Micronation of Ludea

Describe your idea and concept of your work in relation to the festival outlines:

Urban planning is typically a lengthy bureaucratic process that aims to balance a network of systems and rules that are social, institutional, spatial, commercial and cultural. The modern city is an algorithm, similar to Forrester's 'urban dynamics' on which SimCity is built. Somewhat like SimCity but rather than being 'god' of the simulation we are worker ants or nodes embedded in its system.

What if players recoded the city from within? Multiple agents in an intimate conversation with the city using actual and virtual technologies, real and potential realities. The Micronation of Ludea proposes street games that engage players with cities using languages of play. Nonverbal languages of entities, actions, tokens, and processes that open up new forms of dialogue with the codes of the city.

What kind of communication approach do you use?

Urban play strategies enabled by transmedia storytelling alter our experience of the contemporary city. Over the past two years the Ludeans have developed an approach to urban spaces called ‘urban codemaking’ that draws upon the pictographic language of travelling hobos, the spatial narrative of game worlds and generative systems as tools for urban design. The street game draws upon the mythology of a fictional universe, pervasive gaming methodologies, and strategies for urban renewal and intervention. This story is told via a game that follows players across social, digital and physical spaces within the city.

What are in your opinion concrete benefits to the society because of your communication?

If you have played a game then you have been to Ludea. It is that space you go to when you are ‘in-game’, in the zone, or otherwise immersed in play.

For the Ludeans, this state is the basis of their culture, their language, their way of life. Patterns and logic of the game become their way of seeing the entire world. The ontology of the game world is the ontology of their reality. Reality is game.

This game places players in that mixed reality, allowing them to reflect on the processes that bring it into being.

What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work?

I also have a personal connection with the Micronation of Ludea. Indulge me in a moment of personal reflection. I spent most of the 90s immersed in a virtual world of digital icons, plastic knowbots and artificial life. During September of 2001, while exhibiting a work entitled Mixed Reality, I rediscovered reality. Four years later in 2005, I became involved with the Ludeans. They helped me at a difficult time in my life as I made the shift across to reality. Whilst still a ‘reality newbie’ I can get where they are coming from – spend a significant amount of time ‘in-game’ and the real world is coloured by the that experience. It is encoded in your way of being.

Why is your work, GOOD communication WORK?

First of all, play might make better cities.

The game points to a different set of relations with the world, and a different mindset as a player. This is significant because, as pointed out by Huizinga and Callois, play has an important role in the formation of culture.

The role of play in cultural production is a central theme of the Micronation of Ludea, which proposes a theoretical experiment–a society ruled by systems of play. This is a poetic expression of contemporary developments in the developed world, in which players already engage with reality, particularly the mixed realities of cities, in new ways both mentally and physically.

Where and how do you intent do implement your work?

The game has been played in the Melbourne CBD, Sydney, St Kilda, and Hawthorn. Sites currently under consideration include Taipei, Shimokitazawa, and Plymouth.

The game manifests across an ecology of sites to create a cohesive alternate reality. Traces and flows left within the city itself–lasercut tags, chalk drawings, QR codes and other markers–to make believable the presence of other entities on its streets.

Did your intervention had an effect on other Media. If yes, describe the effect? (Has other media reported on it- how? Were you able to change other media with your work- how?)

The first street game comprised three guilds, street signage, 100+ blog posts, a street game, 768 IdeoTags, a public demonstration, video screening in Federation Square, academic articles, and three urban planning proposals.