Dorsa Kafili
Doctor of Philosophy candidate
Architecture
Biography
Dorsa is an architect, researcher, former canoe sprint athlete in Iran national team and amateur gamer with a passion for world-building and visual storytelling in videogames media. She received her Bachelor's degree in architecture from Azad University in Iran and finished her double Master degree in Italy from Politecnico di Milano and Alta Scuola Politecnica in architecture in 2018. Her research interest sits between disciplines of architecture and game studies.
Thesis
Architecture in Play: An Investigation into the Emerging Common Ground Between the Discipline of Architecture and Videogame Design
The videogame industry has grown and evolved exponentially, unlike any other form of media and has become a significant part of our contemporary society in a very short period of time. To experience fictional worlds of videogames, millions of people regularly immerse themselves in their imagery worlds. Hence, the game developers enhance the interactivity and immersion of videogame environments either by simulating or altering the real-world rules and logic in their level designs to create eccentric, peculiar and imaginative settings. Henry Jenkins, a key scholar in the field of videogame studies, highlights that “game designers don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces”. Digitally crafted images in videogames, design and construct virtual environments and animate and narrate them. At the basic level, videogame design and architecture share their most fundamental aspects: designing strategies, planning, form generation, textures and working on the scale of elements. These aspects are not purely digital attributes. Rather, they require an in-depth comprehension of architectural techniques and methods.
This PhD research explores game spaces through a multidisciplinary research approach to scrutinise the mutual relationships between spatial principles of videogame environments and architecture. Its purpose is to investigate the shared realm, to compare, and make a bridge between the newly emerged field of videogame studies and architecture and will focus on the representation of architecture and urbanism in videogame spaces where the players experience, explore, inhabit and manipulate the constructed worlds but architecture is not physically present. By considering videogames as both media and rule-based systems with environmental features, this PhD examines how the visual image, spatial characteristics and architectural properties operate in game worlds.