I want to return to an idea today that I really like, which I explored in this column at Discourse Magazine and in a piece for a small magazine called Typebar. I did a little follow-up on the column, but I haven’t linked or shared the Typebar piece yet, so it’s a good opportunity to revisit this.

Basically, it’s an idea, sort of based on a thing my best friend and I used to say about our hometown Main Street, that classic small towns are kind of like video game villages. Particularly, in an old-school RPG adventure game, like the town where you start the game and can always return to (to sleep in your house, save the game, visit family members and villagers and receive new side quests, etc. Those are common in-game mechanics).

But I mean this in the inverse of the way you might think. I don’t mean that living in a small town is like playing a video game. I mean that playing a video game is like living in a small town. I mean that what we think of as the escapism or unbounded adventure of a video game is really a video game mimicking a lot of elements of life in traditionally urban places. Video games feel so open and adventurous mostly because so few of us have experienced that kind of thing in a real, physical place.

This is a similar insight to something urbanists say about snow days—fitting, given the Monday’s winter storm—which goes like, “Snow days are so quiet and magical because there’s no motor traffic.” I thought that sounded silly until I thought about. In other words, in the absence of urbanist ideas, we don’t really perceive what’s around us. We think “magical,” when it’s really that there’s not a car or its loud engine in sight (or earshot). It doesn’t occur to most of us to even think about the absence of cars or the noise they make, because they’re so much a part of everyday life. We love urbanism but we don’t have the perception to know that or the language to express it.

Here’s a bit from the Typebar piece:

Why is this important, anyway? Well, I would have wondered that a few years ago. I’m an “urbanist”—someone who studies and cares about cities, towns, issues of urban design, and how they affect our everyday lives—and I’ve been on this beat as a mostly self-taught writer for about six years now. But these issues and some of their champions often fail to feel relatable to people outside of the field.

I could talk about setbacks, or lot sizes, or minimum-parking mandates, or the building code elements that make it difficult to build small multifamily structures (leading to the single-family house/giant apartment building dichotomy), or, of course, zoning. Those are all important policy issues which determine what our daily surroundings look like, and which explain why so often they’re dreary, spread-out places that are ugly, frictional, and barely accessible without a car.

But conceptually, a great deal of “urbanism” comes down to what I said above: lots of things being close to each other. In real life, that can be complicated by those wonky policy issues, as well as by NIMBYism, the economic fortunes of a place, infrastructure and school capacity issues, and the kinds of projects that banks are willing to lend for. In other words, “doing urbanism” in real life is difficult, complicated, multifaceted work.

In a video game, however, none of these constraints exist. And so it’s possible to keep building the sort of worlds that we used to build, under a different and less frictional land-use regime. It’s possible to build the quaint, quirky villages in Animal Crossing, with as little regard for height limits, setbacks, or strict separation of uses as an old American hillside town like Harpers Ferry. It’s possible to build a Hateno or Kakariko Village, the Hyrule towns brought to full 3D life in the latest two Legend of Zelda video games. In these fictional villages, farm fields, homes, shops, and civic buildings unselfconsciously reside together. It only takes a minute of in-game walking to access just about everything one of these towns has to offer the player. In the most recent main Zelda title, Tears of the Kingdom, there’s even a side-quest storyline in Hateno village that winks at real-life NIMBYism, pitting an avant-garde artist against the buttoned-up mayor. The story resolves—much as in real life—with a compromise, the thrust of which is to permit the town to evolve within a framework of its historic identity.

The key here is that a video game town which isn’t completely fantastical is really a window into what we did, and could, build if our land-use regime permitted it.

And here’s a little bit specifically touching on a video game design philosophy, which I argue illustrates my point:

The typical video game town or village is remarkably like a small European village or American town: a rough grid, buildings of one, two, or three stories; a mix of residential, commercial, and civic uses in close enough proximity that all of it can be accessed on a whim. Such places have a certain amount of raw density, but more importantly, they are dense with human interest.

In fact, something like “dense with human interest” was a design inspiration for Nintendo’s Super Mario Odyssey, the main Mario adventure for the Nintendo Switch. The inspiration was not human cities, but rather gardens: specifically hakoniwa gardens, a kind of Japanese miniature garden full of tiny, subtle details….

One can imagine how a video game with large worlds to explore could feel like being placed inside a miniature garden environment dense with delightful little details. What is striking, though, is that towns and neighborhoods are like this writ large: they are full of oddly shaped lots, liminal spaces, nooks and crannies, buildings built over time in bits and pieces, layers of history, real-life “collectibles” like the basement with manhole access in my hometown.

Here’s that basement.

It used to be a package-receiving room, and shipments were delivered through the manhole. My whole life, I imagined the manhole out on the sidewalk was just a sewer or water main access hole, but after I met my town’s mayor, she showed me that room. We went into the store whose basement it accessed, went down a narrow, creaky staircase, and stood in a basement, looking up at the underside of a manhole cover. If that isn’t a real-life video game side quest!

Here’s a picture, down the block from the manhole, that I took standing in the display window of the storefront that was once our town’s department store:

You can almost imagine “find the entrance to the old department store” as a video game task.

There are analogous points of interest or experiences or relationships to form in suburbia, but it all takes a lot more effort and imagination. It demands more of us individually. I think we under-appreciate how much our physical built environments and surroundings can do for us: for our sense of excitement and adventure, for our mental health and energy, for our relationships, for our sense of being independent fully realized people.

In other words, what I’m arguing is that the video game overworld is simply imitating the functions of a classic town or central physical, proximate, urban place, but that because so few of us have really experienced that, we think the video game is innovating on real life in some way.

Read the whole piece in Typebar!

Related Reading:

The Screen Where You Started

That Old Small Town Variety

The Case of the Car Seats

Inhabiting Old Ghosts

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