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Dragon (Cárdenas et al. 2009 ) while others create psychedelic art installations like
StormEye (Story and Enfield 2009 ) out of giant moving shapes coated in video
and sound. Artists build these virtual installations and then share them with other
citizens of Second Life to experience.
However, this idea of locative art within a virtual world is not new to online
platforms. Gamers have been designing their own levels for decades. Lode Runner
from 1983 was one of the earliest games to come with a level editor that enabled
level designers to create their own custom environments for playing within. The
website worldofleveldesign.com is built exclusively for this community to aid
sharing articles and tutorials for environment artists and level designers to help with
all aspects of working on level designs and 2d/3d environments. Also, LEVEL-
DESIGN.org has a reference database of tagged image screenshots to help share
ideas on level design.
Now, there are countless massively multiplayer online (MMO) games where
large groups of users collaborate together in teams and factions to move through
the game story. In addition to solving the challenges presented by the original game
designers, players often choose to create their own virtual art installations within
the game world. LittleBigPlanet is an example launched in 2008 on the Playstation
3 that focused primarily on user-generated content as evidenced by their tagline
“Play, Create, Share” and over 1 million user-created levels to play.
Ingress is a transmedia game by Google played out through live events, the
web and mobile applications. The players' goal is to capture “portals” which are
co-located with objects in the real world such as public art sculptures, landmarks
and libraries. Once captured, three or more portals can be linked together to create
fields that give users points. There are two factions players must choose between,
the enlightened and the resistance, which battle each other to control these portals
and fields. As of January 2014, over one million people are walking through cities
around the planet capturing portals and linking fields.
There are no pre-defined rules on what the shape of these portal fields should
look like and most of them are abstract shapes designed to maximize the amount
of underlying land controlled with no consideration given to aesthetics. However,
having reviewed the history of locative art in Social Sculpture, computer gaming
and science fiction, we might find it inevitable that players have begun to create
specific designs within these augmented reality platforms so that they link portals
together in a strategic manner as to form a representational image across actual
cities. This so called Field Art may connect dozens of points spanning entire cities.
Given that every portal and field is in constant danger of being attacked, it is easy
for one to appreciate the transient complexity of these undertakings and the need
for large groups of people to help create them. We might perhaps expect to find that
several Field Art installations utilize collaborations between factions to create even
more complex designs. In the screenshots shown below in Fig. 8.4 , you can identify
the two factions contributions by looking at the two colors on the maps.
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