Games for Cities

Ego City is a multiplayer gaming platform for participatory design, where multiple individual players can each confront and negotiate one another’s spatial desires. Based on the hypothesis of increasing density = increasing desires, the game explores the potentials of negotiation and density for both residents and design. Through the development of multi-user real-time video games, Ego City explores participatory design processes through gaming to model the competing desires and egos of each inhabitant in a housing block, and designs their apartments accordingly in the fairest way possible. Instead of juxtaposing compromised individual “dreams”, the game designers propose a new urban model based solely on its citizens’ most crazy fantasies.

The project aspires to construct, in urbanised and dense conditions, a participative dream — a living mosaic that contains an unlimited amount of desired situations, exploring the possibility of self-sufficient living and adjustable sizes/types of one’s personal living space. In order to achieve that, rather than focusing on an aesthetic product, a particular interest has been manifested in the development of an appropriate gaming process that would be capable of taking advantage of every player’s selfishness and then transform it into a spatial potential. This constant emergence of unexpected typologies may be of crucial interest as we move towards the production of an authentically human-driven architecture.

Ego City represents a playful take on Le Corbusier’s Domino project, which by extending it with an attached ‘gaming engine’, reinvents its modular concept and adds new and surprising dimensions to it – that of unlimited diversity and constant dynamism. Ego City utilises gaming technologies to broaden the scope of participation in architecture and urban design, creating tools that facilitate co-creation in the design of dense urban environments. In its post-topian vision, the game has been further developed by MVRDV and The Why Factory into I-City/We-City as part of the project ‘News from Nowhere’ for Documenta 13, by Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho.

Learn more about Ego City

back to overview