This is from my 2023 elective course on ecological simulations at SCI-Arc: [[Planet Garden]] **Real-time simulations are an exciting new way of modeling urban phenomena. Going beyond drawing, mapping and diagramming, the students will learn how to leverage the power of Unreal Engine to create a small toy world consisting of a playable model of a fictional ecological machine, set in a dynamic and responsive environment. We will model and develop the machine parts library, learn about dynamic systems, look into simulation games such as SimCity and SimEarth, as well as other visually led games (Citizen Sleeper) as precedents for the work, and explore how to utilize game workflows as ways to address urban issues. We will utilize Unreal Engine to develop a real-time rendering and exploration tool that will serve as a foundation for the game. Beside the practical foundation, the seminar focuses on a reading list that will shed light on emergent practices of worldmaking, and help us establish a theoretical basis for discussions. The seminar is part of the Planet City research project that is conducted at SCI-Arc for Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time exhibition. The focus of the seminar is the exploration and application of computer game technologies as novel ways of drawing and modeling. In recent years, the discipline has seen a gradual shift from standard, static models into animated, and even simulated models. In the seminar,  the students will explore the simulation as a format and adopt the usage of interactive models as the project. An Interactive Model is part a drawing and part a model, a new representational interactive format produced through the use of real-time rendering.  The goal of the modeling is to create a fictional ecological construct, a toy machine that exists within the simulation. To create this machine, students will look at existing ecological technologies (the list is found at the end of this document) and extrapolate possible components and shapes. With the help of Blender, the students will model the machine components  in the language of hard surface science fiction. It is important to note that the machine is not bound by any idea of realism (of use, function, materiality etc), but instead, it should be an elaborate, imaginative (or weird), fictional, visually compelling construct. The students will then use ChatGPT to create descriptions of various parts of the machine, to be used as part of the game user interface. The main defining logic of this machine is: it uses energy and produces waste; it affects the environment and is affected by the environment, it forms loops. This, incidentally is the foundational insight that James Lovelock has had in his “Gaia hypothesis”. In contemplating the problem of detecting life on Mars, Lovelock found that the fact that all living organisms take in energy and matter and discard waste products was the most general characteristic of life he could identify. Constructing a simulation of a fictional machine points to a possible poetics of creating artificial life as well. In this approach , designs operate as the characters in a video game. Even if they can exist individually, the final meaning of designs results from their grouping together to create a particular ensemble. Every piece references and contains a broader whole, a World. The term "world" here is metaphorical. Its meaning is similar to the one Nelson Goodman uses in Ways of Worldmaking: a world is a formal structure governed by an internally consistent logic. Simulations are entering culture as a new format of storytelling and artistic expression. The concept of an ‘infinite game’ comes from James P. Carse, and offers a window into some of the ideological motivations behind the work, something we might even call ‘simulationism’. Simulationist worldview privileges open-ended structure and presupposes a non-deterministic universe, as a liberation from fixed and finite models of thinking and making. The work consists of a series of self-playing, open ended simulations of a world imbued with characters and objects. This means that the unpredictability of the outcome does not also entail a degree of opaqueness of the model, as it does in various neural network machine learning models. Worldmaking represents in many ways a completely new narrative paradigm, where the traditional narrative structures are put in friction and an adversarial relation with the open-endedness and the chaotic beauty of a simulation. The classical tropes of storytelling that have always governed how we understand and assign meaning are incapable of regulating the chaos of a simulation.  In the second part of the semester, the students will work to develop an internal dynamic system for the fictional machine. The machine will spend energy to produce oxygen, or scrub carbon, and will in this way form a closed feedback loop with its environment. A careful act of balancing will be needed to fine tune all the system parameters. The underlying idea of the dynamic system of a game’s economy becomes tied to a question of ecology. This is based on the duality of the words ecology-economy, and their common origin in the concept of oikos. The Greek word for household is oikos, which means the words ecology (oikos-logos, the studied knowledge of our planetary household), economy (oikos-nomos, the management of the household), and ecumenicity (oikou-menikos, an openness to the worldwide household) all share a basic orientation to “home.” System Dynamics is a discipline that deals with the modeling of complex, unpredictable and non-linear phenomena. The field has its roots in the cybernetic theories of Norbert Weinberg, but it was formalized and created in the mid-1950s by Prof. Jay Forrester at MIT, and later developed by Donella H. Meadows in her seminal book ‘Thinking in Systems’. System dynamics is an approach to understanding the nonlinear behavior of complex systems over time using stocks, flows, internal feedback loops, table functions and time delays. Forrester’s ideas were explored by the game designer Will Wright in a series of games that he designed for Maxis, including SimCity, SimEarth and The Sims. This approach has since been adopted as one of the main ways to model game systems as it enables easier understanding of systemic depth and causality in time based scenarios. The approach was also used in a series of software projects by MVRDV, for working with urban phenomena. In the class, we will learn to understand and model basic dynamic systems by utilizing the online tool Machinations (machinations.io), as well as implement them within Unreal Engine.** ** Ecological Technologies, to be used, mixed and grafted together into a fictional eco-machine: solar photovoltaics thin film photovoltaics, dichroic film 3d printing from recycled plastic concentrated solar power using dual axis tracking spherical fresnel reflectors solar photovoltaic fabric (inflatables)/rubber microturbines hydrogen fuel cells water harvesting fabric growing lights for farming solar powered autonomous rewilding robots (SPARRs) photobioreactors with bioluminescent algae energy storage units phytoremediation through local vegetation water harvesting passive cooling carbon scrubbers composting greenhouses aquaponics biodigesters greywater recycling fruit trees fruit walls vertical outdoor gardening water biofiltration binary low-temperature geothermal units luminescent solar concentrator (ClearVue) Vortex Tacoma bladeless wind turbines microgrid (storage, connections, powerpacks) walipini style greenhouses gravity-fed water filtration with botanical cells bio ceramic domes (Geoship) seed banks cistern and drip irrigation ### REFERENCES: Reading list: Damjan Jovanovic, “[[Games and Worldmaking]]”, The Bartlett B-Pro Prospectives Journal Issue 3, eds. Deborah Lopez and Hadin Charbel, 2022. Damjan Jovanovic, “[[Screen Space, Real Time]]: Simulation as an Emergent Format” bilingual (english and spanish), Monumental Wastelands Magazine, eds. Deborah Lopez and Hadin Charbel, 2022. Donella H. Meadows - Thinking in Systems, Chelsea Green Publishing, (2008). Jay W. Forrester, Some Basic Concepts in System Dynamics, Sloan School of Management Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (2009). Michael Sellers - Advanced Game Design, A Systems Approach, Addison-Weasley, (2018). Ben Vickers and K. Allado-McDowell - Atlas of Anomalous Ai, Ignota Books, (2021). Michael Weisberg - Simulation and Similarity, Oxford University Press; Reprint edition ( 2015). S. de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood (eds.) - Models, The Third Dimension of Science, Stanford University Press; 1st edition ( 2004). N. Goodman - Ways of Worldmaking, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (1978). James P. Carse - Finite and Infinite Games, Free Press, (2013) Ian Cheng - Emissaries Guide to Worlding, Koenig Books, (2018) Ian Cheng, Wordling Raga 2: What is a World?, at Ribbonfarm, (2019). [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/03/05/worlding-raga-2-what-is-a-world/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/03/05/worlding-raga-2-what-is-a-world/) Watch List: Will Wright, Dynamics for game Designers [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBcfiiulw-8&ab_channel=GDC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBcfiiulw-8&ab_channel=GDC) Secrets of Systems Design with Mike Sellers [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5xYcRf7_64&ab_channel=GDCGDC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5xYcRf7_64&ab_channel=GDCGDC) A Systems View of Game Design and Life [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH2AAmu7Rzs&ab_channel=TheGameOveranalyserTheGameOveranalyser](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH2AAmu7Rzs&ab_channel=TheGameOveranalyserTheGameOveranalyser) Play List: Citizen Sleeper (Fellow Travellers, 2022) SimEarth  (Maxis, Will Wright, 1989) SimCity (Maxis, Will Wright, 1990) Cloud Gardens Stardew Valley Factorio Satisfactory Industries of Titan **