#project #### a terraforming simulation game, #### developed in the Games and Worldmaking seminar at SCI-Arc. [[Play]] , [[Simulation]] , [[Game]] , [[Model]] , [[System]], [[World]] PLANET GARDEN is a game were players can organize resources to create a self-sustaining robotic garden. The game was made in SCI-Arc’s Games & Worldmaking seminar, instructed by Damjan Jovanovic during the Summer 2021 semester. This collaboration is part of the Planet City research project for Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time Exhibition. See the Game Manual: [[Planet Garden Game Manual.pdf]] ![[PlanetGarden01.jpg]] ###### Planet Garden is a video game where the player builds a garden by managing resources in a hostile environment. In the book “Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools”, Stefano Gualeni traces a lineage of thinking about simulations to Espen Aarseth’s 1994 text called Hyper/Text/Theory, and specifically to the idea of cybertextuality.  According to this line of reasoning, simulations contain an element not found in fiction and thus need an ontological category of their own. “Simulations are somewhere between reality and fiction: they are not obliged to represent reality, but they have an empirical logic of their own, and therefore should not be called fictions.” This presents us with a fundamental insight into the use of simulations as the future of architectural design: they model internally coherent, testable Worlds and go beyond mere fiction-making into Worldmaking proper. ![[PlanetGarden02.jpg]] ###### The simulation is a result of an exploration into modeling and representing nonlinear systems. ![[gif1s.gif]] ###### The goal of the game is to build and balance various resources and environmental conditions in order to achieve optimal conditions for plant growth and oxygen production. Architecture’s power of engaging with complex phenomena through modeling can be recaptured through the use of simulations. In the seminar, we worked with Unreal Engine to create a multi-scalar, interactive, playable model of a self-sustaining, wind and solar-powered robotic garden, set in a desert landscape. The simulation was envisioned as a kind of reverse city builder, where a goal of the game is to terraform a desert landscape by deploying different kinds of energy blocks, until the right conditions are met for planting and the production of oxygen. The aim of the seminar was to learn how to model dynamic systems and explore how to utilize game workflows as ways to address urban issues. ![[PlanetGarden03.jpg]] ###### The game incorporates dynamic, changing environmental data such as solar time, wind direction and bedrock density as part of the system loop. ![[PlanetGarden04.jpg]] ![[gif2s.gif]] ###### Planet Garden is a game about environment, change and time. The player transforms the desert into a lush garden. The work was a result of a renewed interest in exploring how non-linear models are represented and imaged. One of the main ways in which video games achieve this is through techniques that come from System Dynamics, 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 Wiener, 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’. ![[geck01.gif]] ###### The main loop of Planet Garden ![[planetGardenDiagram.png]] ###### How to play, from the game manual 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. Wright has developed a detailed theoretical and practical approach for systems design, outlined in his 2003 GDC talk ([[W. Wright, Dynamics for Designers, GDC 2003]]). 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 early 2000s software projects by MVRDV , as means of working with urban phenomena. In these projects, MVRDV worked actively on establishing interactive modeling as a valid and accepted practice for urban design, and produced a series of tools and applications that were used in real world modeling scenarios. One of the main outcomes of the seminar was an understanding of the need to go beyond cybernetics and learn from contemporary, probabilistic ways of modeling through the use of machine learning. ![[pg_gif3.gif]] ![[PlanetGarden06.jpg]] ###### The Games and Worldmaking seminar at SCI-Arc aims to explore the utilization of video game workflows as means of addressing urban and environmental issues. ### In version 2, we added Carbon as part of the global energy system of the game. Version 2 also features a redesigned UI as well as different models for blocks and plants. ![[pg_v2_01.png]] <div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/687710132?h=3966edd5db&amp;badge=0&amp;autopause=0&amp;player_id=0&amp;app_id=58479" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" title="PLanetGarden_v2_FHD"></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script> ![[pg_v2_02.png]] ![[pg_v2_04.png]] ![[pg_v2_05.png]] ![[pg_v2_06.png]] ### SCI-Arc Interview A shorter version of this text: https://www.sciarc.edu/news/2021/damjan-jovanovic-planet-city **Can you speak about how the original impetus for this project—EO Wilson’s Half Earth proposition—led to the development of your project for _Views of_ _Planet City_?** The story of Half Earth, and especially the very big city that is implied in it, is an important and very interesting thought experiment. It is almost a proto design, a prompt, an idea for a massive, planetary agglomeration of urban matter which could liberate the rest of the planet to heal and rewild. I started thinking about the design side of it: how could we actually model something like that? How do we capture all that complexity and nuance, how do we figure out stakes and variables and come up with consequences and conclusions? I realized that it would be necessary to employ systems thinking and go beyond the architect’s standard toolkit of drawings, diagrams, or videos; this would also mean that the project will present a new kind of a model. The question of the model became central at this point, reframed in my case as a computer game: a dynamic, playable simulated complex system, not just a cool looking 3D model of the city. I started thinking about the city as an interconnected and nested dynamic system with components interacting on multiple scales, which is something video games can simulate really well. To model such a system requires going into multiple other disciplines and learning their operational strategies while keeping an eye on what makes the work important architecturally. **Can you describe the simulation game that you’re making for the Getty PST exhibition?** The game is a simulation of an enormous city for 10 billion people, and it is made with Unreal Engine. We model various aspects of the planetary city, and the player will be able to operate on multiple spatial sectors and urban scales. The player can explore different ways to influence the development and growth of the city and test many scenarios, but the game will also run on its own, so that the city can exist without direct player input. The game belongs to a genre of ‘serious’ simulation games, and we researched the work of the game designer Will Wright (in particular games like SimEarth, SimCity, and The Sims), as well as some other important games like Sid Meier’s Civilization and Paradox Studio’s Stellaris. These games are conceptually very ambitious and extremely complex as they model the evolution of whole societies and civilizations, and they also operate on very long timescales. These types of games are open-ended and not bound to one goal and there is rarely a clear win state. It was very interesting to learn what kinds of mathematical models, but also assumptions and biases, are behind these games. For example, SimCity is well known (and some would say notorious) for its rootedness in Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics approach, which means that its mathematical model delivers very specific urban conditions and ultimately, a very specific vision of what a city is and could be. One of the main questions in our project became how we can update this approach on two fronts: by rethinking the mathematical model and by rethinking urban assumptions of the conceptual model. Our game utilizes the core design principles that have to do with system dynamics, evolution, environmental conditions, and change. A major point is the player’s input and decision-making process, which influences the outcome of the game. The game will also be able to present conditions and consequences of this urban thought experiment, as something is always at stake for the player. The core of the simulation-as-a-model idea is that there are testable consequences of a design. **How has your understanding of the power of imaginary worlds grown throughout the process?** We live in a period of unprecedented multiplication and even inflation of constructed, internally coherent worlds, which pop up everywhere, from politics to video games. One ripple effect of this phenomenon is that we are now asking fundamental questions, such as what consensus reality is and how to engage it. Another effect is that there is a need for a special kind of expertise that can deal with designing and organizing these worlds and that is where architects possibly have a unique advantage. These notions are central to my research interest in the intersection of games and architectural design. I do believe that we as architects have a unique perspective and should have a say in how these worlds are constructed and inhabited. But there is a question of how we engage this: do we simply adopt and repeat the tropes and cliches of the entertainment industry and remain at the stage of mythologizing or can we go deeper and learn from scientific ways of imaging and sensing to construct new, legitimate, and serious ways of seeing and modeling? While working on The Simulator project, I started believing more and more in the latter, began rethinking the working concept of a design fiction—which was previously an important part of my conceptual position as a designer—and replacing it with the new core idea of the simulation. The research led me to discover the work of philosophers Federico Campagna, who writes about Worlds, as well as Stefano Gualeni, whose book _Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools_ was a big revelation. **How do you see the shifting landscape of your work within the context of the ever-changing, ever-worsening global climate crisis?** One of the reasons why it is difficult to really comprehend a kind of complex system such as the climate crisis is because it is difficult to model it, which also means to visually represent or image it in a legible way which humans can understand. This crisis of representation is a well-known problem in the literature on the Anthropocene, for example in the book _Against the Anthropocene_, by T.J. Demos. We do not yet have the tools and formats of visualizing that can fully and legibly describe such a complex thing, and this is, in a way, also a failure of architectural imagination. The standard architectural toolkit is limited and also very dated—it is designed to describe and model objects, not hyperobjects. I am very interested in inventing new modalities of description and modeling of complex systems through the interactive software format, and this is one of the ideas behind the Simulator project. The game we are designing is a means to model and host hugely complex urban systems which unravel over time, while being able to legibly present an enormous amount of information visually and through the narrative. One thing that architects could do is work on new ways of imaging the World and making sense of reality through models, and that is one area where we could contribute to the climate change problem without falling into naïve solutionism. **Is there anything else you can share about _Views of_ _Planet City_, the Getty PST exhibition, or upcoming projects?** During the 2021 summer semester at SCI-Arc, I instructed a seminar called Games and Worldmaking, which served as an entry point into the Simulator project. In the seminar, we worked with Unreal Engine to create a small game called Planet Garden, which was a way to test ideas for the Simulator. Planet Garden is a multi-scalar, interactive, playable model of a self-sustaining, wind and solar-powered robotic garden, set in a desert landscape. The simulation was envisioned as a kind of reverse city builder, where a goal of the game is to terraform a desert landscape by deploying different kinds of energy-producing technologies, until the right conditions are met for planting and the production of oxygen. The basic game loop is based on the interaction between the player and four main resources: energy, water, carbon, and oxygen. The aim of the seminar was to learn how to model dynamic systems and explore how to utilize game workflows as ways to address urban issues. Many of the ideas from Planet Garden will end up being applied to the Simulator, in different ways. ### **Version 1 TEAM** Instructor Damjan Jovanovic **Models** Nikhil Bang Xiaolei Liu Hakcheol Seo Sanghyun Suh **Landscape Design** Ilaria Lu Yaqing Mao Caleb Roberts Runhuan Wang **Vegetation** Mariam Aramyan Wen Chen Shuo Feng Yehong Mi **Interface Design** Yuhong Gong Robert Leising Pan Tan **Game Manual** Eva Besmerti Carlo Sturken ### **Version 2 TEAM** Damjan Jovanovic Ayoade Adetonkunbo Wei Chun Cheng Andrew DePew Carolina Garcia Kai Johnson Astha Kapila Yashwanth Munikoti Saeri Shojima Samantha Stapleton Yundi Zhang