Urban Codemakers

Arbitrary patterns. Unstable IDEOTAGs. Mutating forms.

Having first established vectors for patterns of movement in his simulation, the Urbanist hacked the Eyes of the City to see what it could see. Now he throws a wild card into the mix.

Active nodes are slowly being infected. A virus. The Locative Urbanist is attempting to sabotage the hold that the Master Codemakers has on the city. On his program. His simulation of flows, traces and data is built on the game so far. This is the same data he is using to develop his proposal for the new City of Melbourne.

This week, the appearance of each and every IDEOTAG is unique.

How will the other Codemakers respond? Who will collect the infected IDEOTAGs? Will this act of revenge kill his program or mutate it into a new form…

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“According to E. O. Wilson’s Biophilia hypothesis*, humans have an innate desire to catalog, understand, and spend time with other life-forms.”

Time for another story this one is about Dr Bug.

Dr Bug is the childhood nickname of game designer Satoshi Tajiri. He earned this name due his fascination for studying insects he had as a child. Tajiri grew up in Machida, a western Tokyo suburb which was then still quite rural with rice paddies, rivers and forests. As the suburb became more developed the insects were driven away. Tajiri laments that urban children today do not have the opportunity to explore and learn about nature that way he did as a child. He designed the Pokémon game to recapture the pleasures of collecting and learning about creatures he so enjoyed as a child.

According to Science Magazine zoologists at the University of Cambridge are now looking to Pokémon for ways to engage children with conservation issues. There studies with a sample of 109 UK showed that children over 8 years old were able to correctly identify nearly 80%  of a sample drawn from the 150 virtual Pokémon creatures whilst struggled to identify their native wildlife such as a badger.

They were impressed by the children’s detailed knowledge of Pokémon. Noting that people care about what they know – they ask how can scientists uses games to re-establish links with nature?

How can game designers and urban designers work together to protect the future of all urban life? What is the potential of play?

Please collect and save the city’s ludic creatures.

*E. O. Wilson, Biophilia (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1984)

Pokédex

Interview with Satoshi Tajiri

Even with the slight success in running our program that has resulted in a small increase in the number of ideotags gathered for our guild, we are still deeply aware that the contested space of the city will not fall in line with our plans.

And so we find ourselves wondering at what that means for us, and for the intelligence we uncovered in the city.

We wonder if, perhaps, we have been to binary about this whole affair, breaking things down into discrete packets of zeros and ones, success and failure, black and white, people and buildings, urban and rural, life and death.  We wonder if, perhaps, there is a space between these extremes, something transitory where the expected rules of systems break down into things that cannot be measured, only observed.  We wonder if, perhaps, we should have been looking there all along.  Will there be meaning?  Will there be life?  Can everything be encoded and sampled and endlessly repeated and simulated?  Can we predict the future if we know everything about the past and present?  Or do we all exist within that contested space between states of certainty?

We also wonder if, perhaps, the other guilds understand this – through intuition or study – and whether our gaze should be turned on them instead of the city itself.