Milan Koerner-Safrata


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   milan@scrnprnt.ca
@     milanimalism
   werkstatte
   Infinite State Machine


  • b. 1993, Vancouver, Canada
  • Multimedia artist and designer
    of playful cybernetics




Alien Garden 2.0

2018, Interactive Media



 Simulation, Cellular Automata, Art Games
    A love letter to one of the earliest art-games by Bernie de Koven and Jaron Lanier. I came across Alien Garden for the Atari 8-bit family in a class on 80's computer games taught by Jesse Fuchs. Alien Garden 2.0 chooses a random ruleset for each plant the player creates, and further specifies whether this plant should be standalone, invasive, or parasitic. New plants are given a random latin name, and ranked based on the amount of living cells. Invasive plants override neighbours while parasites only propogate on other plants. The player sows seeds which grow a plant in a 3x3 area, which matures toward a randomly chosen radius. Invasive and parasitic plants have no limits, and are helpful to prune back gardens, or introduce chaos into the stable symmetry of a mature plant.

Along with Worms? by David Maynard, Jesse introduced me to incredibly rich design spaces at a time when memory and graphics were sparse. Earlier in the year I had been introduced to John Conway’s Game of Life, a stunning zero player game that opened the door to my future imaginings about games qua simulations. Conway’s game is a cellular automata, a simple set of rules for how cells on a grid should live or die based on cells in their neighbourhood. The outcome is an emergent system that appears analogous to biological processes. 

As games continue the arms race for graphical fidelity, designing for systemic complexity remains thorny. Even a simple cellular automata creates an unweildy, enormous possibility space. While videogames are increasingly generated on the content side (No Man’s Sky, Minecraft) their systemic complexity remains modest. On the other end maximalist narrative games such as Baldur’s Gate or Disco Elysium are able to author complexity through sheer brute force, foreclosing emergence. The question asked by Worms?, Alien Garden, and Conway remains. How do we cultivate, prune, channel, complexity into a form where players have meaningful agency, or will it remain inimical to the goals of the designer?