Vaissnavi Shukl
I grew up playing a lot of video games, and even though the last decade dipped the lights on that front, I recently started playing again. From my naive younger self who played George rash and Super Mario on a console with cassettes to now playing Assassin’s Creed on a high definition TV, video game technology has developed beyond imagination, and so have the virtual worlds within which these games are based. From online gaming in Fortnite to teaming up with players Counter Strike and FIFA to participatory world building in Minecraft. Video games now touch upon discourses on digitally Metaverse and the social element in online games to take a deep dive into these we have with us today. Alina Nazmeeva, a researcher at MIT whose work investigates the relationship between cities and digital games, interfaces and public CG and politics.

My name is Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off- Centre, a podcast where we highlight unconventional design practices and research projects that reflect the emerging discourses within the design discipline and beyond. Architecture of Center features conversations with exceptionally creative individuals who have extrapolated the traditional fields of Art, Architecture, Planning, landscape, and urban design.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Alina your work lies at the intersection of media and technology, and the virtual and the built environment. So why don’t you get us warmed up and tell us about your research.

Alina Nazmeeva
Oh hi Vaissnavi. Thank you. Yeah, it sounds like you mentioned four things. Quite too many intersections. I guess if I can put it more broadly and kind of closer to where I’m coming from and I was trained as an architect. In my research attempts to study the relationships between images and spaces, right. So, as an architect, originally I was thinking and considering the relationship between drawings, renderings, collages and all the other like means of architectural representations, and the space itself, the actual build project. So thinking in terms of what kind of drawings, you know, are produced, and then being delivered to for the server construction and what kind of images are produced for investors or for public or for a client, etc, or research media or exhibitions. So, all of them have different roles and all of them are quite distinct, and then as the technology evolves, the imaging technology the what I call the digital reproduction technology this tools and devices to develop and produce these images, expand, so today we can talk about using VR for architecture, we can talk about game-edge, engines with real time rendering for architecture, we can talk about AR for furniture design, etc. So they all have these mutual technologies that are kind of entering or like even BIM something like Revit is absolutely revolutionary for the way architecture thing designed and produced. So how do these tools influence how we perceive space and how they essentially reformulated conceptualise, the notion of space, and our relationship between like human relationship to spaces as well as the relationship between images and spaces.

So, as an architect I started from there but then I started learning more about the technology I started expanding, for myself, the notion of space and the notion of architecture built environment or like social environment. So I started kind of being interested in all kinds of computer generated images and digital reproduction of space so I started thinking about social media and how it influences architectural design worldwide. I started looking at video games that I think undeniably especially during COVID-19, they have become social places. So kind of understanding that and looking deeper into this relationship in like a more expanded level but also more. I would say less architectural level so it’s more now became something like media studies I would say, and architecture and the intersection of that. So at the moment, in particular, right now I continue looking at video games, specifically, and I look at them for the research… I look at them as real estate markets and spaces where we can notice, developing and burgeoning virtual economy. And also I was recently commissioned by Russian Pavilion, or Russian Pavilion in Venice Biennale to write about political dimensions of virtual worlds and produce a video essay for them about this subject as well. So I started, I continued expanding considerations of virtual worlds as like this very diverse space where everything is possible. Essentially that we think about virtual worlds, or like when we think about video games and I will get later to the distinction between a difference between the call something again another call coming or two world like, games are not really games only, and it’s the same thing like in the EU we refer to our smartphones as phone but like, for me personally, I barely call to anyone ever.

So, my smartphone is my, you know, device to use the internet to communicate via Apps who have someone to play casual games with, etc to take photographs but not more. So this is the same thing that people refer to as “games” are like virtual board games. This kind of in a way, this, the capacity, the diversity of the medium is obscured by this word. And that’s the difference I prefer to call this ‘environments virtual worlds’, specifically because games can be played in them and here I’m quoting Richard Bartle one of the first designers and developers of first MBD small Multi User Domains, back in 70s or 80s He was one of the pioneers who developed those, and he was referring to this environment as he is referring to this environment as virtual worlds because games can be played in there, but also all the other activities can unfold there as well, so it’s not limited to games.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I think the first thing that comes to my mind is probably a decade ago or something, in Ahmedabad, where I am from and currently am in India, real estate market was booming, it still is booming and there’s been some 50% rise in population over the decade and as a result of that, there’s just so much of housing being produced in the city and the way people sell housing any pointer to it is, you know, you create brochures and you create renderings and we’ll get to how you’re talking about these images of finished environments being made before they are actually constructed. And there is one real estate builder I remember when so over the job that as a part of his brochure and VR and AR was like super new. He would give people these headsets, so you could walk through the house or the buildings before it was. I mean, right now it sounds like such a commonplace thing to do, you could get your own headset, but at that time, I remember the impact it had, it was literally the talk of the town. It was like, “You should go to that person’s site office, not to see the building that they’re going to build, but just to experience the technology.” And it was path breaking in the sense that they created this world and it wasn’t a gaming world like you couldn’t play there, but it had a certain effect on their marketing, and the way people perceive their project or something I was like so technologically advanced, based on how they were representing the whole project. The building itself was not technologically advanced, it was a pretty ‘blah’ project. But this kind of set up, and it’s going, going, going back to your work and I was reading some of your work before and came across this just one line that was quite auto again, and it says, quote, “The most pervasive and profitable technological device of contemporary world, our online display games. Those spaces and environments have become dominant social spaces for hundreds of millions” unquote, and you’ve tapped into a whole new discourse on shared spaces and social interactions in the virtual world, to the medium of video games. This is quite different from the space and interaction on social media for example, right. I guess it engages a different visual environment and different types of user control, and perhaps even a different demographic in terms of what are the different age groups and what are the different kinds of people who engage with this environment. So does this work those social that you’re talking about, in some ways, aspire to create spaces and relationships that are missing in the real world, or is it a critique of what actually exists in the real world and mimics it in a whole different dimension, so to say. Which is, you know, this dimension that is bridged or interacted with, to a screen, and that is not physical or in the same physical space, as we would on a normal day.

Alina Nazmeeva
Well, I mean, I guess if we go back to know even the internet, originally was perceived as a kind of a utopia, especially that the internet started really rapidly becoming more social, beyond scientific, you know, exchange of like papers, etc. It was perceived as a utopia, which is, you know, somehow beyond the regulations and laws and nation states, etc. Like, it’s like a free great new world where everything is possible and the free you know free individuals can do as they please and there is a like utopian, I don’t know democracy or something like that and look what’s happened. Exactly. Of course it’s not the gate, I mean I think it’s the same, I think, same issues with this, you know, rhetoric of freedom is that this individual freedom is being confused with unabridged capital expansion. So, what do you mean by freedom that means like a big corporation can enclose a large part of the internet, to have their own social media there or, like, and control, whatever data is when it. So what do we define as freedom I think it is not exactly clear in all of these statements and had hasn’t been as such and I mean of course right now we see that the internet is not a utopia, the internet, you know, is very complicated space with a lot of different features and of course there are really great features of it, as well as really potentially negative and, you know, having a negative externalities. So to the, to the world, everywhere, right. And I think video games, in part and virtual worlds online virtual worlds, especially kind of continued that rhetoric, but also they supplemented with visual aesthetics. Because it really is a simulation of free dimensional space which does produce this kind of exciting effect. I mean, right now we’re so used to, but like back then the first three dimensional games have a beard especially and like I say gradually year by year become more and more photorealistic kind of triggering, you know kind of having this effect on our brain, because we become believable become immersive. And what is interesting, in particular in video games of social spaces, while I can agree in part with, you know this kind of utopian vision. Virtual Worlds is a game because social spaces, they enable certain things which are harder to make in physical space, but they also, in many ways. Continue the heuristics of physical space like navigation through physical space.

And I think this is a very interesting feature especially if we compare virtual worlds of social media right? In social media, it looks like, let’s speak in very simple terms, it looks like you’re scrolling through a newspaper or like something like that. Whereas in virtual world, you can move around physical space so like your brain already understands, or this is a city, this is a forest, this is something else. So, the some of the kinds of ideas, and I’m going a basic understanding of how to move around and how to get things, how to try to do different things, is inherited from physical world and from the way we interact with the physical world, but also from the ways we socially interact with different people within physical world. So for example, in Second Life on the first and so far the most successful works of all because it has been out there for over 10 years right now and it still exists. One of the anthropologists, dedicated to the study of this world have been comparing the communication and Second Life to talking whispering at the same time, like the anthropologist his name is Tom Boellstorff he wrote a fantastic book, ‘Coming of Age in Second Life’, dedicated to this world, and he was comparing it to talking and whispering because you embodied with your avatar can go around and talk to people, where we’re using your audio or typing into chat but you can also simultaneously to continue chatting with other people, anywhere in the world. Whereas you have like a distance based communication that you have a face to face interaction, but you also simultaneously have a variety of other means to interact with people. So, you have this kind of blend between some of the you know heuristics and communication, socialisation with physical space, alongside with the some sort of heuristics of rapid user interface interactions, and they all blended into like one experience. So yeah and then some of the other things of course social space in virtual worlds enables people to like from some of the basic things like look like anything, they can look like when the certain virtual worlds like choose an avatar. Like, try to embrace a different identity, behave, not like your behaviour and, you know, in your everyday life. So all of these things because you are not a bridge, you know, to this. You are not constrained by your identity and social roles there anymore. And if you remember the very early internet, I first certainly used the internet when I was a teenager, like I would never use my real name to register in some way. Like why would you do that. But today if you can see, it’s literally impossible and also nonsensical. We only use our real names to register everywhere we always have to confirm our identity for some reason, how come that is not anonymous anymore. So, and I think virtual wallets allow for this anonymity, or pseudonymity as Tom also says, even now, so those are the spaces that you still can. You don’t need to, you know, with your Facebook avatar there and like, give your date of birth, etc.

Vaissnavi Shukl
You know, it’s interesting. You, you mentioned, um, you mentioned, maybe 15 years ago. There was this huge boom again, just thinking of my experience and I know where they were. Uh, what was the era in which you had internet cafes, you know, uh, where you could go sit on a computer, log in the DM bill on Yahoo messenger and log out. There was a whole phase where it was just like gaming bars. So you would have boys, mostly 12 to, well, 12 to 14, 16, maybe going in, logging in and playing on this track with the randomest people across the world. And it was such a josh, but didn’t know at that point that you could be anywhere logging in from anywhere in the world and teaming up with somebody from Russia and somebody from, uh, You know, France and we doing these missions together and I’m going again. I know that the whole discourse on it, I have all these also wonder what goes into the design of these environments because there’s a lot of visas and there’s a lot of discourse on the way spaces are designed. And I know probably there’s a bunch of architects who study architecture and then transitioned into a whole different profession that looks at designing wheelchair was, I mean, was that cannot probably be built in their life or landscapes that don’t exist, either utopian or even dystopian for that matter where relationships are completely screwed and you’re cultivating, uh, friendships or. Getting to know other people for a wholly different purpose, which is non-representative of what life would be on earth.

But I wanted to know your thoughts on what goes into the design of these virtual environments, not unlike Nevada, like the physical aspect of design, but how the physical and the social are so intertwined in the way we do games or the world was designed because I feel like you can not, uh, distance one from the other, like you can not. They divorce, uh, the existence of a player and the way that relationship is so intrinsic within the game from the physical environment that the game exists in. And I feel like one influences the other and vice versa. Is that true? Or am I completely off track?

Alina Nazmeeva
Well, I do think it’s true and it, I mean, partially it’s related to, uh, You know, fan cultures and gaming cultures, and then also sort of the complexity of games, forces people to, you know, to go on forums and like to go and seek asking the questions about go, how do I get there?
Like get to point A or point B, how do I, you know, find this item in the game, et cetera, because sometimes it’s really hard to, uh, It’s the games are not really clear. Like, so you’ve, you know, entered a virtual world and you immediately get what, what is, what are the missions? But then again, we’re talking about gaming, like the, the w here, I’m using the example of virtual worlds, which have some sort of game like missions or goals, but then in social virtual worlds, I think of course it’s direct.

I absolutely agree with you. It is definitely related to the social environment, at least because in most of these virtual worlds, the, um, the environment itself is designed by the residents by the players. So the, uh, basically the virtual board developer company, like the corporation, which designs it is. Kind of providing some sort of empty platform on which, um, uh, the players or the residents themselves can build whatever they want, who can do certain constraints,

Vaissnavi Shukl
Sorry, I’m forgetting the name of this game. Help me, help me decode it. It’s not from it. It’s something where you can build stuff together. And I remember when COVID hit. There was somebody, I don’t know, one of, one of the American universities who actually Zebit the entire university mine class, that is that a social work field would work.

Alina Nazmeeva
Yeah. I mean, they press some game components, but yeah, Minecraft is really fascinating because, um, yeah, actually several universities, including MIT revealed the campuses in Minecraft. During the course during COVID-19 not all of them had kind of like commencements there or like, you know, um, I think do I had the measurements on Minecraft, like Minecraft platform? Uh, you know, I, I think, yes, I can honestly tell that those officially authorised by the schools, but the attempts, uh, 100%, they don’t attempt to do that. And I know, I remember if I’m not mistaken because it was like such a crazy time and a lot of things have been happening. Uh, at the beginning of COVID and like last spring, but the, um, I think it all started from the Japanese high school or like middle school, uh, which had to be like look down and, uh, they decided to have a commencement in Minecraft and sort of, it got really, um, Like published on all over the media, everywhere, invested in media, especially like, I, I like came across a bunch of articles and then all of these institutions got inspired by that.

And, uh, also started, started trying to build the campuses in, in Minecraft. And I, I didn’t go, like, I didn’t explore all of them, but I explored MIT campus in Minecraft. And I thought it to be a really, um, Amazing tool for so many reasons, at least, you know, especially for the people who. Who miss this school and miss being a part of the institution and hanging out in the corridors, the incident corridor, walking around in Killian court, et cetera, for them rebuilding that space is in a way, um, I think operators a sort of coping mechanism to help, to go through hard times.
And also another aspect is that it’s a collaborative work all the time. So, uh, it is. It’s several people organised on discord and, uh, they had been trying to build it together and make it not just a haphazard kind of activity, but more or less regular. I think they like keeping spreadsheets with types, like the buildings which are complete, or like what’s the stage of completion, et cetera. So they’re trying to yeah. To work together. And I think it’s a really fantastic tool and I had a lot of fun exploring it.

Vaissnavi Shukl
No way I would ever have seen it. And I completely got yours from your point, but this Bridgeway where the game itself and that’s where it was, becomes that tool for. People do get firsthand involved in space making.
And placemaking, I mean, I’m always thinking about the accessibility factor, how without a know-how of how to design buildings in the emerging world, which is, you know, architects and engineers do that, this, this platform hands over that power and that agency to everybody, and kind of be a participant in creating a whole different virtual. What is that? They either imagine or have experienced firsthand that, you know, you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise as well as a professional.

Alina Nazmeeva
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, UN has a, the UN has a collaboration with Minecraft called block by block there, they, uh, you know, experiment with participatory design, using Minecraft as a tool. They have been several presidents, you know, like in different countries around the world where people would just cover too. To build, uh, what, like to kind of envision what they want to have in their physical environment, in their neighbourhoods, et cetera. It’s like we’re writing urban projects. I think Minecraft also has been used for citizen science as well, or like sometimes of urban planning, citizen mapping, et cetera, and never, I guess the most, um, again, uh, prominent and I guess, famous, um, Use case for, Minecraft was the reporters without borders release their Minecraft server with, uh, the news articles, uh, from, you know, for about and fro for the countries where freedom of speech is it, you know, censored and there is a huge censorship. So it’s also a fascinating, you know, uh, tool to hijab or like kind of subverts the, the certain disabilities can have some sort of political pushback on that. Like spreading information and communicating through this kind of platform is fascinating and that’s a real case study. And the other thing I think there was, again, like games used as a sort of tool to increase empathy between different people, because of what they allow you to do. The game is to communicate with frank and you don’t really need to know their language. So as you mentioned, you go on like, then you are, uh, I remember my classmates and I myself did the same and it was a teenager in this internet confessed.

So there was a lot of fun. You will just like to play with random people. You don’t do it. No. And you barely speak their language, but you still. We’ll win the game, have to be a team and figure out how to communicate and how to beat your enemy, et cetera in the game. So it doesn’t read empathy and it definitely helps you to yeah. To improve your communication skills. So, this definitely exposed you to other people who are not like you. This is a fantastic opportunity. And, um, I think, especially in COVID like the value of virtual worlds and VJ games, social spaces in particular, uh, have become extremely visible.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I think the point about language is so important. I’m just talking about creating empathy and, you know, Bridging that gap that language often creates and having people work towards a common goal before the word at all. But there is a series of studios. One, especially that I saw firsthand was Daniel D’Oca at the GSD and he did a studio for housing. I don’t remember where the site was, but the first exercise that the studio did was to create board games. They were board games, but they were still games that everybody could play with the participant group, um, which was not English speaking to figure out what people’s hopes and ambitions would be in terms of creating housing or urban planning in terms of policy design.
But, going back to the word shield was it, and this is. A little bit of a convention than fishnet. I absolutely love games. I play a lot of video games, sometimes a heavy amount, but Jason, I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s creed and it’s not a social game per se. It’s a single use in game grade. You know, you have goals and you do those challenges and you do those missions and, you know, whatever you explore the world I played because I think. The time period during which all these different worlds were created are spectacular. I’m playing Assassin’s Creed Syndicate right now, which has been recreated like the old London and it’s, and it’s beautiful. So I’m going to go back to another, um, in your research on video games that I found very intriguing, especially about being Assassin’s creed. Was that a virtual economy? And you’re talking about. Data collection about real estate, about capitalism and even gender in the world of video games. And you’re saying that both privacy and property is. I can relate a lot of it to me playing Assassin’s creed, but I want you to elaborate on the economics in the worst environment. How does that work? And what’s your dating role?

Alina Nazmeeva
Yeah. So I guess, uh, then we talk about, you know, economies of virtual environments we can consider. Like kind of this three party system, right, of production, distribution, and consumption of virtual world or virtual goods. So I want to have like a crazy side track here because I really want to talk about non fungible talking art, because this is like the most fascinating subject, but when last couple of months, uh, so basically we have this precedent then, you know, value is generated for, um, Digital object. And a lot of the people I know, and I have been talking about this, uh, Crazy and fi and LFT fever, uh, do not understand why would they, you know, why would someone, uh, purchase non fungible talk and email, then they could just screenshot the same image and keep it on their, on their hard being defined in this world. And that’s it. That’s like the same thing. But here we are talking about, you know, value generated through. Uh, some sort of, you know, digital signature or like, you know, an additional thing attached to that digital image, uh, that did like makes it out centric. I mean, this is super contested, uh, because, uh, I would argue that I would actually agree with, uh, Everest 15, who is an, um, fantastic, um, digital artist and, uh, an order she recently.

So they recently published an article on medium there. They would emphasise, and I pretty much agree that the only value of digital art and the, one of the most prominent and unique features is it’s. Uh, Ability to be replicated infinitely like hypothetically independently. And, uh, each of these copies is as centric as the previous one. So there is no concept of Cobian origin, like what we have in physical art. You know, you cannot forge, like if you forge more than the laser, it’s not going to be the same laser, even if you somehow manage, make it identical. But in the digital world, this is not the case. It’s actually great that we can. And have a capacity to instantly copy something, but, you know, and if she goes against that, I mean, there are a lot of really good qualities of fantasies. Like for example, the artists, uh, you know, are being. Paid for their work, which is fantastic. And, you know, uh, ours has been one of these, uh, professions which have been struggling with, you know, financial sustainability of their, their labour and the compensation.

But then also the ecological costs of NFTs are also very questionable because of the amount of energy needed to mint. Well, one of the tokens is absolutely large. So it is a really crazy space. But like, regardless of all of this, you know, it looks like the art world, or like people who research visual culture are divided into two, two very polar camps. Right now, one of them is saying on NFCS that the future produces a democratic society where everyone is rewarded for their labour, et cetera. And the others are like, It’s in the environmental course. And in fact, and if she’s just exacerbating the already existing, horrible features of the art market. So, and I think, and if seized are very like fundamental cases, then we talk about, um, virtual economy and the production of value because the goal of basically all of the economy, not just vertical economy is to produce scarcity, right. To have a, some sort of scarcity and based on that scarcity of certain good or item or commodity, um, to generate some value and profit or like distributed this, uh, good, uh, according to. According to the like kind of no demand, like the lowest supply demand, et cetera, and all of the other intricacies going along the way with that, because it’s of course not that simple so go to the economy, we can receive it, you know, as like AAA games, like something like Assassin’s creed takes several years to produce requires thousands of people to do requires like research of historical archives to really produce believable, uh, historical spaces, which is amazing. And it’s like an hour of fascinating subject, how they really need this.
These companies go and do urban research. It’s just mind-blowing and, um, and then they have to be able to make this like, release this game. And so it is popular and, uh, everyone buys it and enjoys it. And then we have our types. I actually never played Assassin’s creed. So it’s like an unknown territory for me.

I mean, I know. Yeah, maybe there are so many games. It’s insane. I have, I cannot keep track of all of them. It’s ridiculous. But then we talk about, you know, also other ways to make money out of, you know, being in the game business. So for example, let’s look at Fortnite, right? There are a lot of so-called free to play games there. You can download and play for free, but if you want, uh, some additional perks within the game, you can, you can purchase them for money. And, uh, this can be two things. It could be like so-called principally when you like, just buy items, which have no significant impact on your gameplay. So it’s not like you’re getting advantage over other people or you can buy the advantage. And like everybody, all the game is heat is second thing, which is colloquially referred to us. Pay to win. Right. Um, but, uh, this is not really important, I think for our purposes, but the first one is important. So what is fascinating about Fortnite is that you can go there and, you know, Fortnite is probably the best word war game right now. Mostly we’ll go to a virtual world, which has such a huge variety of things happening inside and outside all over the place related to fortnight. Uh, Uh, people go there, you know, play with friends, strangers, et cetera, but they also buy different, um, you know, Dance moves or like, uh, avatars and equipment and all of these things they have, no, they don’t give any advantage for them in the game. The only purpose for these things is social and cultural. These items have an exclusively cosmetic character. That’s what is fascinating. So it is the same thing. Like we go and buy, you know, Close to society, et cetera. Or like if we’re going into the office, like, you know, by suit horrible. No, that’s the best example.So, you know what I mean? Like people value, you know, certain things like certain visual aesthetic things, give them social standing or they make them feel good or. They make them recognizable and make them unique, distinctive from the others. So, and this is the only point is that the only, um, okay. Or like the largest subset of the revenue stream for Epic games, the developer fortnight, that’s it purely like their revenue is solely based on the selling of roto goods. So that’s the, like, that’s basically the economy.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Time for another confession. I relate and I was nodding so frivolously and my neck hurts right now because I have been playing Candy Crush. Seven years now I’ve deleted it twice cause I was hooked and I downloaded it and started from scratch. And I’m on level 6,962 right now.
Candy Crush’s on exactly the same principles. I think for me, it just has to do with my obsession on dopamine drugs. Because every time I pass a level, it’s just like, I hope like I want to do the other one and it’s the same. When you’re playing the game for free on your phone, it has a social element you’re logged in through your Facebook because that’s how you keep saying otherwise you have to pay the levels again, if it’s not saying, and you see everybody from your Facebook friend list who is also playing candy crush, and they have these vases. Now they have weekly races that they like, they’ve really up this or shoe game every week that I log in, or every time I log in, I see what those other 5 cents are and what levels they’re on. And then they create like a. Weekly raised with random people from around the world. And whoever’s like the first tee to reach to pass like a stage with a STEM level, then you get a free striped candy. You get gum candy, you get a lollipop, a hammer, whatever for free. And then your life is only five lives and they regenerate life every 30 minutes. So the maximum life you can have is fine. Even if you, if you’re playing something in your home, you have to buy lives, which is like $1 for 30 minutes of unlimited lives. Or if your piggy bank is full, then you can be whatever, $10 to get 600 points to which you can buy boosters. And it’s incredible how close I’ve gone to actually paying for life, because I was probably second an airport energy want to play candy crush when I’m out of life. And I don’t want to wait for 30 minutes to recharge my life. And I’m just like, Just like pay for it, like in geo currency, like real money, like, you know, put my phone, call details and get those lives. He couldn’t believe it. It’s mind boggling because people do it. And I know my aunt and you’re like my mother’s generation. Uh, the honours in my family, he bought boosters.
Like they really bought boosters and they’ve sent lives to other people on their Facebook list and say that why real money? It’s incredible how much revenue that might have generated while I’ve decided I’m never going to be for that. And as I’ve learned a new skill of self control to put my phone aside when I don’t have any lives, but Hanukkah has done incredible.
I don’t even know how much money they generate while selling all these boosters. I mean, now they started advertising, you know, one has to sustain and you know, you put ads to support your servers and your programming, but. That’s the closest that I’ve come to experiencing a word economy, like it exists and it exists.

Alina Nazmeeva
Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. And I mean, I think it’s very, for me, honestly, it makes no difference whether you buy in a booster in candy crush or. You, you buy, you know, a clothing item, which has no utilitarian purpose. Like, it doesn’t make you warm, but it’s just pretty, or like, I dunno, something like that. It’s very, very similar. Um, it’s I mean, it’s just like something brings you back, like there is value for you in that. Right. Um, but then there is also another type of economy, which is, uh, I’m looking specifically at the, a player to player. Economy then, uh, players can, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes it involves real money. And sometimes again, going, we’re going to connect this conversation back to non fungible tokens or one of the virtual worlds I’m looking at right now. And I’m trying to, uh, You know, have some real estate and do make some real estate analysis of it. Um, it’s called the central land and basically it’s based on the idea that like every single parcel of land in this world can be, uh, is a, is a non-perishable Dogon and they have RB being perpetually traded.

Between people. So there is a lot of like real estate speculation, but there is also, um, like, well, there are a lot of similarities with some of the August similarities between, you know, the way the property is being bought and sold in. In real cities and, uh, the way it’s being fought off and also bought and sold in the central line, like, you know, the closest to the public space parcel is going to be more expensive. The language that is adjacent to the road is going to be more expensive. The volume, which is adjacent to some districts, has a really fun theme, which is super attractive and generates. A lot of foot traffic is going to be more expensive, et cetera. And they, people have been flipping this property, like crazy and. Uh, right now, they also have been building stuff there, right? Because it’s a, it’s a virtual world which can be accessed through your browser, but also with VR goggles. But also you can make real money there. You can not just sell property like land. You can also sell buildings, you can sell clothes, you can sell, um, And buy and claim, et cetera. I think avatar names. So like you’d like domain names on the internet in the central land, you can sell a name for an avatar or like another person, for instance. So it is very fascinating. Like every single kind a bit of, of, of, of this world can be, can become an unconscionable token and technically being bought and sold and like to get to some sort of economic value. Which is kind of grim on the one hand, you know,

Vaissnavi Shukl
Really extremely grim and just, you know, it just is exactly what a bunch of these episodes in Black Mirror talk about. There’s one. I don’t know if you’ve seen the last season. This guy who’s hooked to a certain kind of lifestyle in a video game. I mean, he’s mad at, and, um, he’s playing this read again once and he, he gets to be used by another player in the video game, who is who? Um, Oh, it was amazing. Like he’s a guy and this was a guy playing a game. Who might’ve done a woman. So he’s, he’s straight in his jail life, but he realises that he’s, he’s probably having homosexual tendencies within the video game and. And it’s crazy like how he’s meeting these, and doing other lives. One, one that is like his real life and then one life that he’s living, living in the word shield word and how those two intersect or don’t. But. Um, I’m going to change the gears a little bit here. And, um, thinking about the years that have gone by today, marking the exact one year anniversary of a DSP in the US shutting down in March.
Oh really? It was 13. I bought it for some reason. I had the number 16 in my head. It was Friday the 13th and that’s the last day when we had like this huge group photo in gun-ho and we’ve never been back. Been back inside the building since then. But my screen time since then has easily increased by a few hours a day, very unhealthy. And I first had known of at least four people who made sure that they had, um, either bought new Xboxes and PlayStations or cleaned the dust off their old ones before the lockdown began. Now, what was really striking to me was an in-season upgrade in the gaming paraphernalia. And that’s just even limited to the console and the controller anymore. There’s a bunch of these AR VR headsets and new technology that I don’t understand much, but what’s your take on these technological upgrades and you know, what does the future hold?

Alina Nazmeeva
Well, I think. The place, at least for me to get there carefully is yeah, of course, blockchain, like continue looking at this NFC institution all over the place.
But also the, um, from the hardware perspective, AR I would say AR goggles, like whoever will the company right now, multiple companies are struggling for that. Right. We are talking about. And trying to develop something which would be useful and commercially successful, and we’ll be able to reach the audience because right now I think the AR landscape is stifled by, you know, the ability to experience your own phone. And I think it’s extremely limiting. Um, and that sort of, I think this is one of the reasons AR is not so. Bustling like virtual. In environments like VJ games, um, social virtual worlds and the VR experiences, because, because of that particular limitations, but there have been a lot of presidents, you know, putting, uh, art in AR like there was a collaboration between Apple and, um, I do not remember which you used him in New York, but they made like an exhibition in central park.
I invited several prominent artists and kind of placed AR. Pieces of art within the park or, um, There have been a lot of experiments in that field. Also, Jeff Koons put his, you know, his dog on, in central park again, but then the next day it was wonderful by another artist as a, like, you know, too, Yeah. Yeah. I think it was just, uh, overlapped. I, I really, I, I don’t know the technicality of how it’s been done, but I think the idea is if the chemo, he just kind of juxtaposed, you know, the copy of that one, or maybe like created a mask to vandalise because this was like a graffiti. I know, but it raised a lot of questions like who, who else, you know, virtual AR space who can put things on. In social spaces, like in public spaces and who cannot, what is going on there. So this really condensed the territory. And I think, uh, we’ve, you know, everybody’s in the tech world is looking forward to see, and there are a lot of rumours that Apple is going to announce their AR goggles, but then, you know, we have so many different questions about, you know, while it’s economic it’s political question, it’s social it’s cultural question. It’s a policy question, at least in terms of. How AR can be placed and where, and who can see it, who can not see it and like, what is, what is going on there? So this is, uh, it’s a very important, and I think it’s a very, like, it’s a design driven, it’s a policy it’s urban, it’s urban planning question. And essentially in my opinion, so, um, yeah, hardware on that side is fascinating.
But then again, there are so many like 5g, we’re talking about 5g and it’s also essential to that, right. To enable high quality high precision geo-location and fast internet. Yeah. So you need the infrastructure in order to make this AR useful and, um, what colour among people, um, other things, again, the development of VR, the development of real time. Rendering is fascinating with game engines and what is happening there. Um, this is definitely going to improve, you know, the general, uh, and it has been improving the general quality of simulated environments and that feed and the capacity of, uh, different scale studios to produce them. If before, you know, one really huge thousand, several thousand people studios could be good.

Design high-quality super like realistic, uh, virtual environments today. Like year by year, it becomes more and more accessible for everyone. They recently have released, like at the game person to help release this, um, um, of metahuman, which is an avatar. Production, uh, software, which enables you to create extremely difficult to realistic high precision, uh, humans.
Which is very, you know, superin County too. We’ll get them because they look like, like, this looks very much like a photograph. And again, I say accessible for everyone. It will enable, you know, all creators and whoever wants to do that to create, you know, for the realistic worlds or like kind of animated movies with those, um, Oh, my gosh, essentially 3d models. Right? Um, so this is Def, but this is, again, this is not a hardware question. And I guess all of these technologies for me, um, they all lead in a way to this rejuvenation of the concept of metaverse. I think, and you know, I was so surprised. I remember two or three years ago, then it was like I was working on my thesis and, uh, at MIT and it was dedicated to the virtual world.
I liked the concept of social space and virtual worlds. And like, what are the overlaps between physical social space and the social space and those economic political implications, blah, blah, blah. But I was a little bit uncomfortable using the term metaverse because I like, you know, just three years ago, for me it seemed like it’s like two sides, no one would ever get it.
It looks, it sounds kind of funny. Um, I’m not going to use that, but now, you know, uh, Washington post is talking about it’s diverse, a lot of like Forbes or something like that. Some of these magazines, you know, super mass media talking about metaphors and treating it seriously. So. With the development of both the CJ technology and the hardware, which is like quite capable to process all of this stuff, these ideas of blockchain, as well as it’s also, for some reason, connected, it’s like all of these technologies which are being developed, they become this, uh, No construction materials to create the metaverse and, uh, you know, everybody’s talking about it now. Seriously, so that is super fascinating. Yeah. This is something, a super long-term thing. And they derive a lot of crucial, you know, hardware, software questions, which haven’t been resolved for metaverse and, uh, it’s, we’re talking about real long-term plan, like something. 10-20 years at this, maybe longer.

Vaissnavi Shukl
What did I have that’s happening when a whole new discourse thoughts on metaphors.
Uh, they’re going to look back at your thesis and they’re going to cite you because you were talking at that point 10 or 20 years ago. So we, we, we have that in the making, you know, it’s just like, you’re, you’re going to be at the forefront of it. But so looking at, I don’t know, like the future of technology and, um, who works in social spaces, um, Super curious to know what’s next for you. And where does this research lead you from here?

Alina Nazmeeva
I guess? Well, I mean, I’m just doing, I think this subject for me is so broad. Like I am really. Trying, I’m not, I’m looking at the video games and virtual worlds and they already are such a huge landscape of all of the different possible things. You have social games, you know, and then you have candy crush, which is, uh, not even a social world, even though we can argue that it’s about spatial problems. It is just still about the arrangement of certain things about the resource management space. Um, and then. The games are such a rich, uh, to rain for me, because it also is, you know, a window to the cultural, uh, to the, to the global culture, essentially, because we’re talking about pop culture, right? If games, if we consider games as a, um, Pop culture media and if we agree that pop culture always reflects to an extent the. You know, the political, the social cultural aspect of the role of the board. It’s like certain trends, et cetera, what’s happening. We can read the games as this mirrors the world. You know, on one hand, on the other hand, we can also see games. As you know, I really like to bring some new Marxists talk here. We can think about them as so-called, like David Harvey’s spatial fix: this kind of infinite expansion of markets towards more and more. I, you know, things to be able to capture and exploit. And I think this is so evident in, like in the concept of the internet at first, but more visualised in the world, the virtual world video game market, but also the blockchain market.

There has been this really fascinating project, which is called a thing or two. Or to IDEO or something like that. So the concept is that there’s this digital twin of the earth of the blind. Right. And it has almost like cultural landmarks on it. I actually have never, I didn’t look at it. I don’t know what’s the fidelity of it, but it’s, well, imagine if it’s something like a Microsoft flight simulator, something extremely realistic. And the point is that this is also a marketplace there. Everyone who, uh, is a part of this virtual world can actually buy all of those landmarks on this, you know, Digital twin of the planet. So you can go there and buy an April tower or like anger. What if you want to, and just have a habit there for some reason. And there is again, a lot of speculation happening. So this is the expanding market which finds its value and finds its audience and finds those who are interested in wanting to be a part of that. And it seems to be, it seems to be fascinatingly inventive of, you know, more and more ways to expand further and Thurber. I mean, and of course, you know, at the expense of. A lot of things. So it’s definitely very problematic. We talk about ecological costs. We talk about social costs. We talk about unsustainable labour practices. So all of those things are very critical to consider, um, But, you know, the opponent. So from that point of view I would say that it also provides jobs and opportunities and reduces the generational wealth gap because all of these people, you know, invest in all of this cryptocurrency and they. You know, get updated on the means to live comfortably, which is amazing. Like, we all can agree that everyone wants to, like, I mean, I want everyone to have enough money to survive and be comfortable. Uh, but then again, you know, it’s very complicated, but it’s, um, I am super, I mean, I really. I’m just, what’s next for me. I’m going to continue looking at office spaces and trying to make sense of them.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I love it. I love it, Alina. Thank you so much. I have enjoyed this conversation so much. I have a list of things I’m going to dig into denied going to the rabbit hole. Uh, look this off, be informed and, and kind of get obsessed with this cause. This is a super fascinating subject and something that we all interact with on a day-to-day basis. Most of us, yes. But never really think about it in the domes that you framed it. So thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your research and thank you so much for being here today.

Alina Nazmeeva
Yeah, thank you so much. It was nice. It was really fun. I really enjoyed this conversation and I really want to learn more about a sizing screen now.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.