What was that again about the Düssel and the Rhein? When Düsseldorfer natives, newcomers, and part-timers meet for a joint city tour, they can't necessarily rely on geographic orientation down to the nearest meter. Fortunately, GPS technology comes to the rescue: equipped with smartphones and tablets, and drenched by a summer rainstorm, we test out the mobile mapping game STADT UNTER! (CITY BELOW!). The project was conceived by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen on the occasion of the exhibition Beneath the Ground: From Kafka to Kippenberger, and realized jointly with a student team from the Media Design Hochschule in Düsseldorf. A positive side effect: insights into the world of game design.

A report for #32 by Alissa Krusch

The itinerary begins at the K20. Of course, a museum too contains subterranean, hidden places; for the game, however, our rendezvous point is the underground garage beneath Grabbeplatz. The GPS geolocation function is activated, our presence is displayed against the dark gray backdrop of the mobile city map as a green, pulsating circle. Now, we are to proceed to the next game location, indicated by a manhole cover. If the manhole cover is closed and surrounded by orange, the location can still be discovered. Once a task has been solved, a question correctly answered, the cover’s color changes, and it shifts to one side – as though an emblematic gate to the underworld opens itself up to us as a reward for a job well done.

Of Maps and Manhole Covers: Getting Started with the Mapping Game

Each location (at the beginning there were approximately 30, the number has meanwhile grown to more than 50) is visible only when you find yourself actually occupying it physically. Information is conveyed by an image and a brief text, a quiz offers 4 predefined possible answers. For art lovers who have just visited the exhibition at the K21, the question: “When was Martin Kippenberger born?” may be readily solvable. But what exactly is the “Düsseldorf Bridge Family?”

Passing through the narrow streets of Düsseldorf’s old town, we make our way toward the Rhine River. For a moment, we take refuge from the gathering downpour beneath the marquee of the Art Film Cinema on Schneider-Wibbel-Gasse. Gazing through the glass at the staircase that leads from the cinema lobby down to a lower level, a question emerges that we discussed already when the project was initiated: beyond searching out preselected places, it would be nice if players could also add their own discoveries of subterranean spaces to the catalog during their excursions through the city.

The Next Stage: Adding Your Own Locations

Alongside its play character, another aspect distinguishes this participative game from a printed city map, and it served as an inspiration for the app. All visitors to the exhibition at the K21 received a city map in DIN A2 format free of charge. On it, the curator Kathrin Beßen and her team had documented an initial series of 39 subterranean places, ranging from underground parking garages to an air raid shelter, assembling data from a variety of sources. But one or another STADT UNTER! player might be familiar with yet another hidden subterranean space whose existence still remains a secret – even to Kathrin Beßen and the obliging municipal agencies, even after months of research for the map.

Looking Backward: A Computer Game Is Born

While producing a publication in the classical sense “merely” involves designing it and at some point printing it, the emergence of the computer game is bound up with processes of a completely different kind: the first operational sketch, still static and conceptual, resembled a drawn “mind map.” What happens when you call up the app? What step follows registration? Often, “if-then” decisions characterize the progression of the game. If a question is answered correctly, I receive a point or an icon, along with the next challenge. If my reply is false, I cannot continue. All perfectly logical.

But there is no need to immerse ourselves in the subtleties of game theory to understand why so many people respond to mobile games, along with the much-loved activity called GEOcaching. We are standing at the corner of Ritterstraße/Ursulinengasse, in the heart of the old town, and are actually en route toward the “tube” that is the subterranean course of the Düssel, the smaller tributary of the Rhine River, which gives the regional capital of North Rhine-Westphalia its name. On our way, we take in a few other locations as well. After all, we want to collect points for our account – and distinctions, so that our ranking will be as high as possible. But the search for the correct GPS point for the next quiz also sensitizes us to what is visible in urban space, including objects we normally pass without awareness on a daily basis. We stand together in front of a wall relief depicting the medieval city walls, or ponder a slab set into the pavement there, which delineates the course of the former wall.

Our experience on location is characterized by game designers and by game theory as “balancing.” Required for a game to be enjoyable, for people to want to play, is an optimum calibration between incentives and rewards. When has my search lasted too long? Is a given question too difficult? How many points do I need to revel in the acquisition of a new icon? Am I instead annoyed at having to answer yet another bonus question?

“Balancing” is only one of the concepts introduced by game designers already in the first phase of our joint project; like others (wireframe, mockup, achievements), it may cause confusion among the uninitiated. Already, a certain level of professionalization and specialization has been attained within this relatively young branch of research and education, one that seems simultaneously foreign and fascinating even to seasoned board game players.

Game Design Studies in Düsseldorf

That game design is in demand is something known by Professor Tim Bruysten for years now already. Since 2008, this Düsseldorf native has been instructor at the private academy Mediadesign, the first in Europe to offer an officially accredited course of studies in game design. On the initiative of the Kunstsammlung, he brought a team of four students and an advising programmer together with museum staff. Despite the high application numbers, the academy’s courses are kept small: a maximum of 27 students begin the program together, and for the first time this year, during summer semester as well. The criteria of selection are correspondingly rigorous: one prerequisite is a strong affinity for computer games, of course, while depending upon the specialization, candidates must bring programming skills, drafting and design talent, and the ability to work in a quality-conscious way. After a Bachelor's program lasting seven semesters, which may lead to a Master of Arts after a four further semesters, graduates can be confident of rapid career entry.

And so, somewhere between the Düssel and the Rhine, we end up discussing the game industry with Tim Bruysten. More than 10 years ago, revenues from this business branch already surpassed those of the film industry, whose onetime flagship was Hollywood. Direct comparisons are difficult, but Tim Bruysten is always ready with figures: sales of video games in Germany came to around 1.8 billion euros in 2013. Altogether 18% of those aged between 20 and 29 are active players, for those between 30 and 39, the figure is 16%.

Astonishingly, 40% of active gamers are female. We are definitely among them!

Mareike Bohler, Sarah Anees, and Dominica Wester study game design at the Mediadesign Hochschule in Düsseldorf. For #32, they provide insights into their field of study:

What do you learn as a game designer already in the 1st semester?

To begin with, you learn the main things: how does a game work, and why is it fun? Since this doesn't apply to computer games exclusively, we develop board games during first semester, with their own rules, their own playing boards and figures. We also learn how to dream up our own fantasy figures and put them down on paper, and finally how to model them as plasticine figures. And of course, we also program our first little games.

What was the biggest challenge with STADT UNTER!?

The biggest challenge was to bring together the divergent ideas of all of the participants, and also the technical realization.

What experiences are you taking away from the museum?

That art is more than pictures hanging on a wall or sculptures, that it can be more exciting and more tangible, an example being the ant colony in the display case, or exhibition pieces you can physically enter. We also realized that museums are becoming more and more open and contemporary, which we really liked.

What is your dream job?

We want to go in three different directions: Mareike wants to remain active as a game designer, Sarah wants to become a 2D artist, and Dominica wants to enter the field of 3D animation.

What game would you recommend this year?

Sarah is convinced Dragon Age, which comes out in October, is the best game of the year. Dominica prefers Infamous: Second Son, and Mareike recommends Pokémon.

Author Alissa Krusch is head of Digital Communication at the Kunstsammlung. Around Christmastime, she posed the question of how to translate an exhibition scheme into a computer game. But her approach was not to involve illustrating works of art, defamiliarizing them, or converting them into game content. A city map became the perfect template for a virtual world. She looks forward to traveling this year together with her team and the game itself to Gamescom, the world's biggest computer game fair, and is currently asking herself whether it would be worthwhile to take the working title Crazy Caves out of the bottom drawer again.

The Mapping Game STADT UNTER! is available free of charge at the iTunes App Store and at Google Play.

http://www.stadt-unter.de/