
The underappreciated art of furniture in video games - sophcw
http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/culture/design/216873-video-games-furniture-design
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akiselev
Just to bring up an example from a recently released AAA game: Fallout 4's
immersion is absolutely incredible due to the furniture and item design. All
of the furniture is designed as if it's from the mid-20th century (with iconic
retro radios and televisions) and it's mixed in with this futurist post
apocalypse style set in the 23rd century that includes a variety of robots
(including human form Cylon-like synths), giant exoskeltons powered by fusion
cores, and intelligent robotic dog toys.

Bethesda also added a great (albeit hardly intuitive) base construction
feature that allows you to build out dozens of settlements with farms, towns,
and even 8-10 story tall skyscrapers which requires raw materials like
concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, and adhesives to construct. In order to get
these items you have to scrap hundreds of different "junk" objects placed all
over the world like coffee cups, random widgets in factories that were in the
middle of production when nuclear war hit, typewriters, hot plates, desk fans,
cigarettes, children's toys (20th century wooden ones like derby cars and
space ships), duct tape, wrenches, and many more every day objects. When you
build out your settlements you can even scrap entire collapsed houses, sinks
and toilets, cardboard boxes of paper, old rugs and mailboxes, trees, ovens
and washing machines and every other obstacle short of bushes and rock
outcrops. The result is a world that feels _real,_ not because of any one
specific feature but because everything just flows so well together from the
furniture to the ineractive junk to the desolate landscape.

As any other multi million dollar projects it has its misteps, but I haven't
been this impressed by the stylistic design of a game since Morrowind, another
Bethesda game, which also had an absurd number of "junk" items that you could
pick up and about half a dozen very distinctive architectural and furniture
styles (with their own extensive lore!)

~~~
DonHopkins
That's a great description of what I love about Fallout 4. They've found a
nice balanced granularity between high level functional crafted items, medium
level non-(or less-)functional junk items, which you can break down into low
level elemental raw materials (crafting components) to craft other items with.
[http://m.ign.com/wikis/fallout-4/Junk_Items_and_Crafting_Mat...](http://m.ign.com/wikis/fallout-4/Junk_Items_and_Crafting_Materials)

In typical games, most items including furniture are useless and only
decorative obstacles, and only a few items like keys have exactly one possible
use. If you see something that you can pick up, then you know it must be
required for something important and obvious.

Minecraft has crafting and building, but not so much of a scavenging economy
of recycling crafted and found items into raw materials -- it's more of a one-
way entropic trip instead of a feedback loop.

But Fallout items have more tiers and finer granularity of usefulness than the
binary "useless / essential" dichotomy of most games. It has a rich enough set
of atomic crafting materials so some are common, some are rare, and most are
in-between, but there aren't too many.

There are few enough kinds of raw materials that you can easily learn and
remember what items are made of, and it's appropriately challenging to find
enough different kinds of resources to craft a wide variety of items of
different skill levels.

They've found a nice balance in the number of resource types, that there is a
wide range from common easy-to-craft beginner items to unique hard-to-craft
expert items, without having too many resource types that it would overwhelm
users. To use the entire periodic chart would have been too much, but "earth,
wind and fire" would have been too simple.

And it's funny how some items break down, like how cigarettes are made from
asbestos, plastic and cloth. There's a lot of social commentary in that form
of free speech.
[http://m.ign.com/wikis/fallout-4/Asbestos](http://m.ign.com/wikis/fallout-4/Asbestos)

The world is richly decorated in piles of inert but interesting junk, that
you'd never give a second though to in most games. But Fallout has a
scavenging game aspect to support its crafting game and building game aspects.

Most but not all of the stuff in the world is actually useful to scavenge and
bring back to your settlements for crafting more useful items. The user
interface displays an item's constituent ingredients so you can know what's
worth picking up or leaving behind, and the UI makes it easy to manage junk as
its own category of items distinct from weapons, ammo, apparel, etc. You can
easily toss all your junk into a crafting table, and it will be automatically
broken down on demand when you craft new items that require a certain number
of raw materials.

------
Splines
Deus Ex: Human Revolution's interior design is quite striking, although I'm
completely uneducated in this area. There's an interesting analysis done by an
architecture student here:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD7519BFFBCE668B2](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD7519BFFBCE668B2)

Interesting to watch. The music of DX:HR is also lovely.

~~~
frik
Having played all parts of the Deus Ex series: DX 1 is stellar, one of the top
10 PC/video games. Speaking about interior design, DX1 is outstanding for its
time (Unreal 1 engine). One could use, move and destroy objects in the room.
DX2 had a similar good interior design and a even more realisitic physics
engine (fire could spread across the room, not seen again until Far Cry 2 many
years later). The music of DX1 is great, every single piece. Though DX2
suffered from being developed for XBox1, a console which lacked memory and was
quite slow in comparision to a PC at that time. So DX2 levels were very tiny
(only 1-3 rooms per level) and a fraction of the level size of DX1 which spans
up to 1 square mile. DX2 was also dumped down for consoles (1 ammo type for
all weapons - seriously wtf!). DX 3 (aka Human Revolution) had beautiful cloth
designs and interesting art design, but used an outdated game engine. DX3 had
a very static game world, move or destroying interior object wasn't possible.
The story was less complex and less grand than DX1&2, the levels were
comparable almost small to DX2 and far smaller than DX1 that came out like 7
years before. DX3 had one of the most stupid interior archtectual designs,
like accessable ventilation pipes had been added at a very late state in the
development for more stealth gameplay. The ventilation pipes were placed at
the illogical places and gone through many feets of concrete space just for
the sake of offering stealth gameplay. People who like DX3 more thanDX1 often
never played DX1 at release date and/or haven't completed both games. Sure
today, all Deus Ex parts look very outdated from a graphical point of view. So
I tend to say DX1 was superb, DX2 & DX3 development was misguided and the
result just good or very good, but not one of the best games ever. The release
date of DX4 (due Dec 2015) has just been pushed back another 8 months due to
subpar quality from the publisher - weeks just before the Gold master.
Nowadays the Dishonored and Watch_Dogs series seem to be the logic successor
of Deus Ex. If only Warren Spector would come back and be the lead of a new
Deus Ex like game.

~~~
tormeh
I tried to play DX1 once. I quit in the intro when the lead villains said
"[...] and then we'll take over the world, muahahaha". Nothing can make up for
that sort of thing. I'd honestly prefer watching grass grow. At least watching
grass grow doesn't make me cringe.

DX1's reputation is pure nostalgia. Standards have risen since then and now
DX1 is below par.

~~~
frik
You judge a video game based on a 2min intro video? Listen more carefully and
don't judge something in 1-2 minutes.

Deus Ex 1 has still one of the best stories in a video game. It's a lot more
complex and awesome you might think. And yes, the game has different endings
and the player can decide if the visions of the intro becomes true. The while
graphics aged though the gameplay is still great.

------
frik
Is this an advertisal for obscure games that were mentioned on the bottom? An
article written by someone who apparently knows little about the vast amount
of video games. There are so many games that could be mentioned, beside Skyrim
and Sims 1(!) (and maybe Ico) the other examples are a joke (read little known
non-triple A games). Deus Ex, Gothic, Half Life, No One Lives Forever,
Witcher, etc.

~~~
Onnisotnio
I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't mentioned this. Advertisment? I doubt
it. Written with the explicit intention of writing about Gone
Home/Jazzpunk/Sunset. Probably. I did a google search of her name, and then
the names that came up associated with her. They all write/talk about these
games a lot.

------
Animats
In Second Life, there are furniture stores.[1]

Heavy Rain has meaningful interiors with realistic furnishings.[2] They're in
scale, they have detail, and they look lived-in.

Most games tend to look under-furnished. Especially ones with big rooms.
Worse, in some the furniture is out of scale with the room or character sizes.

[1]
[http://secondlife.com/destinations/home/furnishings](http://secondlife.com/destinations/home/furnishings)
[2] [http://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-22/hr-ethan-house-
kids-...](http://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-22/hr-ethan-house-kids-
bedroom.html)

------
DonHopkins
Here are some thoughts from my experience working on The Sims 1:

Even if you don't sit in a chair or less functional piece of furniture like a
fish tank, it also serves as an obstacle that affects everything you do in
that room, by participating in the A* "maze game" of getting the characters
from one place to another and possibly making parts of the room inaccessible.

In more typical shoot-em-up games, furniture also provide cover for ducking
behind when players are shooting at each other. Fallout 4 is a lot like The
Sims with weapons and radiation, in that respect.

By adding a few strategically placed pieces of furniture, you can increase the
time it takes for a character to take a shit and shower in the morning, so
they miss their carpool, lose their job, and then finally have to stay home
all day and actually have time to sit in the chair.

One of the early working names for The Sims was "TDS: The Tactical Domestic
Simulator". As the design evolved, it became clear that building the house and
arranging the furniture was an important part of the game, but it was
difficult to come up with a way to objectively evaluate the "feng shui" of the
architecture.

Will Wright realized that the simulated people could actually play that role
in an indirect way by how the physical geometry of the architecture and
furniture placement affected their use of time, space, and resulting
happiness, etc.

If you can't make it to the bathroom in time because somebody's temporarily
blocking your way, you crap your pants and dump a blue puddle on the floor,
your personal hygiene score goes down, the room score goes down, and somebody
has to spend their time cleaning it up.

That made it less of a materialistic game of simply buying as much stuff as
you can to make your characters happy, and more of exercising restraint and
leaving enough negative space and open floor and adjoining doors, that the
characters can get on with their days, get from place to place without
bottlenecks, invite more friends over, mingle around, dance and socialize with
each other.

In order to use the toilet, the character has to be in the room alone, so it
doesn't make sense to put a toilet in the living room in front of the TV for
efficiency's sake, unless you live alone. If other people are in the room when
they want to use the toilet, they will attempt to "shoo" them out of the room
for privacy.

Here is one of my favorite bugs from unintentional emergent behavior,
involving the toilet and the maid:

A dude walks into the bathroom, pixelates his crotch, pulls down his pants,
sits on the toilet, and proceeds to take a nice leisurely dump.

But as soon as he pinches a deuce into the bowl, the toilet immediately clogs
up and starts desperately advertising that it's dirty and needs to be plunged.

Of course that attracts the attention of the maid, who at the time was
blissfully uninhibited, and cheerfully wanders into the bathroom, then reaches
around behind her to whip out a plunger from "hammerspace".

Then she helpfully thrusts the plunger into the toilet bowl through the still-
squatting dude's pixelated crotch, with the long hard plunger handle sticking
up at full attention, and starts vigorously jerking the handle up and down to
unclog the toilet while the lucky dude was still sitting on the toilet!

I'll leave it to your imagination what it looked like was really going on...

