12 ms·

Nakatomi Space

401 points by sebg 3y ago

the_af 3y ago
This is actually a very interesting essay. I always liked Die Hard way better than its sequels (Die Hard 2 is merely acceptable, and the rest are embarrassing), but I never thought about this use of space and architecture. "Military parkour", as the article calls it. Also insightful are the comparisons between Jason Bourne and the latest Bond movies; Bond feels sterile, and I find myself in agreement that some of the reasons for this are: > Jones writes that “there’s no travel in the new Bond”; there are simply “establishing shots of exotic destinations.” By the end of a Bond film, he adds, you simply “feel like you are in the international late-capitalist nonplace,” a geography with neither landmarks nor personal memory. Whereas > “Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armor.”
- busterarm 3y ago
  Bond does feel sterile, dated and out of place. I've long argued that its cultural relevance died off after the end of the cold war. Goldeneye took advantage of that setting but subsequent movies did not. Watching a Bond film feels like the cinematic equivalent of reading a SkyMall catalog. They should shelve the franchise for a decade or two and bring it back recontextualized around whatever geopolitical realities are fresh at that time.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Skyfall has a decent premise.
    - sleepybrett 3y ago
      The whole siege of the house is one of the only bits of the daniel craig era, excepting maybe casino royale ( I only saw it once but I remember enjoying it ), of bond I can stand. It's not 'bondian' though, bond movies have kind of always been this way. If anything bond has become somewhat less campy in the recent era.
      - nativeit 3y ago
        I think you’ve actually understated the rather precipitous drop off of 007’s campiness. It wasn’t a mistake, the intention was to reboot the series in the same vein as Batman Begins, where he becomes an unbearably gloomy figure who exists as a morally ambiguous antihero brooding among the gritty backdrop of a fully corrupted world. Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of both franchises, and enjoy the gritty Bond on its own terms, without tying it to the frequently almost farcical source material. I can easily understand why the “gritty realism” action genre trend didn’t last long, and why some folks do not enjoy it, it quickly becomes somewhat oppressive to endure. I think that’s why Taika Waititi’s Thor movies were so well received, they offered a lot of the fun-for-its-own-sake set pieces that were more common in the late ‘80s-early ‘90s action films. Patrick H Willems did a really good YouTube video where he talks about “vibe films” [1], where things like plot details and character development are prioritized behind an overall mood and sense of style. Examples cited include Miami Vice, Bond films, and more recently Tenet. [1] https://youtu.be/ZStkUxC4iL4?si=GSecJKBdbzMcQDVF https://youtu.be/ZStkUxC4iL4?si=GSecJKBdbzMcQDVF
        sleepybrett 3y ago
        I've never really been a bond fan, but of course the craig era eschews much of the almost 100% of the camp of previous generations. Except (and you'll need to pardon me, i've seen each of these movies at most once and they don't really stick in my brain at all) maybe the villan who's face had been eaten by acid or something, it's not jawz or oddjob levels of camp but it's getting there. Earlier bonds i've seen a few here and there but missed many. Like I've seen moonraker, but never thunderball, view to a kill but not goldeneye, octopussy but not never say never again. I couldn't tell you what any of the plots were (other than i'm pretty sure they go to a moon base in moonraker) or which villan goes with which film. Bond, to me, has always been kind of a mystery to me, how do these terrible films keep getting made? I will also say that 'yes' to thor rangnarok, no to 'love and thunder' which i thought got mired in too many plots and had too many inappropriately timed jokes. Like do the Jane arc or do the Gor arc, but if you do either right they don't both fit in the film. So instead they opted to do a half assed version of each.
  - the_af 3y ago
    > Watching a Bond film feels like the cinematic equivalent of reading a SkyMall catalog Nicely put! I'm not saying it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, mind you. It's just generic and empty. There may be exceptions in specific movies of the saga, of course.
    - busterarm 3y ago
      AmEx's Departures magazine would be another great example.
  - fullarr 3y ago
    It's actually just that Barbara Broccoli hates the main character and ever since she took over as Executive Producer they've been on a mission to destroy the character But they have no new ideas, and they only make something that feels vaguely like what it was Bond as a concept is fine, the execution has been trash for over a decade now
    - busterarm 3y ago
      I don't entirely disagree with you, but I would argue strongly that the concept is out of place politically right now. Maybe not for much longer but since the late 90s, surely. There's also just too much info in the public about how real spies operate. It makes the Bond concept pretty nonsensical. The character has to change to overcome the audience's disbelief.
      - fullarr 3y ago
        I think it's ok to have different movie franchises that have different strengths From my perspective it's the realism, seriousness, and lack of everything the franchise did for like 40 years that has successfully killed the fun I also love Bourne movies, and I don't need them to be the same
  - throwaway_08932 3y ago
    Time for a "spywave" genre.
  - mcphage 3y ago
    I don't particularly like Bond films, but I did really like Skyfall—it felt like it leaned into the things you mention. Like, the movie was about how dated and out-of-place Bond felt (and made the villain in that film explicitly a mirror of Bond, angry at that fact).
  - sumtechguy 3y ago
    They basically ran out of material after moonraker. After which Ian Flemings influence was totally gone. One of them basically was a glorified BMW commercial. Another one the 'gadgets' where whatever was cool tech for sony at the time. Which is why your skymall analogy works decent enough. The only new one that came close to what 'bond' was is Casino Royal which was loosely based on Ian FLemings book. Even Ian Fleming saw the problem with the genre he had basically made up was that you could not always fight the same baddy all the time. So he created SMIRSH to do have a way to plug in new bad guys.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  There's a trilogy of movie fight compilations set to music that was on youtube until it was removed for copyright. Your comment about Bourne vs Bond and how they use the scenery is illustrated in some very cool action shots, especially one where a camera follows Bourne as he jumps from a building into a window to catch up with an assailant. The first is now here: https://vimeo.com/68656656 https://vimeo.com/68656656 I think action can be made much more interesting by a good visual director moving the viewpoint, balancing the view of the action against quick cuts or angles to serve the needs of the special effects and stunt people. There's a silhouetted scene in Bond's Skyfall where the colours and viewpoint are far more artistic, without detracting from the impact of the fight. (Die Hard With a Vengeance, the 3rd one, is better than the 2nd, I feel)
  - the_af 3y ago
    > I think action can be made much more interesting by a good visual director moving the viewpoint Definitely! Thanks for sharing that video, I'll go watch it :) There are also many YouTube analyses of why Michael Bay's action scenes are like disposable junk food: thrilling while watching them, but oddly unsatisfying. The most convincing I've seen is that Michael Bay lacks a sense of space or direction; his action scenes are flashy but there are no visual cues of where everyone is placed within the scene, how the location is positioned, etc.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    That Die Hard will be forever my favorite because of the nod they gave to the Yugo.
  - criddell 3y ago
    If you are going to mention Skyfall, I have to bring up the opening sequence of Casino Royale (my favorite of the Daniel Craig Bond movies). The fight scene is pretty brutal: https://youtu.be/I4fTKmbtu8E?t=68 https://youtu.be/I4fTKmbtu8E?t=68
- Keysh 3y ago
  Ironically, the Greenglass-directed Bourne films that the quotes refer to are more like Bond than the very first Bourne film (The Bourne Identity, directed by Doug Liman). In that film, Bourne travels by boat to Marseilles, by train to Zurich, and then by impulsively-hired-car-driven-by-sketchy-woman to Paris. (And then by stolen car to someplace in rural France.) In the second Bourne film (the first one directed by Greenglass), he starts off in Goa, then shows up in an airport in Italy, and later appears (with no indication of how he travels) in Munich, Berlin, Moscow, and New York City. And, honestly, there wasn't a whole lot of visible "travel" in the "old" Bond, either. Bond is an agent of MI6, often with a cover as some kind of rich businessman or playboy. So of course he travels everywhere by passenger plane. (Unless he's doing some covert infiltration by parachute or surfboard or whatever.) The difference between Bond and (later) Bourne in terms of travel is that Bond has the resources of a wealthy government, while Bourne has... some kind of ninja superpower, I guess. In both cases, they mostly just translate invisibly from place to place.
  - bentley 3y ago
    > In the second Bourne film (the first one directed by Greenglass), he starts off in Goa, then shows up in an airport in Italy, and later appears (with no indication of how he travels) in Munich, Berlin, Moscow, and New York City. Actually… • He is shown departing Goa by bus, and arriving in Naples by sea. • He is shown stealing a car in Naples, and driving it along some picturesque highways to Munich. • He is shown driving another stolen car out of Munich, and along further highways to Berlin. • He is shown riding a train to Moscow (later remarked upon by his pursuers). How he gets to New York is a mystery—though the third film makes the mistake (IMO) of covering this in more detail.
hersko 3y ago
I wonder how this will work in regards to Gaza. Apparently the IDF knows where many of the tunnels are, and presumably they can just blast into the middle of the tunnel system without having to force their way through a presumably fortified or hidden entrance.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  This sounds only marginally helpful. The whole thing is probably rigged with explosives.
deleted 3y ago
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barrenko 3y ago
"- Why is architecture important? - A murder on the street is not the same as a murder inside a building."
jvanderbot 3y ago
Let's not forget home alone! Especially 2 had a lot of improvised travel routes through apts and cities. This article made me realize why I like that one better than the first.
- ivolimmen 3y ago
  For me Die hard is the better Christmas movie...
gorkish 3y ago
When reading this I get echos of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" when the police storm Buttle's apartment, entering through a big hole they cut directly through the ceiling .
- the_af 3y ago
  "Brazil" has a lot of interesting things to say about space and movement. Police goons storming into apartments, yes, but also De Niro's "illegal" repairman flying into apartments to fix stuff. And then there's that depressing moment where you see a car traveling through a highway and the view to either side is entirely blocked by billboards.
  - zoogeny 3y ago
    If I recall correctly, the view obscured by the billboards in that scene in Brazil was a barren wasteland. That fits even more into the themes of the film where the harsh realities of the world are constantly hidden behind facades. It's almost to say, if you think the artifice is bad then just wait until you see what is behind it.
  - gorkish 3y ago
    I think you are misinterpreting the highway scene, but yeah I have always enjoyed the way that both public and private spaces are portrayed in the film. Other good examples include sam's tiny car (Messerschmitt KR200!) and his tiny office with the half-desk. Somehow I wonder if they were making the film today, would Sam live in a tiny apartment too?
- ninjin 3y ago
  Interesting, it was the scene that sprang into my mind as well. Brazil is very much a flawed movie in my mind, but still enjoyable and one that I highly recommend.
  - the_af 3y ago
    I'm curious, why do you think it's flawed? To me, it's a masterpiece.
zzzbra 3y ago
Why do I feel like blogs just offered a lot more 10+ years ago... Probably just survivor bias right?
- sersi 3y ago
  survivor bias coupled with the fact that there were a lot more blogs back then. So with a lot more content, you have more great content as well as more crap content but what survives is the great content.
- Affric 3y ago
  I came here searching for a similar comment. I don't think it's just survivorship bias. I think it's a combination of: 1) Social media lowering the barrier to entry so much as to stop new good blogs from coming up (rather than simply posting to social media) 2) Social media favouring first image then short form video content hosted on their own CDN 3) The content farms designed for SEO absolutely obliterating the idea that you could make money from advertising on your blog It's hard to really understand the tragedy element of tragedy of the commons and enclosure. Like I feel the gross injustice of it all but I never got to experience the loss. But the destruction of the early (capital I) Internet is something that certainly causes me a lot of pain. I feel like for Zoomers talking to older nerds about the Internet et cetera must be like talking to a Gen Xer about the second Summer of Love or the Boomers about the first, but it was really just that much better.
durkie 3y ago
Geoff Manaugh, author of this blog, has a fun book called "A Burglar's Guide to the City", discussing how city layouts influence the types of crimes committed there. One example that I remember talks about the differences between Los Angeles and New York City: at one point in the 1990s, LA was the bank robbery capital of the world, averaging over 1 per day for a while, but bank robberies rarely happen in NYC. When you compare their layouts, it makes total sense: LA was built around the car. The pattern of "highway offramp, bank next to the road, highway onramp" was everywhere throughout LA. Robbing a bank in NYC would be just so much harder: parking is more difficult, traffic is slower, way more people around to identify you, etc. It's a good read.
- busterarm 3y ago
  My favorite bits from that book were the ones about people living in unseen spaces inside of department stores & malls.
- ck45 3y ago
  You are wrong about the average of one per day. But not in a good sense: "In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25511220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25511220
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - saghm 3y ago
    To be fair, they said "over one per day", so they weren't really wrong, just imprecise.
- fodkodrasz 3y ago
  The title of the post immediately made me think about that book. (Not a coincident, as it became clear when clicking :)) I found the book too repetitive and cursory, employing pop-culture movie references too much. The research that went into the book (as it can be seen from the bibliography) is immense, but for me the book was underwhelming for the potential it had based on the immense knowledge the author has accumulated from those sources. It is still worth a read for those interested in the topics of heists or city planning, but has wasted its potential in my eyes.
hirundo 3y ago
I suggest that air ducts should not be considered part of Nakatomi Space. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/PlayingWith/AirVentPassageway https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/PlayingWith/AirVentPa... Because rather than being inventive uses of architectural spaces they're generally lazy plot devices. Now I have a reason to go back and watch Die Hard again to see if John crawls through air ducts.
- the_af 3y ago
  He does use them, in fact this is one of the pictures in the article! The villains catch up to his use of vents though. I think Die Hard is fair use of this trope, because it popularized or codified it. Back when Die Hard opened, a lot of these tropes were far less common; in fact they've become common because of the movie. Many later action thrillers owe a lot to John McClane.
  - hirundo 3y ago
    You just spoiled my excuse to watch Die Hard again.
    - the_af 3y ago
      Now I feel bad. But rejoice! You need no excuse to rewatch Die Hard, it's just a good idea regardless.
    - nativeit 3y ago
      I once heard a British comedian talk about hiring a hypnotherapist to help him watch the first Harry Potter movie again as if it was his first time. I personally don’t think such precision or efficacy is possible in hypnotherapy, but it’s a fun idea.
  - jameshart 3y ago
    That’s definitely a missing aspect of the TVtropes dataset - what is the influence timeline of the trope? Which instances are referencing other instances? When did it transition into cliche? When was its tropiness punctured to make it into something that could be parodied or lampshaded? While I’d agree post-Die-Hard vent spelunking is likely to nod to the Die-Hardness of the situation, the trope had a long life before Nakatomi.
LordShredda 3y ago
Also needs a (2010) tag This was a bit of the appeal of "level design" when I was dabbling with game development. Having these hidden areas and passageways, then seeing if a creative enough actor could then create their own passageways.
bernardom 3y ago
"sadly, the series is unremarkable for the fact that each film is substantially worse than the one before" Patently false! The third is better than the second.
- sleepybrett 3y ago
  The terrible diarrhea I had yesterday was worse the than the terrible diarrhea I had today... not exactly a high bar ;)
  - omnicognate 3y ago
    The third film is fantastic, including in ways relevant to the article, playing with similar abuse-of-infrastructure ideas at city- rather than building-level. It's actually a better city-level example of the first film's architectural ideas than the Nablus raid the article brings up. The Israeli forces' (horrifying, from the account in the article) "reconfiguration" of Nablus was a massively forceful one, blasting through wall after (residential) wall throughout the entire city *. In Die Hard (1 and 3) the protagonists' interactions with the civil infrastructure were far more involuntary and far less forceful, with the characters often being imperilled by those hostile spaces. Blasting through them like a Terminator wouldn't have been at all in keeping with the movies and the article does the first one a disservice by describing it in those terms. The second one isn't great but I've always rather enjoyed it too. Far from diarrhoea, anyway. * I should say, I know absolutely nothing about Nablus besides what's described in the article, and have no idea how accurate it is.
    - sleepybrett 3y ago
      They are both terrible, and they only get more terrible from there, sorry.
      - omnicognate 3y ago
        Oh, in that case I suppose I hate them now. Thanks for setting me right.
unixhero 3y ago
Wtf is the point here?
- jakearmitage 3y ago
  It is just a chronicle. What point did you want?
  - hathym 3y ago
    well, it look like some of the most armed and prepared armies in the world are seeking assistance and more innovative strategies directed towards causing harm to a large number of innocent and defenseless individuals.
    - anileated 3y ago
      The defenseless individuals of Gaza are being taken advantage of by the terrorists who have no regard for their (civilians) life. In fact, IDF has more regard for Gaza civilians’ life than Hamas has. Check who uses civilians as human shields, it is broadly documented. Check which terrorist organization seeks genocide based on religion and which country lacks faith-based persecution.
      - Arn_Thor 3y ago
        The responsibility falls on both parties. Hamas is responsible for a heinous crime which provokes this retaliation. But all aspects of the retaliation is still Israel’s responsibility.
        anileated 3y ago
        Sending rockets from Gaza strip’s hospitals and schools in years past is broadly documented. If terrorists attack civilians using own civilians as human shields, having destruction of Israel as their stated goal[0], then the choice for Israel seems to be between responding with possible civilian casualties in Gaza or accepting the blame for deaths of its own people if Israel’s defense system malfunctions (which happens even these years). It’s a fun trolley problem no one asked for. In fact, I believe Hamas has been spraying rockets with depressing regularity, and I believe Israel was not retaliating in kind for a long time in recent years. It’s baffling how many people consider this state of affairs normal: militant group openly attempting to kill civilians in your country, and your country doing not much in terms of response lest it causes deaths of civilians camping near that militant group. It’s only less baffling if we remember that antisemitism is still quite common, just less public. [0] That said, we should remember that converting every other faith or non-faith to Sunni Islam is the end goal of jihad in practice.
jakearmitage 3y ago
Ah, Die Hard. The perfect Christmas movie and the reason behind one of my most fun posessions: An HK SP5 with A3 retractable stock.
Night_Thastus 3y ago
This post reminds me a bit of some games, which would normally be called "immersive sims". One of their biggest draws is how they let you interact with the environment in such a variety of ways. A blocked-off entrance isn't a set scripted objective or a tool for the developers to get you to go elsewhere - it's an opportunity for the player to find a creative solution. Blow up the barrier. Pick a lock. Break a window. Reach through an opening to press a button to open another door. Enter from vents or sewers. Alert an NPC so they open another entrance to check it out. Shut off the power elsewhere. Etc. It's so much fun to have all those options with how you interact with the environment, instead of it just being static and 1-dimensional.
- keiferski 3y ago
  I enjoyed the new Cyberpunk game, but one thing that did bother me was its lack of "Nakatomi spaces." Most of the city doors are locked and don't lead anywhere, and while the city itself is fun to roam around in, it all feels very on rails and with basically no way to "hack" the local infrastructure and environment – which I would consider almost a fundamental quality of cyberpunk literature.
  - dexwiz 3y ago
    I think those mostly comes down to resources. Real rooms make more sense to spend time on. Procedural generation could help with some of this. But you still have to spend resources on assets to fill these spaces.
- Tallain 3y ago
  Do you have a few favorites in this genre?
  - laidoffamazon 3y ago
    Not OP, but I do in the form of the original Deus Ex (not to be confused with it's sequels, which are pale imitations with the veneer of being in the same universe). This particular clip is what convinced me to get into the game (potential spoiler) [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT7sjoH8Sqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT7sjoH8Sqc
mav88 3y ago
I remember reading this post around the same time as I came across the concept of psychogeography, an interesting way of looking at how the exploration of our environments and how they're made up affects our attitude and emotions. Die Hard is a great example of this, so is The Shining. The deliberate disorientation and spatial impossibility of The Overlook conveys deep unease just by being what it is.
- tizio13 3y ago
  Oh that’s interesting. Do you have any book/article recommendations for psychogeography?
  - mav88 3y ago
    Start here: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/psychogeography-a-purposeful-drift-through-the-city/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/psychogeography-a-purpose... Karen O'Rourke's book is great too.
dumah 3y ago
The worst take I’ve ever read on hnews is that Die Hard 2 is better than Die Hard 3.
mindslight 3y ago
It feels like the blog is trying to force a more significant connection here than there actually is. Many movies involve doing/using things "improperly" to intelligently get an advantage because it's novel and keeps people entertained. It would be really cool to see a movie that fleshed out some strategic dynamics of urban combat of busting through walls etc, but it feels like accessing less-used mechanical spaces isn't that. Elevator shafts, ventilation ducts, and the outsides of highrise buildings are pretty common tropes.
picometer 3y ago
I think the possibility of this alternate navigation through cities and buildings is why certain open world games are so popular. For instance, the buildability of Minecraft and destructibility of GTA both enable worlds of exceptions and edge cases, where players can come up with alternate pathways to their goal, and where the latent environmental possibilities can even shape the player’s goals. In ill-designed sandbox games without sufficient storyline (or other meaning-making mechanisms), if I run up against the edge of a map, or can’t pick up whatever decorative object, there’s a certain disappointment - that the world is limiting, but there isn’t sufficient purpose/meaning to balance those limitations. In real life, there’s a reason we don’t indiscriminately blast holes through walls (other than perhaps lack of appropriate tool) - we care about the people on the other side, the asset comprised by the wall material, etc. But the material possibility of such hole-blasting always remains. This is a rambling comment with unfinished thoughts, but what I’m getting at is: there’s a relationship between potential interactions w/ our environment and the “amount” of meaning that we ascribe and extract from it.
- dEnigma 3y ago
  I don't think GTA is the best example for "alternate navigation" through "destructibility". Apart from a couple of fences and lampposts, what can you really destroy that gives you new navigation possibilities? There are games that took this way further (e.g. Red Faction)
  - bbddg 3y ago
    Yeah GTA doesn't have much in terms of destructibility. Some of the battlefield games do this pretty well though, particularly Bad Company 2. It was very common in that game to use explosives to make different ways in and out of buildings.
    - lobsterthief 3y ago
      Also Battlefield 1. With the wide range of tanks and explosives, the WWI-era buildings become quite destructible
koliber 3y ago
Neat post. It bent my mind in surprising ways. I guess I take the "permanent" structures as scripture and it would not occur to me to break through a wall, literally, when a situation would require it. At the same time, this is exactly what I practice, and expect my teams to practice, when we build software. Each one of us has certain analogous "walls" in our minds, which define the way we can move when looking for solutions. Often, they're arbitrary and can be bypassed with relative ease - no blasting required. All we have to do is to realize that we can. It's a fun moment when we realize this and get outsized outcomes just because we step right through a preconceived and arbitrary limit which no one actually imposed. So very Matrix.
withinrafael 3y ago
This blog post also reminded me of the Red Faction[1] game franchise. I remember it specifically taught players to take alternate paths or unlock doors by blasting out walls and/or anything else in the entire environment (with some exceptions). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Faction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Faction
jl6 3y ago
I see others have drawn parallels to games like Deus Ex, and that one in particular is great at creating the illusion of a Nakatomi Space, but in truth the developers intended all its pathways to be traversed. I believe to find a true Nakatomi Space in gaming we must look to the world of speedrunning. This is where players move through the game’s spaces in ways almost certainly not intended by the architects - including exploiting every possible trick to accomplish impossible moves. A gamer wishing to emulate John McClane wouldn’t demolish a wall using the rocket launcher that the level designer put in a crate: they would exploit a clipping bug to glitch right through it. I highly recommend the “Quake Speedruns Explained” channel on YouTube.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > the illusion of a Nakatomi Space, but in truth the developers intended all its pathways to be traversed I don't think that logic works, because if we turn around and apply it onto Die Hard, we get a bizarre conclusion: The movie's Nakatomi Plaza lacks any of the eponymous Nakatomi Places it supposedly showcases. (Because that protagonist, too, is traveling intended routes that were planned and put there by screenwriters.) When it comes to works of fiction, what we need to be looking at are the intents and assumptions of the in-universe fictional architects and/or typical users of the space.
  - 0x112233 3y ago
    > When it comes to works of fiction, what we need to be looking at are the intents and assumptions of the in-universe fictional architects and/or typical users of the space. I agree in the context of films, but this ignores the relationship between creator and player/user in interactive fiction like games.
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      Your argument is incomplete, everyone agrees differences exist, but you haven't explained how any of those differences make "Nakatomi spaces" in games somehow less legitimate than in movies like Die Hard. If anything, you've got it backwards: The fact that each individual player must notice and choose to exploit alternate paths makes them more authentically unusual and innovative than in movies, rather than less.
urig 3y ago
Infuriating to see how Israeli soldiers are criticized for their self-defense tactics in the face of fundamentalist terrorists. The author's expectation seems to be that soldiers travel the streets, exposing themselves to militant fire from within the buildings. How woke.
- tyg13 3y ago
  The author seemed to offer no particular criticism of the invading Israelis, as far as I can tell. In fact, they almost seemed to praise their tactics for their unconventional nature.
- mindslight 3y ago
  What an amazing example of this common knee-jerk playing-the-victim reaction to anything that discusses Israel without fawning. The article was describing the IDF doing something novel and clever, yet you're "infuriated" by what? It not repeating some mantra about how the action was definitely certainly most positively justified? Lest you misunderstand where I'm coming from - brutally attacking and slaughtering a civilian music festival is unequivocally evil. And Israel readily turning off civilian water and power infrastructure for collective punishment is also evil. There is no shortage of evils on both sides, and whitewashing this for either side ultimately just helps perpetuate the whole terrible situation.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
m463 3y ago
The description of the living room wall breach reminds me of Cory Doctorow's "Nimby and the D-Hoppers" full (open) text here: https://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/nimby.html https://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/nimby.html
gumby 3y ago
This article doesn’t call out to me about buildings or games, but rather software. Part of the underused promise of having the source is the opportunity to “infest it with yourself” as the author describes. I want to rip out useless modules (or at least their interface), plop in new, better structures, etc. This is a capability that at least is available, if largely unused, to programmers, but should be available to non-programmers too. The only program I know that is intended to be made form-fit with the user is emacs. Are there others?
omegaworks 3y ago
Cop City in Atlanta is being built to train American police forces to engage in urban warfare in the exact same way the IDF engages in Gaza. The Palestinian experience is coming our way: > Is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, twelve soldiers, their faces painted black, submachine guns pointed everywhere, antennas protruding from their backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through that wall? The US is preparing to scale up enforcement generally both on the southern border and within its segregated cities. It's how the current regime intends to handle climate-induced desperation, cost inflation, and migration.
js2 3y ago
Other films that sprung to mind while reading this: Columbus (2017), Aliens, Escape from New York, Brazil.
tomcam 3y ago
Pompous and not very original IMHO, but I did love this passage: "An alternative-history plot for a much better Die Hard 2 could thus perhaps include a scene in which the rescuing squad of John McClane-led police officers does not even know what building they are in, a suitably bewildering encapsulation of this method of moving undetected through the city."
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Nice to see the Matt Jones post on Jason Bourne vs James Bond linked here. Very appropriate, on Bond as a well equipped foreigner wandering through fancy action sequences & villains lairs, while Bourne is equipped with a sharp recall of the local train timetables & ability to steal cars and parkour his way through complex urbam settings. That article got submitted too, and was fun to re-encounter! After living in my head so long & being something I'd orally relay along (and having forgotten the original source)! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37957558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37957558 https://petafloptimism.com/2008/12/12/the-bourne-infrastructure/ https://petafloptimism.com/2008/12/12/the-bourne-infrastruct... I could have sworn the pieces was like 4x as long! I'm on mobile so it's not easy to see post times, but I assume the discussion here lead to The Bourne Infrastructure getting submitted. Thanks all. This is wild stuff.

401 points by sebg 3y ago

This is actually a very interesting essay. I always liked Die Hard way better than its sequels (Die Hard 2 is merely acceptable, and the rest are embarrassing), but I never thought about this use of space and architecture. "Military parkour", as the article calls it. Also insightful are the comparisons between Jason Bourne and the latest Bond movies; Bond feels sterile, and I find myself in agreement that some of the reasons for this are: > Jones writes that “there’s no travel in the new Bond”; there are simply “establishing shots of exotic destinations.” By the end of a Bond film, he adds, you simply “feel like you are in the international late-capitalist nonplace,” a geography with neither landmarks nor personal memory. Whereas > “Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armor.”

busterarm 3y ago
Bond does feel sterile, dated and out of place. I've long argued that its cultural relevance died off after the end of the cold war. Goldeneye took advantage of that setting but subsequent movies did not. Watching a Bond film feels like the cinematic equivalent of reading a SkyMall catalog. They should shelve the franchise for a decade or two and bring it back recontextualized around whatever geopolitical realities are fresh at that time.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Skyfall has a decent premise.
  - sleepybrett 3y ago
    The whole siege of the house is one of the only bits of the daniel craig era, excepting maybe casino royale ( I only saw it once but I remember enjoying it ), of bond I can stand. It's not 'bondian' though, bond movies have kind of always been this way. If anything bond has become somewhat less campy in the recent era.
    - nativeit 3y ago
      I think you’ve actually understated the rather precipitous drop off of 007’s campiness. It wasn’t a mistake, the intention was to reboot the series in the same vein as Batman Begins, where he becomes an unbearably gloomy figure who exists as a morally ambiguous antihero brooding among the gritty backdrop of a fully corrupted world. Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of both franchises, and enjoy the gritty Bond on its own terms, without tying it to the frequently almost farcical source material. I can easily understand why the “gritty realism” action genre trend didn’t last long, and why some folks do not enjoy it, it quickly becomes somewhat oppressive to endure. I think that’s why Taika Waititi’s Thor movies were so well received, they offered a lot of the fun-for-its-own-sake set pieces that were more common in the late ‘80s-early ‘90s action films. Patrick H Willems did a really good YouTube video where he talks about “vibe films” [1], where things like plot details and character development are prioritized behind an overall mood and sense of style. Examples cited include Miami Vice, Bond films, and more recently Tenet. [1] https://youtu.be/ZStkUxC4iL4?si=GSecJKBdbzMcQDVF https://youtu.be/ZStkUxC4iL4?si=GSecJKBdbzMcQDVF
      - sleepybrett 3y ago
        I've never really been a bond fan, but of course the craig era eschews much of the almost 100% of the camp of previous generations. Except (and you'll need to pardon me, i've seen each of these movies at most once and they don't really stick in my brain at all) maybe the villan who's face had been eaten by acid or something, it's not jawz or oddjob levels of camp but it's getting there. Earlier bonds i've seen a few here and there but missed many. Like I've seen moonraker, but never thunderball, view to a kill but not goldeneye, octopussy but not never say never again. I couldn't tell you what any of the plots were (other than i'm pretty sure they go to a moon base in moonraker) or which villan goes with which film. Bond, to me, has always been kind of a mystery to me, how do these terrible films keep getting made? I will also say that 'yes' to thor rangnarok, no to 'love and thunder' which i thought got mired in too many plots and had too many inappropriately timed jokes. Like do the Jane arc or do the Gor arc, but if you do either right they don't both fit in the film. So instead they opted to do a half assed version of each.
- the_af 3y ago
  > Watching a Bond film feels like the cinematic equivalent of reading a SkyMall catalog Nicely put! I'm not saying it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, mind you. It's just generic and empty. There may be exceptions in specific movies of the saga, of course.
  - busterarm 3y ago
    AmEx's Departures magazine would be another great example.
- fullarr 3y ago
  It's actually just that Barbara Broccoli hates the main character and ever since she took over as Executive Producer they've been on a mission to destroy the character But they have no new ideas, and they only make something that feels vaguely like what it was Bond as a concept is fine, the execution has been trash for over a decade now
  - busterarm 3y ago
    I don't entirely disagree with you, but I would argue strongly that the concept is out of place politically right now. Maybe not for much longer but since the late 90s, surely. There's also just too much info in the public about how real spies operate. It makes the Bond concept pretty nonsensical. The character has to change to overcome the audience's disbelief.
    - fullarr 3y ago
      I think it's ok to have different movie franchises that have different strengths From my perspective it's the realism, seriousness, and lack of everything the franchise did for like 40 years that has successfully killed the fun I also love Bourne movies, and I don't need them to be the same
- throwaway_08932 3y ago
  Time for a "spywave" genre.
- mcphage 3y ago
  I don't particularly like Bond films, but I did really like Skyfall—it felt like it leaned into the things you mention. Like, the movie was about how dated and out-of-place Bond felt (and made the villain in that film explicitly a mirror of Bond, angry at that fact).
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  They basically ran out of material after moonraker. After which Ian Flemings influence was totally gone. One of them basically was a glorified BMW commercial. Another one the 'gadgets' where whatever was cool tech for sony at the time. Which is why your skymall analogy works decent enough. The only new one that came close to what 'bond' was is Casino Royal which was loosely based on Ian FLemings book. Even Ian Fleming saw the problem with the genre he had basically made up was that you could not always fight the same baddy all the time. So he created SMIRSH to do have a way to plug in new bad guys.
bloopernova 3y ago
There's a trilogy of movie fight compilations set to music that was on youtube until it was removed for copyright. Your comment about Bourne vs Bond and how they use the scenery is illustrated in some very cool action shots, especially one where a camera follows Bourne as he jumps from a building into a window to catch up with an assailant. The first is now here: https://vimeo.com/68656656 https://vimeo.com/68656656 I think action can be made much more interesting by a good visual director moving the viewpoint, balancing the view of the action against quick cuts or angles to serve the needs of the special effects and stunt people. There's a silhouetted scene in Bond's Skyfall where the colours and viewpoint are far more artistic, without detracting from the impact of the fight. (Die Hard With a Vengeance, the 3rd one, is better than the 2nd, I feel)
- the_af 3y ago
  > I think action can be made much more interesting by a good visual director moving the viewpoint Definitely! Thanks for sharing that video, I'll go watch it :) There are also many YouTube analyses of why Michael Bay's action scenes are like disposable junk food: thrilling while watching them, but oddly unsatisfying. The most convincing I've seen is that Michael Bay lacks a sense of space or direction; his action scenes are flashy but there are no visual cues of where everyone is placed within the scene, how the location is positioned, etc.
- foobarian 3y ago
  That Die Hard will be forever my favorite because of the nod they gave to the Yugo.
- criddell 3y ago
  If you are going to mention Skyfall, I have to bring up the opening sequence of Casino Royale (my favorite of the Daniel Craig Bond movies). The fight scene is pretty brutal: https://youtu.be/I4fTKmbtu8E?t=68 https://youtu.be/I4fTKmbtu8E?t=68
Keysh 3y ago
Ironically, the Greenglass-directed Bourne films that the quotes refer to are more like Bond than the very first Bourne film (The Bourne Identity, directed by Doug Liman). In that film, Bourne travels by boat to Marseilles, by train to Zurich, and then by impulsively-hired-car-driven-by-sketchy-woman to Paris. (And then by stolen car to someplace in rural France.) In the second Bourne film (the first one directed by Greenglass), he starts off in Goa, then shows up in an airport in Italy, and later appears (with no indication of how he travels) in Munich, Berlin, Moscow, and New York City. And, honestly, there wasn't a whole lot of visible "travel" in the "old" Bond, either. Bond is an agent of MI6, often with a cover as some kind of rich businessman or playboy. So of course he travels everywhere by passenger plane. (Unless he's doing some covert infiltration by parachute or surfboard or whatever.) The difference between Bond and (later) Bourne in terms of travel is that Bond has the resources of a wealthy government, while Bourne has... some kind of ninja superpower, I guess. In both cases, they mostly just translate invisibly from place to place.
- bentley 3y ago
  > In the second Bourne film (the first one directed by Greenglass), he starts off in Goa, then shows up in an airport in Italy, and later appears (with no indication of how he travels) in Munich, Berlin, Moscow, and New York City. Actually… • He is shown departing Goa by bus, and arriving in Naples by sea. • He is shown stealing a car in Naples, and driving it along some picturesque highways to Munich. • He is shown driving another stolen car out of Munich, and along further highways to Berlin. • He is shown riding a train to Moscow (later remarked upon by his pursuers). How he gets to New York is a mystery—though the third film makes the mistake (IMO) of covering this in more detail.

hersko 3y ago

I wonder how this will work in regards to Gaza. Apparently the IDF knows where many of the tunnels are, and presumably they can just blast into the middle of the tunnel system without having to force their way through a presumably fortified or hidden entrance.

actionfromafar 3y ago
This sounds only marginally helpful. The whole thing is probably rigged with explosives.

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barrenko 3y ago

"- Why is architecture important? - A murder on the street is not the same as a murder inside a building."

jvanderbot 3y ago

Let's not forget home alone! Especially 2 had a lot of improvised travel routes through apts and cities. This article made me realize why I like that one better than the first.

ivolimmen 3y ago
For me Die hard is the better Christmas movie...

gorkish 3y ago

When reading this I get echos of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" when the police storm Buttle's apartment, entering through a big hole they cut directly through the ceiling .

the_af 3y ago
"Brazil" has a lot of interesting things to say about space and movement. Police goons storming into apartments, yes, but also De Niro's "illegal" repairman flying into apartments to fix stuff. And then there's that depressing moment where you see a car traveling through a highway and the view to either side is entirely blocked by billboards.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  If I recall correctly, the view obscured by the billboards in that scene in Brazil was a barren wasteland. That fits even more into the themes of the film where the harsh realities of the world are constantly hidden behind facades. It's almost to say, if you think the artifice is bad then just wait until you see what is behind it.
- gorkish 3y ago
  I think you are misinterpreting the highway scene, but yeah I have always enjoyed the way that both public and private spaces are portrayed in the film. Other good examples include sam's tiny car (Messerschmitt KR200!) and his tiny office with the half-desk. Somehow I wonder if they were making the film today, would Sam live in a tiny apartment too?
ninjin 3y ago
Interesting, it was the scene that sprang into my mind as well. Brazil is very much a flawed movie in my mind, but still enjoyable and one that I highly recommend.
- the_af 3y ago
  I'm curious, why do you think it's flawed? To me, it's a masterpiece.

zzzbra 3y ago

Why do I feel like blogs just offered a lot more 10+ years ago... Probably just survivor bias right?

sersi 3y ago
survivor bias coupled with the fact that there were a lot more blogs back then. So with a lot more content, you have more great content as well as more crap content but what survives is the great content.
Affric 3y ago
I came here searching for a similar comment. I don't think it's just survivorship bias. I think it's a combination of: 1) Social media lowering the barrier to entry so much as to stop new good blogs from coming up (rather than simply posting to social media) 2) Social media favouring first image then short form video content hosted on their own CDN 3) The content farms designed for SEO absolutely obliterating the idea that you could make money from advertising on your blog It's hard to really understand the tragedy element of tragedy of the commons and enclosure. Like I feel the gross injustice of it all but I never got to experience the loss. But the destruction of the early (capital I) Internet is something that certainly causes me a lot of pain. I feel like for Zoomers talking to older nerds about the Internet et cetera must be like talking to a Gen Xer about the second Summer of Love or the Boomers about the first, but it was really just that much better.

durkie 3y ago

Geoff Manaugh, author of this blog, has a fun book called "A Burglar's Guide to the City", discussing how city layouts influence the types of crimes committed there. One example that I remember talks about the differences between Los Angeles and New York City: at one point in the 1990s, LA was the bank robbery capital of the world, averaging over 1 per day for a while, but bank robberies rarely happen in NYC. When you compare their layouts, it makes total sense: LA was built around the car. The pattern of "highway offramp, bank next to the road, highway onramp" was everywhere throughout LA. Robbing a bank in NYC would be just so much harder: parking is more difficult, traffic is slower, way more people around to identify you, etc. It's a good read.

busterarm 3y ago
My favorite bits from that book were the ones about people living in unseen spaces inside of department stores & malls.
ck45 3y ago
You are wrong about the average of one per day. But not in a good sense: "In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25511220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25511220
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- saghm 3y ago
  To be fair, they said "over one per day", so they weren't really wrong, just imprecise.
fodkodrasz 3y ago
The title of the post immediately made me think about that book. (Not a coincident, as it became clear when clicking :)) I found the book too repetitive and cursory, employing pop-culture movie references too much. The research that went into the book (as it can be seen from the bibliography) is immense, but for me the book was underwhelming for the potential it had based on the immense knowledge the author has accumulated from those sources. It is still worth a read for those interested in the topics of heists or city planning, but has wasted its potential in my eyes.

hirundo 3y ago

I suggest that air ducts should not be considered part of Nakatomi Space. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/PlayingWith/AirVentPassageway https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/PlayingWith/AirVentPa... Because rather than being inventive uses of architectural spaces they're generally lazy plot devices. Now I have a reason to go back and watch Die Hard again to see if John crawls through air ducts.

the_af 3y ago
He does use them, in fact this is one of the pictures in the article! The villains catch up to his use of vents though. I think Die Hard is fair use of this trope, because it popularized or codified it. Back when Die Hard opened, a lot of these tropes were far less common; in fact they've become common because of the movie. Many later action thrillers owe a lot to John McClane.
- hirundo 3y ago
  You just spoiled my excuse to watch Die Hard again.
  - the_af 3y ago
    Now I feel bad. But rejoice! You need no excuse to rewatch Die Hard, it's just a good idea regardless.
  - nativeit 3y ago
    I once heard a British comedian talk about hiring a hypnotherapist to help him watch the first Harry Potter movie again as if it was his first time. I personally don’t think such precision or efficacy is possible in hypnotherapy, but it’s a fun idea.
- jameshart 3y ago
  That’s definitely a missing aspect of the TVtropes dataset - what is the influence timeline of the trope? Which instances are referencing other instances? When did it transition into cliche? When was its tropiness punctured to make it into something that could be parodied or lampshaded? While I’d agree post-Die-Hard vent spelunking is likely to nod to the Die-Hardness of the situation, the trope had a long life before Nakatomi.

LordShredda 3y ago

Also needs a (2010) tag This was a bit of the appeal of "level design" when I was dabbling with game development. Having these hidden areas and passageways, then seeing if a creative enough actor could then create their own passageways.

bernardom 3y ago

"sadly, the series is unremarkable for the fact that each film is substantially worse than the one before" Patently false! The third is better than the second.

sleepybrett 3y ago
The terrible diarrhea I had yesterday was worse the than the terrible diarrhea I had today... not exactly a high bar ;)
- omnicognate 3y ago
  The third film is fantastic, including in ways relevant to the article, playing with similar abuse-of-infrastructure ideas at city- rather than building-level. It's actually a better city-level example of the first film's architectural ideas than the Nablus raid the article brings up. The Israeli forces' (horrifying, from the account in the article) "reconfiguration" of Nablus was a massively forceful one, blasting through wall after (residential) wall throughout the entire city *. In Die Hard (1 and 3) the protagonists' interactions with the civil infrastructure were far more involuntary and far less forceful, with the characters often being imperilled by those hostile spaces. Blasting through them like a Terminator wouldn't have been at all in keeping with the movies and the article does the first one a disservice by describing it in those terms. The second one isn't great but I've always rather enjoyed it too. Far from diarrhoea, anyway. * I should say, I know absolutely nothing about Nablus besides what's described in the article, and have no idea how accurate it is.
  - sleepybrett 3y ago
    They are both terrible, and they only get more terrible from there, sorry.
    - omnicognate 3y ago
      Oh, in that case I suppose I hate them now. Thanks for setting me right.

unixhero 3y ago

Wtf is the point here?

jakearmitage 3y ago
It is just a chronicle. What point did you want?
- hathym 3y ago
  well, it look like some of the most armed and prepared armies in the world are seeking assistance and more innovative strategies directed towards causing harm to a large number of innocent and defenseless individuals.
  - anileated 3y ago
    The defenseless individuals of Gaza are being taken advantage of by the terrorists who have no regard for their (civilians) life. In fact, IDF has more regard for Gaza civilians’ life than Hamas has. Check who uses civilians as human shields, it is broadly documented. Check which terrorist organization seeks genocide based on religion and which country lacks faith-based persecution.
    - Arn_Thor 3y ago
      The responsibility falls on both parties. Hamas is responsible for a heinous crime which provokes this retaliation. But all aspects of the retaliation is still Israel’s responsibility.
      - anileated 3y ago
        Sending rockets from Gaza strip’s hospitals and schools in years past is broadly documented. If terrorists attack civilians using own civilians as human shields, having destruction of Israel as their stated goal[0], then the choice for Israel seems to be between responding with possible civilian casualties in Gaza or accepting the blame for deaths of its own people if Israel’s defense system malfunctions (which happens even these years). It’s a fun trolley problem no one asked for. In fact, I believe Hamas has been spraying rockets with depressing regularity, and I believe Israel was not retaliating in kind for a long time in recent years. It’s baffling how many people consider this state of affairs normal: militant group openly attempting to kill civilians in your country, and your country doing not much in terms of response lest it causes deaths of civilians camping near that militant group. It’s only less baffling if we remember that antisemitism is still quite common, just less public. [0] That said, we should remember that converting every other faith or non-faith to Sunni Islam is the end goal of jihad in practice.

jakearmitage 3y ago

Ah, Die Hard. The perfect Christmas movie and the reason behind one of my most fun posessions: An HK SP5 with A3 retractable stock.

Night_Thastus 3y ago

This post reminds me a bit of some games, which would normally be called "immersive sims". One of their biggest draws is how they let you interact with the environment in such a variety of ways. A blocked-off entrance isn't a set scripted objective or a tool for the developers to get you to go elsewhere - it's an opportunity for the player to find a creative solution. Blow up the barrier. Pick a lock. Break a window. Reach through an opening to press a button to open another door. Enter from vents or sewers. Alert an NPC so they open another entrance to check it out. Shut off the power elsewhere. Etc. It's so much fun to have all those options with how you interact with the environment, instead of it just being static and 1-dimensional.

keiferski 3y ago
I enjoyed the new Cyberpunk game, but one thing that did bother me was its lack of "Nakatomi spaces." Most of the city doors are locked and don't lead anywhere, and while the city itself is fun to roam around in, it all feels very on rails and with basically no way to "hack" the local infrastructure and environment – which I would consider almost a fundamental quality of cyberpunk literature.
- dexwiz 3y ago
  I think those mostly comes down to resources. Real rooms make more sense to spend time on. Procedural generation could help with some of this. But you still have to spend resources on assets to fill these spaces.
Tallain 3y ago
Do you have a few favorites in this genre?
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  Not OP, but I do in the form of the original Deus Ex (not to be confused with it's sequels, which are pale imitations with the veneer of being in the same universe). This particular clip is what convinced me to get into the game (potential spoiler) [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT7sjoH8Sqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT7sjoH8Sqc

mav88 3y ago

I remember reading this post around the same time as I came across the concept of psychogeography, an interesting way of looking at how the exploration of our environments and how they're made up affects our attitude and emotions. Die Hard is a great example of this, so is The Shining. The deliberate disorientation and spatial impossibility of The Overlook conveys deep unease just by being what it is.

tizio13 3y ago
Oh that’s interesting. Do you have any book/article recommendations for psychogeography?
- mav88 3y ago
  Start here: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/psychogeography-a-purposeful-drift-through-the-city/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/psychogeography-a-purpose... Karen O'Rourke's book is great too.

dumah 3y ago

The worst take I’ve ever read on hnews is that Die Hard 2 is better than Die Hard 3.

mindslight 3y ago

It feels like the blog is trying to force a more significant connection here than there actually is. Many movies involve doing/using things "improperly" to intelligently get an advantage because it's novel and keeps people entertained. It would be really cool to see a movie that fleshed out some strategic dynamics of urban combat of busting through walls etc, but it feels like accessing less-used mechanical spaces isn't that. Elevator shafts, ventilation ducts, and the outsides of highrise buildings are pretty common tropes.

picometer 3y ago

I think the possibility of this alternate navigation through cities and buildings is why certain open world games are so popular. For instance, the buildability of Minecraft and destructibility of GTA both enable worlds of exceptions and edge cases, where players can come up with alternate pathways to their goal, and where the latent environmental possibilities can even shape the player’s goals. In ill-designed sandbox games without sufficient storyline (or other meaning-making mechanisms), if I run up against the edge of a map, or can’t pick up whatever decorative object, there’s a certain disappointment - that the world is limiting, but there isn’t sufficient purpose/meaning to balance those limitations. In real life, there’s a reason we don’t indiscriminately blast holes through walls (other than perhaps lack of appropriate tool) - we care about the people on the other side, the asset comprised by the wall material, etc. But the material possibility of such hole-blasting always remains. This is a rambling comment with unfinished thoughts, but what I’m getting at is: there’s a relationship between potential interactions w/ our environment and the “amount” of meaning that we ascribe and extract from it.

dEnigma 3y ago
I don't think GTA is the best example for "alternate navigation" through "destructibility". Apart from a couple of fences and lampposts, what can you really destroy that gives you new navigation possibilities? There are games that took this way further (e.g. Red Faction)
- bbddg 3y ago
  Yeah GTA doesn't have much in terms of destructibility. Some of the battlefield games do this pretty well though, particularly Bad Company 2. It was very common in that game to use explosives to make different ways in and out of buildings.
  - lobsterthief 3y ago
    Also Battlefield 1. With the wide range of tanks and explosives, the WWI-era buildings become quite destructible

koliber 3y ago

Neat post. It bent my mind in surprising ways. I guess I take the "permanent" structures as scripture and it would not occur to me to break through a wall, literally, when a situation would require it. At the same time, this is exactly what I practice, and expect my teams to practice, when we build software. Each one of us has certain analogous "walls" in our minds, which define the way we can move when looking for solutions. Often, they're arbitrary and can be bypassed with relative ease - no blasting required. All we have to do is to realize that we can. It's a fun moment when we realize this and get outsized outcomes just because we step right through a preconceived and arbitrary limit which no one actually imposed. So very Matrix.

withinrafael 3y ago

This blog post also reminded me of the Red Faction[1] game franchise. I remember it specifically taught players to take alternate paths or unlock doors by blasting out walls and/or anything else in the entire environment (with some exceptions). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Faction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Faction

jl6 3y ago

I see others have drawn parallels to games like Deus Ex, and that one in particular is great at creating the illusion of a Nakatomi Space, but in truth the developers intended all its pathways to be traversed. I believe to find a true Nakatomi Space in gaming we must look to the world of speedrunning. This is where players move through the game’s spaces in ways almost certainly not intended by the architects - including exploiting every possible trick to accomplish impossible moves. A gamer wishing to emulate John McClane wouldn’t demolish a wall using the rocket launcher that the level designer put in a crate: they would exploit a clipping bug to glitch right through it. I highly recommend the “Quake Speedruns Explained” channel on YouTube.

Terr_ 3y ago
> the illusion of a Nakatomi Space, but in truth the developers intended all its pathways to be traversed I don't think that logic works, because if we turn around and apply it onto Die Hard, we get a bizarre conclusion: The movie's Nakatomi Plaza lacks any of the eponymous Nakatomi Places it supposedly showcases. (Because that protagonist, too, is traveling intended routes that were planned and put there by screenwriters.) When it comes to works of fiction, what we need to be looking at are the intents and assumptions of the in-universe fictional architects and/or typical users of the space.
- 0x112233 3y ago
  > When it comes to works of fiction, what we need to be looking at are the intents and assumptions of the in-universe fictional architects and/or typical users of the space. I agree in the context of films, but this ignores the relationship between creator and player/user in interactive fiction like games.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    Your argument is incomplete, everyone agrees differences exist, but you haven't explained how any of those differences make "Nakatomi spaces" in games somehow less legitimate than in movies like Die Hard. If anything, you've got it backwards: The fact that each individual player must notice and choose to exploit alternate paths makes them more authentically unusual and innovative than in movies, rather than less.

urig 3y ago

Infuriating to see how Israeli soldiers are criticized for their self-defense tactics in the face of fundamentalist terrorists. The author's expectation seems to be that soldiers travel the streets, exposing themselves to militant fire from within the buildings. How woke.

tyg13 3y ago
The author seemed to offer no particular criticism of the invading Israelis, as far as I can tell. In fact, they almost seemed to praise their tactics for their unconventional nature.
mindslight 3y ago
What an amazing example of this common knee-jerk playing-the-victim reaction to anything that discusses Israel without fawning. The article was describing the IDF doing something novel and clever, yet you're "infuriated" by what? It not repeating some mantra about how the action was definitely certainly most positively justified? Lest you misunderstand where I'm coming from - brutally attacking and slaughtering a civilian music festival is unequivocally evil. And Israel readily turning off civilian water and power infrastructure for collective punishment is also evil. There is no shortage of evils on both sides, and whitewashing this for either side ultimately just helps perpetuate the whole terrible situation.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

m463 3y ago

The description of the living room wall breach reminds me of Cory Doctorow's "Nimby and the D-Hoppers" full (open) text here: https://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/nimby.html https://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/nimby.html

gumby 3y ago

This article doesn’t call out to me about buildings or games, but rather software. Part of the underused promise of having the source is the opportunity to “infest it with yourself” as the author describes. I want to rip out useless modules (or at least their interface), plop in new, better structures, etc. This is a capability that at least is available, if largely unused, to programmers, but should be available to non-programmers too. The only program I know that is intended to be made form-fit with the user is emacs. Are there others?

omegaworks 3y ago

Cop City in Atlanta is being built to train American police forces to engage in urban warfare in the exact same way the IDF engages in Gaza. The Palestinian experience is coming our way: > Is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, twelve soldiers, their faces painted black, submachine guns pointed everywhere, antennas protruding from their backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through that wall? The US is preparing to scale up enforcement generally both on the southern border and within its segregated cities. It's how the current regime intends to handle climate-induced desperation, cost inflation, and migration.

js2 3y ago

Other films that sprung to mind while reading this: Columbus (2017), Aliens, Escape from New York, Brazil.

tomcam 3y ago

Pompous and not very original IMHO, but I did love this passage: "An alternative-history plot for a much better Die Hard 2 could thus perhaps include a scene in which the rescuing squad of John McClane-led police officers does not even know what building they are in, a suitably bewildering encapsulation of this method of moving undetected through the city."

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

Nice to see the Matt Jones post on Jason Bourne vs James Bond linked here. Very appropriate, on Bond as a well equipped foreigner wandering through fancy action sequences & villains lairs, while Bourne is equipped with a sharp recall of the local train timetables & ability to steal cars and parkour his way through complex urbam settings. That article got submitted too, and was fun to re-encounter! After living in my head so long & being something I'd orally relay along (and having forgotten the original source)! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37957558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37957558 https://petafloptimism.com/2008/12/12/the-bourne-infrastructure/ https://petafloptimism.com/2008/12/12/the-bourne-infrastruct... I could have sworn the pieces was like 4x as long! I'm on mobile so it's not easy to see post times, but I assume the discussion here lead to The Bourne Infrastructure getting submitted. Thanks all. This is wild stuff.