Making Videogames: The Art of Creating Digital Worlds

"Digital and analogue realms cross over with ever-greater regularity—life imitates art, which imitates video games , it seems. Making Videogames: The Art of Creating Digital Worlds by Duncan Harris and Alex Wiltshire is a lavishly illustrated overview of interactive entertainment, arguing for the craft that is videogame design. Last month I interviewed Brian Attebery on the many uses of fantasy , the cultural DNA that is at the heart of human worldbuilding and visual storytelling. This book takes a similar view through the prism of the world’s most popular entertainment medium, including some of my favourite electronic pastimes. Yves Saint Laurent Museum Marrakech is yet another gem from the publishing house Phaidon. Taking a single project from start to finish, this architectural book by Pierre Bergé and the architecture practice Studio KO tracks the museum from conception to launch, just after Bergé—Yves Saint Laurent’s partner and collaborator of many years—passed away. The Museum is dedicated to the work of the legendary French fashion designer, featuring Yves Saint Laurent’s vast collection of 5,000 items of clothing, 15,000 haute couture accessories as well thousands of sketches. The museum opened its doors in 2017, and now gets an artful overview including archival photographs, plans and sketches to accompany text by the likes of Catherine Deneuve and other members of their inner circle. The Ruins of Detroit (2010) was a landmark project by French photography duo Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, which alighted on a city of faded splendour before it vanished entirely. Detroit in its entirety has seemed to me like an island of abandonment for much of the recent past—to reference the ever-so-apt title of my colleague Cal Flyn’s excellent book on the culture of contemporary ruins. In Movie Theaters , they now return to capture the ruins of cinemas all across America. Those with an eye for architecture will find everything here: gothic to art nouveau, modernism to post-modernism, via the Byzantine and the Bauhaus. Last call for this late-nite screening of late capitalist splendour! Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This editor has long believed that the accomplishments of a civilisation, or at least a city, are best judged by the quality of its public spaces. Edwin Heathcote, the Financial Times architecture editor, would appear to agree if his new book On The Street: In Between Architecture is anything to go by. Street furniture can amount to a municipal signature, the public infrastructure that situates citizens in public space. This book spans London, New York , Paris and Budapest, but satellite editions extending to other cities would provide a fascinating architectural and anthropological survey of how we live collectively. Much architectural writing has focused on the ‘starchitect’ and their dazzling creations; I love that this book looks at the humble nuts and bolts that make cities more or less functional as living spaces."