Nakatomi Space
bldgblog.com
bldgblog.com
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.
"In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25511220
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.
"The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects," Loos proclaimed, thus linking the optimistic sense of the linear and upward progress of cultures with the contemporary vogue for applying evolution to cultural contexts. Loos's work was prompted by regulations he encountered when he designed a building without ornamentation opposite a palace. He eventually conceded to requirements by adding window flower boxes.
Ironically, you can read it all as a sort of window dressing for a core of xenophobia, as that's the only thing consistent across the two.
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.
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.
I agree in the context of films, but this ignores the relationship between creator and player/user in interactive fiction like games.
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.
I meant the opposite - games have an additional layer in which "Nakatomi space" can exist. The misunderstanding seems to be my fault (oops)
> 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 failed to grasp this initially; I agree with you here - but only for films and novels where the reader/viewer/audience lacks agency. This is what OP (jl6) seemed to be driving at:
> 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
Games contain not just a relationship between fictional architects and fictional entities (with fictional agency), but additionally a relationship between real developers and real players (with real, albeit constrained and often imagined, agency).
> each individual player must notice and choose to exploit alternate paths
If these paths were planned by the developers, they are akin to hallways and stairwells in a skyscraper. In the creator-player context their traversal is within the norm, excluding them from being "Nakatomi space". I agree with OP that glitches/exploits better embody this concept:
> 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.
A player choosing to make their avatar avoid the front door in favor of discovering an unusual route is always going to be a more authentic experience of subverting architecture, compared to passively observing a character doing the same actions in film.
Being able to go further and glitch/hack/mod the game merely raises the ceiling, it does not lower the floor.
I'll share an anecdote about one of my favorites. So the objective in my puzzle is to collect all the gold orbs spread around the space. Once I saw a player get a gold orb in a way that was suicidal. Under any other circumstances they would have died immediately afterwards and revert to the last check point. But because they saved it for last, they beat the level in mid air just after touching the orb but before touching the lava.
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.
This particular clip is what convinced me to get into the game (potential spoiler) [0].
Almost all the areas have Nakatomi spaces but it is entirely possible to never use them. Likewise one can use them almost exclusively.
Unlike Human Rebolution where these spaces are occasional treats sprinkled out by the devs, they are more properly "worked in" in Mankind Divided.
My point for it being a shallow imitation should be reserved only for the plot and themes of the original game, which are far more subversive and interesting than the ones in MD or HR. But I do agree, gameplay wise Mankind Divided is very well done and does fit the Nakatomi Space paradigm.
I would recommend Streets of Rogue from the indie sphere. It doesn't have vents you can crawl through but you can poison the ventilation system, bribe the police, hack security robots, hire people as bodyguard or to cause a ruckus. Surprisng amount of options for a top down roguelike.
There are few games that fall truly in that genre, which is a shame as (to me at least) it’s the video game genre that is most interesting from an “interactive medium” pov.
Arkane games (Dishonored, Deathloop) have some segments that get close, but at their core the games still have a few privileged paths (and are about killing people).
One fun indie game that uses a voxel engine effectively for open ended gameplay is Teardown (and it’s not about killing people!). The maps are quite small though. It’ll be exciting in a decade or so when we can run such engines at much higher dimensions.
The least old one is 9 years old though, and thief 3 is like 20 years old.
Most people hate those with a passion, and only recommend Thief 1 + 2.
Never played 2 but always hear it is amazing.
Deus Ex, Thief 1+2, Dishonored 1/2/Death of the Outsider, Prey 2017, Bioshock
Ones I've heard great things about:
System Shock 2, Arx Fatalis, Stalker
I believe a big part of the success of Die Hard is that McClane is such a strong hero. One of the ways the movie viscerally demonstrates his individualist heroism is how we constantly subverts the architecture of Nakatomi Plaza. While most of us would be awed by the expensive and heft of a luxurious skyscraper and feel obligated to follow its rules, McClane gives zero fucks and bends the skyscraper's physical substance to his will.
Likewise, videogames where the world is a pile of static geometry that you can only navigate in ways the game designers decided to allow feel decidedly disempowering. You're essentially a rat in their maze where your only option is to find the cheese in the way they've chosen.
Immersive simulation-like games with emergent gameplay are empowering because they offer an open-ended space to explore with greater agency and creativity. It feels like it is your game and the NPCs are just playing in it.
I then thought of Broforce, a retro side-scrolling shooter, where almost all the terrain is destructible, and so if you don't fancy climbing the enemy's walls, or navigating some subterranean passages, you can usually just blast your way straight through. Indeed, there are some levels which i can only complete by digging a tunnel under the entire map, avoiding both the enemies on the surface, and the constant aerial bombardment which is raining down on it.
- Telekinetically lift, rotate, and glue together anything that is not alive or nailed down.
- Summon and activate small mechanisms (fans, self-spinning wheels, flamethrowers, hydrants, etc).
- Phase vertically through any ceiling, as long as it's not too far away. This includes mountains, floating platforms, and large enemies.
- Reverse the last ~30 seconds of any object's motion. A falling boulder flies back up, a floating plank goes against the current, a spinning wheel changes direction.
Then you get to apply these powers for transport, combat, and puzzles. And somehow it just works.
I found myself frequently wondering what is the canonical solution to a puzzle, because it sure as hell isn't what I just did. It's a brilliant game.
In many ways, I'm reminded of the Portal games where just figuring out how to creatively move the player character from A to B is a big part of the game loop.
They continued, and I liked Death of the Outsider, but Arkane is long gone now. :(
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.
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.
To me, it's a masterpiece.
Patently false! The third is better than the second.
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.
If that's intended as a commentary on the fifth movie I agree with it, but in case it's an actual misapprehension, sadly there was one [1]. It's more part of Bruce Willis' output during his cognitive decline than part of the Die Hard series, really.
> 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.
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 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.
But rejoice! You need no excuse to rewatch Die Hard, it's just a good idea regardless.
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.
This article made me realize why I like that one better than the first.
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.
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.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/psychogeography-a-purpose...
Karen O'Rourke's book is great too.
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.
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
full (open) text here:
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://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.
The whole thing is probably rigged with explosives.
"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."
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.
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.