Home  /  Being an Architect   /  Hidden Patterns: Learning from Street Fighter

Hidden Patterns: Learning from Street Fighter

Certain things haunt me. I learn a piece of information and the whole world tilts. I wanted to be an architect when I was little. Then I forgot. Then I remembered a week before my senior year of high school and upended my class load to get myself ready to apply to only architecture schools. Clearing out a high school schedule to carve out enough space for AP Art so that one could build a portfolio from scratch between September and December was a bit insane. And stupid. It’s telling that I had to mostly sacrifice music classes to make this happen. In less than 24 hours I realigned my life and focused on something I hadn’t thought of as anything but a childhood fantasy. Other kids wanted to be firemen or police officers. When I was six, seven, ten, twelve, I always said I wanted to be an architect. But it wasn’t until that late day in August 1998 when I was seventeen that I realized it wasn’t just childhood musings but actually my future life. I wish I recalled the exact moment. Somehow being an architect came up and everything clicked. Obviously. That’s what I really wanted to do with my life, and always had. Once that forgotten conversation happened, everything I had been doing made more sense. All the models I found excuses to build for school projects, all the house museums I loved visiting, all the times I would wander through cool buildings I wasn’t supposed to be in just because they were cool buildings and who doesn’t love exploring and understanding the built environment…

Here’s another more recent example: On February 16th, 2015 I went to an optometrist and learned I suffered from Convergence Insufficiency.** I went to the optometrist thinking I just needed glasses, and left with a better understanding of why my life was the way it was. Within a week I had retrained my brain and transformed my life. Months later I am still cognizant how my life has been altered. The difference between my life on February 1st, 2015 and March 1st, 2015 is just scary huge for something so easily solved, but so shockingly missed for so long. So much of my life makes more sense now that I understand how I have been compensating for decades with this issue. Every few weeks another minor example appears and I see one more way that I was dealing with this invisible issue. But more on that another time (for example just how interconnected paragraphs one and two of this article are).

Today I don’t want to talk about how I can now stare at a computer for more than twenty or thirty minutes without getting a headache, or how I can now read for longer than fifteen minutes without getting sleepy. I want to talk about the design magic that is Street Fighter.

I suck at Street Fighter. I am horrible at all fighting games. I love them, but I am just incompetent at them. My win percentage as a youth playing Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat easily hovered in the single digits. I suspect I continued to go over friend’s houses to play video games just so I could unconsciously critic their basements and understand the different housing typologies of northern Connecticut. Given my memories of my youth, that actually checks out. I suck to this day. But the more I learn about Street Fighter, the more I see that it is an incredible source of design inspiration. I’ve previously written about Skill vs Power in the game. The video from that post is one of those things that haunts me. Skill vs Power. Is there any better concept for the struggles of harnessing BIM? Or design for that matter? Nope. And now this video, about spacing and negative space. Street Fighter is not a game about one character in relation to another. It’s actually about controlling negative space. Oh my goodness. Is that not a beautiful definition of architecture? What else is architecture than the purposeful controlling of negative space?

Go home tonight and play some fighting games. Or find some videos online. I’m sure you can watch fighting games on Twitch right now. Or YouTube. Find a way to experience these games, but don’t watch the characters. Watch the space around them. Invert your vision and see what isn’t the characters. They are but the expression of the space around them. Look at the hidden patterns of the invisible.Street_Fighter_II_guile owns the space**Testing for Convergence Insufficiency is super easy. Check your kids. Have them stare at a pencil which you slowly bring towards the bridge of their nose. Watch to see if they can cross their eyes or if at a certain point their eyes shake fast and give up focusing on the pencil. Two weeks ago I was telling my tale to my brother and sister-in-law and we easily found out my nephew suffers in the same way as I did. They will be bringing him to an optometrist for official diagnosis and solve it for him at age 7 rather than 34. That’s going to make his life easier.

I need to write more about why you need to study video games and why you need to make your kids play them. Make sure to follow Shoegnome on Facebook and Twitter. If you’re not a social media person, RSS feed is also a great way to never miss anything either.

Post a Comment