Keeping computers in check

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The basic Scalable City technology could, Brown said, be an attractive and powerful application for the implementation of large-scale video games. That's because the program is based on the idea that a computer will someday be able to efficiently develop all kinds of assets--game characters, structures, environments and the like--in real time and extrapolated from simple data sets.

The end result: Game publishers may very well look increasingly to computers to automate the design and implementation of many of the small but vital details of such games.

'Seductive entrapment'
In some ways, Brown is pointing out that humans are already playing the role of the data set.

"Our lives in general are now really a part of algorithmic processes," Brown said. The "major part of our lives are for producing algorithmic data and then interacting with it. We've become I/O, input/output."

But today, he argued, people are increasingly relying on algorithms to do the work we used to do ourselves, and while that can be good, it's not necessarily a positive development.

"Cities are part of our computational processes--(things like) water systems, and roads and information about us," he said. "Algorithms do things well that they're set up to do, but we were around for centuries without computational processes."

Thus, Scalable City is in some ways a metaphor for showing the power of these algorithms and showing what can happen when computers start to take over the decision-making processes.

"I'm trying to exaggerate the artifacts of algorithmic processes," Brown said, "and show that this power can be seductive entrapment."

For example, video game companies like Electronic Arts or Activision are looking for ways to create new titles without having to spend tens of millions of dollars on artistic teams that can create material suitable for new high-definition displays.

"As an artist, I need to be working with (new) video game technologies and taking advantage of them," said Brown, who consults with leading game publishers such as EA. "So I think about them, but I only have a tiny bit of funding. I don't have $100 million for this. So I have to come up with these methods that are more efficient and clever and which help us figure out how to squeeze more out of these systems."