Urban Codemakers

Today was our last day in Guildford Lane. With the project complete it is time to move on. The guild sign of the winning guild remains at our old headquarters as a legacy to the last five months we have spent making urban codes in Melbourne. Other, more transient, traces remain – the Master Codemakers’s plan has been posted in Flanigan Lane to encourage public involvement.

In fact with the City of Melbourne on side with the Master Codemaker’s plan to reclaim the city we will stay on within your city in some shape or form…

For your information, all three proposals to rezone the city through play are linked below.

Discovering Melbourne’s Origins Through Play is an urban reclamation project. The MasterCodemaker is mindful that it may not necessarily conform to the terms of the current Planning Process being administered by the City of Melbourne. However it is argued here that Melbourne has had sufficient planning and is need of renewal. This renewal is central to the future polity of the city. It is consistent with the recent activities of the CodeMaker guild and has the imprimatur of the MasterCodemaker himself.

The Locative Urbanist Guild is committed to better understanding of city development through the use of technology, metrics, and encouraging inhabitant’s behaviours through careful consideration of behaviour, play like mechanics, and improved understanding of their own movements and activities.

Game Designer Katie Salen is just one of the many theorists whose has argued of for the possibility of gameplay informing urban design. She argues “Games on one side, and interactive and mutable architecture on the other, share methodology share techniques, share possibilities to orient the practice of architecture toward understanding and shaping building as contexts for user interaction or “sandboxes” which create contexts for user creativity.” The Crossmedia Ecologist supports the idea of urban design informed by play of the possibility of “dynamically authored spaces borne from the collaboration between architects and users”.

The Crossmedia Ecologist in his/her’s latest missive is quite correct.  To a point.

The virus was never about the city. The city was merely a platform for it. It was about the other guilds, and their place within it.

The game can run without us. The city can run without us. It was that way before we arrived and it will be that way when we are gone.

What the virus has done though is revealed that, first to me, and now to the scattered Ecologist.  We are, as we probably always were, unnecessary. At best we provided a diversion from the natural order of the city, disrupting it in ways both serious and playful, but soon we will reach the end of the line, the last function call which will purge us from its memory, returning the rules of the city to their natural state, perhaps altered, perhaps not, but running on the underlying structure that was there before us.

It is, in some sense, a form of death. We will follow the consciousness that we failed to bring forth into the dust and aether. We hope that some scrap of our consciousness finds itself.

To those who supported us, we thank you. To those who helped run our programs, we know now that you are more than impulses along pathways, you are much, much more complex than that, and we are grateful for your time and energy. To those who saw this as little more than a self-indulgent exercise, almost narcissistic in our attempts to create life, we now understand you and we know that you were, at least partially, correct.

Our simulations are winding down. Little remains but to submit our findings to the city before finally, blissfully, powering down.

After many weeks of portents, the MasterCodemaker can now reveal the identity of the One, true architect of Melbourne.

For over 170 years Melbourne’s collective memory of its origins has complacently believed that Robert Hoddle, who gave his name to the eponymous “Hoddle Grid” that defines the city, was the designer of the city. Recent tagging in the environs of the State Library of Victoria now reveals, once and for all, that it was indeed Robert Russell, whose inaugural design for the City of Melbourne preceded Hoddle’s blatantly plagiarized version by at least one year. This controversy is well known within civic, historical and popular knowledge of Melbourne and its cartographic origins. However it is Hoddle the usurper whose name still defines the city. The MasterCodemaker has gestured to this ancient grudge in a number of earlier posts (most notably In Search of the Gelded Third Ho).

The MasterCodemaker can further reveal, as recent tagging suggests, that both Roberts Hoddle and Russell have been uncritically assumed to be historical figures from the world of humans.

Portrait of Bold Herder Tö in the State Library of Victoria

Found by Jampd: Feb 4th 2011

These portraits that hang in the State Library of Victoria would seem to suggest this (as well as myriad other images in the Public Records Office and the visual archive of Melbourne’s history). These are in fact proof artifacts planted in the collective conscious of the City by Ludean public servants in the 19th century. For both Hoddle and Russell were in fact rival Ludean MasterCodemakers who took the guise of earthly beings in order to undertake the work of urban codemaking for the commonweal of the Ludean nation.

Recent tagging clearly identifies the Ludean countenance of Hoddle (Bolder Herder Tö) and Robert Russell (Rebus Stroller).

Detail of attribution in bottom left corner

Forensic research undertaken into the signature on this portrait of Hoddle is in fact an encrypted message to the Ludean nation. When translated into the Third Language of Ludea it reads as “pretender and fraud”.

Found by Jampd: Feb 4th 2011

Portrait of Rebus Stroller in the State Library of Victoria

Detail of attribution in bottom left corner

Similarly, this detail of the portrait of Rebus Stroller in human form conceals the message in Ludean, “he whose story will one day be told”.

Now the day has finally come, as the culmination of play and the urban rezoning of Melbourne comes to fruition. The MasterCodemaker’s Urban Reclamation Planning application, once approved by the City of Melbourne, will install Rebus Stroller as the rightful surveyor and architect of Melbourne. Soon, commuters will cross the Yarra via the Rebus Stroller Portal, while visitors to the State Library of Victoria will stroll to it, fittingly, along Rebus Stroller Boulevard.

And to put to rest any nagging doubts as to the unique provenance of Rebus Stroller’s inaugural map of the layout of Melbourne, respective maps designed by “Russell” and “Hoddle” are documented in the MasterCodemaker’s Urban Reclamation Planning application currently under consideration by the City of Melbourne.

So as foretold in the annals of the Colophon Rippley Ti (Third Codex, OS::1001), the Gelded Third Ho will soon be also renamed by popular opinion, in your language, as the “Russell Grid”.

Game complete. City rezoned.

A win for the Codemakers with 251 IDEOTAGs claimed.

However, it was the Urbanists who cracked the Codemakers code. Early this week two players began decoding the third language of the Master Codemaker…

It seems the Ecologists were right all along. There are no teams, no rules, no control – the city does what the city wants. Perhaps both the Codemakers and the Urbanists city planning proposals will be presented to the City of Melbourne and we can let them decide – discuss!

In the meantime, thanks to everyone for playing!

During the last week our system was overloaded causing a glitch limiting tag claims. Some players still have unclaimed IDEOTAGs – essential in making the game and related data collection complete. For a limited time on Friday 11th February the tag claim page will be active to tally any outstanding IDEOTAGs so that the final score may be determined.