Slides and notes for ‘Limits of the Imaginable’ – a lecture on the future of applied game design

Last week I found myself in the gor­geous sur­round­ings of the Roy­al Dutch Acad­e­my of Sci­ences (KNAW) to talk about my views on the future of applied game design at an expert meet­ing orga­nized by the Nether­lands Study Cen­tre for Tech­nol­o­gy Trends (STT). I was one of four speak­ers, the oth­ers being David Shaf­fer, Jeroen van Mas­trigt (HKU) and Jeroen Elf­ferich (Ex Machi­na). The lec­tures focused on var­i­ous domains: edu­ca­tion, soci­ety and tech­nol­o­gy, respec­tive­ly. My focus was design. Below you’ll find a selec­tion of slides and my notes for the talk.1 If you’re deal­ing with fore­sight, design fic­tion, applied games, archi­tec­ture or biol­o­gy, I hope you’ll find it use­ful or at least thought-pro­vok­ing.2

Hel­lo, my name is Kars. I am the founder and prin­ci­pal design­er at Hub­bub, a stu­dio that inves­ti­gates ways of affect­ing soci­ety and cul­ture using games in pub­lic space. Thank you Jac­co for invit­ing me here. So I was asked to talk about design. These kinds of pre­sen­ta­tions often start with a def­i­n­i­tion of design. I won­t’t do that. Instead I’ll start with an example:

This is Roy Neary (played by Richard Drey­fus) in the film Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind. You are all famil­iar with this film, I assume? What Roy does in the film, build­ing this mound with­out know­ing up front what it is or what it means: design­ers to this all the time. They engage in think­ing through mak­ing.

These are images from the Lyd­dle End 2050 project, insti­gat­ed by Rus­sell Davies. He invit­ed peo­ple all over the world to imag­ine the future by mod­i­fy­ing mod­el rail­way stuff. The idea is that mak­ing mod­els is a kind of time trav­el. It’s also inter­est­ing to see how it’s kind of a col­lec­tion of indi­vid­ual imag­in­ings that gel because of the few small con­straints. Rus­sell calls this way of work­ing ‘spec­u­la­tive modeling’.

Design

So any­way, design deals with the future all the time. It shares this with sci­ence fic­tion. Where the two over­lap, peo­ple often talk about design fic­tion. This is when one uses the tech­niques of design to cre­ate believ­able poten­tial futures or to sug­gest alter­na­tive presents. One per­son who is quite active in this field is the sci­ence fic­tion author turned design crit­ic Bruce Ster­ling. In a recent arti­cle, he writes that we are expe­ri­enc­ing “a mas­sive cyber­net­ic hem­or­rhage in ways of know­ing the world”. We have so many ways of exam­in­ing real­i­ty, that this has lead to a col­lapse of our val­ue sys­tems. Old ways of deter­min­ing what is worth­while have gone out the window.

He also describes how design and sci­ence fic­tion as a result have become unable to effec­tive­ly imag­ine any future. This is the prob­lem I find myself con­front­ed with. But I’m not the only one. Famous sci-fi author and con­tem­po­rary of Ster­ling, William Gib­son, has stopped writ­ing sci­ence fic­tion. The same goes for Kim Stan­ley Robin­son, whose recent book is on Galileo Galilei. In an inter­view he says:

“If the world is a sci­ence fic­tion nov­el then what do you read? What can the lit­er­a­ture do for you?” What indeed.

The way to deal with this, as Ster­ling writes in the afore­men­tioned arti­cle, is to map the edges of what we cur­rent­ly find imag­in­able. To get a sense of the con­tours of that gap. And sub­se­quent­ly to plug it. The way to plug this hole is through action. Through prag­ma­tism. I think that is the only viable stance. In this time, when we (or at least I) have been kind of total­ly gob­s­macked by cur­rent events, “peak every­thing” as John Thackara likes to call it. The way to move ahead is by doing, by con­stant self-improve­ment, through ‘prac­tice’ as Ger­man philoso­pher Peter Slo­ter­dijk calls it. In fact, I think the “gam­ing mind­set” that Jane McGo­ni­gal talks about is sim­i­lar to this stance. So we as game design­ers might need to become more like our play­ers. Fear­less­ly ven­tur­ing into the unknown, think­ing through action, con­stant­ly self-improving.

But any­way, back to the gap. What might the con­tours of that gap be? I would like to look at two areas where I feel like I am run­ning up against true unknowns. One is the urban­ist, deal­ing with the cities more and more of us humans find our­selves liv­ing in. The oth­er is bio­log­i­cal, deal­ing with the liv­ing, the myr­i­ad species we share this plan­et with, all the way down to the small­est ones, like bac­te­ria. And the build­ing blocks of life. At the end, I hope you’ll come to share my vision, which is that we need a new kind of game design, one that is much more rela­tion­al and envi­ron­men­tal, to deal with these unknowns.

Cities

So cities. Let’s start by agree­ing that humans are becom­ing an urban species. More and more peo­ple find them­selves liv­ing in cities. Over 50% of the globe’s pop­u­la­tion. We’ve kind of invent­ed cities to aug­ment our abil­i­ties, as these kind of engines of cul­ture. Cities work (or used to work any­way) because it allowed all these dif­fer­ent kinds of peo­ple, all with their own spe­cial­i­ties, to live in close prox­im­i­ty to each oth­er. They enable rapid exchange of ideas. They increase serendip­i­ty, which is this dri­ving force behind inven­tion. No won­der design­ers love busy urban centers.

Cities are becom­ing the new states, they are lead­ing the way, in stead of the nations they are part of. In devel­op­ing coun­tries peo­ple move into the city in the hopes of find­ing a bet­ter life. Devel­op­ing cities put a tremen­dous pres­sure on the envi­ron­ment, this we all know. Old ways of build­ing cities don’t work any­more at the cur­rent scale. Old cities need hack­ing and fix­ing. At the same time, they’re our best bet of sur­viv­ing into the future. Matt Jones wrote a design fic­tion piece about this with the won­der­ful title ‘The City Is A Bat­tle­suit For Sur­viv­ing The Future’.

But it’s not just about the good old cities in the west­ern world. It gets weird­er when you look to the devel­op­ing world. We real­ly do not know what life is like in those cities, what makes them work. Let alone what game design for those urban­ites looks like. Take the city of Shen­zhen, for instance. Whol­ly owned by man­u­fac­tur­er Fox­conn. It was dubbed iPod City because it man­u­fac­tures Apple parts. More than 14 mil­lion peo­ple live there. Life is gov­erned by “a schizoid mix of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism and hard­line com­mu­nism”.3 Can you imag­ine these peo­ple play­ing Xbox Knect? I can’t.

But what will they play? And, as applied game design­ers, what issues can we address? If we want to invent for such a cul­ture, we’d first need to get to know it. I myself have worked on applied urban games in the past for under­priv­i­leged areas of Dutch cities. We focused on cre­at­ing games that increase social cohe­sion, renew peo­ple’s sense of agency in the hopes of rekin­dling cit­i­zen­ship, but real­ly, those are all issues rel­e­vant to West­ern con­tem­po­rary cities. If iPod City is the future of cities, I want to know what the social issues are there, and start design­ing for those.

Sci­ence fic­tion author J.G. Bal­lard pre­dict­ed Shen­zhen, to an extent. In his nov­el Super-Cannes he describes an elite work­er’s par­adise called Eden-Olympia. It’s a closed soci­ety where every­thing is per­fect­ly arranged. The pro­tag­o­nist enters this par­adise and dis­cov­ers an under­world where peo­ple engage in heinous acts. The thing is, the res­i­dents wel­come this under­world, and are even encour­aged to engage in it by res­i­dent psy­chi­a­trists as a stress release. To escape from the bore­dom and social restraint that gov­erns their every­day life. I don’t know. But maybe applied game design can do for Shen­zhen what this under­world does for Eden-Olympia? Offer a release valve?4

When I was prepar­ing this talk I thought I would leave it at that. But this being a talk about design I felt oblig­ed to at least make a small attempt at envi­sion­ing what such a game might be. So on the way here, in the train, I did some quick sketch­es. The first, as you can see, is me try­ing to fig­ure out what a per­son in a Shen­zhen-like future city might be dream­ing of. Again I hon­est­ly do not know. The only way to fig­ure out is to go to such cities and explore what life there is like.

The sec­ond was inspired by some quick research I did on social games pop­u­lar in Chi­na. It turns out many of the games on Chi­nese social net­work­ing sites are clones of the ones we know from Face­book and such. Like Far­mville. There’s one impor­tant dif­fer­ence though: many of these games are much less ‘friend­ly’ and fea­ture com­pet­i­tive, even nasty ele­ments. In the Chi­nese equiv­a­lent of Far­mville, you can steal stuff from oth­er play­ers homes, or leave pests in their yards… So I was think­ing back to Bal­lard’s Eden-Olympian under­ground, and was won­der­ing if a per­va­sive game that would catch on in Shen­zhen might involve pick­pock­et­ing? Anyway.

Biology

Lets move on from cities to biol­o­gy. Maybe it’s best to start by telling you about a project I am involved with, which I have code­named Buta.5 Project Buta is about explor­ing the poten­tial of games for inter­ac­tion between humans and domes­tic pig. You could call it a crit­i­cal design project, where we are attempt­ing to come up with designs that are fea­si­ble on the one hand, and on the oth­er hand embody the many eth­i­cal stand­points one finds in the meat indus­try: those of farm­ers, con­sumers, cit­i­zens, ani­mal rights activists etc. What hap­pens to peo­ple’s per­cep­tion of pigs if they play with them and dis­cov­er (like I did) that they are at least as intel­li­gent as your pet dog?

So trans-species inter­ac­tion. That’s a tru­ly brave new world, some­thing I can only see the con­tours of. Natal­ie Jere­mi­jenko is a design­er who is very active in this space. She talks about re-script­ing the ways we relate to our envi­ron­ment, includ­ing the liv­ing species we co-inhab­it it with.6 Many of her works are very play­ful. Like this tad­pole walk­er, or this rig that one can use to com­mu­ni­cate with fish. Com­pared to humans, ani­mals are a whol­ly unex­plored ter­rain of playmates.

Or con­sid­er the field of syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy, which looks at biol­o­gy as a mate­r­i­al for design. Every year, at the iGEM (Inter­na­tion­al Genet­i­cal­ly Engi­neered Machines) Jam­boree, teams of stu­dents com­pete in the cre­ation of new liv­ing sys­tems. On of last year’s entries was an e.coli bac­te­ria that can secrete one of sev­en col­ors. It was dubbed E.chromi. Design­ers who were part of this team pro­posed a thing called Scat­a­log: cheap, per­son­al­ized dis­ease mon­i­tor­ing using this new bac­te­ria. You eat the bac­te­ria, they col­o­nize your intestines and col­or your feces if a dis­ease is detected…

Can you imag­ine using liv­ing mate­ri­als as a plat­form for your game? The mind bog­gles. OK, one more. This is design fic­tion, but let’s be hon­est, if we can get bac­te­ria to make pret­ty col­ors, why can’t we make trees grow con­duc­tive lay­ers so that they can become a plat­form for com­pu­ta­tion? This is Com­pu­ta­tion­al Wood, a project by Matt Cot­tam. Imag­ine trees that can act as com­put­ers. As they grow, they might become more pow­er­ful machines. Machines that could be used for play and games.

So, again, some sketch­es. Future games might be cre­at­ed around syn­thet­ic sub­stances. Maybe you can play a game of food poi­son­ing. You sneak a game sub­stance into your friend’s food with­out him notic­ing. Next day he wakes up with a green tongue. You win.

I have a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion the only rea­son we haven’t seen soc­cer match­es between humans and dogs is because the dogs will sure­ly win.

In summary…

Let’s sum­ma­rize the points I’ve been try­ing to make. To start, design­ers deal with the unknow­able all the time. They explore the unknow­able through mak­ing. But myself, and many design­ers and futur­ists alike are hav­ing issues with get­ting a clear pic­ture of what lies ahead. It seems as if there are unchart­ed lim­its to our cur­rent-day imag­i­na­tion. I have tried to show you two domains where I myself have run into these lim­its, where I have to throw up my hands and say: “I don’t know”. In the hopes that we can start mov­ing beyond those bor­ders. Not by talk­ing, but by mak­ing. What’s our Dev­ils Tow­er?

The first domain is: the future of cities. We are an urban species, and if we want to arm our­selves for future life we’d bet­ter learn to live well in cities. But the future city looks noth­ing like the one we know now. It’s prob­a­bly some­thing like Shen­zhen. What does life look like in there? What kinds of play can we imag­ine in that space? It’s part­ly a new tech­no­log­i­cal fron­tier, part­ly a social one.

The sec­ond is: the realm of the liv­ing. Biol­o­gy is becom­ing a mate­r­i­al for design. This includes game design. Can you imag­ine a game that runs on bac­te­ria? Or that you play with your back­yard fox? Just like we need to learn to live well in cities. We need to learn to live well with the oth­er species inhab­it­ing this plan­et. Play is a uni­ver­sal, trans-species lan­guage. Future applied game design will need to deal with the bio­log­i­cal as much as with the tech­no­log­i­cal. The line between both will sure­ly blur.

So those are some of the lim­its of the imag­in­able, as I see them. I hope you feel an urge to plug the hole in our imag­i­na­tion of this future as much as I do. And I would sug­gest we do this through action. The main chal­lenge I see with all this is nice­ly summed up by a quote from the archi­tect Eliel Saari­nen:

“Always design a thing by con­sid­er­ing its next larg­er con­text — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an envi­ron­ment, an envi­ron­ment in a city plan.”

It reminds me of the Ray and Charles Eames film Pow­ers of Ten. In oth­er words, we need to become bet­ter at under­stand­ing the effects any­thing we make has on its sur­round­ing con­text. We might need new tools for this, or new ways of look­ing at things. It might be that the games we make are a way to see these sec­ond-order effects.

The future of applied game design, in oth­er words, is a future where design has become very much a rela­tion­al, and envi­ron­men­tal dis­ci­pline. But per­haps it already is.

1. The slides with­out notes are also up on SlideShare. [↩]
2. A video of the talk is now up on Vimeo. [↩]
3. For a fas­ci­nat­ing account of Shen­zhen, see ‘The bal­let of iPod City’. [↩]
4. For a view on Bal­lard’s sig­nif­i­cance for video game design, have a look at the arti­cle ‘Rag­doll Meta­physics: JG Bal­lard, Bore­dom, And The Vio­lent Promise Of Videogames’ by Jim Rossig­nol. [↩]
5. I am work­ing on this at the Utrecht School of the Arts’ Design for Play­ful Impact research pro­gram. [↩]
6. For a good intro­duc­tion to Jere­mi­jenko’s work, check out this TED talk. [↩]