An Open World

In the "I-Can't-Believe-Someone-Made-This" Category today, some hard-core fans of Grand Theft Auto IV went ahead and put all of Liberty City online... with Google Street View. I've definitely made use of this site before to find locations on their map, but it looks like you can also now drop that yellow figurine onto Rockstar's pint-sized Manhattan and take a look at their version of Times Square, then compare it to the real one.

I like to point out when video games or cool data visualization can be used to improve real-world urban planning, but this is... the reverse? the opposite? Just go check it out, it's awesome. Be sure to turn full screen on.

Meanwhile, the relentless onslaught of technical progress continues, as Google is well on their way in photographing business interiors and incorporating that into Street View. Entering stores from a first person view, is, of course, a staple mechanic of role-playing games, which actually gives me a really good idea. What if you overlaid "characters" or "shopkeepers" into store screens and then gave them dialogue and things to buy? What if you were able to create an entire game out of the real world just by piggybacking onto Street View?

Well, this is interesting: a media producer/festival director named Marcus Westbury started a program called Renew Newcastle to find a way of revitalizing his hometown without going through traditional processes of city planning, which could be very time-consuming and expensive. The idea is to consider cities as software, or, to be more precise, creating better "software" (processes) that run on aging, underutilized "hardware" (city infrastructure). Westbury describes on example of this:

Renew Newcastle started by hacking how much spaces cost and the terms they were available on. While there were over 150 empty buildings in Newcastle few if any of them were cheap or simple to access. They were bound up in complex rules – from bad tax incentives to complex, costly and long-term commercial leases that made it difficult to access them flexibly. Renew Newcastle traded cost for security. We created new rules, new contracts, and convinced owners to make spaces available for what was effectively barter – we would find people to clean them use them and clean them and activate them and they could have them back if and when they needed them. We stepped outside the default legal framework in which most property in Australia is managed and created a new one. We used licenses not leases, we asked for access not tenancy and exploited the loopholes those kinds of arrangements enabled. While such schemes are institutionalised in many European countries they have little precedent in Australia – in Newcastle, the entire scheme was devised, brokered and implemented directly from the community without the involvement of a government or formal development authorities still grasping at hardware based solutions. Only after the first dozen buildings had been activated did any funding appear. More than two years later any changes to rules and regulations – to the operating system – are yet to transpire.

The entire metaphor of city as hardware and operating system software is quite apt in the entire write-up, and the process of getting around all of it as "hacking" the city is one that bears consideration. But to a certain extent, the metaphor might simply be describing a common process of artists and creative types who have descended on decayed urban infrastructure to ultimately transform it, as have been seen in places like Greenwich Village and SOMA and is ongoing in neighborhoods like Northern Liberties (Philadelphia) and my own neighborhood, the Uptown district of Oakland.

I think the takeway here, for the tech-savvy, is that you can see the city as a system of hardware and software. Hardware is expensive, fixed in place, difficult to upgrade in timely and affordable ways. But people, organizations, and communities are software. As Westbury notes, some software is regulatory in nature, like anti-virus software that is overzealous in protecting against threats. The rest of us, however, should come up with software that essentially hacks the city, making its hardware do new and better things it wasn't necessarily designed to do.

[via Grist]

I've been incredibly busy at work recently, and haven't really given myself the opportunity to cap off my series on Gamification, which really needs a few hours so I can assemble some thoughts together and have it addressed in a thoughtful way. Meanwhile, industry charges forward even when I'm not around to observe it. This latest service is called Chromaroma, which gamifies the London Tube in exactly the way Jesse Schell imagined it: users get immediate visual feedback on the number of Oyster Card swipes, how far they've travelled, what stations they use the most, and all of that contextualized with the thousand or so players currently signed on with the service.

There's achievements for visiting a certain number of stations, for holding the record for fastest journey between two stations, or for being a "Busy Bee" and passing through five stations in the same day. You can pick up missions (or "quests" in RPG parlance) like visiting a certain set of stations or a particular station on a given day. And all users are placed on teams, so whichever team's players rides the most tubes and gets the most points for doing so "wins." I guess.

But forgetting all that for just a moment, if you strip away the game portion of this, what you're left with is a delicious visualization of transit patterns. When can we start feeding hard data into Chromaroma's machinery and have it crank out colorful, 3D charts of New York City subway ridership?

The issue with gamification, which I've touched on in my previous post, is the question of whether too much of a game can be sustained over the long term, even as it encourages participation only in the short term. The goal of Chromaroma may be to encourage a certain population to take transit more, which is an excellent goal to have, but do we take transit for the sake of winning? What happens to the players when they're tired of the game? 

On a related note, yesterday was Bike to Work Day in San Francisco, and I did notice a marked increase in the number of bikes on BART (my usual form of transportation). As a personal anecdote with no statistical basis, it succeeded in getting some commuters to bike who didn't normally do so. But it's just one day out of the year; today, they're probably back to paying tolls on the Bay Bridge. There's a sense that most folks are willing participants in activities they deem worthy even if there's no trophy, virtual or otherwise, at the end of the day, as long as someone creates something to participate in. Maybe you make Bike to Work Day or Take Public Transit Day one day a week, like Casual Friday.

[video: Chromaroma from Mudlark on Vimeo]

[via Brute Labs]

Just last week, Rockstar Games and the Los Angeles Times revealed an interactive crime map for the City of Angels circa 1947 to promote L.A. Noire, an open-world game I wrote about not too long ago. It features a heavily curated selection of actual crimes geospatially located on a Yahoo! map, along with a newspaper clipping describing just how unrosy the past could be: a jealous man attacks a woman in a ballroom, another man gets stabbed in the neck by his fiance, a 72-year old oil driller picks up three hitchhikers, who then attempt to steal his car at gunpoint... and he fights them off, because he's that much of a badass.

This is really art imitating life, because a 1947 L.A. crime map is actually the third of its kind in California, despite being chronologically older because it works from a 64-year-old dataset. Its predecessors are the excellent Oakland Crimespotting map, and its spinoff sister site San Francisco Crimespotting, which have been visually mashing together police agency data with OpenStreetMaps since 2007. Most jurisdictions publish crime information for the public; they're just not usually as accessible as Stamen Design have made it. Their mission with Crimespotting is one I'm hoping to espouse more often in this blog:

We’ve found ourselves frustrated by the proprietary systems and long disclaimers that ultimately limit information available to the public. As citizens we have a right to public information. A clear understanding of our environment is essential to an informed citizenry.

Instead of simply knowing where a crime took place, we would like to investigate questions like: Is there more crime this week than last week? More this month than last? Do robberies tend to happen close to murders? We’re interested in everything from complex questions of patterns and trends, to the most local of concerns on a block-by-block basis.

...

We believe that civic data should be exposed to the public in a more open way. With these maps, we hope to inspire local governments to use this data visualization model for the public release of many different kinds of data: tree plantings, new schools, applications for liquor licenses, and any other information that matters to people who live in neighborhoods.

Here's to hoping that there's more of this in the future, even if it means starting with information from the past.

There's a block of apartments in Ljubljana, Slovenia designed by OFIS arhitekti which locals had nicknamed the "Tetris Apartments" because of its unique facade, resembling different colored L-shapes piled up by an ineffective Tetris player. Despite not having actually been influenced by Tetris (apparently, the facade design came from tracing the floorplan, rather than by mimicking the Russian puzzle-action game), the architects ran with it anyway when introducing the geometric concepts behind the building in a recent video.

If anything, I would say it's more influenced by the Atari 2600.

[via ArchDaily]

If you've ever ridden the BART Transbay Tube between Oakland and San Francisco (as I do, every day), you've probably heard that high-pitched screech as the train's wheels are grating along the track. The fact that you're stuck inside a ten-minute echo chamber doesn't help, either. Well, in the category of this-is-old-news-but-I-just-learned-it-this-week, it turns out someone thought that sound could be recycled for a science fiction horror game. That game is Dead Space. Says audio designer Don Veca:

I’m not sure why, but for some reason the tracks really scream down there… but in a very “scary” way – lots of high, screechy over-tones, big bottom end, and very dynamic. In later years as a sound designer at EA, I started thinking that this sound would be perfect for a game, but I didn’t know what game or where. Fast-forward to Dead Space – the perfect place for it. The sound we actually used in the game was recorded in the tunnel while standing between two cars (where it says “Do Not Stand Between Cars”). I didn’t really know where in the game to put it, but in our early demo there was a very inconspicuous room right after the first “zero gravity/zero air” moment that seemed to have no purpose. Since the Horror genre is also known for its heavy use of contrast, audio-wise, it seemed to be the perfect place to use this sound. When you open the air-vac door from the virtually silent “zero G moment” into this next room that has air (and therefore sound), you immediately get this deafening, screechy, scraping, pseudo-mechanical ambient roar. The art team jumped on this, and turned that room into a dark but strobing visual environment to match the audio. It was pretty cool.

Of course, BART's little traincar of horrors has less to do with mutants and more to do with microbes, but anyway, I thought this was a cool tidbit to cap off the week.

Read the full interview with Don Veca at Original Sound Version.

I must've spent a good twenty minutes or so yesterday mesmerized by Google's Map Maker live stream, showing the work of amateur cartographers adding roads and filling in buildings all over the world. Although the Map Maker service was launched in 2008 so Google could crowd-source the map making in areas where cartographic sources was minimal, it was only last week that they opened the feature to the United States.

What do people add when roads are already fairly complete for the U.S.? Apparently, it's good for filling in details like college campus maps, local parks and businesses, and bike and pedestrian paths — all information that's been spottily represented in many municipalities thus far.

Unfortunately, while Google will credit your submission, they essentially own that information — and you can't really get any of that back out, short of screenshotting their site. OpenStreetMap, which has allowed user edits for much longer than Google has, licenses all its data in Creative Commons and gives you a whole host of options when you want to export it to something else. But Google's reach and presence is a lot larger than OpenStreetMap, so the tradeoff here is completeness of data versus availability and usability of data.

But what if Google makes user contributions available for download, much like they already do for SketchUp's 3D Warehouse? 

This blog isn't old enough to start off with this line, but I'll say it anyway: Long-time readers of An Open World are familiar with my go-to example of the Grand Theft Auto IV when it comes to immersive, fully explorable virtual cities in a video game environment. Rockstar, GTA's developer, didn't shy away from the extensive research needed to build Liberty City, a mirror-universe New York City — we're talking site visits, a ton of photography, and keeping a full-time research team in the Big Apple to report on everything from traffic patterns to the composition of ethnic minorities in each neighborhood to how the sky moves. It's no wonder that Rockstar picked up developer Team Bondi's L.A. Noire, a similarly ambitious undertaking for a murder mystery game set in 1947 Los Angeles.

This isn't Rockstar's first outing in sunny Southern California. They've previously mimicked 90s-era L.A., calling it Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Then in 2008, they stepped up the realism with the street racing simulator Midnight Club: Los Angeles — it's the actual Los Angeles this time, no renaming necessary. If you can find it, you can floor your Mitsubishi Eclipse right past the landscaped animal sculptures of Santa Monica's 3rd Street Promenade.

And then, as if there wasn't a challenge hard enough to back down from, Rockstar will capture the essense of a city as it was over sixty years ago — likely before any of the programmers and certainly most of the gamers were even alive. An analysis of traffic patterns would be worthless; studies of ethnic makeup, completely irrelevant.

But according to an L.A. Times article, it just means the research has to go where the historians do: to the library. 

Trolley car routes! In a video game! Yeah, that's right — in case you didn't know, Los Angeles used to be covered by trolleys. In fact, that's how most people got around from neighborhood to distant neighborhood. If you're in the game, driving around Los Angeles, but you want to get on the 101 — well, you can't. It doesn't exist yet. It's Los Angeles before it was crisscrossed by 10-lane highways. 

And it's also the Los Angeles of Who Framed Roger Rabbit — which also takes place in 1947, coincidentally — and its plotline, while ostensibly about a murder, a hapless detective and a cartoon lagomorph, is set upon an actual historical backdrop: when the automobile industry conspired to buy out the Pacific Electric Railway company and run it into the ground. Judge Doom's proposed freeway is where the actual I-10 is now, and it used to be a Red Car line, from Santa Monica to Covina and beyond by way of Downtown. 1947 Los Angeles is one where Eddie Valiant gets to say, "Who needs a car in LA? We've got the best public transportation system in the world!"

Of course, not everything is peaches and roses in 1947. The L.A. Times also notes that the city of the time was also choked by smog and the deleterious outputs of industry, which needed time and technology before people figured out how to clean it all up. Supposedly, all that's wrong with 1947 is faithfully recreated in L.A. Noire as well. But at a time when Angelenos are battling over whether to extend dedicated bus rapid transit through Wilshire Boulevard, it might take a video game to remind us that just sixty years ago, they already had that kind of service through that neighborhood. Like GTAIV's Liberty City or real-world New York City, 1947 Los Angeles was a place where your car wasn't the only viable mode of transportation. Of course, no one remembers those days anymore. But if L.A. Noire lives up to its hype, it's not just a treat for architects and historians — it'll be a fascinating lesson for urban planners as well.

Several months after Schell's inspiring talk at DICE seemingly lit a fire under web developers to "gamify" their services, user experience designer Sebastian Deterding followed up with his own blistering critique of this ongoing craze (he notes that the term "gamification" itself was likely invented by Bunchball, a service aimed at adding just that to your company's website). The talk itself isn't online, but the 62-slide presentation and Deterding's script are. And he points out five confusions about what gamification really is, and three unintended side effects that could actually make behavior worse. Although you should probably just look at it, I'll provide my own summary of salient points here.

One of the most important confusions is the idea that just adding points and badges to make something look like a game is enough -- but it's not. An achievement system doesn't automatically create a fun game or even a good game. If that was true, a simple Flash game that gave you a million points every time you clicked a button should be the funnest thing ever, but it's not. Even looking at video games themselves, there are plenty that are poorly implemented and tested, and disappear into bargain bins forever. 

People don't play games just someone can give them points or badges for accomplishment. It's the process of accomplishment itself that drives the gamer, or what Deterding calls intrinsic motivation. Quoting from designer Raph Koster, he notes that we play games because they "provide experiences of competence, self-efficacy, and mastery." We play games because they're internally fulfilling, not because someone is giving us a separate incentive to play games. Imagine if someone paid you -- an extrinsic reward -- to beat a game. Is that still a game, or is it now work?

And that's one of the unintended side effects: too much gamification means that at some point attaining these achievement badges become the goal, rather than the task itself. When you feel your goal is an extrinsic reward, your intrisic motivation matters less and less. Suppose an in-game achievement wants you to defeat 200 enemies. You could either play the game as usual and earn the badge over the course of normal gameplay. Or you could go out and specifically devote time to defeating 200 enemies (an utterly boring process that gamers call "grinding" -- just like an unfulfilling job). Or worse yet, you might discover a bug that allows you to stand in one place and defeat instantly-respawning monsters in one hit. You would never need to take advantage of the bug unless you were trying to gain the achievement.

Deterding notes that gamification leads to gaming the system and exploiting loopholes: when drivers were given the goal of saving fuel, for example, they unsafely ran red lights, because stopping and going would result in more fuel usage. Or when an economist incentivized his daughter to use the toilet by giving her Skittles each time she went, she trained herself to go every twenty minutes. And when he incentivized his daughter to train his younger son to use the potty, she made him drink more water to force him to go more. Of course, we all know using the toilet instead of your pants is a good idea. But it was no longer about doing it for the good, it was about doing it for the Skittles.

Lastly, one of the main goals of gamification is to encourage more community involvement and participation -- and these are vital components in city planning, where it's important to find consensus within a large group of very different people. And again, that's not necessarily the case when something is gamified. The novelty of it wears off, only the most competitive (a small percentage of overall accounts) ever consistently participate, and -- as we've seen with extrinsic rewards -- relationships and interaction aren't fostered because people ought to care about each other, but because they're seeking achievement badges.

So it's entirely possible that gamification itself is an idea that can't work as intended, as Deterding suggests. But rather than writing it off entirely, it's important to note that with all lessons, there's a wrong way of implementing it and a right way. Is it still possible to take what's fun and good about games and apply it to life? In the next part I'll talk about the work of Jane McGonigal, one of the current prominent voices on this front. Be right back!

[via Fast Company Design]

[Skittles image by Krystle Fleming]

What is the world like when we try to apply game design to real life? There' s an ongoing movement of the last couple of years in which people (well, game designers) have noticed that our in-game achievements routinely affect our lives in small but somewhat meaningful ways, whether we're just trading in emotion (a proud "I did it!") or in cash, such as microtransactions in FarmVille. And according to Jesse Schell, a game designer and professor at Carnegie Mellon, this is just the beginning. At a talk given at DICE 2010 (yeah, last year), he envisions a possible future where we're constantly racking up points for every positive action we do in real life. It's a half hour long, but it's really engaging and worth watching if you haven't seen it already.

And it's just one interpretation of this big idea that people have begun to call "gamification." It's no longer a new idea in the game design world, but it's still so new that most of us -- including architects and urban designers and even most gamers -- have probably never even imagined the possibilities. And I think starting off with this in mind is a good way to introduce the idea of gaming to the very real discipline of urban design.

So, is this a good future? Is this even how we want to live our lives? Coming up in Part Two, I'll take a look at some of the critical response to gamification.