14 February 2006

Judgement Day.

After about 4 months of research, partying, sleepless nights and hard work finally the first version of ‘The Evolutionary City’ or the “SPACEFIGHTER” game was ready to be revealed to the World. This game is not just a tool to envision a new form of Urban Planning but also a huge databank of parameterized Data on cities both contemporary and historical – its growth, its decay and most importantly it’s Survival.

In fact the ‘SPACEFIGHTER’ is not one game but a ‘Platform’ for hundreds of small games*. Games about People, about Markets, about Nature, about Cities and about the Globe. These games have been created by Abstracting from Reality itself. These games are designed on Evolutionary Gaming Principles and a complex set of relationships between different games on the Platform makes sure that these games impact each other (+ive or –ive) to create a dynamic field of thousands of very simple interactive processes.

[* - Though the whole Platform is not complete some major components are.]


In a simplest possible explanation of what the ‘SPACEFIGHTER’ does? I can say that the process of gaming on this platform generates hundreds of Scenarios for planning and managing cities from which important lessons can be abstracted back into the real world. So it starts at Scenario planning and goes much beyond it.

Though I realise there are a lot of questions yet to be answered about and by the programme, I strongly believe that it is worth the effort and that it is a step in the right direction from earlier experiments of Data Scaping by MVRDV and others. To me the idea of playing a game to help you make Urban decision (though naive at times) is a beautiful idea.


And above is a pic of the complete team that worked on this project. Thanks guys/gals for an amazing experience and for some great times.

No comments:

A Google map tracing my travels across the globe


View Larger Map
  • In Red cities where I have lived (more than one month);
  • In Blue cities that I have visited