Videogame Spatial Cinematics: Reading and Designing Play with the VSCiogram
About Gang Pan’s Research:
Over the past two decades, videogames have become a subject of architectural interest, with game space discussed in familiar terms: layout, navigation, spatial experience. One thing is usually left out. Everything in a videogame is seen through a virtual camera, and whether it tracks the player or holds a fixed angle, the way that camera relates to the space largely decides how a place is understood and felt. Yet it is rarely treated as part of the architecture. My research addresses this through an approach I call Videogame Spatial Cinematics: a way of reading game environments where the virtual camera, not just the layout, shapes spatial experience. It places the camera at the meeting point of architecture, film, and game design.
Within this approach I developed a notation system, the VSCiogram, which records spatial experience from the player’s point of view. It tracks where attention is pulled, how movement is paced, and what the camera reveals or withholds moment by moment. Where a floor plan describes a building at rest, the VSCiogram describes a space as it is lived through play. This showcase puts the notation to work in two directions. It reads familiar moments from well-known games, and it includes simple game scenes I designed using the VSCiogram, where the notation guides how space is built rather than only describing how it is experienced. Together they show how the camera turns ordinary spaces into experiences players feel but rarely have words for.
About Gang Pan:
Gang Pan is a PhD Candidate at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA), University of Edinburgh, where he studies the relationship between architecture and videogames. He is affiliated with the Manchester Game Centre and is a visiting scholar at the Manchester School of Architecture, where he works with the Future Processes (FP) Lab and has taught courses and workshops bridging architectural design and videogame spatial practice.
Over the past two decades, videogames have become objects of architectural inquiry and design. Their environments are studied and built like architecture, and their space is discussed in familiar terms: layout, navigation, spatial experience. Yet that space is not encountered as a fixed plan. It is framed by a virtual camera and activated by a player, and it unfolds differently each time it is moved through. The drawings architecture relies on, the plan and the section, describe space at rest. They struggle to record how a space is actually lived: where attention is pulled, where movement quickens or holds, where tension gathers and releases.
The VSCiogram is a notation I developed to record exactly that. It registers a passage of play from the player’s point of view, capturing how spatial and cinematic structures are perceived, missed, returned to, and reinterpreted as the player moves. Where conventional analysis looks at a game environment from above, the VSCiogram works from the ground of traversal, so the way a design is lived can be studied, compared, and revised alongside the way it was built. It is the experiential half of my wider framework, Videogame Spatial Cinematics; the other half analyses how that space is designed.
The notation extends a long line of attempts to draw spatial experience rather than spatial form. Kevin Lynch used symbols to record how a city is perceived rather than how it is laid out. Dance notation, as Paul Virilio observed, can hold space and time on a single surface, which architectural plans cannot. Donald Appleyard’s notation for the experience of a road set perceptual layers in parallel, to be read together at any moment. Cedric Price, designing the Fun Palace as a building defined by use and change rather than fixed walls, drew it as relationships and pathways. The VSCiogram redirects these commitments towards interactive, camera-mediated space. It began on paper, drawn by hand from my own play, because drawing slows the moment down and makes the camera’s choices visible.
A VSCiogram is read from left to right, as play happens, with several layers stacked above one another: the camera’s framing, the avatar’s pace, moments of interaction, the rise and fall of tension. Read down through the layers at any single moment, it shows how these conditions coincide to shape how a place is felt. A floor plan describes a building at rest; the VSCiogram describes a space as it is lived through play.
The problem is not confined to games. As virtual production, immersive media, and historical visualisation increasingly stage space through a moving camera and an active viewer, how to represent lived spatial experience becomes a question shared across architecture and media. The VSCiogram offers one answer. This showcase puts it to work in three ways: reading a moment from an existing game, drawn by hand over the same sequence, and guiding a scene I designed myself, where the notation shaped the space before it was built.
Figure 1: A VSCiogram laid over a sequence of play from Indika (Odd Meter, 2024). Copyright credit: Indika © Odd Meter (2024). Footage used for criticism and analysis.
Figure 2: A hand-drawn VSCiogram of the same sequence. Copyright credit: © Gang Pan.
Figure 3: A scene designed through the VSCiogram in Unreal Engine.Copyright credit: © Gang Pan.
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