Capital of the Eternal Century
The Capital of the Eternal Century is a game of urban psychogeography. It celebrates the city as a puzzle of emotional zones. Themes drawn from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project provide the pieces. Think of it as a barely-recognizable 19th Century Paris experienced by a fl?neur (stroller) voraciously absorbing the dense details of streets life and urban transformations while walking through the metropolis.
Capital of the Eternal Century is a game of urban psychogeography. It celebrates the city as a puzzle of emotional zones. Themes drawn from Walter Benjamin?s Arcades Project provide the pieces.
Think of it as a barely-recognizable 19th Century Paris experienced by a fl ?neur (stroller) voraciously absorbing the dense details of streets life and urban transformations while walking through the metropolis.
The game follows a single character out on a long, meandering stroll: ten hours from a day in their life. You will play the game as ten one-hour sessions. The fi rst session fi nds the character eating a meal in preparation for the long walk in front of them. During this fi rst hour you will begin to build the character by establishing some of his or her emotional and intellectual facilities. You will fi ll in part of a phrenological map of the character?s mind and personality, leaving blank spaces that will inscribed over the course of the remaining sessions.
You have the choice of whether the initiating meal is breakfast, lunch or supper, which determines what hours of the day the character will be out strolling. Since the mood of a city changes throughout the day, the time you set will shift the emotional resonance of the nine city districts the character experiences.
Sessions two through ten each take place in a different zone of the city. These zones are physical settings with varying mixes of inhabitants, architecture, street activity and businesses. More importantly, every zone is infused with its own unique mood, which will influence the game as much as much as the city?s physical layout.
The fl ?neur character spends exactly one hour walking though each zone. He or she may pause, step inside a shopping arcade, chat with a friend, be drawn intoa temporary escapade, but by the end of the hour the character will have moved on the next district.
Players open each of the strolling sessions with approximately fi ve or ten minutes of description to establish the setting and color of the zone their character is passing through. For the remainder of the hour, players introduce confl icts linked to the zone?s mood and to themes of 19th century urban modernity. Confl icts in the game unfold in three varieties. The fl ?neur can be confronted directly? perhaps by a petty criminal, gendarme, scam artist, lost child, street preacher or the like ? choose to intervene in a tense situation, or create the tension by intervening. The character can also observe confl ict as an emotional voyeur by fi xing on the disputes and passions of people encountered along the way. Finally, confl ict can play out internally among competing mental drives as the character reacts to the cityscape and the issues inscribed in its boulevards.
The outcomes of these conflicts add new details to the character?s mental topography. Over the course of play, the phrenological map that defi nes the character blends with the other ?map layers? of the game. Movements tracked along city streets. Psychogeography?s validation of the emotional resonance of place. Benjamin?s schema of cultural trends and material artifacts that made Paris the capital of the 19th century.
Capital of the Eternal Century was written for the 26 Game Chef competition. It incorporates the time limitation of ten one-hour sessions, with character creation taking place during the initial session and each remaining session exploring a different city zone. The game also uses three ingredients: glass, ancient, and emotion. Glass gives the game the glass roofs of the arcades that signify the rise of modern consumer culture. Ancient provides the buried city of the river, the sewers, and the metropolises deep history. Emotion inspired the psychogeographic division of the city into emotional zones and the emotion-description based conflict resolution system.
Tags: Mark Vallianatos
