Prototype is a widely anticipated sandbox-style game that was developed by Radical Entertainment and released by Activision a few weeks ago. I had the opportunity to spend a few hours playing the game earlier this week and the experience left me a combination of numb and puzzled. The plot revolves around Alex Mercer, a young amnesiac infected with a weapons-grade genetic enhancements that ties him to the outbreak of a related lethal virus. The tone is dire and the game is set in a faithful reproduction of Manhattan, albeit post-quarantine, overrun with mutants and military contractors and rendered in a style that speaks to the cinematography of Children of Men and 28 Days Later. As is the case with most open world games, while the plot is not worth speaking of, the level design and gameplay are.

Does Prototype bring anything novel to the table in terms of playable urban space? Yes, there are some wild opportunities for movement and battle within this game. The most impressive characteristic of Prototype's Manhattan is that experiencing the verticality of the city is a key element of gameplay. Hopped up on superpowers, Alex is able to sprint up the sides of skyscrapers and half-glide around the city. Battles rage on the street, up the faces of buildings and onto rooftops. The cityscape is jammed with architecture, infrastructure, street furniture, vehicles and trees - all precisely tuned by a physics engine to facilitate total carnage. The game designers must have a particular fascination with the mechanical systems of buildings as rooftop air conditioners and water towers figure rather prominently into gameplay. This is similar terrain to that treaded by Faith, the parkour protagonist in Mirror's Edge, last year's first-person platformer. However, where Faith used building systems to circumnavigate the pitfalls associated with moving from rooftop to rooftop, Alex Mercer hurls AC units at helicopters. Ultraviolence aside, Prototype actually delivers the kinetic rush you'd expect from a game like Mirror's Edge, where the stiff level design reduced gameplay to little more than spatial grinding. The "adaptive parkour" of Prototype is the best free running I've seen in a game and the momentum you can build is incredible - like a Liberty City rampage that isn't tethered to the asphalt. Unfortunately, movement is about where my accolades for Prototype end. While the combat system is vast and idiosyncratic, my impressions thus far lead me to believe that the game is crippled by a lack of imagination. Now hold that thought.

[Wasted space, locked door syndrome illustrated / diagram: Structure]

Last week, Peter Kirn highlighted some of the current developments in the procedural modeling of urban space for gaming and CGI purposes. As illustrated in the demo video for Structure, programmers can employ generative systems to reduce the workload of producing digital cities for gaming. The developers of Structure contextualize their tool as follows:

This system overcomes the main limitation normally found in virtual city models and games: The "Locked Door Syndrome". Although there are enterable buildings in urban games or city simulations, normally only a small fraction of the buildings can be entered. This is due to the sheer number of buildings in a typical city. Given limited development time and memory requirements, it is infeasible for developers to create such a large amount of building interiors using traditional asset creation pipelines, where all buildings in a city have to be individually modeled and placed by artists. To the best of our knowledge, current existing solutions attempting to generate or model virtual cities are generating only "fake" building exteriors without indoor areas.

So if we take this statement at face value, spatial authenticity is the key concern in modeling cities for games. Are we to assume that gamers want to move beyond the bitmapped streetscape (a stage set) and into the interiors of nondescript retail space and generic office towers? The developers of Structure seem to think so. While few studios can afford the reported $100 million price tag of GTA IV who can deny the degree to which Liberty City resonated as a place? What bothers me about the Structure demo video is how much it is tied to the first-person shooter genre - point of view is synonymous with wielding a firearm and the "destructibility" of matter is a major selling point. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare had an oblique fascination with building assembly and the penetration power of various firearms factored heavily into gameplay. Whether you unloaded a shotgun blast or a 5.56x45mm round at an adversary on the opposite side of sheet metal fence could have drastically different results. In the procedural cities generated by Structure everything just crumbles uniformly, and this is ultimately my confusion about Prototype - why go to the trouble of creating a complex, detailed, simulated city and neutralize it with gameplay that is entirely contingent on spectacular, unending mayhem?

If locked door syndrome limits the experience of space in gaming by presenting architectural window dressing rather than explorable interiors, I posit that locked city syndrome could be a charge levied against another type of dead end - the lack of engagement associated with many open world games set in cities. Johan Huizinga situated "play" as a phenomena that emerges from, and can be measured against the protocol and the rhythms of daily life. Sandbox-style urban games need to ground their narratives and play in some semblance of "urban normalcy" otherwise there is simply no friction. The Manhattan in Prototype doesn't succeed as a dystopian urban space because there is no hint that it ever even functioned properly in the first place - sandbox as stage set rather than a charged, oscillating environment. Locked city syndrome.