What if architecture could be experienced not as static form, but as a world you could step inside, wander, and play? Gaming Worlds as Prototypes for Speculative Architecture explores how gaming engines can be transformed into civic platforms for architectural speculation, enabling communities to collectively imagine and discuss the futures of their cities.

This project investigates gaming environments as living prototypes for architecture - not entertainment, but cultural and civic tools for speculation, storytelling, and dissemination. By constructing immersive worlds that reimagine futures of Naarm/Melbourne, the work proposes new ways for the public to encounter architecture through play, drifting, and atmospheric exploration. Unlike traditional architectural media, these worlds are not fixed images or models, but interactive prototypes. Participants navigate them in first-person perspectives, experiencing architecture as an unfolding environment rather than a finished object. This approach reframes gaming as both a design method and a medium of civic engagement, where futures can be tested, debated, and co-imagined. The vitality of this approach has been demonstrated through multiple contexts: gallery installations, civic exhibitions, live storytelling performances, and international festivals. Each instance reveals a different potential, from large-scale public immersion to intimate narrative encounters, showing how gaming worlds can act as future civic infrastructures. Together, these experiments point towards a shift in architectural practice: from designing objects to building participatory worlds, from presenting outcomes to creating platforms of imagination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMnZD5YQhdk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRQ4ozCXHnM

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Details

Building or project owner : SUPERSCALE with RMIT AUD Immersive Futures Lab

Descriptions

Participatory architecture & urban interaction

Community or communities involved : Audiences across festivals, galleries, and cultural programs, including families, young people, architectural communities, and broader publics. Participants engaged as wanderers, spectators, and co-creators of speculative futures.

Host organization : Presented in partnership with cultural institutions including RMIT Design Hub Gallery (Now or Never Festival), Robin Boyd Foundation, Melbourne Design Week, and the Edge Architecture Festival in Budapest.

Legal form : Exhibited as part of cultural programs, festivals, and exhibitions.

Issues addressed : The project addresses the accessibility of emerging technologies in architectural design, the democratization of design tools across generations, and the expansion of civic participation to include cultural imagination and speculative futures.

Impact : The project has enabled communities to encounter architectural futures as immersive worlds, reframing AI and gaming as civic and cultural tools rather than entertainment. It has sparked public conversations about how future cities might be collectively imagined, while offering a replicable model for participatory architectural engagement across civic and cultural settings.

Tools developed : A workflow combining gaming engines and narrative worlding for architectural speculation, with participatory prompts bridging design, storytelling, and virtual environments.

Tools used : - Gaming engines (Unreal Engine) for world-building and navigation. - Live facilitation and performance methods for public storytelling. - Rhino for architectural modelling.

Next steps : Future work will expand the participatory toolkit into schools, museums, and civic contexts. The project will continue to evolve as a portable and adaptable model for speculative architecture, integrated into broader research and pedagogy on how communities engage with futures through immersive world-building and media architecture.

Mediacredits

SUPERSCALE and RMIT AUD Immersive Futures Lab

Architectus

Tobias Titz

Michael Pham

Hegyháti Ré

SUPERSCALE

SUPERSCALE and RMIT AUD Immersive Futures Lab