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Culture Arcade questions the future of cultural institutions in the face of emerging technologies for the exhibition and marketisation of art. Exploring the Southbank Centre as a paradigm of a cultural institution, the game generates a procedural museum that emphasises the collective fungibility of artistic practice rather than the artificial scarcity of NFTs. Exploring a generative environment based on Brutalist architecture, players create their own artistic interventions and reshape the virtual world by sharing them. Employing skills from an artistic toolbox, players collaborate to extend and augment the cultural institution in their own image. Participants can paint and sculpt the architecture around them, procedurally generate or carve space at their command, warp architectural features or even turn the space into a giant dynamic environment that pulses to player-generated music. Culture Arcade allows players to produce new cultural platforms for the Metaverse by leveraging the aesthetics of games to increase engagement with cultural practice, creating an urbanism co-designed through cues from real-world architecture, algorithmic generation, curation and collaborative design.
The procedural systems underpinning the game produce an infinite range of possible starting points for the Culture Arcade, by distributing the Southbank Centre's 'Brutalist' blocks that can be reshaped by players.
Through the continual reshaping and rebuilding of the Culture Arcade by players, the cultural institution is perpetually made and remade in the image of its participants as a collective space for creativity in the Metaverse.
Examples of configurations generated by players, where different combinations of tools and collaborative play produce unique spatial variations.
While the basic procedural system of the game uses algorithmically distributed spatial blocks, these elements are freely altered, redesigned and reshaped by players.
The basic procedural architecture of blocks generated by the game can be infinitely redesigned by players.
As the Culture Arcade is an architecture shaped by its players, we can imagine an infinite number of these structures connecting together into a larger Metaverse environment.
Different structures at varying levels of completion show how the marks and traces of players can be read through the architecture.
Game and procedural prototype studies in Unreal Engine, including the creation of 'design tools' for players to use, procedural distribution using Wave Function Collapse algorithms and agent-based systems for assessing the popularity of designs.
Procedural blocks are generated as the player moves through the world, meaning that each experience of a Culture Arcade will grow from an infinite number of possible starting points.
Players can redesign any part of the world through 'artistic' tools, gaining new abilities through social interactions with other contributors. Tools include material painting, real-time carving, geometry manipulation, and dynamic audio generation.
Spatial blocks within the Culture Arcade can be reshaped in many different ways depending on which combination of tools players use to redesign them.
Each player visiting Culture Arcade has their own individual 'skill tree' - a set of tools defined by their actions within the game and social interactions with other players.
In-game screenshots show the basic Brutalist blocks alongside all the user-designed elements combine together into a new architectural form.
In-game screenshots showing different community-generated Culture Arcade forms as a meeting place for people's Metaverse avatars.
Different versions of a Culture Arcade produced through a combination of procedural generation and player interaction.
In-game screenshots, showing the isometric view players can use to understand the developing overall design and extent of the Culture Arcade.
Examples of Culture Arcades built during gameplay, accompanied by analytical assessments of their spatial, design and cultural composition.
Players can collect audio samples, composing these together into loops that cause the architecture around them to warp in time to the music.
Culture Arcade reacts to the artificial scarcity of the NFT art market by proposing that the future of cultural institutions in the Metaverse will emphasise fungibility, free-exchange, and the interchangeability of cultural forms and artefacts.
In-game footage demonstrating the dynamic outputs produced by players cooperatively designing within a Culture Arcade.