Beta.City— Game Engines as Tools for Speculative Urbanism and Architecture, presents student projects developed within the Artistic Project course at the Department of Visual Culture at the Faculty for Architecture, Vienna University of Technology. Digital prototypes of gamified environments and virtual spaces reflect the new realities of technofeudalism, data regime and platform urbanism. Using methods of speculative fiction, worldbuilding, and digital prototyping, students created playable worlds that imagine alternative urban futures.
The exhibited works reclaim virtual space as a site for artistic experimentation, proposing new narratives, architectures, and forms of collective imagination in response to the growing influence of AI and data-driven technologies.
BETA.CITY invites visitors to enter speculative worlds where urban futures can be questioned, redesigned, and reimagined.

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One of the digital worlds presented, The Space Game by Yana Hurovych and Alexandra Baicu, is about choice, unfolding in an unconventional setting — on a space station. Isolation leaves you without outside perspectives, forcing you to make decisions almost blindly, while a faceless system threatens to strip away your privileges if you refuse to comply. Here, life-changing decisions are woven into the fabric of ordinary daily routines. You may be small, but you are not insignificant. Will you challenge the system and uncover the truth, or go with the flow to preserve your comfortable life?