How To Break Anything

A city is a complicated thing. With districts becoming neighborhoods, neighborhoods becoming streets, streets becoming homes, homes becoming rooms, and so on, there's a near-fractal level of every-increasing detail. So how do you build one in a videogame?

Grand Theft Auto has long been associated with the creation of realistic, living cities, with Liberty City in GTA IV arguably the peak of that art. Every corner is stuffed full of interesting things to see. But the problem with that approach is that it's very labour-intensive -- creating so much content by hand requires huge teams of designers, modellers and artists, and therefore you have to make compromises, like not allowing the player inside the majority of a city's buildings.

Introversion Software, the independent games studio behind cult titles Uplink, Defcon and Darwinia doesn't have the resources to hire legions of artists and designers, so it's taking a different strategy -- procedural generation. Procedural generation is a programming technique where pseudorandom number generators are fed into an algorithm, and that then cranks out a near-infinite amount of content. Streets, lamp-posts, rooms, buildings, and anything else that a city needs can be assembled in a relatively short space of time just from a string of numbers.

Cities aren't just villages, but bigger - cities represent an evolution of progressively complex relationships, as humans trying to more efficiently access, control, and share resources. The design of complex and networked environments in which humans interact with resources and other humans trying to access resources is actually very fascinating.

The above is a signal of an interesting concept - that our understanding of how these networks operate is becoming sophisticated enough that we can think about how to generate them automatically. In the above, the only thing being algorithmically generated is the details - "lamp-posts, rooms, and buildings," but it reminds me of how we are also beginning to generate and recreate complex networked infrastructures like rail systems, as illustrated below in Slime Mould Simulates Tokyo Rail Network:

What does Nostalgia for a past future mean to you?

This question comes about via OFFF, the International Festival for the Post-Digital Creation Culture.

A bit of perspective on how to think of time, nostalgia, future, etc

@calebkramer pointed me to this book; as you might expect I find the subject matter fascinating, neuroscience/perception/culture and all. I'll be reading it.

I'm mostly just curious to see how he solves the problem of "not making the same Socrates-esque case that's been made for centuries, that '[insert new media here] is ruining humanity'."

"The best-selling author of The Big Switch returns with an explosive look at technology’s effect on the mind. “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. Weaving insights from philosophy, neuroscience, and history into a rich narrative, The Shallows explains how the Net is rerouting our neural pathways, replacing the subtle mind of the book reader with the distracted mind of the screen watcher. A gripping story of human transformation played out against a backdrop of technological upheaval, The Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds"

If you've been following you may have discovered that I'm not too keen on dystopian/doomsday scenarios. I'll say again that if the future is going to be a scary place, well, it's been happening for centuries.

In fact, I watched this incredibly compelling video a few hours ago on scientific progress; perhaps not directly related to the above, but something along the lines of the goodness of progress:

An entirely fascinating set of thoughts on the future of humanity. Being deeply metaphorical it takes some time to really get what is going on, but before too long you can probably start to reflect on some of the statements and relate in some way.

Although:

I'm never much for doomsday scenarios; were it the case that the future is a scary place, well, it's been happening for centuries.

In other words, we presently live in the scary future that past generations predicted.

In other words, the scary future we're predicting now will feel exactly the same as the "scary present" feels today.

In other words, everything's going to be OK.

In other words, if there is some point along the timeline of humanity at which the threshold from absolute metaphysical "goodness" can be crossed into absolute metaphysical "tragedy," then either 1) it has already happened or 2) we won't notice when it does happen.

In other words, everything is going to be OK

(There is a valid counterpoint here, and it is to say that the present absolutely is scary, and things are not OK today. I just find that to be a sad way to live life.)

If you look at all the interesting concepts for how the iPad will fundamentally shift how we think about content, each one is the result of clever writers integrating creative narration into their work. Artists change the world, not technology.

Addendum: The above was inspired by the comment conversation on the PSFK post linked above:

Michael Kowalski:  Hm, so the iPad could be a good platform for multimedia, games and augmented reality. Not much of a surprise there. I expect the textbook industry in particular will be utterly transformed in short order. But what about, you know, *real* books? I would have liked to have seen how, say, the next Martin Amis will be “enhanced” on the iPad.

Kyle Studstill: @Michael I tend to think of this about a variety of media/story content in general as well. Movies, for example. Everything about a movie, promotion and all, is about getting you into the theater, and once you’ve seen the film you’re done. I’d be fascinated to see a movie written such that the experience of “watching the movie” continued in some way outside of the theatre. Perhaps something is written into the script such that some common event occurs that everyone can be a part of (and anticipate) months after people have seen the film opening week. I don’t know. But I do think that the kind of “enhanced” you’re talking about comes from within the work itself, not necessarily the iPad that holds it. I think you’re right if you’re saying the iPad gives storytellers a fantastic opportunity to create something with the ability to be “enhanced,” and I hope they do.

To which I was referencing a thought that occurred to me once upon a time:

From the future: The evolution of movie-based entertainment

 

'why so serious?' via socialhallucinations.tumblr.com

It occurs to me that every movie-based campaign focuses entirely on getting consumers into the theatre to watch the film. There have been more and more interesting ways of doing this, through events leading up to launch day, but everything culminates in seeing the film in theatre and then the experience is over.

Seeing this today got me thinking: 'what if the Batman: Dark Knight experience were still something ongoing?' Something we were still excited about today. What if inherent in the plot and script of a movie there was something that made the story much more than a 2-hour experience? Something in the script that took the movie into real life, an event that could be held months after opening day, once everyone has had a chance to see it and understand how the event is an extension of the plot.

At some point, we'll stop thinking of phones as devouring other devices; soon enough, we'll start thinking of it as devices that happen to be able to make calls as well. Kinda like how we had computers that just happened to have a solitare game on them too.