Lose Yourself in a Utopian Virtual London

Take a trip through the hidden corners of a the utopia of London, as imagined by an artist based in the city.

This tube train might look strikingly familiar, but peek out the window and you'll notice the city's concrete crush has been replaced by a placid lake and a mountainous backdrop. Oh yeah, and it's floating in the air. It's as if elements from the real London—the Underground turnstiles, the Gherkin, the Shard—have been dropped into a futuristic take on 90s puzzle game Myst.

Bonus Levels is a series of playable games made by visual artist Lawrence Lek. Each is a fully explorable virtual world that presents his ideal version of a part of London. In this case it's the Circle Line; earlier instalments have included the zone around 2012 Olympic Park and the long-destroyed Crystal Palace.

"I'm just really interested in utopian versions of reality, so I take physical environments—for example London, most often—and try to create a kind of ideal version of that," Lek told me over the phone.

The latest, Sky Line, was commissioned as part of the independent art festival Art Licks Weekend, and is now available as an online download. The five stops of the tube train represent virtual versions of five of the galleries that took part in the festival.

Lek's utopian revision of the transport infrastructure questions the usual function of the city's train lines. He explained that he wanted to do something different to the reality of the city, where most infrastructure is driven by commercial and industrial interests. Train lines are built to connect workplaces and luxury flats, not art spaces, which he pointed out are usually scattered across the city on whatever low-cost patch they can find.

"In this world the idea was, what if there was a train line exclusively for these kind of places?" he said. "The places that are usually tucked around corners, in these arches, in people's living rooms, and so on," he said.

Lek told me that he doesn't really play many games any more, but is interested in the language of some of their virtual worlds, and gave a nod to Myst and sequel Riven. "Basically I'm really interested in the idea of like a first-person shooting game with all the shooting taken out of it," he said. "So like using a game, but taking all goal-oriented aspects out of it, any kind of linear storyline—essentially any point to the game."

You'll notice a lack of busyness, or people in general; the focus is purely on the vaguely eerie but picturesque environment.

Despite the lonely feel of the games, Lek said that when he first designs them he always has an installation in mind that brings people together while keeping things single-player. The Sky Line exhibition, at the White Building in London's Hackney Wick, featured a "gaming pavilion" that saw three participants explore the world simultaneously, but separately.

Lek plans to continue to build up his expansive digital utopia, but at the other end of the spectrum he's also working on a project that confines the limits of virtual worlds.

From Second Life to Minecraft, we're used to being able to stroll almost endlessly in online scenes, but Lek said he's considering how the opposite could offer a new perspective on virtual space. His suggestion: a prosthetic device that focuses your vision on a limited section of an immersive environment.

"What I'm interested in, is actually if instead of expanding your visual field, you could have a device that really focuses it on something much smaller and specific," he said.

While virtual reality projects like Bonus Levels are immersive in their expansiveness, Lek suggested there could in fact be more intrigue when aspects are cloaked, rather than exposed all at once. "I think that's going to be an increasingly important thing, in terms of privacy and information overload, and things like that," he added. "It's more like a cloak than an open world; more things are hidden."