SpaceFighter is a game that wants to model the complexity of time based competitive urban developments. It wants to reflect and compare imaginable forecasted, interactive urban processes, actions and reactions. It compares series of selected and possible projective simulations, results and outcomes of urbanistic chain reactions. SpaceFighter builds on the accumulated knowledge of MVRDV's Regionmaker and Climatizer. Yet where the Regionmaker was about scenario building and the comparison of scenarios, SpaceFighter wants to model the interactive process beyond scenario making. Scenarios are based on a given, limited set of outcomes, while interactive models can generate outcomes that never could have been imagined beforehand. One can imagine that as soon as a scenario has been laid out, reactions appear. And, as soon as these reactions have appeared, the planner is forced to interact in order to 'deal with these reactions', which results in a new interaction, which in its turn triggers new reactions, etc. SpaceFighter seeks to model interactive urban developments as an evolutionary process.

Test version in De Unie, Rotterdam

For the Rotterdam Biennale a small test version is shown in the black room, back in De Unie. It is a multi-player game, where there is an initial terrain where intelligent agents move around to react to the players. The players use paint to project their intensions of the future. Paint attracts and repels agents, often converting them into urban forms.

It is multi-player environment and there is substantial interference between the players (competition and collaboration) just like the real world. This interference leads to emergent patterns of urban form.

The book

The book SpaceFighter will be published by Actar publishers in Barcelona. It accompanies the theoretical backgrounds by DSD, the dreams of the Berlage Institute and a test game by MIT. It will be released in August 2007.

MIT, Cambridge USA

SpaceFighter is based on studies by the Delft School of Design and the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, 2006-2007.

Tutor: Winy Maas

Assistant: Kaustuv De Biswas with Joris Fach

Students: Thomas Plewe, John Snavely, Simon Kim, Seth Avecilla

Preliminary studies:  Agent Based Game Design with an urban context