Hello everybody My name is Marina. I'm currently finishing my MSc (Historic Building Conservation) at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Previously I did a BA for Interior Design. Now why would someone like me post in this forum? Because I need YOU! My dissertation project is about historic architecture in computer games, how it is designed and how people feel about it. You are the guys who shape game concepts into tasty designs. I'd like to know about your work. For this purpose I've constructed a really short questionnaire. With really short I mean 'if-it-takes-you-more-than-10-minutes-you-can-spam-my-inbox-with-abuse' kind of short. You'll see. It doesn't matter whether you're a trouper or still at university, but it would be nice if you had worked on ingame architecture before. You can decide to back out at any time of the survey, and you don't have to answer all the questions. It's completely anonymous and the results will not be published. So why would you do this? First of all it would greatly help me in my study. Secondly, at the end of the questionnaire there's an optional (!) contact form, which, if you decide to leave me your email address, will allow me to send you a compact version of my findings at the end of my project. [This is NO PHISHING!. You DON'T HAVE TO STATE YOUR EMAIL!]. And thirdly, because I'm assuming you're a nice person :). Ready? All right here you go! http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/56872/-historic-game-architecture Thanks a bunch! yours Marina @Mods: I was unsure where to post this thread. If necessary, please re-locate to wherever it fits best. Thank you!

Hi, I went through your questionnaire and came up with some issues that might throw off your results:

- Size of group: If I'm a freelance artist and the only artist working on a very small project, I usually have a lot of freedom to make the game look how I want, accurate or not according to my tastes. In larger teams, and I imagine especially in large companies, freedom to determine the art design is much, much lower for any particular artist, which leads to the next point...

- Design of the game: Some games are fantastic and take very loose direction from historical building styles (World of Warcraft), and some games are strictly historical due to design (Europa Universalis 3, maybe), and some are somewhat incidentally accurate in architecture due to the building artist having a degree in historical architecture (Anno 1603).

I guess what I'm saying is that it is probably difficult to make very generalized assumptions about how game designers use historical reference due to these issues unless you break the field down into some categories that take this into account.

Good luck with your project!

thanks!

this is good advice. I know that there are several issues concerning the degree of 'fantastic' design in games. My project will consider representatives of all sorts, including very realistic and very fantasy-based designs. Due to the relatively small size of this project I can not, however unfortunate, look at every single aspect. Thanks for pointing out group sizes, I will bear this in mind!

*BUMP!

Survey is still running. thanks to everybody who completed it so far! :)