Old BldgBlog got backlinked today, talking about navigation of space, and it struck me that this tidily summarizes why running cyberpunk as sci-fi dungeons falls short. https://www.bldgblog.com/2010/01/nakatomi-space/

General thrust of the piece is about navigation of spaces in non-standard ways, with the primary example being Die Hard, but with some interesting stuff around urban combat and James Bond vs. Jason Bourne. Adventure applicability is high.

But also kind of fascinating to think in terms of video game design, where the development of architectural space is often designed for something akin to (but also opposed to) this sort of use of space.

A hallmark of very good level design in many games is that there are many possible ways to approach a problem. At it's simplest, your gun guy might shoot his way into the generic evil den, or sneak through the vents.

Sometimes this just takes the form of, effectively, multiple different hallways with different trappings and skill triggers. If there are vents, there is often just one route through the vents, for example.

This maybe sounds lazy on the surface, but it's understandable. Exploring dead ends is not super fun, so space generally needs to be designed to go *somewhere*.

But it's not always so. Sometimes you have environments that can be navigated in multiple ways, including explicitly "wrong" ways, and a lot of really interesting, emergent complexity comes out of that.

It also makes for very fun gameplay, if your idea of fun includes exploring, getting a sense of an environment, then using that to your advantage. A good design helps that particularly thrill of mastery along.

This is, I should note, the dramatic heart of why there is still interest in "realistic" games. It's not out of a desire to perfectly model sci-fi ballistics, but rather a desire for that potential level of emergence in gameplay.

I consider this an area where video games can (and should) surpass TTRPGs. Not because they can do more math - that's a red herring - but because this kind of play is on different social axes.

That is, it's often solo (because watching people explore can be dull). If collaborative, it's usually around construction, which benefits from tools.

Anyway, this idea of navigating space in odd ways is one of those ideas and techniques which I think is best suited to putting in *player* hands. It is not reasonable for a GM to narrate ALL possibilities, but it *is* reasonable for players to *ask* (and the GM should listen)

(If you don't like the word 'ask', please substitute in 'propose', 'suggest' or 'narrate' as suits your particular game.)