videoludica. game culture 

• Matteo Lo Prete

Here's an excerpt (the full text is attached):

"Before analysing level design as a sophisticated devising technique, used by highly qualified professional designers to create video-ludic settings, which, afterwards, will be enjoyed by a large number of players;   before contemplating most peculiar aspects typical of this kind of virtual environments and before weighing in a brief and critical way some of the tricks used for their development. Before we compare a creative practice very similar to contemporary architectural planning with other examples from film culture.
Before all this, we need to define level design as a mass phenomenon, tending to break professional borders of the software house to show up in the house of whoever has got a propensity for the personalization of his own playing environment, as well as a minimum fund of useful technical knowledge to shape desired settings as he likes.

By making these statements, there is undoubtedly no intention of diminishing the expert and skilful work of specialists such as IT engineers, 3D graphics experts, modellers and finally architects, whose main occupation consists in devising and developing settings where videogames’ vicissitudes take place. But we need to be aware of the trend which Alex de Jong, architect at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), briefly summarizes in the volume entitled Space, Time, Play.

During last years, thanks to the development of specific editors, the ever-growing number of non-professional players have started to realize or modify settings according to their own necessities or most daring creative inspirations, often sharing with other users the outcome of their passionate efforts. The result is a surprising fund of mods, abbreviation synthesizing all the modifications made to a standard configuration of a video-ludic title, available on the net completely free of charge. To do it, it is not necessary to know most advanced scripting languages, or the sophisticated group of rules at the basis of the architectural work. Most of these players, actually, have started developing these new settings completely by themselves, using quite easy 3D modelling systems and guided by a creative attitude free from all the rules and bonds which characterize the realization of complex settings.

The arrival of Second Life has greatly contributed to the growth of this phenomenon, though it can not be considered in all respects as a videogame. Sandboxes of this kind of interactive virtual setting probably represent the greatest expression of the trend leading to the extreme personalization of the game play space. In this case, even the setting where relationships take place, where new stories rise and mingle together, results from a really particular collective creative effort, which could be compared only to the effort which makes possible, in the course of time, the growth and the articulation of big metropolis, among which Rome is one of the more interesting." (Matteo Lo Prete, 2009)