Gamespace Odyssey: Notes on the Procedural Transformation of Athens

Two images, one vista point. In the first (above) – a screenshot taken from the video game Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey – a mercenary looks out over the computer-generated city of ancient Athens. In the second (below), a man looks out over the freshly reconstructed Athens of the 1950s, a dense sea of concrete apartment blocks spread before him. These two images are not as different as they may seem. Both the real-world city of Athens and its gamic counterpart, I will argue, emerge from a shared procedural logic: the outcome of dispersed and anonymous protocols of spatial production.

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is an open-world action role-playing game, wherein the player proceeds through a series of quests while exploring an expansive game world. The vastness of the environment is staggering, made possible only through heavy use of procedural generation: a suite of techniques that automate the production of the game’s playable space. Its landscape, textures, architecture, and even cinematic cutscenes were not directly modeled by designers but generated by procedural algorithms that unfold during play. My focus here, however, lies not in the spectacle of this world but in the underlying mechanics that enable it. After all, as media theorist Alexander Galloway reminds us, video games are indeed games, but “more importantly they are software systems; this must always remain in the forefront of one’s analysis.”¹Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 6.

The analysis that follows situates the procedural techniques of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey within a longer genealogy of procedural logics that have shaped the production of Athens. Drawing on McKenzie Wark’s notion of gamespace, I examine how procedural systems – from ancient architectural orders to postwar housing protocols and contemporary platform urbanism – have mediated the spatial transformation of the city. The essay concludes by considering how such logics might also be redirected toward alternative, collectivizing forms of spatial practice.

Pre-History of the Procedure

The rules governing gamespace far predate the video game itself. This can be seen as early as sixth century BC, when Greek architects developed an architectural “order”: a systematized approach to the construction of a building. The Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders relied on a meticulous taxonomy of the building, which was broken down into a series of components: stylobate, column, entablature, pediment, etc.²Colette Hemingway, “Architecture in Ancient Greece,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art (blog), October 2003, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/grarc/hd_grarc.htm. Such is the first step of any procedural workflow: the creation of a formal ontology, or a systematized means of representing the world. To assemble these components into logical compositions, a set of protocols are then developed that govern the relationships between these components. Such a protocol might determine the number and spacing of columns, the relationship between the column and the entablature, or the form of the sculptural relief of the frieze.

In trying to recreate these architectural orders computationally, the game designers behind Odyssey followed a similar process. First, they developed a library of building components (column, stair, window, roof), each part manually modeled and then tagged accordingly. From here, a set of protocols were developed to govern the appropriate relationships between them. In computational terms, a procedure is an ordered set of tasks given to a computer to produce a result. The procedural production of an object, then, relies on the translation of its visual characteristics into a series of machine-readable steps. In the process, the object is reontologized, which philosopher Luciano Floridi describes as “a very radical form of reengineering, one that not only designs, constructs or structures a system … anew, but one that also fundamentally transforms its intrinsic nature, that is, its ontology or essence.”³Luciano Floridi, The Ethics of Information (Oxford University Press, 2013), 6.

The symbolic abstraction of the procedural world establishes a newfound equivalence among formerly disparate objects and systems, based not on their visual appearance but on their underlying structure or diagram, to borrow a term from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.⁴Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). McKenzie Wark explains: “In the database, all description is numerical, equivalent in form. In principle everything within it can be related to or transformed into everything else. A new kind of symmetry operates.”⁵McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press, 2009), sec. 69. Procedural systems introduce a high degree of flexibility and replicability to the design process. The procedural building generator, for example, can produce a whole range of different outcomes, with the difference between an informal settlement and a defensive fort requiring only a small tweak in the parameters. When combined with mathematically produced randomness such as Perlin noise, the procedural asset is injected with a degree of randomness that mimics the variation seen in both human and natural environments. The scale and variation seen in Odyssey is unthinkable without the productive power afforded by the computation. Herein lies the fundamental axiom of procedural generation: it allows one to do more with less.

Viral Necessity

In times of crisis, the possibility of doing more with less is particularly seductive. In the mid-twentieth century, back-to-back wars – World War II and the Greek Civil War – devastated the country’s infrastructure and led to widespread displacement. Seeking refuge and employment, migrants moved en masse to Athens, causing the urban population to swell from 200,000 to over one million in just a few decades.⁶Alex Sakalis, “Why Does Athens Look So Quirky?” BBC (blog), August 15, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20191011-the-surprising-story-of-athens-offbeat-architecture. At the time, Athens was characterized by broad orthogonal streets and grand neoclassical buildings. This low-density layout was unable to accommodate the sudden population surge, and the government, financially incapacitated by the wars, could not provide adequate housing or employment for the new residents. Out of this landscape of crisis emerged a bottom-up procedural response known as antiparochi (roughly translated as “mutual exchange”).

Following the wars, many homeowners could no longer afford to maintain their homes. Enterprising building contractors approached them with a plan: demolish the existing house and build an apartment block (polykatoikia) in its place. In exchange, the original homeowners would receive a few units in the new building, which they could occupy, rent, or sell. The contractors would profit by selling the remaining units on the market.

The new apartments adopted Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino system, which reduced the building to a concrete slab supported by reinforced pillars. This rigid standardization radically simplified the design and construction process, eliminating the need for specialized expertise.⁷Feargus O’Sullivan, “Behind the Accidentally Resilient Design of Athens Apartments,” CityLab, July 10, 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-10/why-athens-apartments-are-unexpectedly-resilient. It enabled rapid, inexpensive construction while also providing employment for many newly arrived, unemployed migrants. With this formalized ontology in place, a simple procedure emerged: subtract one house, stack five or six vertically in its place. Repeat wherever a cash-strapped homeowner exists. Like crystals in a supersaturated solution, concrete apartment blocks spread rapidly across the city in just a few decades.

The procedure succeeded because it addressed multiple needs simultaneously: it provided jobs for the unemployed, income for former homeowners, housing for migrants, a shared project to ease postwar tensions, and capital for further urban development.⁸Keller Easterling writes extensively on the practice of “aligning needs” in urban design in her book Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World (Verso, 2020). The state, viewing it as a private solution to the housing crisis, sanctioned the phenomenon – exempting it from taxes and major regulations.⁹Sakalis, “Why Does Athens Look So Quirky?” It allowed them, too, to do more with less.

Unlike the procedural systems in Odyssey, antiparochi had no master plan, no designer, and no predetermined outcome. It unfolded instead through the iterative application of simple rules across the urban fabric. McKenzie Wark describes the broader conditions in which such procedural logics take hold: the mutually reinforcing forces of capitalism, globalization, and technological standardization introduce a logic of economization that increasingly resembles that of the video game, producing what she calls gamespace:

The game has not just colonized reality, it is also the sole remaining ideal… Everything is evacuated from an empty space and time which now appears natural, neutral, and without qualities – a gamespace. The lines are clearly marked. Every action is just a means to an end. All that counts is the score… Its triumphs affirm not just the rules of the game but the rule of the game.¹⁰Wark, Gamer Theory, sec. 8.

In contrast to the more restricted notion of gamification, in which gamic principles are applied to non-game sectors – financial services, for example – gamespace refers more broadly to the pernicious infiltration of gamic ideology into all aspects of life, from economics to dating to architecture. Unlike the game, gamespace lacks any coherent author, boundaries, or goals. It is best understood as an emergent patchwork of protocols – financial instruments, standardized construction techniques, and platformization – that shape the world in their image.¹¹For more on this topic, see Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014). Antiparochi installed a proto-gamespace into the city, dynamiting its historical form and replacing it with a standardized, entrepreneurial landscape born of necessity. The city began to resemble a board game, with a simple set of rules dictating the expansion of game pieces across the board – only here, the game was played not against space, but with space itself.

Expansion / Contraction

In the decades since antiparochi, intensified financialization under neoliberal capitalism has further embedded the logic of the game in the production of space worldwide. This was seen perhaps most explicitly in the United States in the years leading up to the 2007-08 financial crisis. While the complexities of this event lie outside the scope of this essay, it suffices to say that the procedural production of financialized space in the United States became inextricably linked to the production of vacant space in Athens. In the fallout of the crisis, a combination of disinvestment in public spaces and infrastructure, decrease in household disposable income, rising unemployment, and contraction of investment and construction activity led to a sharp drop in house prices and a proliferation of vacancies in the city center of Athens.¹²Stefanos Giannoulakis, “The Impact of the Financial Crisis on Residential Property Market of Greece” (Christchurch, New Zealand, 2016). As of 2016, 30 percent of homes and 20 to 50 percent of stores remained empty in the city, while a large migrant population were forced to sleep on the street.¹³Constantina Theodorou, “Athens as a Shrinking City? On Empty Buildings,” City Issue, July 20, 2016, https://cityissue.org/2016/07/20/athens-as-a-shrinking-city-on-empty-buildings/; Aristide Antonas and Thanos Zartaloudis, “Protocols for a Life of the Ordinary,” E-Flux Architecture (blog), June 2018, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/positions/204038/protocols-for-a-life-of-the-ordinary/.

Affirmative Vacancy

This landscape of vacancies produced a fertile ground for the privatization of space through market-based solutions such as Airbnb. The platform’s rise was exponential: from 2017 to 2018 alone, there was a 90 percent rise in listings.¹⁴Dimitris Balampanidis, Thomas Maloutas, Evangelia Papatzani, and Dimitris Pettas, “Informal Urban Regeneration as a Way Out of the Crisis? Airbnb in Athens and Its Effects on Space and Society,” Urban Research & Practice 14, no. 3 (May 27, 2021): 223–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2019.1600009. In a strange way, this structurally mirrors the bottom-up process of antiparochi 70 years prior, where an intermediary approaches financially precarious homeowners in hopes of gaining money through the provision of additional accommodation. Crucially, however, while antiparochi generated socioeconomic diversity and an abundance of housing, Airbnb has so far proven to do exactly the opposite.  Countering this procedural production of privatized space, Greek architect Aristide Antonas reimagines the city’s legal infrastructure to support collective occupation and shared use. In his 2016 book Archipelago of Protocols, Antonas takes aim at gamespace from within. He proposes five interlocking protocols – speculative legal instruments – which together form a rigid system of rules that create the conditions for the legal temporary occupation of the abandoned city center. To do so, he does not reject procedural logic, but instead embraces it to its fullest extent:

Aggressive gamification strategies were in my mind when first conceiving of the protocols: could we use such power-games… to target the field of a conscious sociality differently? Political subjectification has surrendered to a spectacularized game that leads to and is premised on a depoliticization. So why not play the political as a game in order to rekindle politicization?¹⁵Antonas and Zartaloudis, “Protocols for a Life of the Ordinary.”

Such a strategy attempts to inhabit existing legal protocols, politicize them, and transcend their alienating power through use itself. Such an approach closely mirrors the type of practice McKenzie Wark deems necessary for dismantling gamespace:

Gamespace needs theorists – but also a new kind of practice. One that can break down the line that divides gamer from designer, to redeploy the digital so that it makes this very distinction arbitrary.¹⁶Wark, Gamer Theory, sec. 23.

By radically embracing the procedure, Antonas aims to create a landscape in which the law and the market are rendered inoperative.¹⁷Antonas and Zartaloudis, “Protocols for a Life of the Ordinary.” The first protocol, “The Diagonal Commonhold”, proposes a means for establishing collective rights to land in a city dominated by private ownership. This enables the legal and spatial unification of disjointed, privately owned urban spaces – such as roof terraces and abandoned retail shops – without any changes to their original ownership. Another protocol, “Radical Non-Use,” establishes a process for the expropriation of vacant land and a new legal category of “radical non-use” which preserves the land for common use, “defined as the type of use that consists of an openly accessible, non-for-profit, occupation and function.”¹⁸Aristide Antonas, Archipelago of Protocols, 1st ed. (dpr-barcelona, 2016). This protocol offers a process for the creation of commonly-held land, as well as protects against any for-profit or proprietary use. The protocols are designed to overlap and mutually reinforce each other to form an emergent meshwork that ultimately provides the condition for a wide variety of procedural responses.

Crucially, Antonas does not specify exactly how citizens might make use of these protocols. He does, however, sketch some examples of what worlds might be possible when produced through the affirmative power of the protocols. The Shared Terraces project, for example, imagines the unified legal entity of a single block transformed into a machine for energy production, made possible via a lightweight photovoltaic canopy constructed over the common rooftops. Another project, Roof Playgrounds, imagines a merging of adjacent “diagonal commonholds” to form a larger aggregate entity. The height differences of adjacent rooftops are negotiated through ladders and slides, transforming the city into a hyper-playground. In contrast to the fragmentation and privatization of the city under Airbnb, these projects leverage procedural techniques to weave together the elements of the city into shared, horizontal relations. In attending to the creation of the conditions for possibility rather than the possibilities themselves, Antonas exemplifies what Isabelle Stengers terms the “speculative commitment.” For Stengers, speculation as a philosophical project is “not as much a matter of projecting abstract ideas of future possibilities as it is a question of how to precipitate and make possible distinct ways of life.”¹⁹Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 265. Such a sentiment closely echoes Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of the social production of space: to produce a new type of space, one must first attend to the social relations that engender its production.²⁰Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Blackwell Publishing, 1991). By redesigning the legislative landscape of the city to privilege communal and not-for-profit uses, Antonas’s project ultimately aims at the production of a corresponding, communally-oriented space. In doing so, he mirrors the practice of the game designer: attending to the underlying mechanics of the system with the aim of producing an emergent possibility space to be explored through play. In contrast to traditional practice of architecture, in which a new “skin” is applied to an already-existing skeleton, Antonas instead proposes a new skeleton, upon which new skins can be collectively grown.

Gamespace today is stronger than ever, as cities around the world are increasingly shaped in the image of platforms, networks, and markets. It is crucial not to apply totalizing narratives to these forces, however. Built on the logic of the procedure, these forces contain with them the seeds for their own destruction. Their being is not fixed, but dependent on the ongoing interaction of multiple discrete protocols. Viewed through the lens of the procedure, the fixity of these forces are destabilized, as the world is revealed as a process of continuous unfolding. As David Graeber notes: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”²¹David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Melville House, 2015), 89.

As Antonas’s project demonstrates, remaking the world does not involve a rejection of the procedural, but rather its radical embrace. What must be rejected is the closed, efficiency-driven procedures that drastically delimit the potential range of action possible in the city. A radically open procedural praxis asks what it truly means to do more with less: to create a more pluralistic world using less new construction, less financialization, less marketization, less inequality? As a city with empty houses and inhabited streets, Athens provides the perfect location for a radically banal experiment of achieving more with less. What is needed is not new construction, new masterplans, or new platforms, but rather what Antonas and Zartaloudis call “a different ordinary” made possible through “a form of life structured through different forms and rules of living.”²²Antonas and Zartaloudis, “Protocols for a Life of the Ordinary.”

Connor Cook

Connor Cook is a media artist and researcher from California, currently based in Amsterdam. Utilizing real-time software systems and hardware interfaces, he designs informatic circuits that integrate body and machine, exploring their libidinal interplay through a practice of ‘computational performance.’ His research interests concern the evolutionary dynamics of techno-cultural systems. He holds a BA from Harvard University and an MA from the Design Academy Eindhoven, where he now acts as a tutor in both the BA and MA degree programs. He recently completed Antikythera, a research fellowship in the Philosophy of Technology at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles.