The Age of the Neo-Geographer

Our physical environments are gaining intelligence as our geography transcends the analog. Before Google Maps there were in fact video games that included geo-tagging for points of interest and hazards. Sim-City was the first city-building simulation game, introduced in 1989. Games have shown their merit as pedagogical tools in a variety of fields, including urban planning. The origin of cartography was rooted in a need to fundamentally understand and track our physical movements. The nature of maps is beginning to shift towards a tool for fore-sight rather than hindsight. Games such as Sim-City, Grand Theft Auto, and Civilizations have proven to offer an incubator for testing urban and city planning strategies. Video games provided the speculative grounds to test ideas such as GPS and new forms of guided urbanism. These testing grounds are possible since seemingly complex games are based on bottom up intelligence. Sim-City functions on rules similar to The Game of Life by John Conway.



One interesting notion may be for games such as Sim-City or GTA to begin to incorporate live GIS data in order to narrow the gap between our analog and digital existence. This coupled with our already growing social networks may produce a highly, more tangible version of Second Life. After all, economies have shifted into the digital realm with sites like Ebay and Craigslist. The challenge lies in integrating the natural and urban environments into a seamless neo-geography that transcends the physical and digital and begins to function within aspects of both. In a sense this is hinting at a cultural aspect being coupled with digital cartography and landscapes that have commonly emerged from video games.


Augmented Reality may offer us the mode of transportation to true Virtual Reality that was hinted at earlier. While the physical interface of AR may always suffice the human psyche, technological discourse continues to seek out a self-sufficient model currently through VR. (Kurzweil comes to mind) What will be interesting to see is the means by which AR infiltrates our daily lives. I am not referring here to the growing horde of tech-savy people, but instead to the soccer mom with an iPhone.

"The degree to which AR can blossom to its full paradigm-shifting potential is dependent on the human interface, geolocative, visual analysis, microdisplay, inertial sensor, wireless connection, portable/pocket computing, relational database, and cloud computing technologies that have matured very rapidly in this first decade of the 21st. We weren’t ready for real VR, but we’re about ready for real AR. It’s a broad concept, and the marker-tracking folks are a big part of it, but they can’t have it to themselves because we won’t let them."

Noah Zerkin of Augmentation

Stroll in Central Park+ iPhone + AR + personal avatar + GTA4 = Neo-Geographer Gaming