Gamespace Odyssey: Notes on the Procedural Transformation of Athens

Design Academy Eindhoven Master’s thesis, cum laude
Procedural building generator modified from Youtuber Kammerbild
2022

This thesis attends to a recent paradigm shift in digital design workflows known as procedural generation. In a procedural workflow, designers do not model elements directly, but rather create systems of rules (AKA procedures) for the production of said models. While this distinction may appear technical, it represents a profound transformation in both the methodological and ontological understandings of digital objects and environments.

The thesis attempts to develop a more expansive understanding of procedural design, one not limited to the computer but also including design processes in the “real world.” To do so, the city of Athens is taken as a case study. The thesis draws parallels between the postwar “procedural” architectural transformation of the city and the algorithmically-generated city of ancient Athens in the popular video game franchise Assassins Creed: Odyssey. This research attempts to situate proceduralism along a broader time scale, defined more as an ethic than a computational methodology. To complement the written thesis, a procedural system was developed to produce a wide range of procedurally-generated cityscapes, blending ancient Greek architectural forms with Airbnb interiors, the platform behind the most recent procedural transformation of the city. The system adopted was modified from the procedural building generator first created by Kammerbild.