Urban Technology at University of Michigan week -16
Using video games to see cities anew + Jose Sanchez's Common'hood
Spending so much time at home this past year has resulted in new behaviors and patterns for just about all of us. Me, I’ve been playing more video games than I usually do. But while I’ve been playing games, my colleague Jose Sanchez has been building them. More on both below.
Hello! I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan that will welcome its first students in the 2021-2022 academic year. If you’re new here, try this 90 second video introduction. While we launch the program, we’re using this venue to explore themes and ideas related to our studies. Thanks for reading. Have questions about any of this? Hit reply and let us know.
🧑🌾 We’re Hiring!
If you or someone you know likes technology, cities, and design and is looking for a full-time gig, we’re seeking a proactive future team member to help build the most caring and well-crafted degree program at the intersection of technology and the built environment.
Curious but have questions? Hit reply to this email and we’ll talk. Otherwise, here’s a button you can click to learn more about the position:
🕶 Unusual Lenses
As the COVID numbers were skyrocketing last year, I first found solace in playing Katamari Damacy, wherein you push around a little ball that somehow magnetically grabs anything smaller than it. You’re essentially a hyper-dimensional, physics-defying, somewhat demented Marie Kondo. As you roll more items into your ball of stuff, the collection grows and you can pick up even larger items. Play the game long enough….
… And you can roll up trees and whales and entire buildings. There’s a lot to enjoy about this game. The music is catchy and the graphics decidedly nostalgic, but what I like most is that it is played at the intersection of two running themes for us: scale and time. Since you’re growing the size of the katamari, you have to be sensitive to scale, but since the katamari grows as you play, you also have to be thoughtful about the sequence of your cleaning rampage.
Providing a very different view into urban space is Untitled Goose Game. The premise is that “it’s a lovely morning in the village and you are a horrible goose.” But in fact you’re not a horrible goose, you are just a goose, and geese have different priorities than humans! Do geese care about private property? No! In Untitled Goose Game a serious amount of your time is spent stealing shiny things from humans (like the radio below). Do geese care about human social graces? Of course not! When you are not stealing things from humans, you’re bothering them for your own amusement. With stunning flat graphics and a clever generative soundtrack, UGG is anything but “ugh.”
You probably expected Sim City, Cities:Skyline, or maybe Townscaper, right? Those are great too, and certainly urban in theme, but what I really enjoy about Katamari Damacy and Untitled Goose Game are the unusual lenses they give us to think about cities.
Katamari Damacy asks us to think about how we perceive the city in loops. What sensitivities do you have from navigating your hometown thousands of times that a visitor does not? Likewise, Untitled Goose Game reminds us that humans are just one of millions of life forms that make their homes in cities. Our needs and priorities feel more important to us, but that arrogance is what led humanity to the climate crisis. What can we learn from thinking about cities like a goose?
Have any favorite games that help you understand the world in new ways?
🤝 Gaming Common Futures
Taubman faculty member Jose Sanchez created the game Block’hood, which is a city-building title focused on interdependence and ecology. Recently he and the team at Plethora Project released the trailer for Common’hood, a sequel of sorts, that invites you to now build a new habitat for a group of people who are left behind after an economic crash. Starting with an abandoned factory and little else, the question is ultimately about how you want to live. The trailer is gorgeous:
Jose describes both of his games in his recent book, Architecture for the Commons: Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms:
Projects such as Block’hood and Common’hood are video games that attempt to allow users to design and explore socioeconomical problems associated with their local communities. Platforms are utilized as a dashboard for combinatorial design aiming for the production of literacy and the development of digital infrastructure for participation and self-provisioning. At the core of these initiatives is an interest in generating architectural principles and designs that engage the world through a scope of resource management, systems thinking and ecological interdependence. The challenge is to effectively create a platform that is aimed at the construction of the common knowledges and repositories of architecture alternatives.
For architecture, platforms offer an opportunity to populate the landscape between experts and non-experts… The expansion of the discipline toward user-created content does not threaten the discipline with a form of deprofessionalization. On the contrary, it suggests a much larger portion of our population could take part in a critical discourse of citizenship through participation.
As Jose suggests, gaming is an important avenue for us in the urban technology program because it is a palpable way to bring future possibilities to life for the purposes of discussing their relative merits, much like the spectacular use of fire to prototype future cities that we wrote about a couple weeks ago. Common’hood and games like it offer players a chance to explore possible futures through the rich interface of an interactive and visually engaging simulation—and without the risk of getting burnt.
Next step? Connecting this to the city planning process, which is something that UNDP has been doing with Minecraft in recent years via their Block by Block initiative. There’s lots of room still to explore the use of AR, VR, and games like Common’hood in community planning. It will be exciting to see where Jose takes this.
Links
⚡️ Legos are the original game-like toy for city-obsessed people. But cities are easy, right… can you build a “functional” particle accelerator in lego? Yup.
🎚 A thorough analysis of the user experience of Lego interface panels. h/t Allan Chochinov
🪶 Here’s a game of sorts: Amulets are a form of crypto haiku (not quite but close enough) that’s very hard to write. took me hours to nail it by hand but building a amulet writing device would be a nice exercise for folks who want to test their coding skills. Courtesy of Robin Sloan, A MICHIGANDER!
💈 Want to see how downtown Ann Arbor looks with Tokyo’s signage? World Collider thinks you do. Surprisingly fun and a very clever use of AR by Tomo Kihara.
🥊 This is a game I would like to play with future students of urban technology. "What’s a human-powered computer?” It’s a room of people larping the functions of a computer to learn about how information is processed. How would the internet version of this look?