Architecture of evil: the lairs of games villains

By Cory Doctorow at 1:04 pm Friday, May 15

Geoff sez, "Games critic Jim Rossignol, from Rock Paper Shotgun and This Gaming Life, has guest-posted on BLDGBLOG about the design of 'evil lairs' in contemporary videogames - from World of Warcraft to System Shock to Shadow of the Colossus. It's a great post, actually - asking what evil is and why we insist on representing it in certain ways, architecturally."

...perhaps the most extraordinary and unearthly of evil videogame architectures are the wandering colossi of Shadow of the Colossus. Great, living structures, lonely behemoths, that stride magnificently across the game world. These sad, shaggy giants of stone and moss must be climbed and slain by the hero, often via use of the surrounding environment of ancient ruins and meticulously designed geological formations. Lairs within lairs.

Of course, monsters are presumably evil, but the reality of the colossi remains ambiguous for much of the game. When the game is up, the player-character suffers a terrible price for destroying these strange, animate monuments. It is one of the few videogames in which the protagonist dies â€" horribly and permanently â€" when the game is over. It is a game where destroying the evil lair might well have been the wrong thing to do. And yet it is all you can do.

Such is the inexorable, linear fate of the videogame avatar.

Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds (Thanks, Geoff!)