We see the town as a piece of modular architecture that should conform to the idea of a construction set, when a whole complex is built up by means of particular elements. The projects presented are to include functional zoning and the overall view of the town and its parts.
The project is to be presented with a textual explanation of the concept. Scale modelling is encouraged.
We're currently working on a project aimed at creating a new urban environment, an international association which will become a model for such settlements of the future where the town-forming basis will be game tourism and cybersports competitions.
On the 1st of April a group of Ducklings arrived at the Forest School (Iceland). Several brave MMORPG players are travelling about the land of mists and geysers. They have sightseeing, Eve fanfest and much more on the agenda.
On the 1st of April a group of Ducklings arrived at the Forest School (Iceland). Several brave MMORPG players are travelling about the land of mists and geysers. They have sightseeing, Eve fanfest and much more on the agenda.
But one shouldn't drop their guard even in this blessed land. The veterans stay alert. Observe the informational safety precautions. Fight the enemy on their own territory with minimum losses.
If you want to take part in the Universum Ludens foundation activities as a volunteer or a colonist, fill in the application form and wait for the questionnaire to the address you've given.
We will send you an e-mail with all the details
Modern architects keep working out new models of the cities of the future. Sometimes these plans are actually put into practice, the biggest-scale example being the city of Brasilia. Over the past years great emphasis has been placed on environmental awareness and smart urban infrastructure that would help to control unwieldy municipal facilities from a single computer centre (for instance, PlanIT Valley in Portugal).
Despite their being ambitious and capital-intensive these projects are mostly promotional and have little in common with the actual urban development. They are at best a try-out of certain engineering models that will become widely spread in 5, 10 or 15 years.
Cities or towns of the future are very likely to go out of date in no time and for good just because the innovations applied are standardized. If a certain place is built in the epoch of pagers and lots of funds are invested into state-of-the-art technologies (for example, there's a pager in every door entrance intercom), it will soon enough turn into a fossil of the 90s.
As such places are constructed mostly for show their architecture seems pretentious but is actually irritating, because it turns dwelling houses into pavilions and cheap office buildings. It's unclear who will agree to live in such a setup. The solution is very simple, though, if we think about employees of hypercompanies who don't have a work visa. The floating Googleplex of the Sea, for instance, was conceived for non-US citizens working at Google.
It's highly doubtful that people will continue living there after quitting the job or obtaining a certain level of financial independence. Fake cities of the future have no past and therefore no importance is attached to staying there, not even due to natural historical inertia. From the functional point of view those are still the same cheap technological towns of the XXth century that were constructed around a huge plant and supposed to last for several decades. If something goes wrong such places are “crossed out” with no remorse and left empty. The towns of Chernobyl and Slavutich were abandoned not only because of an ecological catastrophe but also because it is very easy to leave such short-lived settlements behind.
Here lies the main problem of modern urbanistics. As communication technologies and informational environment have undergone significant changes, and town-forming supra-industries have obviously declined, a new type of inhabitant is to emerge and it has to be neither a citizen nor a peasant. Thus, a new form of settlements is to be created and they will be very different from what we are used to, no matter if it is a village, a town, a city, a megalopolis or urbanized suburbs.
Those who will be able to foresee the new forms of human communities will as well have an opportunity of building a real city of the future. First it will be a prototype and a working model and then a matrix, infinitely reproduced around the world.
Over the past decade the necessity of public work has been gradually disappearing. The epoch of mass production is gone, and with the spreading of computerisation office employees are more of freelancers. The necessity of public life nowadays is still smaller. Thanks to a developed communications network a person can interact with others with the desired level of intensity and from anywhere. Due to some natural reasons this place is usually a quiet suburb rather than a busy city centre.
During the upcoming decades lots of people will be left out of the system of production. Right now the developed countries are creating fictitious employment for millions of citizens and this tendency will keep growing. As there are no financial problems in the post-industrial society, and straightforward unemployment is humiliating, the uselessness of the 50-70% of the population not engaged in a narrow range of required occupations will be covered up with intense entertainment activities. Considerable unemployment benefits will be paid out as prizes, bonuses, petty stock speculations and even not quite legal but socially harmless fraud. The important thing is that an economically useless person should feel extremely needed, popular and above all socially initiative and mobile.
The main paradox is that with the development of such a society “virtual (or game) economy” will actually be considered of great importance, just as agriculture and then industry used to be the basis of the economic activity. A post-industrial world is a negative definition. If we extrapolate the current tendencies to the future, the world will be a playing one. Homo sapiens will live in the universum ludens and maybe that will be their natural state.
The extreme development of virtual communication will inevitably cause and is already causing an urge to come up with brand-new forms of collective activities. It has to be neither work nor meaningless pastime. It is all about trying to exist in an alternative reality which is explicitly optional, yet always in the visual field of the object. Modern online games are a prototype of such collective interactions, and the construction of new type game centres may be the first step to creating new types of human communities. “The town of gamers” as a type of settlement will presumably have the following features: a).Population mobility. Having rather a stable (and small) size, the population of such settlements will be extremely mobile. The first towns of the kind will be built on the crossroads of the world's passenger flows, and lifestyle there will be very close to that of present-day hubs which are exterritorial zones and hotels in big international airports. Life there is a permanent symposium, and the main end of such settlements is to appease the hunger for real social communication. At the beginning of the 19th century the population of Moscow in winter increased threefold because the landowners from all Russia returned to their winter apartments “to see and to be seen”. In the town of gamers people will meet in real life their game partners who they haven't seen for several years or at all. b).No industries or media production. There will be no production in such towns, only some auxiliary services like shops, cafes, bakeries, outpatient clinics etc. 90 % of the people don't live in these places permanently and 90 % do not work there. They are not shift workers’ accommodation. c). Hierarchy. At the same time those are not resorts or entertainment centres where all social contacts among people are poorly organized or random. The key problem of all the "towns of the future" up to this moment has been the equality of their citizens and a standardized lifestyle so persistently declared. People not only want to live better, they want to live better than others. This is a basic human need, and such a stubborn disregard for it is certainly worthy of a nicer use. An exaggerated hierarchy, characteristic of the town of gamers, is to show in real life the position of a person that they are used to occupying only virtually. d). Theatricism. Communication in the town of gamers is theatrical and is similar to a Venetian carnaval. Thus, from the architectural and stylistic point of view these places look like a stage setting of a town. In their "futuristic" part they may have certain architectural characteristics of the contemporary "towns of the future", but it should be pointed out that nowadays such traits are not functional and are actually there to show the "advanced thinking" of this or that architect. In the “towns of the future” the general appearance of a settlement will be defined by a common metascenario. e). Game competition. Life in the towns of gamers will have enormous social mobility that will be 100 times higher than in ordinary towns or cities. Every citizen will be involved in the permanent playing process that will cause constant going up the hierarchical ladder and will slowly create a group of professional gamers or, more specifically, professional citizens of gamers' towns. f). Convertible property or "movable fixed property". Land and buildings in the towns of gamers will mostly be the citizens' property, but this property will be common and will easily change owners via game or mortgage transactions. For example, a private house may be owned by 50 people, each will have from 0,1% to 90% with the rent calculated accordingly. In two months the number of owners may add up to 30 or 70 and the shares of the owners may change completely
The Talnavel project envisages creating the first experimental "town of gamers" in Iceland.
We're speaking about the foundation (or total reconstruction) of a locality with about 500 inhabitants. Given the overall size of the country in question it's enough to thoroughly test all the social, economic and cultural aspects of the life in these new type settlements.
Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind that people have no skills of living in "gamers' towns", so at the beginning the true reason for staying there will be covered with certain objectives that are more familiar and comprehensible for the modern culture of communication.
During the first stage Talnavel will be presented as an educational research and tourist centre with a strong role-playing component. A bit later a multiversional scenario of staying there may be introduced and it will depend on the type of social behaviour in the game.
At the same time the staff of Talnavel will have to create an economic model and find permanent employees providing services to the project as well as optimize the game process which has its projection on the real life of the town.
We presume that only 25 people out of 500 will live in Talnavel on a permanent basis. 75 will stay there for a long time, from several months to 2 years. The majority will pass a day/week/month on the territory of the town, occasionally two or three times a year.
Within one year Talnavel's carrying capacity will be about 10 thousand people.
If the amount of applications starts to soar and the first stage is successfully completed it is possible to increase the number of people staying there at the same time from 5,000 to 25,000. Given the size of Iceland it will probably be reasonable to build from zero point some gamers' cities of the kind in other countries, presumably, in South Corea and California.
A town of gamers with a full range of functions is to include the following elements:
a) The digitalization of the town and its virtual citizens, not necessarily staying in it but owning real or game property there.
b) A bank that unlike some ordinary financial institution will be able to process transactions with a game currency or the town's currency. The bank is supposed to exchange all the main game currencies in the world for monetary units (real or conventional ones) that will be accepted everywhere in the town.
c) A hierarchical infrastructure of consumption that provides for social restaurants and distributing shops.
d) An efficient daily routine and a schedule of game events.
e) A developed system of the town's attributes, uniform and ceremonies.
f) An educational system: game schools and training that will gradually involve the citizens in a social career through certain games and roleplaying quests forming the common metascenario of staying in the town.
g) A transport system and an excursion office allowing to go on excursions outside the town.
h) The main building for the town's assemblies and the central drill square.
i) A system of standard residential buildings for 1 person or 2 people per house with 2 or 4 flats.
You can normally stay in Talnavel for 3 days, plus the days of your arrival and departure, and enjoy various services at the level of a 3-star hotel. A little participation in the playing activities will easily give you 2 extra days and new tourist destination choices. Later on, in accordance with the results of the game competitions you can either lose everything and live in a restricted space with almost no central heating or you can be awarded a luxury house with servants. Depending on your game achievements you'll be gaining access to more information about the history and aims of the project, you'll also have an opportunity to join the local authorities etc.
From the functional point of view (money saving, easy involvement in the playing process, simple stylization) the town of Talnavel should be designed as a post-nuclear base town, constructed on Earth, perhaps, by an alien race or a totalitarian sect. It should have a clear layout, an underground shelter and a space launching site. It will also blend in nicely with the surrounding landscape.
