A few minutes with Half-life 2, Super Mario Galaxy or even Tetris might be enough to suggest that videogames have as much in common with architecture and landscape as they do with scorecards and narrative. It’s a notion contemporary artists are increasingly starting to explore in works such as SwanQuake, a series of installations utilising 3D computer environments and motion-capture to examine the relationships between technology and human space. An ongoing project by Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli, also known as igloo, their most recent exhibition is SwanQuake: House, on display at the V22 Gallery in London until November 3.

House takes the form of a series of derelict basement rooms, the first of which is home to a trackball controller and HD display set into a dressing table. Using the trackball in conjunction with two buttons – forwards and jump – visitors are able to explore Fackin ’ELL, a virtual tube station located on a fictional variation of the Central Line, apparently wedged in next to Liverpool Street. All routes to the surface are blocked by piles of rubble (a design choice that will be instantly recognisable to anyone who’s played an FPS in the last ten years), and exploring deeper into the station reveals rooms filled with mysterious dancers, an Escher-like tube platform tacked on at an alarming (and fatal) 45-degree angle, and a burnt-out train carriage. Navigating the carriage leads to a lengthy jaunt down an empty tunnel, until the track fragments and a huge, rocky cavern opens up, offering hints of a volcanic netherworld beyond, before an invisible wall curtails any further exploration.

And beyond the dressing-table console itself, the rest of the basement gallery is made up of empty chambers, many of which feature a gentle bleeding of real and virtual elements as brick walls are interspersed with panels displaying brick textures, and a mirror gives a view into a nearly identical computer-generated corridor.

This wider environment, combined with the shuffling, stuttering soundtrack fed through the rooms, invokes an unnerving atmosphere, but most of House’s power to involve comes from simply taking a game-like space and shaking almost all of the rules out of it, relying instead on gaming’s inherent ability to push its players towards exploration and experimentation. While the name SwanQuake may hint at a tritely defined collision of high- and low-brow cultures, in reality, igloo’s co-opting of game mechanics allows for the blurring of boundaries between investigation, deconstruction, and ultimately, participation in the display. One of the more interesting examples of ‘game art’ yet revealed, it’s promising to see work that suggests that other artforms may have as much to learn from game design as game design has already learnt from them.