Özge Taspinar

Play, Settings, Quit

Spatial Dialogues Between Architecture and Video Game Design

This thesis investigates how rule-based game mechanics—implemented through VR and real-time game engines—can mediate and transform the experience of “the real,” specifically familiar architectural environments. By overlaying alternative spatial rules onto the existing structure of the Angewandte Schwanzer Wing, the project examines how digital interventions disrupt habitual movement patterns, reconfigure spatial legibility, and destabilize the assumed fixity of architectural meaning. Rather than treating games primarily as narrative or problem-solving media, it adopts them as a methodological framework for working with spatial rules, circulation patterns, and systems of value.

The research is situated within contemporary architectural practices increasingly shaped by AI-assisted design tools, VR/XR, and real-time engines. These technologies allow buildings to exist simultaneously as physical structures and as multiple digital counterparts governed by different rule sets. Instead of proposing an entirely new virtual world, the project tests how a routine-filled, memory-laden environment can be reinterpreted through a parallel, rule-based layer. Ordinary spaces—corridors, offices, thresholds—become strange when paths loop, tasks resist completion, and the environment responds unpredictably to user action; conversely, abstract game spaces gain legibility through recognizable architectural cues. This tension between familiarity and estrangement becomes a key lens for rethinking architectural experience.

Wayfinding forms the core of the investigation. In both games and architecture, navigation is experiential: it involves curiosity, hesitation, disorientation, and discovery, and it is strongly shaped by mental maps produced through repeated routines. The project treats these cognitive maps as a material to be manipulated, asking how alternative rule systems might reshape spatial perception and the internal representation of a building.

Based on architectural analysis of the Schwanzer Wing, key themes—walls, doors, windows, vertical connections, circulation, and façade—were translated into three responsive VR game environments played by Angewandte students: Flooded Corridor, a reconfiguring labyrinth on a single level; Broken Vertical, a stacked corridor network that fragments vertical movement; and Chromatic Facade, where façade activations generate interior shifts and new circulation logics. Participants documented their experiences in logbooks with drawings and reflections before and after play, producing a collective record of how familiar architecture is re-learned through interaction. Ultimately, the project argues for play as a critical architectural practice—one that questions spatial norms, reorders values, and opens existing buildings to new futures.