Sunday, October 24, 2010

Introduction


During the summer of 2010, I lived in the Ruhr region of Germany as part of the 2010 European Capital of Culture. My residence was a 10 square meter nomadic modular dwelling unit-- the WALKING HOUSE, a project I helped build in collaboration with Danish art collective N55. I shared this meager living space with two others as we engaged in a strange sort of cultural exchange. We learned much about the region's history as a former industrial center now undergoing a difficult transition and identity crisis as environmentally harmful modes of production and mineral extraction are outsourced to the developing world. It was a place to meditate on ideas of autonomy, production, and leisure in a globalized society where such issues are central to making sense of the world to come.

The WALKING HOUSE in Germany

Our distinctive habitat was a temporary beacon in the landscape, an unintentional nomadic research station of sorts, that put us in contact with an interesting cross section of local people. My housemate Bill McKenna made friends with a group of post-industrial suburban youth who found social refuge in heavy metal music and video games. In this German community that had taken a painful hit to its working class identity, it was ironic that the newest favorite game of Bill's "gamer friends" was, to a large extent, a coal mining simulation: Minecraft.


The WALKING HOUSE is one of many projects by N55 that promote the building of autonomous, self-sufficient, dynamically scalable communities with the design of systems for distributed production (1 2 3 4 5) and modular architecture (1 2 3 4) And N55 is one of many groups that have approached these issues through art and design. If only through a superficial resemblance to Archigram's famous Walking City, the WALKING HOUSE can clearly be seen as an extension of visions promoted by the architectural avante-garde of the last century. It is then perhaps appropriate that the house was the site of my introduction to the game which this blog hopes to connect with such visions.


Suspended cubic forms from Yona Friedman

Minecraft is what's called a "sandbox game" or an "open world." The gameplay is entirely nonlinear and is shaped by the player's own desires and interests. There are no levels to ascend, no bosses to kill, no quests to conquer, no explicit storyline to engage with. As such, it's hard to give a satisfactory description of what the game is "about." Even the game's creator, notch, chooses to avoid the question of "what it is" on the official website and instead simply provides a video of a rollercoaster he built in-game. Each player experiences the world of Minecraft differently in part becasue the world of Minecraft is uniquely shaped--literally--by the player as he or she moves through the game.  Yet the game has become massively popular despite the ambiguity of gameplay and the fact that it is only available as a buggy in-progress alpha release. There is one distinct component of the gameplay that defines the experience for all: the 3D world of Minecraft is made up of cubic blocks that can be both destroyed and created by the player. The blocks exist exclusively on a discrete Cartesian grid that permeates the Minecraft universe, forming an invisible lattice into which players can insert or out of which players can carve structures of their own design. It is an extremely addictive building game, akin to a world of LEGO blocks that become inhabitable, confronting the user with an unmistakable experience of space as both void and product, form and perpetually re-definable function. From my experience with the game, it exhibits a Utopian architecture par excellence. The forms and systems designed by avant-garde visonaries from the past half-century are manifest in this virtual world to a degree not possible in the meatspace of planet Earth. This conjecture is the point of departure for the series of posts that will follow here.


I hope that my writing will be accessible and of interest to two key audiences: Those already well versed in architecture and urbanism will hopefully be keen to learn how theoretical visions have been unintentionally implemented in the virtual world of Minecraft while gamers who have not previously ventured into thinking critically about the spaces of their communities and cities might find words, ideas, and inspiration to advocate for more real examples of the type of creative freedom they enjoy in cyber-playspace. The format of a blog seems conducive to these goals; by essentially writing in public, I hope my text isn't rendered static, locked away in a journal or magazine of interest only to one specialized party of another. My hope is that this process can be a generator of action, whether it's the creation of new games, real-world interventions, or a productive shift of attitudes that sparks conversation between the people who are playing such games for fun and the theorists and designers who analyze and construct space professionally. I am at heart a creator and artist; though this endeavor is initially one of analysis, the eventual goal is to tease out concepts for production with the help of a larger community. Perhaps the central question is this: how can the machines of mass-appeal and entertainment created by figures like notch, John Carmack, or Jane McGonigal engage with the spatio-social dreams of Constant Nieuwenhuys, Cedric Price, Yona Friedman, Archigram, and Reyner Banham?


Modular variety in Archigram's Plug In City

In-game creations on a multiplayer Minecraft server

Dynamically reconfigurable space in Cedric Price's Fun Palace

In general, this blog will discuss video games and the design of cities. More specifically, it will focus on Minecraft, a game of infinitely varied user-built construction that emerges from a simple and rigid structure of aggregating modular units, and the architectural visions of designers in the 60's and 70's, who sought to bring about roughly the same thing. On the way, we'll tour the history of spaceframes, the practice of "griefing," prospects for socialist space, the virtuosic production of spheres, informal building in shantytowns, speculation on redstone-based cybernetic automation, virtual dérive and more.