 The castle in Ico is many things, an imposing structure of majestic proportions, a labyrinth of puzzles and precarious jumps. Mostly though, it is a living organism that tells the story of Ico itself, however sparse and abstract. Level design, architecture is storytelling. Designed to be both insurmountable and yet strangely navigable, the castle tests the resolve of our protagonists as they join hands to escape its harsh judgement. From the first room you make your escape from, a camera that is fixed to a point but allows you to pan from that perch, frames the space to highlight how small you are in relation to the environment. Puzzle design is storytelling. You have to leave Yorda behind on occasion to keep open a door, terrifying for how she is effectively your health bar, the space playing with our connection and separation anxiety. Yorda is our saving grace, not just in how her powers are essential to dispel the castle's magic and solve puzzles, but in how literally you need her to save. In his essay Game Design as Narrative Architecture, Henry Jenkins argues that games are not simply conventional storytelling vehicles, they have their own language. Game designers don't simply tell stories, they design worlds and sculpt spaces. It is no accident for example that game design documents have historically been more interested in issues of level design than plotting or character motivation. Games are architected spaces with narrative possibilities. One, not all games tell stories. Two, games cannot be reduced to just stories. And three, games tell stories in their own way. Spatial stories are not new. Heroes' odysseys, quest myths, travel narratives. Everything from Lord of the Rings to war and peace conceptualized traversal through space as narrative possibility. Eco is curated by its geometry. Its space poses a narrative arc. To understand this more fully, Journey might be of assistance. A game modeled after the hero's journey explicitly. Its space, its highs and lows map onto different stages. The belly of the whale taking place in a cavernous and dark subterranean locale. Apotheosis as you ascend towards the top of the mountain. Heights and depths are storytelling. In Eco, the castle folds in on itself as you try to open the gates by going to two opposite sides to activate the mechanism. Escape now promised we are thwarted by the envious or jealous or vindictive queen. We are cast to the underbelly and have to rise up once more from the ashes. No longer able to save as Yorda is no longer with us. Jenkins states, The organization of the plot becomes a matter of designing the geography of imaginary worlds so that obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate the protagonist's forward movement through resolution. Jenkins concludes his essay by giving us a few ways of thinking about video games. As evoked in narrative, how spatial design can immerse us in a world, much like how it does in Eco. As an acted narrative, how movement and action can tell stories. Brothers the tale of two sons telling its story with its controls. As embedded narrative, how spaces can have details we need to uncover to figure out the world, much like how the lore of Souls games is configured. And as emergent art, as a space of possibilities, contingencies, like how the Sims and SimCities give players a sandbox of narrative possibility. He concludes with, It makes sense to think of game designers less as storytellers than as narrative architects. A narrative architect, huh? Interestingly, this analogy has been extended into formal books about game design. Jesse Shell's The Art of Game Design is inspired by Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, a book about architecture and how it can be reduced to general principles. Another book, an architectural approach to level design, extends this even further, applying architecture more directly. Architecture is a field built on practical theory that can provide level designers with insights into how both humans perceive space and cool ways to construct space. Designing levels involves a process very similar to architecture, literally in concepting and sculpting levels and applying that to a digital interface. However, it also applies in theory as well. The book elaborates on how principles of architectural design can inform game design, from figure ground and negative space considerations, in level layouts, but also sight lines and pathways, dramatic lead ups, focal points. In games, form and function coincide as level layouts need to catch the eye, be beautiful to look at, but also fulfill the function of gameplay, be easily readable based on the game that it is. It isn't just with structure though that this applies, but also with meaning. For example, the development of the Ziggurat is important in the development of architecture as a system of representation. The Ziggurat form is said to have fulfilled two functions, elevating temples closer to the gods and recalling the mountains from which the Sumerians migrated. In this way, the Sumerians were using shapes or ornamentation of buildings to convey a larger idea. Game space and buildings themselves have a spiritual dimension. In Dark Souls, you spend the first 20 hours in the lower bergs, trying to ring the two bells. One is atop a church, another deep below in the swampy hell that is Blighttown. Once done with this, you make your way through Sen's Fortress, a castle of traps to get to Anor Londo. This now iconic scene is beautiful not just an image, but an imagery, presenting you a vista of delight, making us feel like we've ascended into the heavens itself. Except, even more perils await, an archer perched on a ledge that snipes you from a far without a moment's hesitation, a boss fight that involves two guardians who complement one another's play. This all takes place amidst a now abandoned city of the gods, desolate, barren but resplendent, its emotions as conflicted as you are, trying to navigate its turmoil. This idea of meaning in space is also written about in the book, the semiotics of architecture in video games. If we look at virtual architecture, semiotics makes more sense, since everything is significantly more planned to produce meaning. Even natural or accidental occurrences, that while meaningful or often unwanted or unplanned in the real world, are a design choice in digital games. Architecture as a form doesn't exist in nature, and yet it is bound by functionality, just like a game, an abstraction that just works. Moreover, this abstraction allows us to explore ideas, emotions, and themes. The author gives us three kinds of architecture in games. One, reconstructive spaces that aim to represent real-life architecture like Assassin's Creed. Think of all the churches, mosques, and landmarks, particularly reconstructed in these games. Two, fantasy, like in Final Fantasy, that takes motifs from the real world, but then expands them. And finally, visionary, architecture that is unbound to the norms of even physics in the real world, like Manifold Garden, which constructs an infinitely looping space. Designers echo some of these sentiments. The developer of Nassance said this, architecture is the basic element of games. Because games are almost always a process of going from one point to another, and in between you have doors, you have puzzles, it is always a journey, always a progression through space. Nassance, of course, a game about descending into an abyss of monolithic geometry. The walls and spaces funneling you down into oblivion. Games aren't bound to the real world, they are untethered to the restraints of real space. What are these different spaces in games, though? In his book, Video Game Spaces, Michael Nietzsche presents five different kinds of spaces in games that roughly correspond to the different kinds of levels that games have. For one, there's the obvious path, a line, which is characteristic of any linear game. Next, there's the arena, like the Roman Colosseum, a form that forces confrontation. Fighting games take place in arenas, multiplayer shooters take place in arenas as well. There's also a genre literally called arena shooters. Next, the track. More simply, a line folded onto itself. Of course, racing games invoke this structure, using the aesthetics of repetition. Next, the labyrinth, or a maze, like with the Minotaur of Fable. What genre characterizes this? The Metroidvania, where you have to explore interconnected paths, backtrack, and gain abilities that help you progress. Finally, we have the city that combines all these elements functionally, comprised of paths and tracks built into a maze that have buildings that are worlds of their own, or perhaps even an arena where games take place. Each of these spaces has different aesthetic emotions and design goals. We now see why the castle and eco is structurally predisposed to create alienation and isolation and confusion. It is a labyrinth. However, the game is also punctuated with more linear paths. And also, there are combat arenas where you are funneled into a confrontation, forced to fight those that might kidnap Yorda. Dark Souls' world map is a maze, the structure of space coordinating narrative, but punctuated by arenas against bosses. GTA is a city, sure, but it has a mission-based structure that funnels the player into paths within it. These five properties, however, are just the type of rule-based spaces that games can have. Second, there is the mediated space, which is how the space is framed. We talked about Eco's camera and how instrumental it was to create its tone. Three is the fictional space, the place that exists outside the bounds of what is represented. Essays on Eco speculate about what the function of the castle is, why it exists in its form and what the world beyond the gates is like. Four is the play space. This is when the game goes meta. It's the actual physical location the player is in, as they change control reports when Psycho Mantis messes with them. And five is social space, grounding video games finally in the real world with real people. If we think about VR games and AR games, physical space becomes leveled as a, but what they actually do is provide a bridge between virtual and real games. In video games, multiplayer interactions are digital artifacts, but they are also social. How do MMOs design hubs that circulate people in specific ways? This is much an architectural question as a player of sim city poses, as much as a real city planet does. Game spaces evoke narratives because the player is making sense of them in order to engage with them. The designer isn't just architecting meaning, so too is the player as they navigate these worlds. Eco's story seems to save very little because it allows its levels, its architecture, to speak for itself, and the player to respond in kind as an architect of their own.