They went in search of Utopia

With the city skyline behind you and ahead the darkness of an unknown
future you walk alone down a deserted highway. Each step brings to
life a new corner of the world; before you arrived there was nothing
and no-one. You invented this landscape and you distribute evenly its
resources among you and your fellow citizens. Trade routes are
established so that products can be shared between towns and cities.
Your civilization expands exponentially; as it grows your society
takes shape: provisions are made for education, law, and scientific
investigations leading to technological advancement. All the while
there you are, at the edges of the known world, walking alone down a
deserted highway with the darkness of an unknown future ahead of you.
The society you have created is so close to perfect it is as if you
planned it from the very beginning. Food stores are never down,
wages are fair, and the citizens never revolt. This is utopia,
where everything is always available. Connection speed and data
limitation are outdated concepts – information is instant. Everything
is here; everything is now; just as it always was. This is utopia.
Every possible option must be open to everyone. Every city is a copy
of a copy. Every sidewalk and every shopping mall is identical to the
last and the next. Each store carries the same line of stock as the
last and the next and yet choice remains infinite. The utopian society
you created is in agreement that the goal of humanity is efficiency,
so there is never a dispute about best practice.

This is utopia, where suffering is unknown, where difference is
accepted but where acceptance negates the need to be different.
Everyone agrees on the definition of things, words, and ideas.
Everyone is happy, everyone is smiling, everyone loves Mondays as much
as they love Fridays, and nothing bad can happen – no tragedy can occur
– because in utopia there is no unhappiness, no disagreement,
no opposites, no challenge, no variety, no choice.

Trevor H Smith

On and offline behaviours have merged to create a new space, where
friends can be people we have never met, where to like is merely
to see, and where utopia is no longer an impossible dream. Immersed
in a world of ideological imagery, from a farmyard at dawn to
perfect sunsets and the city at night, to endless playlists of
nothing but greatest hits and rows and rows of beautiful girls, the
utopian ideal has shifted its focus from the politically impossible
to the fantastically unimaginative.Slim hope, there may be, of
seven billion souls achieving the old utopia, but maybe – if only
for a few days, and if only inside a fantasy landscape – maybe
MadeScapes can achieve it.

Amid a neon-festival campsite MadeScapes artists are working
together to create a world in which war never happened, where
technological advances are shared, and where science and other creative
pursuits are championed. Via a networked game of Civilisation 5, we
intend to show that utopia is within our grasp.