The Beginnings of EMU

The Electronically Mediated urb Project or "EMU" started out as an attempt to build a virtual city, one which people at home watched on television as they interacted with and took part in by pushing buttons on the phone keypad as they spoke to others likewise connected. Many people, far apart in geographical terms could come together to form this televised 3D community once a week. Finance was difficult to locate however and in early 1995 it was decided to look to alternative delivery media. We decided to use the lower costing Internet to develop a world wide web version of the city.

A defining aspect of urban life is the process of motion through streets and suburbs.

People move from area of a city to another during the course of a single day. Over a lifetime people migrate from part of town to another and from one town to another. Adjacency, or the relative proximity of one area to another is important in developing a sense of place, space and community.
Where we are in relation to other places determines to some extent how we view ourselves. Motion provides us with a sense of one place in relation to others, and of our ever changing relationship to those spaces.

Movement through space as a fundamental characteristic or urban life can be actively built into shared, multi user electronic spaces. Web cities, like adventure role play games can enable participants to move from place to another place.

The Electronically Mediated Urb Project began between 1992 and 1995 as a result of interest in the relationships between the utilisation of mapping and cartographic elements in videogame design as observed while working at Beam Software

Watching the Videogame Map Makers at Beam Software

"Bird's Eye" top down cartographic views of videogame spaces were created by the design department at Beam, in order to see at a glance how the various graphic elements comprising a videogame 'level' would work. These maps represented a domain which was mediated by the computer, where backdrop settings and environments joined characters, 'pick-ups', spells, and weapons as the means to achieve goals, overcome difficulties and actively participate. Games used maps to define and understand the environments in which gameplay would take place. They used maps to further conceptualise these environments as the site for player involvement and crucially, engagements. Maps needed to both represent the game setting, as well as facilitate gameplay itself.

Maps for videogame levels need to indicate the myriad obstacles, objects, characters which the player must negotiate. This makes them an 2D index of a dynamic and active 'world' or cosmology. The maps layout game sequences, and join with other maps for other levels, each with its own unique qualities. By the end of the game up to twenty levels can have been carefully laid out and worked on over months at a time.

In the case of the in-house published side scroller platform game for the Super Nintendo System "Radical Rex" (see videoclip) the Beam design department lays out printouts of Super Nintendo videogame world. The game device can only show one map area at any given time. The computer scrolls the maps in the order that they are occupied and traversed by the player. As the player moves through the game environment, new sections of the overall mapped region appear.

Maps and Cartography

In 1989 I had visited a major exhibition of maps on display at the British Library in London. During the same trip, I had visited Vatican city in Rome, and had marveled at the array of maps of the world on display there, some of which dated back to the 16th century.

Maps have always in a sense reflected the interests of those who make them. The expansionism of the Renaissance was closely linked to the careful creation of maps which in turn reflected areas of the world colonised. The British Empire in its heyday often mapped an area it wished to colonised, India being a prime example. India was carefully divided by cartographers into massive triangle shaped regions. These regions in turn were to indicate which resources the British Raj intended to encompass. Decades after the creation of the maps, these regions were co-opted within the compass of the larger Empire and integrated into a global system of resource exploitation linked to industrialisation.

In electronic media, visual cues relating to the larger world are often required to orient the user in an environment with sufficient metaphoric. This is particularly the case with videogames, where the traversing of space underpins key elements of gameplay.

The book "Mapping Cyberspace" seeks to chronicle and identify trends in the mapping of online space.

Geert Lovink and Digital Cities Amsterdam

The idea of a map based interface for an online city was further reinforced by a visit to Australia by Dutch theorist and Internet Activist Geert Lovink to the Victorian Contemporary Art Gallery hosted by Experimenta in 1996. Lovink displayed the DDS "Digital Cities Amsterdam" online city space which was linked to actual shops and services in the city of Amsterdam. A funded project, backed by the Amsterdam city council, DDS, offered users a grid based cartographic representation of an online Amsterdam, parallel to the actual city, where shops, people and services were replicated and represented via hexagonal jigsaw puzzle like pieces which together formed the digital Amsterdam.

Unlike DDS, the EMUWEBGRID project did not seek to associate its urban members with any already existing physical city, rather users could congregate from anywhere in the world and mutually take part in the development of a new online space. Also, many of the social and civic aspects of DDS mirror those of the real Amsterdam, and actively seek to do so, these are missing from EMUWEBGRID, however it is not difficult to imagine a context in which globally based 'civic' services might also be represented with EMUWEBGRID such as international emergency services, GPS based location oriented systems of mapping and cartography could build a physical world representation of the EMUWEBGRID constituency and so on.