness" that urges you to plan almost everything several hours in advance. If I look back and think about my Imperivm Civitas games, I have no choice but to raise my hands to my head... Where are my grids, Brutus, I'm getting OCD.

Now it's your turn: are you part of the grid cult, or do you prefer to design your cities with a little more improvisation? Is there any title that has broken your schemes with its urban proposal or its construction system? We read you in the comments; Before closing, yes, I did not want to miss the opportunity to tell you that if you want to know what are the scientific and social consequences of the Land Ordinance of 1785 in the US, I recommend that you take a look at the great Twitter thread of Antonio Giraldo, who sums up all these questions wonderfully, and who has served as an inspiration to continue investigating in this article.

 

https://www.3djuegos.com/juegos/frostpunk/noticias/razon-que-todas-tus-ciudades-videojuegos-cuadradas-se-remonta-a-tiempos-salvaje-oeste