City, Game

Excerpted from notes written on 2019-08-05

The experience of a city is shaped by the range of languages (whether spoken/written language or spatial language - any modes used to understand the city) that visitors can comprehend, as well as the information about the city that they already possess. Similarly, the experience in a game is based on the breadth of information that players can perceive and understand within the game, combined with the prior knowledge and information that players bring into the game experience.

Let's define the "city experience" as the experience we go through while directly walking around the city ourselves. Can we also talk about a "city experience" in games? Games also have fields or areas that the player occupies, and the player can navigate between those places by operating a keyboard or controller. One difference between games and the real world is that for gameplay, the game server operated by the game company and the device used for playing additionally mediate between the game and the player. The breadth of information the player receives depends entirely on the game client. Specifically, it depends on the methods the game client uses to interpret the information received from the game server. The information players already know is based on what was downloaded to their device when installing the game.

Let's imagine a situation where a new costume is updated in the game. Players download the new costume information to their local environments through the game update. During gameplay, if they encounter a player wearing the new costume, the server sends information about the type of costume the other player is wearing to the client. The client then interprets this and displays the corresponding new costume information from its local data on the other player's character on the screen. But what happens if there is a player who has not updated the game? If the server sends information telling the client to display the 33rd outfit, for example, but the client only has data up to the 32nd outfit due to missing the update, the client will encounter an error while trying to interpret the server's information. It won't have the data for the newly added 33rd costume.

The way that new costumes are displayed in games can vary based on how each game is designed and implemented. As such, the process of displaying a newly added costume could differ across games. Building on the previous example, the way an error related to missing costume data is handled could also differ. Some games may simply not allow players without the latest update to play at all, essentially forcing them to always have the full costume data downloaded. Other games may have a fallback and show a default costume or a placeholder graphic instead of the intended new costume outfit if that costume data is missing. If the game engine is not prepared to handle missing costume assets in a graceful way, then encountering new unreferenced costume data during gameplay could potentially crash the game outright. Different games constitute different cities. The way a game operates is akin to the underlying rules that form the foundation of a city.

If we view the real-world city as a game, we could consider our physical bodies as the client, the city itself as the server, and our sensory organs as functioning devices which receive information from the server. In that framing, how would updates to our bodies occur, and how is the prior information we carry managed?