What is computer and video game space – and: is there an architectural history of game space-time?
How do architectures, city spaces, and landscapes change when they are transformed into physical game boards, or when they become an extension of a desktop computer game?
How can architects and urban designers apply games and game technologies as tools for drafting and planning?
Across 500 pages, the edited book publication Space Time Play will investigate these questions by compiling designs, best practice examples, as well as essays, interviews, succinct statements, and game space analyses.
Publication Sub City @ Space Time Play @ Birkhäuser, Publishers for Architecture, Basel, Boston, Berlin, 1 April 2006
Sub City
Big Urban Game
for the
Cultural Capital
of
Europe 2010
The Ruhr region in Germany has been defined by its underground, its sub-city. In this mining area the seams were the determining factors. Industrialisation and hence urbanisation were literally based on these subterranean layers. The heterarchical patterns of the above-ground phenomena mirror the submontane beds and follow the course of the mining galleries.
As an ex-mining area, the Ruhr Valley region is conscious of its sub-layers as the foundation and the driver of its development. Nevertheless, the underground connotations are ambiguous. The deeper layers are populated by forgotten mining galleries, inaccessible tunnels and groundwater lakes. The information on these underground structures reverberates with disasters from the past, the peril of the void and the threat of water.
The SubCity game, which we proposed as part of the NNC project, deals with the sub-layers of the city. The SubCity game, played on mobile devices, reinterprets and recodes the communal urban substratum. The inhabitants and the visitors of the Ruhr can simulate and recreate the deep layers of the cityscape. They can dig virtual tunnels and galleries, develop and revitalise an urban underground and live there with their avatars and dreams. They can together recreate and transform the underground systems, weaving a solid tissue of dreams under the city network.
-> roaming the urban network, searching for connections to the SubCity -> the keyholes to the SubCity are spread around the cityscape: you have to find them -> the moment you pass through a keyhole you become an actor in SubCity -> you communicate with your fellow actors and their dreams -> you exchange and interact using the SubCity tools -> while interacting you define your avatar, the actor of your dreams -> you search for new keyholes -> the moment you re-pass through a keyhole you become a new actor -> you pass through the next keyhole -> in search of your docking elements -> in search of your home ->
The SubCity game can be played decentrally with mobile devices. It can also be played in groups or even in large communities.
At the landmark of the Ruhr region, the colliery of the ‘Zollverein’ in the city of Essen which is listed as a World Cultural Heritage site, at the only working entry to the underground network, the virtual space of the SubCity game becomes accessible. In a spatial interactive media simulation you can enter this networked space of urban dreams and interact with the communal substratum of the cityscape.
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