URBAN (RE)DEVELOPMENT FOR VIDEO GAMES. EFFECTIVE LUDOFORMING AND THE WORK OF RYU GA GOTOKU

There are multiple reasons to use preexisting spaces in fiction, from nostalgia to faithful simulation.Cities are sometimes used as settings for books, films, and video games, with their own complete identities. Still, more often than not, those cities are an inspiration, their essence borrowed for a new urban setting. However, despite not keeping their namesakes, we still recognize those original spaces
in them. There is something that endures after “translation,” a distinctiveness. To pursue this line of thought, we explore the following questions:
Are urban environments designed for video games capable of replicating the experience of preexisting real-life urban environments?
How do they accomplish this?
How do gameplay and narrative design impact virtual urban design?

This paper identifies and compares the techniques employed to translate cities' "essence"(distinctiveness) into video games. We look at different elements and layers of the district of Kamurocho from the Yakuza/Judgment series (Ryu Ga Gotoku), relating it to its modeling and transformation of a particular area in Tokyo (Kabukicho). We analyze these spaces that manifest theoriginal cities' essence through a tri-modal methodology based on the following principles and
methods:

First, we acknowledge the referent, the modality of preexisting (real) spaces that shape a particularvirtual environment. Here we turn to Kevin Lynch's study of -mainly- Los Angeles (1960) for a way to read the image created by real-life cities (in his 2019 comprehensive approach to game-level design,Christopher Totten had already shown the usefulness of Lynch’s five urbanistic elements for a “legible”
city). For this first layer, we focus on architecture and urban design (mainly the vertical-horizontal axis) and gauge the “distance to height” proportion of Kamurocho following Ashihara’s study on the primary
and secondary profiles of a city (1979).

The second spatial modality refers to the ludic topology itself. Building on the previous analysis of Kamurocho as a particular place, we explore the practices and strategies of 'ludoforming' (Aarseth,2019) employed by Ryu Ga Gotoku. Abstracting layers of built virtual environment (not breaking, but deconstructing; vid. Pearson, 2017, 2019, 2020; Pearson and Rose, 2017) and juxtaposing them with their real-life referents help us reach unexplored levels of urban design within and without video games.The focus here is the scale of the modifications, camera control, and behavior, among other elements.

Finally, the third modality would be that of "environmental storytelling" ("indexical storytelling" is alsoa valid idea). This final modality brings back together space and life. Ryan et al. (2016) have exploredthe narrative capabilities of space in media; they further explore Jenkins' concept of environmentalstorytelling (2005), bringing closer "embedded" and "emergent" narratives.Following this conceptualization of video game narrative, we find a design loop between a virtual environment and its stories, between virtual urbanism and its embedded-emergent narratives. Through careful comparisons between the designed spaces within and without the Yakuza/Judgment world, we articulate strategies or techniques conducive to a vivid experience and creating a live (virtual) space.
To close this analytical circle, we return to the real world (with Nitsche, 2019 and Dimopoulus, 2022; also for a general exploration of "virtual urbanism" Dimopoulus 2017 and 2020) with one closingquestion: Can specific video game (virtual) urbanistic projects give us insights/inspirations for real-life developments? Indeed, by exploring how the Yakuza/Judgment series translates Kabukicho (real space)
into Kamurocho (virtual space), not only do we identify clear strategies for developing video game environments but also delve into the ever-evolving relationship between real and virtual.