PlastiCity (Mathias Fuchs, The Univeristy of Salford) A Multiplayer Urban Planning Game

PlastiCity is a multi-user computer game based on the architectonic visions and controversial suggestions of British architect Will Alsop. The game was conceived by the author and Steve Manthorp and built by Mathias Fuchs and Vera Schlusmans (programming), and Umran Ali and Kelvin Ward (modelling). Alsop’s brave vision for the redesigning of Bradford’s city centre led to uproar in the media and intense discussion amongst the public about how far a ‘masterplan’ for urban reconstruction could go. Alsop’s suggestion to replace two of the most prominent buildings in the geographical centre of the city with a lake sounded like a joke to many of the inhabitants of Bradford. One journalist at the Telegraph and Argus newspaper described Alsop’s idea as “an unwanted city lake that will double up as a dump for borrowed shopping trolleys”. The computer game PlastiCity enables residents of Bradford to experiment playfully with the city they live in. Similar to the way gamers can navigate through 3D environments, the users of the game can explore their urban neighbourhoods, build or demolish buildings and modify existing buildings. The game features an interface in the style of the familiar HUD as implemented in First Person Shooters like ‘Unreal’ or ‘Quake’. Players can move around and act in an intuitive way, rotating buildings, changing them in size or applying new surfaces to the walls of the buildings. In other words, the players of the game become active urban planners. They have to come to terms with various planning processes, strategies and problems. They also have to understand that they are not changing their city as individuals, but rather partaking in a mutual exchange of suggestions and planning acts.

PlastiCity is an experiment in the employment of gaming technologies for social and cultural ends. It takes an innovative approach to engaging the citizen with the decisions and processes of urban planning. Based on a modification of the popular Unreal Engine, new tools and functions have been coded to provide players with special wands. These tools are point-and-shoot devices that allow the players to instantly change the city centre of Bradford. The project: - creates a detailed, multiplayer environment based upon a meticulous modelling of a city centre; - introduces a range of tools with which architecture and the built environment may be transformed in various ways; - establishes a social/democratic context in which the game may be used to promote constructive discourse; - constitutes a template by which the process may be repeated in other cities, at schools, universities and in planning departments. Serious, Creative or Joyful? The genesis of PlastiCity was an investigation into the history of urban planning and a research project on the past, present and possible future of urban structures. The history of visions of cities of the future was also surveyed, as found in the work of: Boullée, Fourier, Malevitch, Tatlin, Le Corbusier, Fritz Lang, Arata Isozaki, Archigram and Will Alsop. We set out to mix painterly and sculptural approaches with those originating from architecture and tried not to prejudge any of these approaches as being either naïve and silly or advanced and serious. While our interdisciplinary approach of cross-breeding games, film and architecture is certainly unconventional, we believe that it leads to much more interesting outcomes. Led by Alsop’s statement that “the absence of joy is the biggest threat to our society” we have attempted to emphasize the playful, joyful and ludic elements in urban planning and to question the more serious, technically ‘sane’ approaches. PlastiCity is not concerned about construction costs, the diameter of water pipes or interest rates. In this regard SimCity is much more serious than PlastiCity. Basing our methodology on tendencies in 20th Century architecture, our aim was to bring the sculptural aspects of architecture to the fore. Obviously architects themselves use painting and visual thinking for the development of their ideas. Zaha Hadid’s sketches preceded “serious construction” for many years. Will Alsop has a painting background and uses painting as a strategy to loosen up his mind: "I like painting, I like painting big." Painting large abstract canvases has in his case been described as a kind of therapeutic trick, but it can potentially have a much more direct influence on the process of architectonic creation. Swiss curator Markus Brüderlin critically commented that “architecture wants to become sculpture and sculpture wants to become architecture” and earmarks the 1950s as the decade when architecture woke up to the influence of the plastic arts. He quotes Carola Giedion-Welcker who felt that a ‘plastic age’ was dawning in 1954 (“ein ‘plastisches Zeitalter’ im Anzug sei“). PlastiCity borrows Joseph Beuys’ notion

of plasticity as a universal term which according to Beuys might be applied to thought processes and speech. We have reintroduced the term for the arena of urban planning. It is not surprising that user-feedback for the PlastiCity game has included complaints about a lack of serious real-life economics. During the 2006 Games Developers Conference a user suggested implementing a cost-model into the game. Every building process would have to be costed and the player of the game would be punished for expensive constructions and rewarded for an economically careful approach. Even if we stretched the notion of economics and included costs for the community, costs for the environment, social costs and other cost factors, we would still prefer not to include realworld economics. The reasons for this are manifold. On one hand we think that the popularity of simulated economies like the ones in Ultima online and Second Life are ideological as they suggest that every player has a chance to influence global economics and that he or she is also potentially empowered to make a profit and succeed. This is partly true, but only in an ideological sense, as it obscures the main mechanics of a capitalist society in favour of the dream of individual gratification. It is interesting to note that criticism of the PlastiCity project as being unrealistic because of its blind spot toward economic constraints, and its ambiguous role of having a say in real-world issues and being a work of game art at the same time, finds a precedent in the experiences of constructivist sculptors such as Naum Gabo, who told his colleague Vladimir Tatlin: “Bauen Sie entweder funktionelle Häuser und Brücken oder schaffen Sie reine Kunst, aber nicht beides. Verwechseln Sie nicht das eine mit dem anderen.” (“You should build bridges and houses or create pure art, but don’t try to do both at the same time. Don’t mix the two of them up.”) Project Development The first phase of the project was carried out with the support of the Lightwave partnership, a Bradford based organisation run by the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford University, the City of Bradford and a regional development organisation. Phase 1 consisted of research into Will Alsop’s and the magistrate’s plans, into the history of the urban environment, an exploration of elevation data and photographs of the city. Discussions of the project team with Lightwave board members and with potential users of different age, gender and ethnicity led to an initial game concept and design ideas for gameplay and the scope of the game. A significant amount of time had to be spent on taking photos of the buildings and modelling major buildings. Brussels-based programmer Vera Schlusmans had to conduct extensive testing on performance issues of the Unreal engine, to specify the level of detail the modellers could apply. The programming of 28 new classes written in Unrealscript had to balance ease of use, computer and engine performance with a highly detailed realistic look and feel to the environment. At the end of the first phase a prototype with 11 buildings, implemented as realistic architectonic models, basic gameplay and a set of functions for the purposes of creating, rotating, translating, shrinking, growing

and destroying buildings as well as a function to redecorate them was implemented. The game was then tested in single player and multi-player situations with different age groups. The game has also been presented and critically discussed at international conferences such as ISEA2006 and the 2006 Games Developers Conference in San Jose.

Phase 2 of the project will have to be done in closer contact with Alsop Architects. Whereas the first phase concentrated on existing historic buildings, in the next phase we will introduce specific ‘possible buildings’ such as the extension of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television or the notorious "pretentious plastic mushrooms" -as a journalist named Alsop’s suggested buildings. Phase 2 will also allow us to implement collaborative decision making strategies for urban planning. We intend to introduce elements of gameplay specific to different age, gender and ethnic groups. We will have to model and animate different player pawns and optimise the interface with the game which is supposed to be easy to use, fun and rich in possibilities for interaction and collaboration. Gameplay The sole objective of the game PlastiCity is to experience urban planning processes in a changing city. Mushroom buildings grow from the ground, historic Victorian buildings can be destroyed and new buildings can be erected and modified. Most of the gameplay ideas stem from the suggestions Will Alsop presented as the Bradford Masterplan, but some of his ideas have been exaggerated and take the form of a cartoon style attitude. The original plan to have a well-shaped lake in the city centre led us to design a water feature which can be made into anything from a puddle, a pool, a pond right up to a huge lake. The element of water as part of the built environment seems to be central for the Masterplan. As Claude Parent observed: As a structural medium, the oblique is thus associated with all movement of fluids generated by either man or nature. (…) The element of water offers a

maximum receiving surface and developing a contact surface greater than that of the horizontal projection of the place. The oblique function conveys its potential to water: catchment, storage and channelling all help man to create in ‘sites’ the spectacle function fusion of the liquid element without mechanical intervention.

The players of the game will be able to change the lake’s water level. It was not Alsop’s plan to change Bradford into a Venice of the North, a sub-aquatic town or an island in the South Sea. However, the format of the game seems ideal to make such suggestions and to give free rein to the fantasy of the players unrestricted by considerations of cost. The gameplay is designed to promote elements of historic and aesthetic understanding and of fair-play in planning processes. However, our intention is that the game should first and foremost be fun to play. To this end, the game will contain additional playful elements in the form of sub-games. By walking certain paths you can switch on streetlights or discover secret building plans. We hope that this will add to the playability, longevity and intensity of the game experience. PlastiCity will allow players to explore the ways in which the City Masterplan can potentially improve the heart of the city. Rather than a cold, passive flythrough, or a realistically unbiased simulation of a city, PlastiCity will allow users to experience complete freedom of experimental urban planning. The game will provide ease of movement in real time, constructive and destructive operations on the built environment with the speed of a bullet, and a high degree of identification and real engagement with the environment accomplished through models and textures rendered in high resolution. It has sometimes been suggested that gamers are detached from the environment they move around in and from the environment they are physically located in, because of the unrealistic features of the game. Annet Decker stated: “Where in a game world the player needs a lot of concentration to get detached from the real world, in installation art the player is immediately immersed.” It could however be argued that a careful set-up of the gaming gear, contextual information and player-to-player communication keeps the players connected with the real world. PlastiCity tries to find that elusive balance between fantasy and commitment to the real world. Real Architects and Unreal Architects In no way do we wish to suggest that playing a game about urban planning equals urban planning. Will Alsop is well aware of the consequences of his actions when he suggests destroying the central section of the former Odeon building, whereas a 14-year-old gamer with a wand called “destroy” in his hand probably does not. PlastiCity should be understood as a comment on a city regeneration plan rather than as a tool for urban planning. We think however that the value of ludic planning cannot be underestimated in two regards. On one hand PlastiCity can raise awareness of architectural problems and issues in the redesigning of a city. On the other hand the game reflects the approach of creative personalities like Alsop whose creative processes are more often ludic than constraint-bound. The playful element in creating cities, recreating cities and erasing obsolete historically loaded

remains has its roots in processes that can be implemented more effectively by a game engine than by a pocket calculator. During the first phase the flow of information between architects and the team building Bradford in the Unreal environment was uni-directional. We referred to Alsop’s plans and tried to imagine how they could be reproduced in an Unreal world. Phase 2 will involve instigating a dialogue between game designers and urban planners. We hope to receive suggestions for buildings and even building strategies from Alsop’s office and intend to start phase 2 with a brainstorming session with Alsop in order to come up with gamespecific implementations of his ideas. On a more practical level, the office could provide us with 3D models which we would export to a format readable by the Unreal engine. In return we could provide the Lightwave partnership and Alsop Architects with data harvested from the game. We have already implemented functions to count the number of building processes carried out as well as the number of destructive processes. It has so far been interesting to observe that the number of progressive or avant garde planning actions undertaken has far outweighed the number of conservative or protective actions. This might have to do with the group of gamers we tested the game with, but it could also indicate that conservative resistence to changing a city – as published in the local media - does not in fact reflect the will and desire of the population, even if presented as such. It is our sincere hope that the game could in the best case promote increased levels of engagement in the processes of city planning. While we cannot go so far as to translate Brancusi’s statement of “Real architecture is sculpture” into “Real architecture is a game”, we might nevertheless be able to claim that “Unreal architecture is really relevant for real architecture.”

References: Emma Brockes in an interview with Will Alsop. Guardian, London, December 8, 2003. Markus Brüderlin: ArchiSkulptur. Dialoge zwischen Architektur und Plastik vom 18. Jahrhundert bis heute. Fondation Beyeler, Basel 2004. Martin Celmins: Unravelled - The Mysteries of the Masterplan. In:Telegraph and Argus, Bradford, July 4, 2005. Annet Decker: The New Art of Gaming or What Gaming Can Learn from Installation Art. In: Game Set and Match II (Eds. Kas Oosterhuis, Lukas Feiress). Episode Publishers, Rotterdam 2006. Claude Parent: The Function of the Oblique (Architecture Principe, Paul Virilio and Claude Parent) originally published in magazine Architecture Principe 1966, quoted in Jane Alison, Marie-Ange Broyer, Frédéric Migazrou, Neil Spiller: Future City. Experiment and utopia in Architecture 1956 – 2006. Barbican Art Centre, London 2006.