I remember hearing not so long ago, that during the development of Red Faction: Armageddon ran into a problem whilst map-building. Being a sci-fi game set on Mars, the designers tried to give the buildings a unique kind of look. In 3D design or CAD, you can design whatever you want, physics be damned. So when the team tried to make a building with a predominantly glass ground-floor and concrete upper-floor. In standard 3D game-development toolkits, that isn’t too much of a challenge, the game doesn’t acknowledge the reality of the properties in question. But when the Red Faction: Armageddon physics engine was enabled to allow players to blow buildings to pieces, the glass ground-floor was immediately crushed by the upper concrete floors. If the story is true, then the entire team had to take a crash course in basic structural architecture.
Now with games like Minecraft having a profound creative effect on todays youth, building elaborate contraptions and amazing buildings, we’re seeing gamers create art. Now the big secret about Minecraft is that it’s actually a Voxel simulator. Voxels could be the end of polygonal graphics, level architecture and character design will be more akin to molecular methodologies than vector. Now for anyone who doesn’t quite get my paraphrase I’ll explain it like this. I ask you to create a figure of a human using 100 Lego blocks. You do but it looks rather blocky on camera. So we repeat the process but with 1000 Lego blocks, we pull the camera back to get the larger figure in shot, but we can still see the blocks; it still doesn’t pass as realistic. So we keep increasing the amount of blocks and pulling the camera away to compensate for size until we reach a point, were we can’t see individual blocks, but rather the overall shape of the structure. Not convinced? Here are some examples of art made on Minecraft. Remember these images are all composed of individual blocks, or Voxels.
Not only are people creating art, but doing it with a technology that will revolutionize the world. For scientific and technological progression, all creative, mechanical, scientific, and medical avenues must be supported. Neil DeGrasse Tyson pointed this out when he said “The MRI machine was designed by an engineer, NOT a doctor.” I hypothesize that if a physics engine can make a team learn architecture, if Minecraft can teach children to make creations using a method of 3D design that is still being perfected, if strategy games can train us in lateral thinking, then game-design tools are no longer going to be exclusively used by development staff and modders. But by teachers, by parents, allowing their children to explore in a virtual space what they want to do for a career. I’d like to think that the old arcade game Pipes inspired some people to pursue pluming, I know that seeing behind the scenes of some idTech3 maps inspired me to follow film-making as an education. Could the technology of game-building create the next architect who designs the bigger skyscraper, because the tools he used included gravity, weight-distribution, and wind mechanic simulations? I sincerely hope so.
So can it promote further educational vocations? I think so. Do you? Let me know in the comments below.
But I’ll leave you with this. If a 15yr old child, boy or girl, it doesn’t matter, can create something like those images up there, then imagine what that man or women can do in the medical industry with the knowledge and skills to use the same tool set, with 20 years experience, and maybe, just maybe, creates the first fully interactive 3D rendered MRI image, saving lives, because a simple game, gave them a big, big idea.
