AdviceToolbox
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It’s impossible to recreate all the detail of a real city in a game,
so here’s a brief guide to abstracting your urban environmentCityCraft: abstracting
virtual cities
outline, and finally to a simple point with a label.
To see such a process in real time, simply visit
Google Maps and zoom in and out.THE ART OF ABSTRACTION
Cartographers don’t carelessly remove spatial
information when they’re abstracting a real
location, and similarly, designers of virtual cities
need to be careful with what they choose to
show or ignore. We have to make sure that
the crucial, defining elements of our cities
survive, and thus preserve their intended shape,
structure, and character. I would, for example,
always make sure to feature the ‘L’ curve of the
River Thames in any version of London, and
include at least a simple iteration of Central Park
for a virtual New York.
Besides the removal of information, civic
generalisation must also show off what remains.
It’s vital to subtly reorganise, and provide the
virtual space with clarity in order to frame its
characteristics and hide its omissions as best
as you can. Spatial elements may have to be
moved around or even enlarged. Roads can
be curved to camouflage their short length.
Intricate shapes will have to be simplified;
smaller city blocks, or linear features such as
parallel train lines, may have to be aggregatedAUTHOR
KONSTANTINOS DIMOPOULOS
Konstantinos Dimopoulos is a game urbanist and designer, combining a PhD
in urban planning with video games. He is the author of the forthcoming Virtual
Cities atlas, designs game cities, and consults on their creation. game-cities.comE
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ven gaming’s greatest cities pale
in size, complexity, and density of
detail when compared to a real-
world city. Victorian London, the
first modern metropolis, a city that
in its time surpassed every historical civic limit,
was represented by less than 300 city blocks in
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate; driving around GTA V’s
supposedly vast Los Santos barely takes more
than 30 minutes. Still, these open worlds feel
highly convincing. Symbolic representations,
clever design solutions, obstructed views, and,
above all, the careful abstraction and stylisation
of urban space, give players the illusion of much
larger cities.
It’s the ways we choose to present our game
cities, their fidelity, and their aesthetic style,
that define how much abstraction we’ll need
to apply. In most cases, though, the logic that
cartographers use when drawing maps will
provide a good initial approach. In Figure 1,
I’ve sketched an example of how a city can
be represented as we zoom out and reduce
the scale of our map. The increasing degrees
of abstraction lead from a relatively detailed
map, where all major roads and contour lines
are visible, to an outline with a few highways
and stylised mountains, to a shape of the city’s Figure 2: Sometimes
abstraction can preserve
silhouettes and volumes
while altering the
architectural characteristics
of an area.
Figure 1: The cartographic
generalisation of a simple
city in four stages.