Frontier, The Oasis

o FRONTIER a s i THE

References

Haus-Rucker-Co Micromegas EVE Online

Select Essays

What Fortnite Learned from burning Marijuana The Bicameral Mind Theory

Vignettes

Buisness on the Frontier The Erosion of Stone Downbeat

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Representation is abstraction. It challenges us to ask, “How does one best communicate an idea without showing the idea?” Even if one were to show the idea in its truest form, would that be ideal? We hide, obscure, and blur the real in order to be more true to the thing itself. Abstraction, or a representation of something by obscuring or modifying it, has always been key in the art world. Ever since the Romantic period, painters have become more abstract valuing symbolism and meaning over realistic imitation. For instance in Jeffery Kipnis’ Perfect Acts of Architecture, the best creations in the architectural world are all representations of something radically impossible in the real world that we live in. This project is a continuation of the study for representation in architecture. The art of drawing like Daniel Libeskind, the art of theory like Jeffrey Kipnis’, and the art of virtualization like Haus Rucker Co. The goal is to best represent “real” space, without it being real… Abstraction is the preferred medium of representation, twisting reality through the tools which can’t quite capture it. Creating two-dimensional images to represent three-dimensional spaces, yet using those limitations to guide the creation process and incorporating it as abstraction, using these subtractions to create some sort of addition to what was pronounced “real.”

Yet now what we are gifted with through video games is not limitations and subtractions, but additions to the content of real life.

What came before is the pre-real, a series of parts that when combined in the correct way show a completed picture of the real. At one point we were only able to focus on a smaller portion of the picture, and analyze in every aspect only a fraction of the complete work set in “reality”. Now we are released from our limitations. Instead of being handcuffed by limitations of drawing, we are given additional arms to explore the world through virtualization. It can be just as simple as viewing two (or more) screens at once. We are able to see from multiple perspectives and even interact with them all from one physical position. Instead of trying to represent a small portion of the picture we can view and interact with the picture, the frame, and the wall it hangs on.

The abstraction of representation remains, but it is no longer subtractive from our reality. As Picasso painted a portrait, he cleverly removed and modified what existed in his subject’s face. In the virtual, technology and representation is additive so that we can create something greater than it could be when translated into the literal world. We have entered the post-real. A realm, where we can go beyond the limits of the real and into the dark depths of what lies beyond the edges of the picture.

This new representation of the digital age has still yet to reach its full potential, since we mere humans live in the world of the real.

Centuries have trained us to think within this box and be creative with the space that has been provided underneath our shelter. The bounds of this shelter are now removed, our space infinitely expanding in all directions. Yet while our restraints towards the sky being lifted seem quite invigorating, the restraints towards the ground have also been removed. The ground beneath our feet has disappeared and the void it leaves is terrifying. As this realm of infinite has been created, we grasp at the stepping stones we create to understand it. We create a floor beneath our feet for security, for familiarity, as a point of reference for this ever expanding universe, incomprehensible to our minds. We create space in a universe beyond space just as man runs back into Plato’s cave to surround himself with familiarity.

But just as we place humans in stories taking place in galaxies far far away, we need something familiar to start with when pushing the limits. It is the foundation upon which we build our journey into the valley beyond. Using our real as a point of reference for creating that which defies what we know about reality. We do not have the conceptual capacity to understand these seemingly limitless universes. As the limit is infinitely far away, there are an infinite number of steps we can take to get closer to that goal. Grounded by what we know, grasping onto the bit of ground we, ourselves, built to constrain us. Methodically we create outward, adapting with minimal factors at a time, sometimes only a single connection made to create something new. One step in front of the other, a platform to walk on, a bridge that is always connected to what came before. Sometimes reusing previous material, sometimes backtracking and changing directions yet still expanding outward. Always branching off of a path already traveled.

That is where the Oasis comes into play. The Oasis functions as a hub world. It is a small first step into the abyss of the final frontier.

While it can function as a reminder of real life, the depiction of a city, town squares, and even a market, it is also pushing the limits of what is “occupiable space�, urban density, and interaction. Yet, like many of the creations that have come before, the Oasis does not stand alone, it compiles elements from architecture and game development. Creations like the vast universe of EVE Online and its user-created governments are concepts that can be scaled to much more than their niche communities. What is an advancement may not always be new. The bridge does not have to be built from fresh lumber, planks, perhaps entire sections may be appropriated by those building out into oblivion. This project is not new, it has been here, built slowly over decades scattered throughout our web of links, connections, and bridges. This project is a proposal that if oriented the right way, these pieces can combine to extend us further into the abyss, one step closer to infinity.

-Philip Hood

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architecture

video games

Haus-Rucker-Co

Fortnite

No-Stop City

Entropia

Micromegas

Eve Online

Psychogeography

Overwatch

The virtual before computers enabled the virtual to become reality

Space and architecture as a platform for infinite customizability

The art of representation and one of the few “perfect acts of architecture” Envisioning space beyond the limitations of our cartesian grid

The notorious game for making your ten year old nephew dance

Large scale attempt at creating a virtual currency tradable with the dollar The largest open world RPG with a thriving self-sufficient community Reinvented the class based shooter with narratives reaching a wider audience

“What is Real?”

“That which is irreplaceable.”

Westworld s2 e1

Theory

Narrative

Westworld S1E3

The Erosion of Stone

Fortnite & Marijuana

Buisness on the Front

Post-Proccessing

Downbeat

Frontier Treatment

Character Art

Excerpt discussing the theory of understanding and theory of creating How Epic games reinvigorated and reinterested the Fortnite community The art of post-proccessing is dying as real-time rendering grows Early outline of what it would take to make the frontier platform

Dr. Samael extends an offer to Nur Tendean that is very hard to refuse

design Early massings

Attempt at merging the two proccesses for architecture and game design

A day in the life of a wandering traveler on the Frontier

When the pressure of the world is on Emad’s shoulders its hard not to crack.

Concept art of the different builders and companion drones

“If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

toni morrison

“It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death.”

plato I look forward to going through the motions, listing names and offering boilerplate homage, secure that, in truth, I not only did the most important work but all of the hard work. Finding stuff, getting it here, hanging it safely and securely, making It interesting to see, identifying it, taking care of it, returning it, paying for things, and all that pate when confronted with the exhausting, infinitely more arduous task of daydreaming about what would be fun to see on the walls and talking on the phone with friends to see if they want to come to a party.

Jeffrey kipnis

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Haus-Rucker-Co

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Haus-Rucker-Co attempted to create the virtual before the virtual existed.

Most of their work was aspirational statements towards utopian ideals as well as sustainable design within our environment. What they demonstrated was the strive for humanity to create virtual environments.

Complete control to replicate not an environment but our ideas of an environment. In the same way a utopia is the utmost idea of a perfect city and not a perfect city in reality.

Today these images and designs are reflected within hundreds of video games. The idea of an escape from reality is forever chased, yet one thing that seems to remain is how close the barrier is with reality. The outside world is only held at bay by a clear plastic, a mere screen. Little did the architects know that this sort of escape, a mini-world attatched to the side of a building would be in every home in the form of a computer.

Architectural references

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No-Stop City

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Archizoom’s No-Stop City is the creation of a canvas. It is the explosion of a grid system into three dimensions much like what autoCAD has done for us in the digital age. It acts as the foundation for individualizatrion and an infinite amount of possibilities by becoming completely blank.

It inspired the “Anti-Design” of instead of creating fully designed spaces, architects began toying with the idea of creating a platform for others. A homogenious solution that can satisfy an infinite number of possibilities.

In a way the creation of the grid and the force apon which it is visible becomes the design of the No-Stop City. The foundation and platform that proposes infinite customizability in fact creates a rigid platform it must be “customized” through.

Architectural references

“The idea of an inexpressive, catatonic architecture, outcome of the expansive forms of logic of the system and its class antagonists, was the only form of modern architecture of interest to us‌ A society freed from its own alienation, emancipated from the rhetorical forms of humanitarian socialism and rhetorical progressivism: an architecture which took a fearless look at the logic of grey, atheistic and de-dramatized industrialism, where mass production produced infinite urban decors.â€?

- Andrea Branzi the frontier

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Micromegas

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The series of images were all done through the same technicque of paper and pencil, black, on white. To create some sort of coherence among the incoherent. The beauty of becoming lost in these drawings is how the familiar is bent and twisted into the unfamiliar. It has finely tuned the spectrum to reach the uncanny valley of inbetweeness.

Created at a point in time in which the means of creation were becoming stale and new innovative tools were just around the horizon, this intense exploration was a successful last ditch effort to bring the old into the new. Isolated, bits and pieces become familiar, as the entire image also seems familiar, yet it is not grounded.

There is no base for the viewer to gather a perspective from.

Micromegas is a great example of worldbuilding within architecture. It goes beyond a mere image and into a world where the viewer cna infer an infinite series of like images. All of which are held together by some unknown narative or set of rules guiding every stroke or piece into place where it seems to fit amongst the chaos.

Architectural references

MICROMEGAS

Micromegas, is the penultimate example of trying to create the unknown by means of the known.

“An architectural drawing is as much a prospective unfolding of future possibilities as it is a recovery of a particular history to whose intentions it testifies and whose limits it always challenges. In any case, a drawing is more than the shadow of an object, more than a pile of lines, more than a resignation to the inertia of convention.”

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– Daniel Libeskind, The Space of Encounter

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Psychogeography

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Psychogeography is best described by becoming lost in a place. Unlike purposeful walking, when moving throughout a city psychogeography adovcates for becoming lost through the act of “drifting”. It is perceived to better connect a person with their environment.

In modern times the rise of technology has led more people to navigate the world with the goal of efficiency towards a specific place. Less common are the ideas of wandering and stumblig upon a coffee shop, book store, or bar. Google and Yelp have made it extremely easy to find reviews and pick the most ideal place in location and experience before you leave the door. A resurgence in Psychogeography proposes a more oganic approach for getting from point A to point B. Psychogeography also introduces a different view of the size scale a shape of a city.

Instead of the exact dimensions on a map, the map that takes place in one’s mind is highlighted by landmarks and general distances. Subway line maps are a great example. Often their scale does not cordinate with that in real life, and can even be incorrectly proportioned within the same map. However, for the people traveling via subway, it isn’t easy to notice the deception without a side by side comparison with a geographical map.

Architectural references

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2018 and 2019 was filled with Fortnite. When it comes to gameplay, this battle royale was far from revolutionary. The building mechanic, a new twist in competitve shoters, had been in the works for years for their co-op zombies-esc game that has still not had an official release. The real importance of Fortnite in the gaming world comes in free-to-play aspect and its community interactions.

In one year Fortnite made nearly three billion dollars through in-app purchases. All of which were purely cosmetic and gave zero competitive edge or gameplay changes. Hundreds of other games are now attempting to copy that route of “freemium� in an attempt to get a larger audience and hook them into paying out of choice instead of necessity.

Fortnite was the perfect game at the perfect time. The wide audience for all ages, light-hearted imagery and the variety of ways to play came at such a perfect time in gaming culture. Twitch and online streamers was just starting to hit mainstream.

It was the perfect storm that now has names like Ninja and 100 Theives as common and household as Lebron James or the Boston Celtics. In game events like a live Marshmello concert or Thanos’ snappening incorporated modern day culture created a loop of engagement with its audience., creating a friendly platform for content creators and large corprate advertisers alike.

video game references

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Entropia is a self-described “advanced 3D online virtual environment with a developed planetary system and one universal Real Cash Economy system.” It is an MMORPG similar to EVE Online, but much smaller in its scale only containing currently six planets, to create a more intimate environment. The goal is to create a large expansive universe with a real world economy. Entropia is completely free to play however to become involved in most of the worolds activities, players will need to purchase in game currency. This currency at any point can be traded back in exchange for the US dollar. The exchange rate is permanently fixed at ten Entropia dollars to one US dollar. Entropia has broken the record for most expensive in-game purchase multiple times and it thrives as an example of the value of virtual space. The creators, MindArk, have periodically allowed players to purchase land deeds, in which the players receive an income based on the total revenue of specific planets. Banks have also been set up in-game that can lend currency and even allow players to pawn items.

video game references

“Club neverdue” is entered in the Guinness Book of World Records in 2004 and 2008 as the most expensive virtural world ever sold at 635,000 USD. In 2014 Planet Arkadia started selling 200,000 Arkadia Underground Deeds (AUD) valued at $5. In total the Arkadia Underground is valued at one million dollars.

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Overwatch is the best example in contemporary mulitplayer games of world building. Most other first person shooter games do not incorporate narrative and characters into their PvP, or player versus player, gamemodes. Overwatch’s approach to narrative is to create each individual character’s origin story and character arch with a single overarching narrative. Some of these characters also have intertwining stories like some being family siblings and others being arch rivals. Many of the characters’ stories revolve around the center narrative of a fight against the Omnics. The Omnic Crisis was the rebellion of hundreds of robots thought to be under humanities control, and it was the orgin of the Overwatch organization. An elite collection of the best fighters in the world. It’s style and cartoonish actions and storytelling make this game accesible to all ages. Using these characteristic, it can seperate itself from games like Call of Duty to de-violence gunplay and stretch the rules of realistic physics. The fun and goofy atmosphere toes a fine line never takes itself too seriously while upholding the storyline and narratives inspired by countless comics before video games were even realized. Many other games including the likes of Fortnite and Team Fortress have also taken advantage if this aesthetic.

Overwatch’s cast of characters is one of the best collections of cultural representation and inclusivity. Starting with the idea of making each character unique in not only their gameplay, but their form and origins as well. With such a broad crew anyone who plays the game can relate to multiple characters and hopefully connect with at least one, through one or more of their unique and defined qualities.

video game references

One of Overwatch’s best qualities is its extremely inclusive art style. Inherited from games like Team Fortress by Valve. When incorperated with a team based shooter, it is able to reach extrememly wide audiences. From adults who disect the most complex of strategies to children who merely enjoy the light-hearted and quick gameplay.

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EVE online is scale. It sets the boundary of what is possible in size and then proceeds to break it over and over again. Eve sets up thousands of different ways for players to enjoy the game and lets you run wqild. With over 350 different types of ships, over 7,800 different star systems, it answers the question of how will civilization conduct themselves when giving such a massive sandbox to play in. Hundreds of thousands are organized into different factions that claim territory, farm resources and attempt to sustain self-suffuciency.

Throughout the lifespan of this game there are tons of stories of community actions commitments and bonds.

Even wars that have ammounted to over $300,000 USD of damage.

Eve Online has set the bar for creating real dynamics for waring factions within a virtural environment. Politics, war, friendships, and familytt have grown and been created by the players and their actions. Self policed trade centers and scattered portals act as the bare minimum the developers created for the players. Unlike games likev World of Warcraft, EVE takes place on only a single shard, everything that a player does, has an impact on every other player in the game and a permanent impact on the larger universe.

Every narrative, event, and story is completely generated by players in game. Each of these event still ahve an impact including every past battle, heist, trade deals, all creating pwer structures, communities, and wars. video game references

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Westworld S1E3

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“But that wasn’t enough for Arnold. He wasn’t interested in the appearance of intellect or wit. He wanted the real thing. He wanted to create consciousness. He imagined it as a pyramid. See? Memory, improvisation, self-interest... And at the top? Never got there. But he had a notion of what it might be.

He based it on a theory of consciousness called the Bicameral Mind. The idea that primitive man believed his thoughts to be the voice of the gods.”

“I thought it was debunked.”

“As a theory for understanding the human mind, perhaps, but not as a blueprint for building an artificial one. See, Arnold built a version of that cognition in which the hosts heard their programming as an inner monologue, with the hopes that in time, their own voice would take over. It was a way bootstrap consciousness. But Arnold hadn’t considered two things. One, that in this place, the last thing you want the hosts to be is conscious, and two, the other group who considered their thoughts to be the voices of the gods.”

“Lunatics.”

“Indeed. We abandoned the approach. The only vestiges that remain are the voice commands we use to control them.”

The world built within the television show Westworld is constantly growing. From a simple idea of replicating the wild west with no repercusions, the world has grown to now include the real world outside of the park. In this pareticular scene, Robert Ford, one of the founders, explains the creation of the robots minds, and how they are crafted to replicate humans.

Ford revelas that the theory behind understanding a human mind and creating a human mind are completely different. Even though the Bicameral Mind theory. that described how humans interpretted their own thoughts, was disproven. It still was found to be useful when replicating

theory

the human mind. When trying to design something that is so organic and/or complex, one does not have to replicate it perfectly. One only has to create something that can be mistaken for the real. And if someone is not able to comprehend the difference between the real and the fake, does that make the fake, real? If it is indeterminable, does it matter?

Westworld continues to ask these other questions, but this sscene in particular resonates with architecture and design. The theory behind understanding something is most likely a completely seperate from the theory of creating that same thing.

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Fortnite & Marijuana

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Companies have forever been trying to copy other successful brands, yet most of the time they fail to see what they are actually copying.

They pick and choose the pieces of a game like fortnite and graft them together with their own unique parts to create some sort of half-human half-master unsuccessful knockoff.

Fortnite has sparked so much interest in the battle Royale franchise.

When one free to play game can rake in $40 billion dollars in a year, it will turn heads. So what do other companies do? They create battle royal games…. They completely miss the point. If anything the battle Royale game mode is what will kill fortnite. What keeps fortnite going is its friendliness to content creators (play the way you want), its fun all-ages art style, its the taste of narrative and deeper storylines, and its community driven actions.

Birth of a Legend

Before we talk about how to copy fortnite, lets look at how fortnite copied other games. Fortnite came out in July of 2017, at the time of popularity for games like H1Z1 and the rising star of PUBG. Which both were riding the wave of games like Battlefield 4 & 1 which pioneer the ability to have massive lobbies and servers supporting 60+ players.

All relatively new technology in the competitive shooter scene. Only servers supporting that number of players were in MMORPGs where the competitive scene is small or non-existent and split second decisions and reactions aren’t common. theory

Not to mention that compared to a team based shooter, battle royale games are not about winning or losing. That’s a revolutionary concept, not focusing purely on winning. Most other games are you win or you lose, you live or you die. Not this format.

What battle roles thrived off of was placement. If you got 2nd place, boom you’re better than 98 other people that game, how impressive.

Or you go for kills, you may have gotten 54th place but you had 7 eliminations, super cool.

There are so many ways to be successful without actually winning.

Winning is boring, once a competitive game becomes about purely winning, it dies. Because for every winner there is a loser and for every person who wins 3 times in a row there’s someone who loses 3 times in a row. That person probably isn’t going to be playing for much longer…

That is why in the last couple months battle royal have been seeing massive decreases in player counts and views.

We have gotten used to watching people win and winning ourselves.

So now that we understand the complete taste for victory, 3rd place just doesn’t quite satisfy you anymore. Fortnite season 10 was all about winning. There was no more “fun”. There was no let see how we can fuck around this time. Lets explore new areas, new mechanics and new experiences. Fortnite became sweaty.

Sweat - (n)

-A person who is trying extremely hard because they are taking the task at hand more serious than he or she should. Most often because this person lacks talent or skills and needs to focus this hard in order to be decent

-Someone who is focusing to the extreme to where he or she is sweating as if it was extremely physically strenuous activity or he/she was experiencing extreme temperature or pressure

In battle Royale and especially in a game with complex mechanics like building. Players thought that sweats were becoming a real problem. Players “trying to have a good time” would fall victim so someone else trying too hard, or taking it too seriously. I believe that these players who “fell victim” to the sweats are at just much fault as the sweats themselves. They are the ones taking their death too seriously. If you’re an “average” player wouldn’t you only win a 100 person battle Royale once every hundred games? So then why is there so much frustration when someone has lost 4 in a row? Why is that so demoralizing?

Much of this has to do with brain chemistry, we took so much joy from more than just winning while playing the game so how come we can only remember our great wins?

Over time one accumulates enough wins to forget about the rest, even though it might have taken years we still see that there are dozens or possibly hundreds of first places we have gotten.

We feel that there needs to be a sense of progression or escalation within the game that moves us forwards. We should be getting more than yesterday, more than last month, but there are only so many wins that

can go around. There are only so many kills that can go around. And least not forget the fact that everyone else has the same mindset, the same mentality of needing to improve. And some people will improve. Some of those players will get better faster than others and the ones that don’t feel like we are left behind. But are we really left behind?

There are still so many ways to play the game besides winning.

Take Minecraft for example, yes the “goal” is to beat the ender dragon.

Cool story. But in the mean time you could build, explore, trade, or fight. So many avenues of adventure and entertainment/satisfaction. That mentality had been lost in fortnite when we started identifying people as sweats. There was no more satisfaction in completing challenges and unlocking a brand new skin when we had done the same for 6 previous battle passes. All that would satisfy our hunger was getting the fat dub and we wern’t willing to settle.

Second first impressions

Now this is where most games die. They come and go. But not fortnite, they’re not going down without a fight and its a damn good one at that. The creative team at epic games realized that there had been a loss of the thrill and excitement the normally took place in a standard match. The map was getting worn out, the changes were fun but so very temporarily exciting. If you continue to do the same thing over and over you will get ever decreasing returns so a lot of the issue is where do you draw that line and force yourself to come up with something new?

Fortnite had dropped out of the top 3 viewed games on twitch and the frontier

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you tubers where switching to other activities like Minecraft, WoW, and pictionary. So what did Epic Games do? They turned it off. They said ya know what? You don’t want to play our game? Fine, its gone. They erased it. And the craziest fucking part? They jumped up to being the most viewed game again on twitch and youtube.

A game that didn’t exist was now the most watched game in the world. Tens of millions of people around the globe witnessed a spinning black hole where fortnite once stood. Epic Games had sucked the game into oblivion and erased it from the face of the earth. This was unheard of. The audacity to take the most successful video game that had brought in $1,268 a second,$110 million dollars a DAY and just stop it. With no word about if or when it would come back.

Oh and boy did it come back.

36 hours after being shut down, it was back. New graphics, a new map, new characters, skins, new missions, and new guns all exploded from nothing. With open arms Epic invited us to come back, come back to the fortnite we loved, yet it seemed so new and most importantly so exciting. Epic realized they had the opportunity to create a new first impression on players, and that’s such an insane opportunity that not many games are able to have. Most games need to reinvent themselves with a full equal after a year or more. Yet in 36 hours fortnite was able to create a new first impression.

So what do you do? Given that opportunity how do you seize it?

Do you create an exciting cinematic trailer? Do you drop people right theory

into the reinvented gameplay? Or do remind players of all the fun that can be had? Why not all of the above?

Far Cry 3 was a massively successful game that came out in November of 2012. You were a character named Jason Brody who while out partying and vacationing with friends and family got trapped on an island and have to fight you way through defeating the tyrannical military forces that have taken over.

Throughout this game you turn from just trying to save yourself and get off the island to trying to dismantle the corrupt militant leaders controlling the island and using criminal activity to fund their tyranny.

One of these criminal activities was growing marijuana, and the most memorable mission in the game is when you are tasked to go find one of these marijuana fields and burn it to the ground. This mission is very unlike the other missions, mostly about stealth and tactics to take over a base or area while removing the opposing forces that significantly outnumber yourself.

However, in this mission you carry only a flamethrower and pretty much destroy the enemy forces with ease. You’re a complete badass and “accidently” getting super high from burning the massive fields. Oh and there’s dubstep. The entire mission is encased in loud heavy electronic dance music, creating a harsh distinction from the rest of the game.

This mission is just fun, you’re in full control, it’s unscripted but at the same time you’re fully participating in something reminiscent of a cinematic trailer.

That is exactly what Fortnite did. You think its just a trailer, but

you’re really playing the game, you view your character hanging out on the bus and then suddenly you’re being dropped into a game blasting pop music with EDM beats and a sick rap track over your gameplay. The lobby is filled with bots placed around for you to get easy kills and feel like a badass. It seems like you’re watching some E3 trailer but you are actually playing the game.

This feels like a new game, the art style is slightly altered and the map being completely new, yet the mechanics and gameplay is so familiar and somehow manages to evoke so many great memories without damaging its image of the difficult times. It feels like a first impression.

It feels like more than a haircut to spiff things up, and the game wants to let you know, it INVITES you to say, “Wow this is fucking cool.”

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Death of PostProccess

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Architecture presentations are very unique. They are orchestrated to perfection to highlight and convey the important design elements of each respective project. It is understood, especially at university, that each presentation is to fit in with the strict rigidity. When plans and renderings are created weeks and months are put into their creation and post-processing, because when the day of the presentation comes around there is can be no changes. Drawings are a lengthy process and renderings take even longer. This will soon be the past. The post-processing is being replaced in other industries. The days of waiting to see how special effects will result are quickly disappearing.

The days of spontaneous, in the moment creation are upon us.

Only recently has technology gotten advanced enough to support the real-time rendering market, and the people pushing technology the most is the video game industry.

Video games are always pushing to advance interactivity and spatial representation. In the early 1980s, text based adventure games began appearing and were distributed throughout the world. These forms of interactive fiction provided brief descriptions of where you were and what you were doing, while allowing the player to make decision, like open a door, walk in a certain direction, and investigate details. Eventually technology reached a point to where images were able to be drawn, instead of reading about the location, you could see it.

You could witness the walls, doors, and chests. Many of these early games took place in dungeons or a theory

series of rooms, however as hardware advanced, so did the software.

Soon there were vast open worlds to explore.

As hardware advanced and manufacturing process reached nanometer scales. These worlds and 3D spaces became more advanced. Each generation of products added another layer of resolution or interactivity to its predecessor. At first there was always the attempt to make things as realistic as possible. As with art in the renaissance era. This obsession with imitating reality drove technology forward. However, throughout all of these changes and all of these years, one thing has always remained prevalent and remains a key factor, much higher than resolution, responsiveness. What separates the gaming industry from television, movies, and novels is the control the player or viewer has. The anticipation of playing your own way, or crafting your own story is what gives the industry life.

There are two main pieces of hardware used in rendering. There is the CPU and GPU, both necessary elements in a computer. CPU stands for computer processor unit. Traditionally the CPU had been the most powerful component in rendering. It does tasks one at a time, but it does that task very well. The GPU or graphics processor unit has recently become a more powerful tool than the CPU. An old analysis of the two would be to compare a train on a train track to a four lane highway. As the train proceeds down the track it is much more efficient that a car on

the highway however there is only one track and must travel in a single file line. On the other hand the GPU or four lane highway can very effectively completely a large amount of different tasks or have many different vehicles traveling along similar routes. Historically industries like architecture and film have always used CPU rendering to create videos, films, simulations, and effects. Yet, within the last couple years things are changing. Helped by the drive for AI and complex software unimaginable to scientists 20 years ago, GPU rendering has become revolutionarily powerful. It has become so powerful that anything can be captured in real time with the correct components and software.

The film industry is just now catching onto this new wave of real time rendering. There has been a long history of film CG or “computer graphics” in film. There were very few companies who could utilize that sort of technology in the early 80s. When Pixar was founded rendering itself was fairly new. Their first project, produced in 1985, was Luxo Jr, a 2 minute long short starring what would become the classic PIXAR lamp. Every second of this short took an excruciating 35 hours to render, totaling in over 151 days of rendering. Currently using the same rendering strategies, this short film would take approximately 10 seconds to render in completion. However using modern day strategies and video game engines, the entire film could be rendered in less than a second.

Once CG became popular in movies, it turned into the center piece. The Matrix, Terminator, and eventually Transformer movie franchises capitalize on making CG effects.

One aspect of CG effects that became essential was the green screen. Especially in modern day blockbusters like Star Wars and the Avengers, many scenes are filmed with an entire wall of green in the background. It became cheaper to render and edit things in post production than build the entire set in real life. Sometimes it is even impossible to film places like in space, underwater, or on another planet. As the greenscreen became necessary to many genres in the film industry, it becomes more difficult for actors, directors, and crew to envision what is going on around them. Also there is so much more that has to be rendered and crafted when using a greenscreen. Not just the scenery, but reflections and how the surroundings light the actors and characters in frame.

Yet using revolutionary technology of today, the greenscreen’s days are numbered. Software today is now able to utilize large scale displays to render the background directly behind the actors. Even when using a sound stage these large scale displays can be set up on all sides of the scene, creating perfectly accurate reflections and one hundred percent accurate atmospheric lighting. On top of that, the actors, director, and camera crew can see exactly what the scene will look like to movie goers as they capture it. However movies like Terminator and Transformers use more than just CG backgrounds.

They use CG characters too, and technology has an answer. Using the same programs and engines to run the scene simulations, In real time a character’s actions can be rendered and sent to the camera operators viewport. This kind of technology will kill greenscreens across the globe, while vastly improving control the frontier

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and the final result.

So how the hell does any of this apply to architecture?

This past week was finals at Sci_Arc. Across two computer labs over fifty computers were rendering videos and presentations for three weeks straight. Rendering frame by frame using old methods of CPU based rendering, like one very very long train rolling across the country.

When utilizing current technology, these videos can be rendered in as mcu time as it takes to watch it.

Allowing for more efficiency, more time for production, and most importantly, more iterations. In all reality, this makes life easier, but is not fully revolutionary. To fully realize the impact this technology in architecture we need to think about the basics..

Real Time Rendering. This means one can render a video not before, but DURING a presentation, allowing for precise control and in the moment decisions.

As a consumer, real time rendering has very little effect on movies and television. Yes it allows the ones making it to have more control and flexibility, but it does not change one’s own experience. This is very different from what is done in architecture. Architects design space, not images. When a visitor enters a building they are free to walk and view it as they like. In fact there is an argument for saying that no two people experience the same space in the same way. So why should we present these architectural spaces as if everyone has the same experience? Architecture reviews of the future will be fully interactive. When a space can be fully designed in a virtual world or in a game engine, critics have the ability to hold a controller and walk theory

around to areas, they want to go. We have the capacity and the wherewithal to put on a set of VR goggles and walk around in a newly designed room as if it existed in reality. Viewers can point their phones at a specific spot and view a model in virtual space, constantly being rendered in real time to match the viewers angle.

Instead of showing images of what it would be like to have an architectural project built, why not just witness it in person. Yet that is not where the future ends. The current Design Documents class has fully converted to digital format Sci_Arc. Last year dozens of drawings would be pinned on the walls to represent every aspect of a building and now it is purely animation.

In the future this can be taken another step forward with full interactivity. If the video is rendered in real time the viewer can harness full control over what is being shown.

From the tap of a putton one can see a specific joint detail or floor plan.

The distance from any point to the nearest staircase can be calculated.

One can rotate, zoom or hide any aspect with full control while also being one hundred percent realistically rendered. Simply tap the screen to be dropped into a room, to view out a window, or see a wall section.

One can flip a switch to filter on and off realistic or artistic interpretations.

As many critics or presentations go, reviewers often have many questions on what is not being shown or what to investigate more into a detail. This all can be done during the review with full control given in real time.

In a world that focus on transparency and a constant draw for more information, why not allow this thought process to impact the architecture world. Give the viewer access

to everything and anything without holding back. Present an entire building with the ability to view or inspect any inch from an infinite different perspectives. Curation will remain, always. However, the flexibility of modern day technology allows exponential growth for architects in their presentations and creativity.

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Frontier Treatment

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It starts with the Oasis. A hub world for everything in the New Frontier. The Oasis acts as the center of a massive web that stretches out in all directions, a single planet in a massive galaxy of possibilities.

The Frontier is a vast galaxy of open worlds for you to explore alone, with your friends, with a clan, or with your guild.

There are nine different types of activities to take part in throughout the Frontier, and 9 different guilds to help you advance in each one. You can specialize or become well balanced, with challenges, missions and rewards for each kind of player. Each of these factions would have an elected leader, every season. Each would be voted on by the members of his/ her respective faction and is chosen to represent their desires and interests when it comes to improving and advancing the frontier after release.

Most if not all of these elected leaders would be content creators because they would have their own advertising platform and be heavily involved with the game. Being content creators, this also allows them to have their finger on the pulse of what their audience, and our player-base, wants for the future. Once a season (60 days) these faction leaders can

theory

come together to vote on a proposal to the developers on what should be improved, changed or added in the next season. Ideas could be new cosmetics in a certain style, improving gameplay of a certain mode, creating additional maps for a mode, or even quality of life improvements for inventory, land ownership and more.

These nine different factions, inspired by the typical character alignment chart, are directionally aligned with one of the great builders of lore and a game or activity. Some of these games are a battle royale, team based shooter, and a turn based card game. Some of the other factions are more focused on activities like exploration, building, and community based modded gamemodes.

The main reward system comes in the form of building/creating your own house or base somewhere in the galaxy. Can be done simply in a voxelized grid system with different types of materials for walls, floors, roofs, and decorations can be obtained through the different game modes. So a player can work through different game modes trying to obtain specific parts they need or just play heavily through one to derive a building primarily of their factions aesthetic.

One of the key factors of the Oasis is building/creating your personal base. The creation process is closely tied with the exploration portion of the Frontier. Throughout the massive expansive galaxy are an expansive number of small planets.

Each of these small planets are fully explorable yet very simple, they each have similar proportions to the planets from Spore with the diversity of them as well. Each player is able to place a single base on a planet of their choosing (with a few exceptions). If you have a clan of 5 or more each person with their own base you are able to claim an entire planet as your own with your crew. When you claim your space an inhabitable bubble is created that serves as a barrier from the harsh unknown as well as a restriction of your building space.

When it comes to the aesthetic look of the Frontier, Overwatch, Fortnite, TF2, Civilization, and Spore are heavy inspirations. This aesthetic creates a light mood, fun atmosphere, appeal to the widest audience, and is adaptable to any game mode. When it comes to this transition of identity between the different game modes, cross-pollination and interweaving lore is key. For example guns used in a team-based shooter should also each have their own cards in Gwent, or Hearthstone-like game. Playable characters and cosmetic items from one game should also be visible or playable in a teamfight tactics-like game.

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The Erosion of Stone

34

Here I am atop an igneous column. It juts up, black and craggy and young, from a soupy ocean.

My new island’s roughness has already worn fades in the seat of my blue jeans. I only brought a single pair so now I shift on my knees as I work on my data pad. The tablet would look to be made from stone if not for the shifting ink on its surface. I’m using the pad to interface with a network of automated satellites circling my planet.

In the Earth times, I practiced my art crudely and simply. I tapped the mantles of planets to express the creative force within me as chaotic explosions and self-similar fractals of rock. In these rocks I saw the crookedness and chaos within myself made solid.

Form in art is the absence of soul. My canvas, the planets and stars scattered throughout the galaxy, responds to the feelings of my heart in ways I cannot predict. I do not create carefully tailored landscapes or monuments to my own power. Instead, I work within the parameters set by the only two forces I acknowledge as more powerful as myself: physical astrogeology and Dr. Delany Samael.

I met Samael at a peak of new rock like this one. She came to me at a research site in Indonesia, on Earth, in my home at the edge of a volcano, overlooking a coral sea. She had seen my research and knew I was recognized as the greatest mind in geology, intuiting theory and practice in astrogeology like none before me. Everyone knew this, just as everyone knew Samael was the brightest mind in space travel and energy physics.

I had chosen my home for isolation, and refused to speak to her. Her public pleas for a radical future for humanity had never concerned me, and I wanted no part in them. I demanded that she leave me alone.

But Samael carries with her an aura of power, and I could not force her from my island before she explained why she had come. She knew of my academic progress, but had discovered something else: that I had been responsible for a serious of strange natural disasters that struck the solar system. The emergance of volcanic hotspots in the deep Atlantic Ocean. The suddenly changing climate on Europa. The impossible eruption of Olympus Mons.

Despite the summer heat my sweat ran cold. No amount of fame and excellence could protect me from feeling awe in her pressence “I will not turn you in, even if you refuse my offer,” Samael said. “However, I invite you to consider what you would be refusing.

“When the Building commences, I will have no leverage over you,” Samael condinued. “You will be answerable to no one. Instead, you will have the full faith and might of the human race at your disposal to whatever end you choose.

“Well, that’s not quite true,” she qualified. “You will have orders upon orders of magnitude more power than all humanity has ever accumulated at your disposal. You will have eternal life, purpose if you want it, and unlimited freedom.

You will be the mother to a new era without restriction.”

An era without restriction. For the briefest moment I felt the promise of the future radiating from Samael. I understood what she saw for humanity. narratives and lore

Dr. Delaney Samuel - Astrophysicist

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“Saudari Tendean!”

I glance up. It is Chamai Gombe, the biologist Builder, architect of life.

“I am not surprised to see you, Chamai Gombe.”

In spite of his use of the honorific Saudari, Gombe and I are intimately familiar with one another. For the past [REDACTED] Gombe has followed me from planet to planet, infecting each of my newly birthed worlds with the plague of life. We each could be working at any point in the galaxy at any given time, yet he chooses to track me.

Gombe was standing in the air on a pari of small metal squares. As he took steps toward me, the metal plates hurried to catch each foot, giving the illusion of descending an invisible staircase.

Something about the cheer in his eyes when he greets me today reinforces in me the belief that his following behind me like a stray mutt is an intentional act of disrespect.

Each planet I birth is raw and pure, my child with the chaos in each lump of carbon and iron. Gombe pollutes each with the eroding forces of life. His creations stabilize the climates, grind my canyons into dust, dance and fornicate on the graves of my continents.

“How’s your day, Saudari Tendean?”

Forgetting everything for a moment, I smile at him.

“I am well,” I tell him. “The atmospheric sensors are reporting stability in spite of the tectonic forces I awakened. This column will one day sit at the peak of a mountain range. I work now to deliver bots beneath the crust and force together this plate,” I say, gesturing to my left, “and that.”

“You depend too much on Liu’s bots for your work. You’re smart enough to design your own tools, aren’t you?”

“My dependence?” I laugh. “Are you forgetting your own grand entrance on those silly things beneath your feet? Liu’s work is mostly frivolous, but the man knows how to make a chisel. The sculptor need not create her own chisel to feel that what she makes with it is her own.”

Gombe steps down from his platform, attempting to look casual about it, though I suspect he has been hurt by my jibe.

“You always say such lovely things,” he says. “Did you have Liu hack the translators to make you seem more poetic than you are? Or do you sit around looking at rocks all day and writing this stuff in advance?”

I roll my eyes and return to my data pad. The insertion of bots is a finnicky thing--even Liu’s are not immune to the chaos of a planet’s interior, so great care has to be taken, along with mountains of data.

“How is your day, Tendean?”

I do not look up. “You already asked me that.”

“You lied before. You’re unhappy, I can tell. Don’t you think I know you after all this time?”

I look inward. Is he right?

“I know why you’re miserable all the time. You reject life.”

“Gombe, if you’re flirting with me, I swear.”

Gombe laughs.

“It’s my turn to speak truth,” he says. narratives and lore

Chamai Gombe - Biologist

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“You miss the Earth. You’re always looking for it out here,” he waved his hands, “but you will never see it again. All rocks are just pieces of your home you will never put back into the right shape.

“Rocks and geology are things of the past. Their being precedes being.

They decay. But life is the force of the future. It moves forward, rejects its ancestors, and becomes better all the time.

“Nur, you work to preserve some essence that does not exist except within the tomb you have constructed around your own soul. I can promise you more.

Listen--”

He reaches into a fold in his shirt and takes out a plastic case. He opens it, reaches inside, and brings out a cupped hand.

“May I--” he says, and steps toward me, hand out. He opens it.

In his palm is a creature a few centimeters in diameter. It spreads a pair of electric blue wings and tilts a bug-eyed head. A heterogenous glob of green wobbles on its chin like a clump of algae, and betwen the wings is a line of transparent crystals.

“It’s beautiful,” I admit.

“It’s symbiosis,” Gombe whispers. “Not just between two forms of life, but between life and non-life.

“Nur, the distinction between our domains is fake. There is nothing separating life and so-called non-life. My critters chew on your rocks. I’m as tired of being bound by your whims as you are of me altering everything you create.

“We need to work together,” Gombe says. There is a sincerity in his voice I have never heard. “We can design worlds for life, and life for worlds. We can make self-sustaining chaos that spits in the face of death. We can preserve the forces that govern both of our work.”

It is a phenomenal vision.

“No,” I say.

“Nur, look inside yourself. You are unhappy and aimless, and I’m offering you direction and purpose!”

“The planet that turns forcefully inward is uninhabitable. I’ve gotten this far on my gut, and my gut says fuck you, Chamai. Stop following me. I did not choose eternity to spend it with you.”

Gombe’s face darkens. His voice softens, and he does not shift from his casual posture, but I see for the first time a core of fury inside him bubbling up, one so hot that it must always have been there, feeding itself.

“You make a mistake here, Tendean,” he says. “You will no longer see me.

But I will always be behind you. I will spread out my creations across the galaxy, and they will feast on yours, and they will carry on into the future. They’ll destroy you and everything you’ve worked toward, and then they’ll forget you.

“I am the eternal. I am life. You are already dead.”

I turn back to my work. I do not see him leave. I am alone on the column for a long time.

narratives and lore

Nur Tendean - Geologist

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Buisness on the Frontier

40

I woke up in a crowd. All around me, people were sitting up on their beds.

Many were still sleeping.

I felt disoriented and weak. To this day, I have only vague memories of the time before hibernation. I still don’t know if that was an effect of the sleep, or a choice made by the builders?

Between the beds, faceless automata roamed. They moved gently in human bodies like mannikins given life; if they were shorter than their staggering eight feet, one might mistake them for people from behind. One automaton, a matte skyblue, leaned down beside me. Across its face flashed a message: How are you? Its kindness made me grin.

Before long I had been oriented, given some basic effects, and set out into the galaxy to make my way.

Countless words have already been devoted to the singular experience of emerging from the hibernation chambers on Vidae Prime and catching sight of a new world for the first time. I’d be remiss, though, to continue this story without adding my own impressions.

There are the iconic images, burned into the memory of every hibernator.

The seven obsidian paths, radiating outward from the hibernation complex. The blue grass between them, covering land as flat as a level for as far as the eye can see. Above all, the seven statues of the Builders, standing on the horizon, their heads on dizzying high obscured by haze. Immediately opposite the hibernation center’s main gate is Dr. Delaney Samuel, chief Builder, Engineer, her arms spread in welcome.

There are these images, and there are the feelings that accompanied them, perhaps less obvious but no less common. Awe. Wonder. Excitement and fear. The sudden realization that greatness is not only possible for each and every human being, but that in our greatness we challenge one another, and we elevate existence itself.

My first coherent thought upon emerging from the hibernation facility’s main doors was: this is going to be a hell of a lot of fun.

The trading freighter I flagged on Vidae II was heading deep into the galaxy to try to shift goods on outer worlds. The stars neighboring Vidae were already filling up in those early days as pioneers and agriculturalists staked claims to any lot they could mark out in chalk. So I needed a ride

At a fueling station in a particularly , my chauffeurs made an unbeatable deal for a handful of relics and a pile of spice with some explorers just back from unmapped territory, and I got dumped.

Dr. Samuel, the Engineer, created one of the greatest mysteries of the new world in the fueling depots, which are scattered around the galaxy at regular intervals, especially in expanses in between stars. They are entirely self-contained and feature the strongest security anywhere in the galaxy. Somehow they maintain fuel reserves without limit, and charge nothing to access. Without these fuel reserves, humans would be stranded on whichever planets they landed on. A long-standing narratives and lore

Unnamed Builder - Economist

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law, one of the rules handed down from the Builders, stated that the refueling stations were places of peace, uncontrolled by hostile parties.

So there I was, stranded on a small fueling depot with nothing but a satchel of some basic utilities. I paid for a room in a cheap motel some entrepreneurial architect had welded to the side of the station.

I waited days for someone to pick me up, but all the empty ships were heading back to the crowded Vidae region. Those heading outward were laden with goods and high-paying passengers. I wasn’t the only hitchhiker dropped off on the depot without means of escape.

I started begging for pocket change in exchange for some basic station-level manual labor. The main thing people wanted from me was to pump the fuel, a lengthy process that required attendance. While I pumped gas, the captains could pop around, haggle for food, and hunt for cheap goods on overstocked haulers.

Soon, I had enough cash to hitch a ride out to a distant planet. But I decided to stay. In living at the station, I had begun to develop an intuition about the forces driving and containing outward expansion. I learned that food staples, once critical to settling new planets, were less valuable as farmers claimed more and more land in more places, while certain newly-discovered mushrooms and meats could buy their weight in gold.

Above all captains were obsessed with efficiency. The biggest obstacle to making money was moving the goods to where they’d be needed. Resources were hugely plentiful, but the universe was huger. Arriving at a colony to find that potential buyers had just bought the goods you were pedaling from a rival could ruin a whole mission. Central markets had cropped up in some of the denser star clusters, but most homesteaders were focused on developing locally and didn’t have time to travel huge distances just to browse for rare goods.

I developed a plan.

Once I had enough gold to my name, I caught the first cheap ride that would take me past an empty planet. I also bought a handful of tools from an exploring and mining crew returning to Vidae to shift gems. I asked my ride to pick me up on the way back, and paid in advance. I gathered raw materials from the barren rock, set up a workshop, and got crafting.

A week later, I was back at the station with a hundred empty fuel tanks. For a small fee—not much more than what I had charged as an attendant—I swapped pre-fueled tanks for empties. Ships could take off a few minutes after hitting the station, rather than losing precious hours refilling and milling about. The service was a hit, and before long, traders were going out of their way to buy my tanks.

Two major consequences of my business emerged, one good and one bad.

By being the main point of contact between every ship who came by the (who are we kidding, let’s call it “my”) station, I had a monopoly on the most valuable good coming through the station—information. I carefully tracked the movement of resources in and out of the station, where they were going, what they had sold for, who had what. People began asking me for trading advice and soliciting information. I could tell a packer the best price that had been gotten for a slab of organic protein meal in the sector in the last week, and whether it was higher this week than the last. I could refer a tech hauler away from the systems where rivals were headed. I wasn’t just helping merchants; I was improving the pace at which goods could be moved where they were needed and people could explore the cosmos.

Word of my service traveled. Before long, I was expanding. Since the connarratives and lore

Unnamed Builder - Architect

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cept was so strongly associated with my brand, I hired employees to occupy and run fueling stations across the sector with my sector and licensed my own name.

I was raking it in, I mean really making a killing. I had changed the way that people saw fuel. Instead of a public good, it had become a commodity, and the wealthy were soon to take notice. In exchange for my willingness to camp out, and the brand I built, my employees and customers bought into a totally new way of moving between the stars.

Predictably, my change brought me trouble. A handful of competitors cropped up—this was to be expected, and to the extent that these competitors helped spread familiarity with the concept, they actually ended up boosting my business.

More concerning were the pirates, raiding clans, and guilds that took stronger issue with the foothold I was carving out. They objected to what they saw as a hostile takeover of a public good so central to life in the galaxy that the rule of fuel station non-occupation had been widely respected even by warring factions.

Though I did make it damn inconvenient to fuel up by occupying the queue constantly, I didn’t forcibly bar anyone from using the stations, so I wasn’t breaking the law. The automata police force wasn’t intelligent enough to consider whether I was violating the spirit of the law, only the letter.

But when some members of the shipping guild Arcos hired a gang of mercenaries to patrol outside one station’s no-combat zone, picking off potential customers, they weren’t violating any laws, either. Arcos was a little operation with about the same worth as my company, but all of my money was tied up in capital—workers, infrastructure, marketing (I might have started plastering ads with my face on them on every roaming billboard and cargo ship I could find. Hey—I never said I didn’t deserve retribution). I couldn’t afford to hire any counter-fighters.

Things started getting hairy. First, a civilian ship carrying medicine to the edgeworlds got blasted by a pirate outside a station. The New Builders Council— representing the faction of colonists sworn to peace heading out to start a secret and independent society without weaponry—ordered a blanket ban on paying me. That hurt. My employees started abandoning their posts as pirates threatened crueler fates. Bloggers and news outlets were hailing my defeat. I hadn’t imagined that the galaxy could be so united about anything—the campaign of smear and intimidation had worked, and in a week my name had oscillated from legend to villain.

The last straw came when the Peoples’ Council passed legislation outlawing the occupation of refueling stations by commercial interests. The Council was empowered to rewrite the Builders’ original code given sufficient consensus. The bill came into effect the midnight after it was passed, and the automata moved in.

As the clock struck, I had already abandoned my post—rather than going down with my economic ship, I had bartered a tiny starfighter, and was bracing to make my way through the battalion of pirates who had eagerly assembled to celebrate my downfall with my execution in neutral space.

I want to pause for a moment because I’m worried I’ve given you too much of their side of the story. I was a cold-hearted capitalist wresting control of a good through the exercise of power, right? And while I pursued my greedy ends, innocent people got hurt. narratives and lore

Unnamed Builder - Medical Expert

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But the value of efficiency cannot be understated. The Builders gave the people of our new world a gift: freedom of a degree unimagined by any who came before us. The spirit of Vidae Prime—the promise of Delany’s open arms, that the world is ours—was echoed in my own efforts. Not only did I work within the bounds of my society to meet demand, I contributed directly and significantly to the efficient expansion of peoples. I worked to profit from the greatest good: the propagation of freedom.

Is that good? Ready to root for me again? Well—

My hands shook on the controls of my little fighter. My time in the spotlight wasn’t long enough for me to feel like anything but a little fish in a big empty vacuum. I was staring down fighters who’d been training for years since I woke up. And now my life was on the line.

When you’ve dug a hole for yourself after following your gut, sometimes the best thing to do is set aside all your instincts and do what feels most wrong.

So I radioed the pirates and let the panic and embarrassment I felt come through in my voice.

“I surrender,” I said. “Can I bargain?”

Soon I was making calls to the area’s faction heads begging for my pathetic terms to be accepted. I would continue offering refueling services at all stations I occupied, I told them, completely free of charge. Employee expenses I’d cover out of my own pocket. In return, I’d pedal cheap items and they’d let me live.

And I did for a while.

Before long, I realized I’d stumbled upon a business model so genius that I couldn’t have come up with it in a million years. I was losing significant sums staffing a whole network of refueling stations to provide a free service. But I was still receiving a massively valuable piece of capital--information. In my own work I was able to track the movement of volumes of goods traded by every syndicate in the region. I was privy to shortages before they happened, surpluses while they were on their way to population centers. On Earth they would have called what I was doing “insider trading.” I just called it “lucrative.”

Soon I was having my employees record and send to me all the little bits of information they picked up. I turned all this knowledge into profit through trading on my personal account. I could do no wrong.

When my impossible wealth became known and what I was doing got out, I braced myself for a shitstorm of epic proportions. But no such storm of shit ever came. All the major powers were so reliant on my network’s free labor and afraid of losing it that they actually advocated for an official law allowing my profiteering from gossip. By completely subordinating myself and bearing what they thought was a major cost, I had ingratiated myself to the galaxy and earned control of the most valuable resource in space: information.

narratives and lore

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Downbeat

48

I listen closely to the sound of my open palm on the steel wall. I’m slapping out a syncopated rhythm next to the closed panel. When I was young (when I still got older, when time meant something,) I was in a jazz ensemble. I was the drummer. When I need to kill time and I listen to music I still hear the beat more than the melody. I modulate the shape of my hand to get the slap right, drumming out Brubeck’s Take Five. It’s knobbly and stiff compared to back then, but I can’t complain, even to myself.

I pick up the tempo. I’m not afraid to admit it to myself: I’m nervous. Soft, I hear the woman at the mic croon. Meek. Out of practice. Weak.

“Pick up the pace” I snap at the small man next to me. Liu Anton, the roboticist Builder is sitting on a stool one step closer to the door. “You designed this lock, didn’t you?”

He’s got a datapad on his lap and the hand he’s using to tap at it is holding a second datapad. In front of him are a pair of blue plastic jellyfish things. Their fluid movement is apparently helping us get this door open.

Liu glances at me. He pushes a big green button on the touch screen. One of the jellyfish robots crams itself into the hole while the other starts forcing open some new panels. He swaps hands

“Liu, are you making progress or not? I know this is the first time anyone’s asked you to rush in about a hundred years, but try to remember what it’s like to work on something with some urgency.”

Liu puts one datapad on the floor and begins typing on it with his left hand while he scrolls through some schematics on the pad in his right. Without stopping, he looks up at me.

I go back to slapping the steel. I know I’m being shorter with Liu than I need to be. Rusty. Dusty. I just don’t like the guy.

I take a step back. “Ugly ass house,” I say. It is. It’s a big metal box, narrower on top, like a steel ziggurat wedged into rock. The exterior is largely featureless. I pace around the outside, looking for other routes in.

“Can we talk to him?” I ask.

“I’ll get to work on that too,” says Liu.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to understand. Dr. Samael, smartest person in the world, gets to eight people to follow her into eternity and put humanity’s future on their shoulders, and one of the eight, out of billions, is Liu Anton.

I’m not an idiot. Liu is a genius, literally. He’s the best roboticist in the world. But when you have all the time you need, you can become a good roboticist. Hell, I’ve learned my fair share of robotics, I think, kicking my toe against a defense bots, a dark thing lying along the ground like foot-long centipede (my design). What you can’t become is a better person. Liu is not cut out to be a builder.

Emad thought so too, when I brought it up over a game of poker. This was early into the project. Most of the builders--Gombe, Samael, Emad, myself, Liu-made a point of maintaining human contact. We would get together often, teach narratives and lore

Companion Drone

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each other or brainstorm or just spend time. Emad and I shared a love of poker, but got bored playing one-on-one hands--there are only so many variations. I asked for some Liu-bots that could keep up with us. What Liu provided was disappointing--stiff, predictable. After a few weeks their bluffs were obvious, and their expressionless faces became readable. In the end I just had my personal defense bots tear them up as a game.

“Didn’t think Liu could find a way to mess this up,” I complained to Emad.

“How hard is poker? Even just adding some randomness or some personality would’ve helped. These are terrible.”

Emad chuckled and waited. We were sipping tea together on a balcony overlooking a beautiful canyon. Thunderheads stalked the horizon. One of the things I liked best about Emad was his patience--he let me say my piece before feeling like he had to jump in.

“Abdel,” I said, leaning toward him, “you’re my philosopher. You’re a judge of men, of right and wrong. Do you really think Liu belongs here?”

Emad frowned.

“If I said that I understood why he was chosen among all the roboticists on Earth, it would be a lie,” Emad said. “But, if I said that I expected to understand Samael, that would be a lie too. Her machinations have exceeded my understanding ”

I mirrored his frown.

“Samael is a genius, Abdel, but you can’t mean you think she’s got some master plan we’re not in on. Where is it hiding?” I spread my arms out, gesturing toward the vista beneath us. “There’s nothing hidden from us in the universe. No. She’s brilliant--maybe even the best of us--but she’s not outsmarting us.”

These types of conversations had grown more common for Emad and me.

As the years stretched on and the social dimensions of our work remained narrow, we both got paranoid in our own ways. The fact was that neither of us were really needed until the resurrection. As the Enforcer, I could plan out strategy, but beyond building infrastructure, there wasn’t a whole lot to do. Besides, I always worked better when playing off others.

Emad had it even worse. “Philosophy is a human struggle against the condition of being,” he would tell me. “What I am doing is not being. It’s waiting. I can’t just spin wheels forever. Nothing changes without human growth.”

But this paranoia about Samael was a new thought to me, and it got me thinking.

“Okay, he’s actually engaged a video linkup from inside the house,” Liu says to me. His reedy voice snaps me out of my reflection.

“Oh yeah? Okay, put him on. Actually, wait a second.”

I pause. Liu looks at me. I realize all of a sudden that I don’t like the look of this. Breaking into Abdel’s fortress of solitude with the help of Liu, a man we both think of as undeserving of unending life, puts me on the bad side.

“Liu, you know what? Take off. I’ll handle this. Now that I can talk to him,” I pivoted, “I’m confident in my ability to resolve the situation.”

“And if I can’t,” I add, heading off his question, “I’ll use force. I’ve got my defense bots. Unless you’re telling me even sustained pressure can’t take these walls down.”

“I thought you said the risk of injuring Emad in the assault was too great,” Liu answers. narratives and lore

Lui Anton - Robotics Expert

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“Leave the risk calculation to me. And the assaults too, if it comes to that.

You’ve gotten me communication so I can speak with the voice of the law. Now let me. No one is above the law, Liu.”

“No, sir,” Liu says. He hands me a datapad and heads out.

“Something’s sick out there,” is the first thing Emad says to me. “I will not come out.”

“Emad, I don’t need to explain to you that you don’t need to worry about getting sick,” I say. In the datapad he’s as well-groomed and healthy as ever, but his expression is completely unfamiliar. A bit wild. Plenty of times Emad’s mind had gone places in conversations or projects that I completely failed to follow, but I’ve never seen him lose it like this.

“Not disease,” he says. “My job is knowing how the world should be. And the way it is out there, it’s wrong. Corrupted. I can’t figure out why but I’m absolutely positive. And I can’t figure out what it is. So I’m drawing a box around the problem. I’m going to figure out what’s wrong in here, and then I’ll work my way out.”

“Look, you know I have no right to force you out of there. But”--I catch myself lowering my voice--“it’s Dr. Samuel. She’s insisting. You’ve been M.I.A., and she got concerned. So I’m here on… On orders.”

I guess he sees the expression on my face. He calms visibly.

“Okay,” he says, “I understand. There’s nothing that can keep me inside against Dr. Samuel’s will. I’m going to let you in.”

A mechanism roars to life, and the door begins to lift.

“I’m just glad it was you she sent, my friend. I don’t know if I would have been reasonable for anyone else!”

Inside is dark and cool. I make my way down the bare steel walls. (The trouble with dividing a universe nine ways was all the empty space. Can’t decorate everything.) I’m tapping my palms against my thigh again. Am I nervous?

“Emad?” I call. There’s light coming through a doorway to the left. I make my way over and step through it.

I get a glimpse of a lived-in space--a nice rug on the floor, a desk, piles of books--before the light goes out. I hear the door slam shut. I swing around, but it’s pitch black, and my foot catches on a book. I hit the ground hard.

“What the hell is this?” I yell.

“You’re going to listen to me now, Henry.” It’s Emad’s voice, coming through the door. He sounds pissed.

Hell, I’m pissed.

I have a flashlight clipped somewhere on my belt. I find it, click it on, stand up, and try the door. It’s a gesture.

“Let me out of here, Emad,” I say. “You don’t get to do this. When I get out of here, I swear…” I pound my fist against the door.

“When you get out of there I’ll have let you--maybe it’s not such a good idea to threaten me,” he laughs. Goddamn philosopher.

“No, Henry, I just want you to listen. You haven’t listened to me. I’m serious, I think there’s something wrong with this whole business--with the universe.

Written into the fabric of being, something is corrupt. Imagine a world of limitless resources, of long life, in which life is nonetheless painful. How can infinity be short?” narratives and lore

Abdelramen Emad - Philosopher

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I sigh. I give up on pounding, open my fist, and start drumming on the door. It gets the stress out, and…

“I don’t follow, Emad,” I say. “What the hell? You’re saying you’re unhappy? Is this some kind of--what, hostage situation? You have demands?”

“No!” he yells. “I just need your ear. There’s so much I don’t understand about what we’re doing here. I just need to know if I can trust you. Henry, I need to know--are you working for humanity? Or for Dr. Samuel?”

“Uh…” I said. What?

“Henry, I’ve given it thought, and I need you to prove… that you’re willing… to make sacrifices for humanity,” he said. He sounded like he was struggling to get the words out.

“But, I know you, Henry. You’re the best bluffer there is. So I need you to… to not bluff. You have to give something up to… to prove you’re my friend.

That you and I, we’re on the side of humanity.”

“Spit it out, Emad,” I say. I’m getting nervous. My tapping gets faster, louder. I focus on modulating my palm to make the bass and the snare as distinct as possible.

“Harry, there’s a knife in there, on the desk. And there’s a gap beneath the door frame. I need you… I need you to pass me a finger.”

For the first time that day I skip a beat.

“Abdel,” I say.

“Henry, I’ve thought about it, and it’s the only way to take a first step down the road to trust,” he said. “I’m sorry. I won’t wait long.”

“Abdel, please, listen to me. Why don’t you and I take five and come back, and then…”

I trail off, listening for the thud. It comes. A few seconds later, the door slides open. A defense bot is waiting there for me.

“Jazz bots,” I say down to Emad. “Isn’t that clever?” He’s lying on the ground, centipedes wrapped tightly around his wrists, ankles, face. “Say the song name, and they attack on the down beat. I played with a clarinetist in college who did that.”

He responds with a look of defeat.

“What are you going to do to me?” Emad asks. We’re outside the fortress, which construction bots are taking apart piece by piece. “Are you going to kill me? Is this the end?”

“What? No,” I said. “You think you’re the first Builder to lose it a little bit?

This is part of the job. You need to keep your distance for a while, maybe I’ll put a picture of your face on a punching bag, but nothing takes away your power or your…” I look down at him. “Your right to be here.”

It’s true. Not the first disaster, not the last. It’s good to have to stay on my toes, otherwise my joints would freeze. I had hoped, though, that I’d keep one friend.

narratives and lore

General Henry Rankin - Military Strategist

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Design

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As a test, I begun designing a hub for the large Frontier. Called the Oasis, it is strongly intertwined with the narratives and characters of the Frontier, this foundation would hold player’s first impressions and key interactions.

This designed followed a few key characteristics.

First it is contained within a defined boundary. Compared to No-Stop city, infinity is not relatable. Creating a defined, contained space allows people to become connected and intimate with the world.

Second it is split into different distinctive districts. As with Overwatch, these different locations are conrdinated with the different characters.

This adds to the relatability for different people and different cultures to connect and find representation within a single space.

Third, it is large enough to allow for travel time and journeys. The size and scale of the Oasis is to allow easy quick travel between different areas and different locations without being too quick. The passage of time and action of traveling from one location to another helps to create and connection between the place and the player.

Forth, it contains a well-balanced yet diverse hierarchy of spaces. The largest spaces are not associated with the nine different districts. Each district is centered around a plaza where most of the activities will take place.

Then the connecting paths between the district embrace the “inbetween� state of the two different styles. design

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design

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design

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o a s Philip Hood

Creative Director @Ph1sh_Phood Ben Goldstein Narritive Author @dochvam

Sophie Hood

Concept artist @scribblesupport