Space and Playgrounds

Though we don’t see slides in the middle of a business district, swings overhanging a busy intersection, see-saws on the freeway, or crawl tubes lining the sidewalks, the city is actually a place of enormous playground potential. If you remove the cars from the street (or just ensure they won’t hit you), put on a comfortable pair of shoes, and throw away your inhibitions, the architecture of the city can become a wonderful place of play. But what to do in that space?

Iain Borden writes that the city should incorporate spaces in which people can move their body in playful ways (Borden, STP 2007, 332). Alberto Iacovoni, referring to the transformation of space into play place, wrote, “there is a part of the rules of every game that needs room, that becomes a playground, architecture whose limits represent prohibitions and opportunities for the player, who is thus transformed into an inhabitant” (Iacovoni 2004, 15). Free-runners have turned urban landscapes into obstacles courses, doing parkour to get from one place to another with as little resistance possible. Skateboarders, on the other hand, have embraced and adopted the obstacles as challenges. But these are individual uses that have developed over time. So how is it that we transform a familiar space into a playground—how do we know what to do?

Merely walking around a playground, or a video game space, is not enough to understand it. These spaces must be engaged with in order for them to come to life and for us to understand how they function. Iacovoni writes that playgrounds, physical and virtual, are the visible form of a system of rules (Iacovoni 2004, 15). Because playgrounds are made through the eye and body’s relationship to space, we cannot ignore the importance of the participant’s movement in conjunction with their interaction with objects in the space. It is important to note that this space need not be constructed purely from scratch. Creating playgrounds can be merely a matter of changing the way we perceive of the space while constructing rules applicable to the space (Iacovoni 2004, 21). One way to do this, as notably done by the Dadaists and Situationists, is to take a known space and invert it, like children do when they play “don’t touch the hot lava,” in which they are not allowed to step on the ground (Iacovoni 2004, 23). By constructing temporary spaces of play, games challenge players both with new levels and through the transformation of familiar places (Iacovoni 2004, 38-42).

Skateboarding’s transformation of city space into temporary playgrounds is a grounded example of Iacovoni’s observations at work. The evolution of skateboarding was in large part affected by cultural and architectural forces. While the earliest skateboarders merely moved across flat terrain, skateboarding’s growing popularity among surfers in the 1960s and 1970s meant its nascent practitioners looked for man- made landscapes that mirrored the contours of the ocean (Borden, Skateboarding 2006, 29). After carving the rolling streets, skateboarders found the many empty pools of California homes to be a close match to the curl of a wave.

As more skateboarders spent time in concrete pools, the shape of the architecture changed the way they rode the pool—developing new tricks and discovering methods of perpetual motion (Borden, Skateboarding 2006, 37). Not only was a pool about carving the sides, it became about the space of the lip and the vertical space above the pool, the surrounding terrain, and the space produced from within the body (Borden, Skateboarding 2006, 108). As pools gave rise to man-made skateparks, and skateparks gave rise to new ways of skating that required new architecture, the shape of the space took meaning. Kuttler writes about the changing use of architecture over time in Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland. As new tricks and skills are learned the city opens up and the player must explore the city to find places to execute certain tricks (Kuttler 2007).

Game designers can learn a lot from examining the transformation of skateboarding space. The environment has to be a meaningful place of play; the actions performed by the player must fit the arrangement of architecture and objects. But this sort of world design does not necessarily have to be built from the ground up, placing walls and rocks and boxes throughout the level to serve as places for a cover mechanic. Designers can instead look to the city for inspiration, asking, “what would be fun to do here and how can we go about executing it?”

Cited:
Borden, Iain. Skateboarding, Space and the City. New York: Berg, 2006.

Borden, Iain. “Tactics for a Playful City.” In Space Time Play, edited by Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz and Matthias Bottger, 332-334. Basel: Birkhauser, 2007.

Iacovoni, Alberto. Game Zone: Playgrounds Between Virtual Scenarios and Reality. Translated by Gail McDowell. Switzerland: Birkhauser, 2004.

Kuttler, Dorte. “Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland: New Functions of Architecture.” In Space Time Play, edited by Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz and Matthias
Bottger, 124-125. Basel: Birkhauser, 2007.