“New forms of labyrinths made possible”:
Three digital renditions of urban play in contrast with the dérive
While the dérive is sometimes confused with the purposeless amble, the stroll, the questing journey, it is not simply any of these (though each could themselves be contained within the derive). There are something like rules –guidelines, at least. The dérive, as laid out by Debord in “Theory of the Dérive” is is game-like in structure – although it is unlike a game in that it rules are not easily stated: “written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game”. One learns to play by playing, it is through this play that one learns the rules of a game that are always changing.
This collection assembles three experiences, each in its way founded in the digital, each layered over the urban space the dérive proposes to explore. The dérive, translated literally, means ‘drifting’. The experiences offered through these experiences, where play and exploration mingle with wayfinding, control, and enforcement, is more akin to a ‘hunt’ than a ‘drift’. Debord observed that techniques of modern architecture made possible new forms of labyrinth, new possibilities for the dérive. In each of these experiences, modern digital methods create the possibilities of new labyrinths, which is no surprise. The labyrinth is a popular gamic form, reaching back to the earliest days of digital play. We would do well to remember the labyrinth’s origins: built by the state as a place of punishment and hunting ground for an unnatural monster that preyed on youth.
The game Pac Manhattan, established by NYU’s ITP, bears a family resemblance to the dérive. However, while the dérive hopes to discover psychogeographical contours through activity, Pac Manhattan exposes the psychogeographical character of a single location through the very specific experience it makes possible. Established in a moment when the island was being parceled up and sold off as real estate, the island north of 14th was mapped as tidy, saleable portions arranged as a rational grid, which the city’s infrastructure cemented as part of its psychogeographical makeup.
Pac Manhattan would be unplayable in the broad tree-lined avenues of Paris, or the winding, narrow cobblestone thoroughfares of Boston’s Beacon Hill. It is the mathematical precision of Pac Man’s grid that aligns with the rigid, mathematical logics that govern Manhattan’s grid. The same algorithmic principles that undergird the digital experience of play undergird the earlier parceling out of land and the regimentation of human experience represented by Manhattan’s rational layout, dictated not by human use but by the imperative of market logics.
However, Pac Manhattan does not limit itself to this act of implicit description through similarity. It can also be read as a defiant act of “playful-constructive behavior”. The relation between player and controller allows for an exploration of the relationship between player and game, between system and player; but it does this within the flexible bounds of social relations, not the inflexible demands of a system of algorithmic control. To learn to play the digital game of Pac Man well is to learn to play by the rules of the algorithm; but to learn to play Pac Manhattan well is to learn to play well with another human being around and through the struggles that mediation creates.
Uncle Roy All Around You (hereafter Uncle Roy) operates along a similar mixed reality principle as Pac Manhattan – the virtual layered over the actual; an Online Player in connection with a Street Player. However, its relation to the dérive is a different one. If it performs the function of the dérive, it does so incidentally to its central activity: the navigation of a labyrinth, defined by its virtual character, overlaid over the city only through the partnership of the Street Player and the Online Player, mediated by a third presence, that of the illusory Uncle Roy. The dérive discovers existing psychogeographic contours through navigation; Uncle Roy, instead, defines novel psychogeographic experiences through the gamic experience that structures it.
The potential experiences are, of necessity, limited by the contours of the city itself; the virtual city is overlaid by the actual city, as well as bound to its actually existing feature. A collapse in this relation would lead to a collapse in the game. The virtual city, then, is a kind of shadow or ghost of the real – but simultaneously, a presence that informs and dictates the actual flows of activity of players in the world. The potentials of the city itself remain. Does the game direct the player’s attention to these existing potentials – or does it cover over these potentials with an alternate, digital reality? Can either be said to take precedence? In this way, there is a potential for the game itself to develop not only an understanding of the city’s psychogeography, but the complex unfolding digital landscape that shadows it. But is it that digital dimension that begins to constrain not only possibilities of play, but yield to the forceful structuring presence of a society in the grip of algorithmic control?
The vision of a digital world overlaid on the actual world that is at the hearts of projects such as Pac Manhattan or Uncle Roy comes to full flower in the design fiction Game of Drones. The virtual dimension here would not expose the latent psychogeographic principles of the city’s landscape or structure possibilities for action and chance adventure; rather, it operates as a digital force of command and control over the very real presence of the city. The gamification of drone-based civic enforcement is not powered by the operations of algorithmic systems, but by the supple character of the human mind urged on by the new delights that this ‘game’ offers.
While Game of Drones represents a fictional system, the values it proposes are very real. The operation of the fictional system is a dérive sinister: whereas the dérive seeks the pleasures of exploration and the unexpected, Game of Drones seeks transgressions, punishes deviations. It not only operates along these lines, but proposes to do so democratically by making it a game anyone can play – ultimate fulfilment of a certain tendency of liberal thought under late capital which no longer demands all power to the people, but instead, merely demands that the power to ruthlessly enforce the dictates of the system be handed to the people themselves, to be enacted on themselves.