A gamified recode of Scott Snibbe's Boundary Functions (1998.)
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We're all prisoners of capitalism, what matters is the size of your cell. Choices abound: will you maximize your resources, or minimize your space wastage for efficiency's sake? Outmaneuver your "friends!" This recode of a classic interactive projection piece uses the participants' mouse locations to construct a Voronoi diagram through synchronous collaboration. The game is anonymous and purposefully competitive, pitting players against each other in a very, very small-scale simulation of the 'real world'.
Reducing users to sites on a Voronoi diagram, a graphical representation of proximity and 'territory', seems to imply something about the failure of communication inherent among discrete entities like human beings. Depending on each user's goal (and whether they share complimentary goals), patterns of motion created here include chasing others, fleeing from them, or hiding in a corner, like one might do at any college party.
Unlike Snibbe's piece, I used the p5 Voronoi library instead of doing complicated math. I also took advantage of polygon area and merge sort functions I found online. The hardest part was integrating sockets (and this functionality is still very buggy.) The gif below shows the slightly-more-functional single-player version with randomized sites. If I had more time, I'd ideally let the players (collectively?) decide how many random sites they wanted to be generated.
Sketches (sadly, this is all I have):
