Mini group project - create a utopian environment in a game

Block 32
A utopia based video game idea - Research and final idea

For this mini project I have been teamed up with Matteo Roberts, Peter Watton and Stuart Smith and we had to come up with a concept for a game based on Utopia.

There have been quite a few ideas thrown about when trying to come up with the idea of a world similar to the movie Wall-e, where all humans still live on Earth, but are all plugged into machines that provide them with ideal scenarios for their lives. So, each individual can choose what life he or she would like to live, program the machine and live that exact life. There is no interaction between individuals, and there is no physical activity either, they are all static, living an artificial life.

There are robots who maintain the systems, making sure that they are all in working order at any point in time, and if anything breaks, they are capable of entering each individual dream (artificial life), to be able to come up with the right solution to repair it.

Our game will concentrate on this little robot, who is looking after Block 32, a block of flats inhabited by about 40 people, each having their own individual dreams.

In order to recharge its batteries, the robot will enter any of the individual worlds ( the choice is his) and he will have to survice in that environment for 5 minutes without being "wiped out" by the owner of the world. The screen will display Robo's battery life, so it will be very clear when he needs recharging.

Each individual controls his dream / world and is able to "evacuate"any intruder if not happy with him/her. Evacuation can be done by ignoring and hence eliminating from life, or killing.

The story follows Robo, our robot, while he is entering the world of a young girl and falls in love with her. As this develops, he is tempted to enter her world all the time, even when his battery doesn't need charging, and this way he is basically ignoring all other individuals, and maintenance is slacking.
The story gets strange as Robo shouldn't be able to fall in love, him being a robot, however, as this story goes on, through cut scenes, the player finds out that all robots are actually individuals who have not adapted to this way of living (through self induced dreams), so they all have anatomical parts as well as artificial components.

The Utopia created is each individual world. The player will find out that, in fact, Utopia depends on each individual's personality and dreams. Hence, this Utopia can be a pretty world, with sunsets, waterfalls and forests, peaceful and calm environments, while at the same time, Utopia can also mean a nuclear explosion, burning buildings, shooting and dead people.

So, we have decided for each one of us  in the group to come up with a character concept and a world that character would live in.

Here are a few drawings I have done when trying to build my "world". I have come up with 2 character concept designs and 2 worlds, and in he end I have decided upon one of each. The character I have decided to pursue, I have drawn in more detail, and the environment chosen is the calm serene one, where my girl would live in.

This was my first character concept, as we were discussing the world to be  inhabited by humans  and/or robots initially, so drew a girls robot, connecting to a pod. I wasn't too keen to this idea, however, so I then drew the next one.

This is Chloe, my character, who, connected to her pod. is loving in this beautiful world, with waterfalls, rivers, sun and forests. However, as the Q-pid the robot falls in love with her, I have decided to make slightly older, as I thought it to be immoral to have her involved in a love story at such a young age.

This is my idea of a dystopia. I wanted to explore this avenue a little bit. So, a nuclear explosion, buildings burning, and ...weird flat people( I have added the dead person long after I have finished the environment and the proportion is extremely wrong, but the idea is still there:-)) lying dead on the floor, is just my worst nightmare.

This is my initial pencil drawing of a Utopia. This is where I would like to live :-)

I have taken the previous drawing in Photoshop to give it a bit more detail, and I have come up with this, my idea of Utopia, and of course, for this project, Chloe's world.

When researching for this project, I have found a few images for Utopias and Dystopias that, I thought, describe these two concepts perfectly.

This chaotic image symbolises Dystopia, from my point of view, as I don't like chaos at all. Even though I lobe bright colours, and normally, they define bright, happy feelings, in this case, I found them quite disturbing.

Another idea for Dystopia, for me, is this image, which, again, is very chaotic. You don't know where to look, it seems like everything is broken, and somehow, for a strange reason,  it gives me the idea of a very loud noise as well...

You cannot describe these two concepts ( Utopia/Dystopia) better than this. 

And finally, my part in this project was put in a couple of slides in a powerpoint presentation, shown below.

The final product for this mini project, was assembled in a Powerpoint presentation shown below:

Utopia and Dystopia

Utopia and Dystopia

I have missed the first lecture of this term, and because the subject discussed was utopias and Dystopias, I have done some personal research into this subject. 

Oxford dictionary defines Utopia as : an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. The word was first used in the book Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More. The opposite of dystopia.

So, basically, Utopia is an imaginary IDEAL world. A lot has been discussed on the subject, and of course, everyone seems to have their own opinion in relation to the possibility of even imagining what an ideal world would be like. 

Utopia-dystopia by Dylan Glyn - http://dylanglynn.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/utopia-dystopia.html

My opinion is that it is practically impossible to create a Utopian world for more than 1 person, as people, by definition, are different, they all have their own visions, ideas and ideals, so the moment anyone will try to create a Utopian society or place, is the moment they will instantly fail.

Of course, I might be contradicted by many, as history proves that there have been many who attempted creating utopias through books. The very first example of a Utopia was created by Plato in his work of literature called Republic, where he tried to "envisage an ideal state, and to lay down concrete parameters as to the activities of each and every class within society."
                            (guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 April 2004 00.00 BST - Toby Green's top 10 utopias and dystopias)

However, every single idea (ideal) suggested in the book by Plato can be taken individually, analysed, through today's society's eyes, mind, but nevertheless can be broken into pieces and proven wrong. The fact that he suggests the society should be tieredin order to create happiness all around, is not something that can be accepted nowadays, even though, the society we live in, IS tiered, everyone HAS its place and fulfils a certain role. however, if we were to do a social study, I am pretty sure, more that half the population would like to do something else rather than what they are doing, and this is all down to human nature. I believe that no matter what anyone will offer an individual, there will always be something missing, there will always be something that he would rather not have or do. I mentioned during the lecture that Utopia is most probably possible only for a very short period of time, probably seconds, or we are being very optimistic, minutes, and this is exactly down to my previous idea: human nature, does not allow one person to stay happy for too long, they will always desire or long for something else.

During our lecture, the idea of Utopia being associated with an orderly society was brought up, only to be immediately rejected, and for good reason, through the example of George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the society is completely controlled by a Big Brother style system, everything is in complete order, however, the reader will not aspire to live in such a society, on the contrary, everyone would probably avoid it, if given the choice. 

Unfortunately (or fortunately - depending how you look at it), I grew up in communist Romania before the 1989 revolution, so all through my primary and junior high school, we were fed all sorts of idealisms. The main one, which I still remember quite vividly, was that if, as a country, we would reach the state of socialism, that will be the ideal world, where everyone would be equal. That is what we were "aiming" for, and to think that this is what were taught in the early stages in school, that was brainwashing worked out to absolute perfection. A Utopia was being presented to children in their most innocent and mentally absorbing times of their lives. That's possible the only you could attempt a Utopian society, I guess: brain wash children, separate them from adults from an early age, not to be fed any other ideas, keep them in an enclosed parameter with no access to the outside world(in order not to have their ideals tempered with), and so on, and create basically a new breed of humans. 

And this has now made me think of animals in Zoos... Do they live in a Utopia, for the simple reason that they don't know ay different? Most of them were born there, grew up in the same enclosed space, have not experienced any other klife, so cannot compare their way of living with anything else, so probably, in their mind, they are leaving in an ideal world?!?!?

anonymous image

And this is what brings me back to what Doris Lessing said in her book The golden Notebook that brought her the Nobel prize for literature in 2007.
"What seemed to me important was that it could be read as parody, irony or seriously. It seems to me this fact is another expression of the fragmentation of everything, the painful disintegration of something that is linked with what I feel to be true about language, the thinning of language against the density of our experience." 
Indeed, everything can be fragmented and analysed, and given a lot of different meanings, including the idea of a Utopia, or Dystopia for that matter.


I would like to make this following quote from Robert Musil -  a nominee for a Nobel Prize for literature for his work: the Man without Qualities. In this book, he says:
"Nowadays we call good whatever gives us the illusion that it will get us somewhere" 

And this should be, probably the definition of any Utopia, short or long lived: "if anyone has the illusion that by doing something, they will get somewhere (where they want to get), they are basically living their own individual Utopia." (Robert Musil - The man without qualities)