buzzcut

What is a city?

It’s an obvious question with an even more obvious answer. But the answer probably depends on whom you talk to. An urban planner or mayor, a suburban housewife or a cop, an economist or a game designer, everyone will flavor the basic answer of — big place with lots of buildings and people–with a different spin.

Visions of the future offers a bit of narrative and  visual tour of images of the city of tomorrow as it has developed across a grab bag of artists and architects.

Without putting too fine a point on it, these collages of visions of the city provide a context for seeing how easy it is to feel that a virtual place is real. We’ve already reduced our actual urban experiences into an imagination of what a city is, or could be. Visit Exodar in World of Warcraft, and it feels real, in part, because we are used to imagining our cities.

New York New York in Vegas, anyone?

(Link via students in my summer class!)

Architecture may have the glitz, but urban planning has the classic game. Now, SimCity get’s a makeover with the holiday 2007 release of SimCity Societies.

1Up has some of the details:

SimCity Societies PC Preview, SimCity Societies Preview

As someone who teaches an introduction to urban planning using games, I’m quite familiar with the opportunities and hazards of teaching with SimCity. The biggest issue, as my students can tell you, is that the basis of planning is found in the public’s interest in private property. No public, to planning. No private property, no planning–at least not what we mean by urban planning.

SimCity, lacking a notion of private property, works more like a Stalinist simulation, whereby the people simply suffer under the rule of an all-powerful dictator. In SimCity there is simply no significant consequence to razing blocks of homes to make way for a new football stadium. Try that in your town and see what happens.

Will Societies fix any of these problems. From what we know how, it doesn’t seem so. And that may be due to the fact that community participation, public hearings and due process just don’t seem like enjoyable play mechanics.

What is most peculiar about the new game, from the descriptions, is an implementation of something  called “environmental determinism.” In practice, this is a whole raft of beliefs around the idea (and I am trivializing here to just make a clear point), that if you use lots of soothing green colors in a building people will be more relaxed.

The new game uses some form of this in the guise of “social energies”. These spirits inhabit your buildings and shape it, say, from a more totalitarian shape into a bright, happy artistic place.

We’ll see how that pays out, but it might turn SimCity further away from anything useful in terms of understanding cities.

One thing I am looking forward to are whimsicle sets of buildings that let you style your urban places more in the tone of The Nightmre Before Christmas than New York City. It might seem silly on the surface. But if you’ve been to Walt Disney World, you will see just how powerful a city built on fantasy can be.

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According to BBC NEWS , the Church of England has taken exception to the use of the interior of one of its churches in the PlayStation 3 game, “Resistance: Fall of Man”.

Fair enough, they don’t like the idea of space aliens getting their brains blown out in a church.

To my mind, what bares further investigation is this quote in the  story:

“Sony described the game as being set ‘in an alternate and mythical version of Europe in the 1950’s, in which the enemy are strange looking alien invaders seeking to destroy humanity’. Earlier, David Wilson, a Sony spokesman, told The Times newspaper: “It is game-created footage, it is not video or photograph’.”

This raises all kinds of questions about the rights to material, organization, sense of place and imagination. Consider, would the Church have the same issue if they would have simply altered the geometry to make the game church different from the real church? What if they pained the stone to give it an “alternate reality” veneer? Or, what if the fighting occurred on the streets, but never entered the church?

What kinds of rights can a person or entity hold with regards to images and represenations of a place? Does anyone know?

UPDATE

The Wardman Wire » Video Game Battle between Sony and Manchester Cathedral: The Legal Angle

There
have been some efforts to make copyright of “Building Designs” stick.
Mainly to prevent iconic architects’ designs being copied. In practice,
plans are copyright but external views can be photographed.

This site has some good coverage of the issue.

Again, the issue here that interests me is the legal protection of an image of a place. This is a two-part question–because the protection is not just of the image, in the way that I can certainly copyright a picture I take of the Eiffel Tower, but of the picture AND the place.

Whether you read this image as showing that real life is more like Myst than you thought, that environments can be always be viewed as fundamentally lugological or whether game designers should just try harder, it’s an interesting image. And it would make a cool Tony Hawk level too.