With Jussi Parikka, Pau Waelder, Aymeric Mansoux and Mónica Bello. Recorded (VO EN/ES) in Barcelona the 24th of February 2012 as part of the I+C+i Our Life Online session at CCCB.

Internet is changing our way of understanding the public space. The Web has become a dominant structure that covers all aspects of contemporary society. The proliferation of virtual agents, designed to stimulate non-fortuitous reactions and meetings, reconfigures the profile of individuals in dynamics that are innovative but also invasive, and generates new forms of control. In this brand new context, identity and simulation become decisive themes of behaviour on the Web.

Most of the look and feel has been based on the small research on state controlled newspapers and blogs, as well as propaganda poster strategies. The latter led to the repurposing and adaptation of more than 60, mostly Republic of China’s, slogans that are now used as straplines from the Naked on Pluto news site.

Next step now is to make some ads that match the different activities going on in Elastic Versailles, and work on the data that is gathered by the bots which are authoring this propaganda site.

Just like our cleaner bot, we will be using existing platforms, more precisely the newspaper will be a good old WordPress blog and each bot will have its own editor account. Thanks to XML-RPC, making the bridge between EVr14 ecosystems and the blog was quite trivial.

#!/usr/bin/python

import xmlrpclib, sys

target = 'http://nothing.now/xmlrpc.php'

if len(sys.argv) >= 6:
    try:
        post = {'title': sys.argv[4], 
                'description': sys.argv[5], 
                'categories': [sys.argv[3]]}
        blog = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy(target)
        blog.metaWeblog.newPost('Plutonian Times', 
                                sys.argv[1], 
                                sys.argv[2], 
                                post, 
                                1)
    except:
        print 'OOPS: ' + str(sys.exc_info()[1])
else:
    print 'Usage: '+sys.argv[0]+' user password category title content'

We still have to figure out what kind of generative information will be made with this script when it’s called from scheme, but no matter what in a couple of days we should have the first edition of this newspaper up and running!

This residency was very different – naturally at this stage focused on the software, we started with an initial list of showstopping things to fix, and then used online methods of organisation via mantis and the wiki.

We also presented the project for the first time, at NIMk’s space invaders event, and we had some super volunteers from Eindhoven Technical University Game Experience Lab to test the game (which Aymeric describes in more detail).

One of the things that I was pleased to get a chance to tackle was how to cope with the basics of online multiplayer games:

• How do we cope with having too many players?
• What do we do with players who haven’t played for a long time?
• How does this shared world repair itself so new players don’t find a world trashed by the earlier players?

The most worrying problem for me was the (perhaps rather hopeful) issue of being swamped by lots of people. This is an interface and resources problem, there has to be a fixed limit somewhere, a point where we have to turn people away. How do we do that?

There are two limits in this game:

A = The number of people playing at one time (interface, game world, and perhaps to a lesser extent CPU limited).
B = The number of people playing in total, with characters and associated data stored in the game (server memory limited).

B is a much higher number than A, so we can hide inactive players in order to accommodate a far higher number of people playing in total than we do simultaneously.

In other cases we are making solutions part of the game itself. For example, “cleaner” bots wander the world removing players who haven’t moved for a week – and at the same time remove items that are left over as a side effect of people playing the game.

Players can move bots around the world along with anything else, so they are given the ability to navigate their way home automatically. In some cases this results in some amusing emergent behaviour.

If left for long enough, the game will clean up all the players and return it to it’s starting point. If lots of people are playing and messing up the game too much, we just create more cleaners! At least, that’s the theory.

Thanks to Maarten Witteveen @ BALTAN for the photography.