There is never been anything as Sim City and probably there will not be anymore. Such a revolution in videogame thinking will no longer be possible. In an adventure and puzzle games era, Will Wright has invented the management par excellence, perhaps the most influential single game ever. Everyone, even action title designers, drew from Sim City. The system that allowed the construction of a city and the playful dynamics based on the urban planning become very popular. In Sim City, as in all simulations, the winner is not the good architect but the one who follows the rules of the game. However, in all subsequent iterations (and then in the key life simulator The Sims) Wright realized the first creation and videogame design free space. For the first time it was possible to create freely within a rigid structure.

With an increasing commitment to every title from the first to the third (Bioshock Infinite) the designer Ken Levine has created an adventure of environments. In 2007 three-dimensional exploration games had existed for more than ten years but Bioshock was the first to create its maps by imagining that the architecture of places was the one telling a story. The usual mysteries that guide the protagonist are revealed and suggested by the buildings design, and the restlessness was a matter of design too. Unlike Resident Evil, which worked a lot on gameplay and lighting, Bioshock has always been an architecture issue. And in Bioshock Infinite this reaches its climax: the city of the video game setting is an American utopia that tells the spirit of the country, in the contradictory Twenties, when you learn the city leader’s story in which everything is set by exploring a museum and looking at the great statues that fill it. No words, just the pictures and the environment spaces as when you just arrived in a utopian and beautiful world and you are asked to take a shot at African Americans.

There are two things that interest Jonathan Blow: puzzles and environments. If his first game, Braid, was a real narrative bomb based on words and on an idea of playing with time, the second, The Witness, is a crazy construction. It is a whole island that engages in a relationship with the player. Theoretically, it is full of puzzles on electronic panels to be solved in sequence, visual puzzles from puzzle week. Only at a certain point it becomes clear that you can solve the whole island, by interacting with rocks and elements of nature seen as the puzzles that, for once, are related to the idea of the puzzle that Blow has. Once alphabetized, the player by himself discovers that everything on the island is a possible riddle and accesses another awareness of the environment in which he moves. And, maybe, The Witness is the only game in which the final prize is the opening of a house, of new spaces, up to a paradoxical take on the real final domestic. Meeting the creator.

At first glance it is a game designed by Escher. On a deeper level it is a meditation on loneliness. But in the eyes of designers, it is an architect’s mind trying to find meaning in the modern spaces. Based on deconstructionism, Monument Valley is a true education in intricate spaces. Between Arabic influences, impossible perspectives and apparently endless continuous stairs, Monument Valley has no misplaced colour, a sound that does not reveal a material consistency and an ode to the solitude of a stylised princess in an architectural world that affirms its uniqueness and therefore its incommunicability.

If Sim City was the first step for an idea of a freely creation within rules, Minecraft produces an ingenious work of subtraction. Instead of progressing in definition and graphics, it chooses to regress to the Lego stage. Decreasing the rules increases the three-dimensional and primitive world possibilities where everything is possible. It is the reduction to the player-God idea, in a social world, mildly populated, in which create and defend. The survival architecture game that brought those principles to the whole world, by selling, getting into it and creating a community of creators who otherwise would never even have thought they could build anything. Even just digital.

If Bioshock started thinking about creating environments not only to entertain or frighten, but also to tell something or increase the narration sense, Last Of Us II brought that idea forward. There are whole parts of the narrative that nobody or almost nobody talks about, and that we players understand through the clues in the buildings, the murals, the layout of the tanks in the city and the sacred icons carved in wood. The political/religious conflict that raged in Seattle is a vague tale but the clues in the explored spaces are quite clear. Afterwards, there is the sequence of the birthday present in which exploring a science museum and then a natural history museum full of stuffed predators and scary writing on the walls tells everything about man: science and bestiality, progress and murder.

Theoretically, the game takes place in another universe that follows different physics laws, practically the impression is a game set in AutoCAD, where puzzles have to do with the creation of spaces through the geometric shape manipulation. The Witness + Monument Valley with a very modern tones management, colour temperatures and shapes cleanliness, with a strange obsession for infinite repetition.

Originally, it was just a management of the city transport systems, one of the many that were born around the end of the 00's, then a misstep made by Sim City that led the Colossal Order studio to attempt and expand itself to an entire city design. The result is that Cities: Skyline has become a graphically less powerful but more maniacal Sim City’s version, a game which aspires to be almost didactic and to teach players not so much how to win in video games rather how urban planning works.

No wonder that there is a prison management system, there are all kinds of prisons and they are usually always the same game with different clothes and skins. But Prison Architect has another idea behind it. It is not just fun but it goes so deep into the management possibilities (until the guards hiring), becoming a political treaty. How the creation of spaces affects human beings, how they play with their feelings and arouse original and unique feelings, reactions and dynamics. It is not just an issue of dealing with prisoners but of regulating their human relationships (and with the guards) through architecture.

Creating a city, Sim City already allows it. Managing its efficiency, Cities: Skyline already allows it. But Block'hood introduces another variable. The idea is to reason one block at a time, proceeding from building to building, being able to design them individually. The aim is not only to make everything work and create that balance of functionality, style and liveability that shape a city, but also to create it in a sustainable way. Block'hood asks the player to create a city that can exist in harmony with nature and that provides accessibility for the disabled and everything that makes the player aware that the world belongs to everyone and is designed for everyone.

The definitive architect-game in which everything blends together. The principle for which building something as a video game is fun, here it is taken to its extreme consequences. Players build Super Mario schemes which then they can play, effectively taking over from the designers and discovering many of the principles behind the games they play. Why some of them work more and others work less, how the fun is all in the arrangement of objects and a few extra pixels away can make all the difference in the world. It is the breaking of the mystery and the revelation that every form of play is a form of creation.