by Simon Yuill
spring_alpha is a multi-player game set in an industrialized housing estate whose inhabitants are attempting to create their own autonomous society in contrast to that of the regime in which they live. The game serves as a "sketch pad" for testing out alternative forms of social practice at both the 'narrative' level, in terms of the game story, and at a 'code' level, as players are able to re-write the code that runs the simulated world. The original narrative is based on a series of drawings by Chad McCail, "Spring" and "Evolution is Not Over Yet", which also shape the game's visual style. The original stories and images become a framework that is fleshed-out by people's own ideas and experiences. The basic aim of the game is to change the rules by which the society in that world runs. This is done through re-writing the code that simulates that world, creating new types of behaviour and social interaction. How effective this becomes depends on the players' ability to spread these new ideas into the society.
In its name, the project combines the title of one of Chad's drawings with the term 'alpha', referring in part to sci-fi dystopias such as "Alphaville" but also deriving from software development. An 'alpha' version is an early proof-of-concept program in which ideas are first formed. 'spring_alpha' is a game in permanent alpha state, always open to revision and re-versioning. Re-writing spring_alpha is not only an option available to coders however. Much of the focus of the project lies in using game development itself as a vehicle for social enquiry and speculation: the issues involved in re-designing the game draw parallels with those involved in re-thinking social structures. Rather than writing such explorations directly as code, this aspect of the project utilises a programming practice known as 'design patterns'.
A design pattern is not a piece of code as such but rather an outline of how a particular coding task may be handled. Each pattern addresses a specific task or problem in a generalised form. A coder may then adopt this pattern, implementing it within a project in their own choice of programming language and tailoring it the project's needs. Design patterns, therefore, present a way of articulating programming practices and problem-solving approaches in a sharable form that is analogous to the sharing of actual code through FLOSS licensed libraries and source distributions. [1] Whilst they are not unique to FLOSS development, they nevertheless emphasize a similar knowledge-sharing principle.
In the same way in which source code is collected and made available through online repositories, such as Savannah and Sourceforge, design patterns have been collated and shared through repositories such as the Portland Pattern Repository.[2] Portland introduced a new mechanism for collecting and editing patterns called the 'Wiki'. Created in 1995 by Ward Cunnigham, the Wiki adopts a simplified form of the code management systems used by repositories such as Savannah to coordinate the re-writing of code by numerous distributed programmers who download and update the projects. The most widely used code management tools include Concurrent Versions System (CVS), Bitkeeper, and Subversion (SVN).[3] Key to these tools is the use of version control, enabling the history of changes to a source code file to be recorded, and providing the ability to step back to earlier versions and review those changes. The Wiki provides this through a simple-to-use web interface, enabling a website to be generated by multiple authors as a discursive space in which they can review and modify each other's contributions. It is a looser system than CVS, supporting less structured, more informal types of text than program code. The Wiki can be understood as a design pattern in its own right, and has proven to be a powerful one, spawning many variations and applications, including numerous knowledgesharing forums. The most widely used of these is Wikipedia, an 'open', collaborative online encyclopaedia which has now outgrown all comparable institutionally authored encyclopaedias.[4]
The design patterns concept did not originate from the programming community, however, but was adopted from the work of the architect Christopher Alexander who described it in terms of 'pattern languages'. Alexander's pattern languages were developed as an approach to designing buildings and urban space in a way that enabled potential inhabitants of a design, who were without architectural training, to communicate their own desires for the creation and use of the space as well as understand an architect's proposals. Such patterns were a way of de-mythologising and democratising architectural design so that a built environment would not simply be the whim of a singular architect, but rather a response to the collective needs and desires of the communities it housed. In place of the 'Master Builder', Alexander proposed a socially located practice:
"... towns and buildings will not be able to come alive, unless they are made by all the people in society, and unless these people share a common pattern language, within which to make these buildings, and unless this common pattern language is alive itself."[5]
A parallel may be drawn between this and the Free Software movement's emphasis upon software development as a social issue, and the need for code to be 'free' and open in order to facilitate this.[6] Alexander himself has stated that he has been positively impressed by the adoption of the design patterns concept into programming and that programmers have, in general, appeared to understand and utilise it better than architects.[7] Whilst it operates well as a method for communicating between programmers however, there is still a way to go in de-mythologizing programming knowhow akin to that which Alexander sought in architecture. Design patterns, as they are currently used within computing, also fail to implement the kind of socially located practice Alexander promoted.
"A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction" is a repository, in book form, of architectural design patterns collected by Alexander and a team of collaborators over many years. It is intended as a reference book and user's manual from which people (whether architects or not) can implement designs appropriate to their situation. Many of the patterns are based on observations of vernacular building and the ways in which people have made use of spaces according to their own needs rather than the purposes they were possibly planned for. The patterns address issues of building and urban space on a variety of levels, from broad elements such as mixtures of housing and workplaces down to small formal details such as window positions and room layouts. Significantly, Alexander does not present these as exclusively formal patterns dealing solely with structure and shape, but rather, he emphasizes the need for each pattern to combine "the field of physical and social relationships" upon which a successful environment depends. The patterns therefore include examples such as: "Self-governing workshops and offices" in which the workers have autonomous control; "Teen-Age society", which replaces high-schools with distributed learning networks governed by the students; "Dancing in the street", which speaks for itself; and a pattern for creating spaces for people to sleep in public. This last pattern proposes that "it is a mark of success in a park, public lobby or a porch, when people can come there and fall asleep". It is in stark contrast to the kind of regulative perceptions governing most modern cities that see such behaviour as 'anti-social' or counterproductive, highlighting just how far uses of space that are not work or consumption orientated are discouraged there. With the possible exception of the Wiki pattern, such awareness of the combined physical and social, as promoted by Alexander, is absent from the use of design patterns in computing. Here they are almost exclusively applied to formal and technical issues, how software mechanisms operate internally rather than how software functions as a human 'inhabited' environment.
Alexander's patterns are used to articulate a model of how a built environment might be both in terms of structural form and social processes supported by that. As such they can be compared to two quite distinct 'traditions' of pattern use: one located in architecture as an expression of top-down state governance, and the other created from a grass roots level to challenge existing social patterns.
Originally published in the 1960's, "Space in the Home" was a guide book for architects and urban planners addressing the appropriate allocation of space in designing public housing. It had the aim of reforming current design by setting standards of minimum spatial requirements for the typical inhabitants. Based on the findings of the Parker Morris report, published as "Homes for Today and Tomorrow" in 1961, the plans in "Space in the Home" were based upon a model of the typical behaviour of a modern nuclear family. The book includes not only spatial layouts but temporal plans plotting a family's typical activities during the day, in which mother stays at home and father goes to work. The architecture it promotes is, in a sense, 'programmed' according to a particular lifestyle based on traditional gender roles and the demands of Western industrial culture. "Space in the Home" is a 'closed' pattern book, however, imposing itself on the communities it addresses rather than enabling them to voice themselves within, or against it.
It is this kind of closed and imposed social patterning that spring_alpha deliberately starts from. The housing in spring_alpha is directly derived from the designs of "Space in the Home". This is combined with a simulation system that parallels the 'spatial programming' of "Space in the Home". The simulation system in spring_alpha follows the 'smart terrains' model used in games such as The Sims.[8] In a smart terrain character behaviour is coded into the objects of the environment rather than the characters themselves. The behaviour to open a door, for example, will be coded into the door, and when a character comes into contact with that door it acquires and performs the behaviour. Social behaviours may also be encoded this way. In a pub, for example, the roles of barstaff and customer maybe coded into the different sides of the bar. In The Sims, players develop their character's behaviour by purchasing goods for them, with new behaviours being coded directly into the commodities. Whilst The Sims may claim to satirize consumer society, it nevertheless also reinforces a paradigm of consumption as the primary means of social and personal agency - you are what you buy. In spring_alpha, these closed systems are overtly opened and exposed as ones in need of re-writing. The player is not a consumer within the simulated society but rather one of many authors of it.
Whilst the Parker Morris patterns consolidate a set of normative social behaviours, and physically build them into the landscape, an entirely different tradition of patterns have developed to articulate ways of rewriting such behaviours and challenging the institutional mechanisms that support them. These have grown through less formal or systematic approaches than those of "Space in the Home" or Alexander, often being distributed through small-scale self-publication formats such as posters, zines and, more recently, websites.
The "Glasgow User Manual" is a project currently in progress in Glasgow. The 'manual' is more of an ongoing process rather than a static publication, evolving through a series of workshops and events covering different ways of re-claiming autonomous citizenship within the city outside of consumerist and bureaucratic models. Ideas developed through these are being collated on a website, http://www.citystrolls.com [1], where they can be cross-referenced with broader issues and debates and made more widely available. It is informed by an older project, "The Citizens Handbook" put together by Charles Dobson and the Vancouver Citizen's Committee, online at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/citizens-handbook/ [2], and in print as "The Troublemaker's Teaparty, A Manual for Effective Citizen Action". This focuses primarily on forms of community action whereas the Citystrolls project also aims to explore alternative ways in which the city itself can be engaged with.
The 'ex-workers collective' Crimethinc have been gathering and publishing similar material through zines such as "Rolling Thunder" which "neither reduces the organic impulses of revolt to inert theory nor prioritizes conventional activism over the subversive elements present in every other walk of life but instead focuses on sharing the stories of those who step out of line and sharing the skills developed in the process."[9] Crimethinc also make available a series of 'toolkits' such as the "Gender Subversion Kit" produced as posters and leaflets for easy distribution and use in play and workshop situations. These are comparable to Chad's "Evolution is Not Over Yet" drawings which make similar propositions and provocations for alternative patterns of social action: "Obedience does not relieve pain", "School is not compulsory", "Money is burned". They recall an earlier series by Clifford Harper of posters presenting 'instruction manual' style images on converting terraced housing into an eco-collective and setting up a community media lab.
Various forms of 'howto' guides have been a staple part of activist culture for a long time, particularly those informed by anarchist and autonomist principles. The SchNEWS website provides a collection of online howtos covering topics ranging from running a local newspaper to making bio-diesel and road protest techniques.[10] Such knowledge is not always expressed in explicit guidebook form however. "The Heart and Soul of It" is a book put together by women of the Worsbrough community documenting their experiences of the Miners Strike in the mid-1980's.[11] Through a series of personal narratives it describes not only the running of the picket lines but also how the community sustained itself through community kitchens and swap shops. This is a kind of knowledge that often falls outside of academic and theorist studies. The howtos and the Worsbrough narratives articulate a different form of 'pattern' collection. Some are propositional, like Chad's drawings, promoting an alternative for how things could be, others, like the Worsbrough accounts, deal with the situation 'as is', acknowledging the possibility of conflict and adversity. What they share is an emphasis upon recording 'knowledge through action' and making that distributive. Here the pattern is a vehicle for propagating activity rather than imposing form.
The connections between these traditions and FLOSS methods have been recognised in projects such as Socialforge.[12] This is an online repository for developing and discussing various alternative political and social practices which has consciously modeled itself on the FLOSS code repository, naming itself after Sourceforge specifically. "A GNU World" is one project hosted on Socialforge, linked with the Oekunux mailing list.[13] Oekunux and "A GNU World" are concerned with exploring how FLOSS principles may be extended beyond code into other forms of social organisation and practice. As such they come closest to the combining of "the field of physical and social relationships" of Alexander's original pattern concept.
spring_alpha is a hybrid game-engine and Wiki. Whereas, in The Sims, game behaviours are sealed components, in spring_alpha, the code can be accessed directly during gameplay and re-written. Each object keeps a history of its changes. New code does not automatically take effect but depends on game characters adopting and activating it, therefore, gameplay itself is a dual process of re-coding and character actions. The game code is under constant surveillance by the gameworld's state security system, not unlike anti-cheat systems used in commercial games, such as "PunkBuster", but here used as an explicit part of gameplay.[14] The project as a whole, however, is bigger than the game itself. At this larger level the game serves as a focus and test-bed for forms of social pattern development through a series of workshops.
The project is being created and released through a series of modules, each of which focuses on specific aspects of the project overall. So far these have been development modules, through which the construction of the core gaming system itself has been formed along with the basic framework needed to realise the project. A series of actual gameplay modules are now starting to appear which implement more the ideas and content of the project in a playable form. Each gameplay module takes a specific element of the original story, such as the creation of re-claimed urban food gardens, a pirate radio station, or the riot in which the story culminates. The modules are developed in conjunction with different groups, such as a local community in Dundee where the project is currently based, and draw upon issues and histories specific to them. Different materials are developed from this, ranging from characters representing particular individual's viewpoints, to actual gamecode and design patterns. The design patterns enable people to articulate ideas that can be potentially coded up by others, but even if a pattern is never coded up directly it still has significance as part of the project. Being in permanent alpha state, un-coded aspects of the project retain their potential to be implemented elsewhere, possibly outside of the game itself.[15] Each module is made available as a downloadable game and handbook. The handbook is a mixture of the player's manual and cheat-guide genre that has grown alongside commercial gaming and the howto guides described above.
In an era before the spread of home computing, anarchist educator and environmentalist Colin Ward developed a notion of learning through the city he called 'streetwork'.[16] Through this, the city is to be understood as both a resource from which to acquire knowledge, based around local issues and events, and a malleable medium that the child or citizen could shape, or 'write' back into. As well as gathering and interpreting material from the urban environment, streetwork utilises games and simulations to explore how conflicts of attitudes and values shape that environment. Such games need to be open and re-writable, necessarily partial and improvisational, permanently alpha. Games in which we play with the rules rather than by the rules. In spring_alpha conflicts and discourses of patterns can be brought into play and explored in terms of a 'knowledge through action' rather than academic rhetoric. Codework complements streetwork as dual interrogative practices. As such it provides a reflective and speculative 'object to think with' alongside the complex and contested pattern repositories of the real urban environment: "On the one hand, this city is the only one you will ever have, and you must make the best of it. On the other hand, if you want to make the best of if, you've got to be able to criticise it and change it and circumvent it ...." Paul Goodman, The Grand Piano, 1942
•notes
[1] FLOSS stands for 'Free Libre Open Source Software'. For an overview see:
http://www.sarai.net/floss_book.pdf [3]
[2] http://c2.com/ppr/ [4]
[3] http://www.cvshome.org [5], http://www.bitkeeper.com [6], http://subversion.tigris.org [7]
[4] http://www.wikipedia.org [8]
[5] Christopher Alexander, et al., 1977, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings,
Construction, New York: Oxford University Press, p.x
[6] see, for example, Richard Stallman's essay "Why Software Should Be Free",
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html [9]
[7] see Christopher Alexander's forward to Richard P. Gabriel, 2005, Patterns of Software: Tales From the Software Community, New York: Oxford University Press, PDF version available from:
http://www.dreamsongs.com/NewFiles/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf [10]
[8] Celia Pearce, 2001, "Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata, God and Go", http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/pearce/ [11], see also Simon Yuill, "Games for Hackers and Non-Hackers", 2004, http://www.spring-alpha.org/documents/module_02/VIPER_presentation.pdf [12]
[9] http://www.crimethinc.com/a/rt/ [13]
[10] http://www.schnews.org.uk/diyguide/ [14]
[11] Worsbrough Community Group, 1985, The Heart and Soul of It, Barnsley and Huddersfield: Worsbrough Community Group and Bannerworks
[12] http://www.socialforge.net
[15]
[13] http://www.oekonux.org [16]
[14] http://www.punkbuster.com [17]
[15] another project is already in development using the mapping and simulation capabilities of spring_alpha to enable communities to map and model flows of 'social capital' and other intangible economies, this is intended as a toolkit to provide data to combat the imposed economic restructuing of regeneration projects
[16] Colin Ward, 1995, "Education for Mastery of the Environment", in Talking Schools: Ten Lectures by Colin Ward, London: Freedom Press, pp. 21-38, originally given as a lecture in 1978
text by Simon Yuill
drawings by Chad McCail - unless stated otherwise
spring_alpha is a project by Simon Yuill
in collaboration with Chad McCail, Ricardo Creemers, Stefan Gartner, Eleonora Oreggia and Mark Vernon
http://www.spring-alpha.org [18]