From Block’hood to Common’hood

Block’hood VR

Block’hood VR

It’s been over a year since we finished Block’hood. For quite some time we have felt that many of the ideas we wanted to accomplish with Block’hood, needed to be fleshed out in a larger format. We wanted to give players the chances to develop their own blocks and share creations with one another. This motivations became the starting point of Common’hood. While Common’hood uses some of the core ecological principles of Block’hood, we wanted to create a far more customizable building experience. Being trained as an architect, I wanted to create a game where I could design real architecture, even if we would start with simple creations. Some of the ideas present in the documentary ‘Gaming the real world’ by Anders Eklund, were idealistic but not far from reality. We have been greatly inspired by real communities like the Maker Movement, Open Source Ecology, Fablabs or the Tiny house community.

Open source ecology

Open source ecology

We wanted to create a game that would resonate with the experience of real people. The story mode of Common’hood is a story based on real world events, as factories fail and become abandoned, many citizens lose their jobs, get evicted and end up in the street. In a way we are talking of communities at the edge of homelessness. Debt is problem for many and we wanted to create a game that would give a sense of hope in terms of the empowerment obtained from making things with your own hands. The work of Ron Finley, has been particularly inspirational. Common’hood tries to engage real issues and share recipes for autonomous communities to become empowered and resilient. We hope to be able to develop a community around the game and grow the project organically for many years.

We are working on a demo to share our building tools. Soon after we will do an update with some of the survival mechanics. It’s all in very early stages, so things might not be perfect, but we would really like to know what you think.

Ron Finley ‘Guerrilla Gardener’

Ron Finley ‘Guerrilla Gardener’

Common'hood announced at ACADIA 2018

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We had the chance to share Common’hood for the first time at the ACADIA conference. A conference for architecture and technology. In our presentation, we emphasized the opportunity that games as social networks offer to develop architectural content. We placed central emphasis on the protection of users privacy and ownership of the data generated withing the platform.