World Games 2.0
This project formed our contribution in The Yale Architectural Journal Perspecta 54 ‘Atopia’, edited Melinda Agron, Timon Covelli, Alexis Kandel and David Langdon.
The issue deals with Atopia as both the site of architecture's critical confrontation with hegemonic systems and the theoretical space in which its own processes can be challenged.
Our essay, World Games 2.0, reimagines Buckminster Fuller’s global World Game as a series of smaller, more focussed game concepts, that together could address the granularity and inconsistencies of modern living as multiple parallel systems.
World of Wenrenhua [1/4]
What would it be like to alter cities through painterly eyes? World of Wenrenhua is a game for breaking down Western perspectives of the city. In World of Wenrenhua, players operate a ‘Street View’ style car, scanning the world around them through the logic of a Chinese literati landscape painting, with an emphasis on artistic introspection rather than mathematical ‘accuracy’. This multiplayer game produces a world that becomes the repository of all the meanings and associations that players produce together.
Everyone is Architecture [2/4]
A cooperative spatial game, using geolocational positioning and augmented reality to create a system for public participation. Through virtual overlays and geofencing, participants embody architectural components, working together to choreograph new spatial experiences and create virtual buildings. Together players prototype new languages for architecture that reflect our daily interplay between the physical and digital.
Carbon Crush [3/4]
A roleplaying (RPG) game with a difference, where players are defined not by their growing mastery in swords and spells but by their real-world carbon footprint. By using the classic roleplaying mechanics of ‘self-improvement’ through repeated action, players can understand the impact their every-day decisions have on a larger scale. Yet, to fail in such a game is to fail in a synthetic world, not the real one that is under such imminent threat. In turn, Carbon Crush allows players to cultivate expertise for application in their everyday lives.
Stupid City [4/4]
Responding to the contemporary drive towards ‘Smart City’ technologies, framed as super-efficient futures where friction will be smoothed over in the service of capital, and citizens will be treated as corporate data sources. Players act as an AI, growing from a lowly smart toaster to eventually achieve ‘the singularity’. By occupying and controlling an AI, the game suggests that there are rich inconsistencies and illogical moments in urban life that can only be addressed through the culture of the human mind.