Quote Originally Posted by Altrunchen View Post
And I've seen depressing examples of this with Soviet architecture with blocks and blocks of buildings that all look the same. The hard part about mapping this sort of thing out is making these kinds of interpretations of space when in reality it would have been made by hundreds of people over the years.
Blocks of mass-produced identical buildings are the pinnacle of industrial development. They are very cost-efficient to make and almost universally a failure because they assume that humans are mass-produced identical units with identical wants and needs.

Quote Originally Posted by Altrunchen View Post
I'm not sure I follow what you're saying. Do you mean to say that most people don't want to think too much about a game and want something simple and enjoyable?
That's a good first approximation, yes. I spend much of my waking time dealing with certain types of interpersonal and technical challenges at work in order to earn money to pay bills. I rarely want to do more of that sort of thing on my leisure time. When I get to game, I want to engage in straightforward activities that use the skills I've selected for my character and I don't try to analyze if the dungeon's sewer has a proper slope for good drainage or if the water supply has sufficient flow to avoid stagnation or if the fantastic critters that I'm there to kill and loot should would be justified in picketing outside of the chambers of parliament to protest the violations of their civil rights and how they deserve protection as a minority class. I want to enjoy myself and put aside my worries for a while.

Being able to use my understanding of how the "real world" operates is nice. It's useful to be able to apply the notion that fluids flow downhill, even if that sort of behavior would fill up the local Underdark in next to no time. I like the idea of knowing that fires will consume things, even if I can't actually cause 40 foot diameter balls of fire to appear and set everything only in that area on fire while leaving the things next to it unscathed.

Suspension of disbelief is critical for most entertainment activities. Requiring that everything and everyone operate according to exactly one standard of efficiency kills the sense of wonder needed for enjoying a lot of the world. Silly-looking and impractical buildings are central to lots of stories. Massive delvings that would take a thousand years to dig are also central to lots of stories.

Peculiar architecture in the real world helps people to remember a place. The opera house in Sydney is a seriously silly-looking building. So's the Eiffel tower in Paris, the TransAmerica building in San Francisco, the rock-cut churches in Lalibela, Ethiopia, and even the pyramids in Egypt. But each of those places is fairly well-known because of their iconic architecture, not because of the uninteresting and more efficient buildings nearby.

Modern architects are desperate for their works to be iconic, and are getting increasingly desperate in their works. Is this trend a good thing? It depends on what you're trying to optimize for and how much you're willing to pay for it.