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.

Games play into these dynamics to craft tensions and opportunities. We can see this in play in games of all genres. Players sneak into top-secret laboratories, try to escape from monster-infested dungeons, and venture deep into unknown lands. They also take refuge in private spaces, often protecting them from invaders. A trope of the role-playing game genre is for guards to protect the gates of the town or genre, not only keeping the evils of the world out, but forbidding the player from venturing into the wild before they are ready. Considering these dynamics and that “private space is distinct from, but always connected with, public space” (Lefebvre 166), we can see the importance of public and private city spaces.

I would like to illustrate three examples, taken from my thesis research, of this dynamic at play as a part of the narrative environment. The first is the generally public space of Tony Hawk’s Underground. The second is the violation of private space in Max Payne. Lastly, Grand Theft Auto IV is an example of the player as the violator of public space.

The Manhattan of Tony Hawk’s Underground is nearly all public space. Borden chronicled the history of skateboarding in terms of public and private places: from the city streets and the drained pools of California backyards, to the fabricated skateparks and reappropriated public architecture, the place of skateboarding is always in flux (Borden 108). This creates opportunities in the Tony Hawk games much the same as it does in the physical world.

The player rides on every piece of architecture available—storefronts, staircase railings, the roofs of buildings, the sidewalk and street, and even telephone and power lines. Some missions involve impressing pedestrians through the transformation of public property into spectacle. Others involve escaping from security guards or police designated to protect public space from intruders like yourself. The narrative of the game is not just about an up-and-coming skater trying to make it big, but also, as Iacovoni observed, the act of skating transforms spaces public and private into personal places dedicated to the player’s use.

Max Payne opens with a highly evocative scene. In a playable flashback sequence, the player, as Max Payne, comes home to their apartment calling out to their wife as the fireplace crackles. The apartment is cozy—hardwood floors and area rugs provide contrast to the usual concrete and pavement traversed in most games. Immediately this scene is disrupted, as the player catches a glimpse of hanging paintings turned on their side and a large letter V and syringe spray-painted on the wall. As the player makes their way through the house the tranquility of a familiar apartment is violently severed—a series of cinematic cuts show blood on the wall and the screaming of a woman and child are heard in the background. The player regains control over their movement, killing the men who have perpetrated the crime. But it is too late.

Again a series of cinematic cuts show a nursery, a pile of baby blocks, and then the murdered body of Max Payne’s child. After another shootout we see his slain wife on the bed. This opening, which shows the private protected space we most value violently ravaged gives the player motivation for the rest of the game. Here we see evocative narrative environments and elements at play. The elements are the murdered family, the spray-painted logo, and the escaping criminals. The environment is the normally safe private place—the furnished well-loved house—turned on its head both visually and through gameplay action.

There is no danger in Niko Bellic from Grand Theft Auto IV walking the streets of the Bronx at 4 in the morning. The player needs not worry about being mugged or assaulted. There is little threat of pedestrians becoming enemies (sometimes they will fight back if you punch them, but mostly they keep to themselves). On the one hand, the narrative of Grand Theft Auto IV is Niko as victim of circumstance just trying to get by in a strange place. On the other hand, the design of the world tells the story of Niko as a public menace. The gameplay of GTA IV is selfish and the world accommodates this. Ignoring for a moment the wanted system which determines police pursuit of the player, they are free to steal cars, kill pedestrians, run red lights, smash into other vehicles, drive anywhere their vehicle will prohibit, possess a range of weapons, and generally pose a threat to every resident of Liberty City.

Public space becomes threatening in Grand Theft Auto IV when missions are engaged because it leaves the player vulnerable. A massive outdoor gunfight might have enemies spread all over the place trying to kill the player, while one false move in front of a police officer forces the player to focus both on the goals of the mission and evading the pursuing police who will throw them off-course or end the mission. Liberty City tells a very different story about the use of space than our normal experience—it is a world where social norms are designed to be broken.

Cited:

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

Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places. Free Press, September 1966.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1992.

Henri Lefebvre’s seminal text, The Production of Space (1974), outlines space as socially and historically produced: it is created through cultural influence and by its own use. While often cited for its insights, Lefebvre’s work has been criticised for its impractical operational application. Cities, as they stand on the Earth and are used by billions of people each day, are so complex that this kind of criticism is understandable. However, in conducting my research, I have found that the medium of the video game is one place where Lefebvre’s observations are particularly applicable. Cities in video games are designed from the ground-up, translated into executable code, and experienced by the player. Unless a game includes the tools to physically alter the landscape of the city, once a single-player game, like those I looked at, is shipped into retail channels and into households, its space remains relatively static—that is, it remains within the scope and context of the original game.

It is here we have a relatively closed system that follows Lefebvre’s triad of understanding space: representations of space, spatial practice, and representational space (Lefebvre 38).

Representations of space refer to the manner by which social and cultural understandings of space guide the conception and function of that space (Lefebvre 41). It is the logical perception of the relationships between objects (physical and non-physical), and is the method by which social and cultural context is brought to physicality. In terms of the video game, this is the realm in which the designers express how the space of their game should function and how they expect that space to be used. It is formalized through the creation of code that manifests their rule systems.

Spatial practice is what we put in the world (Lefebvre 41). It is our rooms, our buildings, our cities. It also emcompasses the actions we take in these spaces; how we live in the world we produce and how our world, in turn, shapes the way we produce it. This is the part of the video game that we see. It’s the design of the level and the environment, the shape of the city, the gameplay that guides our interaction with the system, and the obstacles and goals the world presents to us.

Lastly, representational space is the experience of space. It is qualitative, fluid, dynamic, symbolic, and is culturally and individually situatied in ideology and knowledge (Lefebvre 42). As video game players, it is the point of the triad in which the we experience the execution of the software, participate in the world as actors, and create meaning.

This research has a heavier focus on spatial practice and representational space because these are more player-centric. It is important to press-upon Lefebvre’s note that these three concepts do not exist in a line nor even a triangle. Instead they are constantly influencing and being influenced by each other (Lefebvre 4). The same is true for games and even this research. I have attempted to address the interrelationship of the triad by developing experiences of space through their use. Divisions made in my sections are for purpose of clarity or convenience, but the cities in these games do not exist without people interacting with them—whether that be through play, through discussion of the game with other players, or through memories of experiences and places.

Over the next week I will be posting bits and pieces from my thesis, as my draft is due in 9 days. Nine days! GAH!

According to de Certeau, “to walk” implies lacking place, a record of this movement only indicates that which is no longer, but that movement can be understood as a system. This system, in part, consists of “modalities of pedestrian enunciation,” which reveal the relationship between movement and what that movement means (de Certeau 99). First, the “alethic” modality relate to the mood and intent of the movement (99). Is the pedestrian taking the most direct route from one place to the next? Does their choice of route represent the multitude of possibility spaces? How are they negotiating that movement which is impossible or forced upon them? Secondly, “epistemic” modalities are concerned with understanding the space and these aforementioned possibilities. Lastly, “deonic” modalities refer to the obligations of space, what they permit and forbid, and what they offer optionally. Because these modalities deal with rules and choices, they map well to the medium of the game.

Important to the concept of representative spaces in games are two terms de Certeau uses to describe fundamental stylistic figures of spatial collapse in the urban environment. The first term, “synecdoche,” means using a word in which a part stands in for a whole (de Certeau 101). The second, “asyndeton,” refers to when conjunctions are deliberately left out of a sentence or phrase. De Certeau uses this to explain the phenomenon of ignoring parts of the travel to connect to places, as if, for example, Baltimore and Philadelphia are next to each other. These concepts become especially important in mission-based games in which the player must travel between locales to trigger events. The space traversed is often ignored; the destination is often represented by a single symbolic piece.

The final concept in “Walking in the City” relates to the functions of naming in place-making. De Certeau identifies naming as making place believable, memorable, and primitive (de Certeau 105). The believable place, identifiable by a name, is a habitable place. The memories of a place help construct its evolving identity by patterning the use of the space—that which is no longer continues to act in the present. The primitive quality of naming is related to that which is whole or quantifiable. A place with a name is a basic unit of understanding; unnamed places are constantly seeking the stability of nominative forces. I will be looking at both de Certeau’s functions of naming as a cultural action as well as naming as a practical practice for navigation in games.

As one of my theoretical sources, Michel de Certeau is of utmost importance because his discussion of imaging the city is based on action and the movement of bodies—a significant part of the 3d game environment experience. Expect summaries of more of my theoretical sources to come!

I present you with a scenario: driving along in your unmarked cop car on the highway, the police dispatcher informs you of a robbery in progress a mile from your position. Seems simple enough, right? After all, the location is practically right next to you. But the problem is that the geographic distance of the target location has nothing to do with the actual route you need to travel to get there. I found myself driving for at least a minute in the opposite direction until I found an exit I could take, and another minute until I was actually on a surface road that could take me back to where I started by the robbery. By then, it was too late–the crime had been perpetrated and the assailants escaped. 

Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City defines five elements that can be used to describe the imagability of the city: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. True Crime: New York City fails at establishing all five of these in a game context. In my previous example, I was moving along a path of travel but needed to stray from it. Unfortunately, my vehicle was unable to transfer between paths in a way that supported the game’s goals. Sure, it makes sense that I cannot drive off-road in the real world to get where I am going, but the game demands it and I should be able to do it.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a good example of how the rigid path of the highway can be broken so the player can move between districts. Driving the freeway over Los Santos, the designers included breaks in the barrier walls so that the player can drive straight off the road and fall to the roads beneath. While unrealistic, it serves the needs of the game. Paths are purposely porous in San Andreas so that transferring between districts comes naturally. 

Even comparing the representations of Manhattan’s spatial distribution in True Crime: NYC and Grand Theft Auto IV reveals how missions can be designed to accommodate the grid that is New York City. For one, GTA IV has more linear missions, so the designers can pick starting and ending locations for travel based on the availability of roads. In True Crime: NYC, however, the dispatcher does not care which direction you are traveling when assigning you the side-missions. As a result, I found myself racing down one-way streets against traffic hoping to make it to my destination on time. The traffic patterns and car control just are not up to handling this movement. Even with my sirens blaring I was constantly getting t-boned in intersections (clearly they only programmed it to affect traffic traveling in front of you). 

The problems of the space of the city translate into problems of place-making. It may be shaped like New York City, but that’s about as close as it gets. The strongest city ambience is the fantastic licensed soundtrack which features songs from a lot of NYC-based rock and hip-hop artists. Unfortunately there’s no persistent soundtrack, so getting in and out of a car changes the track, but it at least helps set the gangster-crime theme. The NPCs take the form of only a few model types, meaning it’s possible to stand in a group of pedestrians who all share the same face though different clothes. It might bill itself as a sandbox city alive and breathing, but this is just a facade. The is hardly any difference between Washington Heights and Hell’s Kitchen. Though it includes many New York City landmarks, they only serve to highlight the disparity between the real place and the place of game action. 

True Crime: New York City is a shining example of what doesn’t work in games. If a designer wants to translate a real place into game form, they need to think about the ways the player will want to navigate that space and compare that to the demands they are making of the player. The awe of traveling in an accurate recreation of New York City is diluted by  the fact that there’s no good reason to explore all the space provided. It was an ambitious project for a 2005 game, but it is clear the designers did not aspire (for whatever reason) to meet their ambition. I’m not convinced that the task is futile, but it certainly will require the full attention of a design team to be executed successfully.

Pay attention to where you are, or you will miss your stop. Metro drivers only announce the stations half the time, and when they do its usually unintelligible. I personally believe they like to fuck with the people riding the train for their own amusement.
- Z, Everyday Reasons Blog

Bethesda Softwork’s most recent release, Fallout 3, is set in the bombed-out ruins of post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C. As a resident of the DC metro area for 23 years of my life, the experience of walking through the Wasteland is my Baudrillardian simulacrum—a mirror construction of a world that never existed. It is at once DC and yet a completely fictional space.

It took a bit of time to connect to this world on a personal level. The game begins in an underground vault, the first major city in the Wasteland is the fictional Megaton (which has no real world referent), and the first quest I went on involved a nondescript supermarket. Exploring the wasteland I saw the outline of the Washington Monument in the distance, but that was a mere landscape landmark at the moment. Much like the suburbs I grew up in, there was nothing distinguishing about the space.

But as I made my way south I had my first surreal moment. I came upon the Falls Church Metro (subway for those unfamiliar) station. As a rider of the Orange Line, the Falls Church stops were just a natural part of the ride to and from the District. This station in Fallout 3 was outdoors, like the real Falls Church, though it was labeled neither East or West (I suppose the creators are allowed a bit of creative liberty when it comes to mapping space). It was also infested with Super Mutants who promptly ended my journey with their assault rifles and sledgehammers. Clearly I was not meant to be there, but it piqued my interest in seeing more of the Metro. It is interesting to note that my desire to explore was curbed by the kind of level-based barring Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Morie, and Celia Pearce describe in “A Game of One’s Own” as a characteristic of male-gendered spaces.

The Metro

I moved in a more guided direction following that incident—making my way across the irradiated Potomac River into the city. I ended up coming across the Georgetown station, going inside, and seeing a familiar walkway but unfamiliar platform. Those who have ridden the Metro system in DC recognize its tall concrete coffered barrel vaulted ceilings, and whatever place I was in was clearly not representative of that definitive architecture. I continued exploring.

I eventually came across the Chevy Chase North area and the Tenleytown Station, which was the metro platform space I was hoping to find. The ceiling, the escalators, the ticketbooth, the rails, the signs–it was all there. But what I ended up finding wasn’t as interesting as the means by which I found it. Fallout 3 lets players experience the Metro in whole new way. When people speak of the Metro, they refer to a few structural things. There’s the rail line’s symbolic color which indicates its path, the trains which are a means of conveyance, and the stops which are the nodes of action. The purpose of riding the Metro is to commute in more or less direct paths that need not adhere to the layout of transportation paths on the surface. It’s supposed to be a seamless transition from one place to the next. This is not so in the game.

Fallout 3 uses the Metro in a number of ways. Though it is a transitional space between areas (some of which are inaccessible over land due to the debris of collapsed buildings), it is anything but seamless. The Metro not only simulates the real life space of mass transit infrastructure, but it also simulates the video game convention of the dungeon. While Fallout 3 does not use the Tolkien-fantasy themed environment that Pearce uses to characterize the most famous dungeon-based game Dungeons and Dragons, it does use some of the structural conventions the dungeon as space of adventure and conflict. In earlier video games “dungeon” is generally a location indicated by some entry point that needs not represent the geography of the space once entered. Think of Dragon Warrior, as an example. A single block on the world map represents a deep multi-level cave in which to slay monsters and collect treasure. The player enters, explores, and either returns to the beginning or makes their way to an exit. The relationships between spaces in these examples are topological.

However, as technology has improved we have seen the dungeon grow into a more geographic space. This puts the Metro of Fallout 3 in a unique position: it can serve the traditional role of the dungeon while also traversing distances. Often cited as an easy example of what topological space is, the London tube map collapses representations of space into utility. Walking into a Metro station in Fallout 3, players can often find a map of the train routes. And yet, these maps are nearly worthless from a game perspective. The player is traveling along actual space with distances that correspond to the surface world, though they can become directionally disoriented.

In a reversal of real life, there is no fast-travel (the ability to jump to a part of the visited map instantaneously) underground. The Metro is an extremely traditional game space. It’s underground, full of monsters, comprised of closed drab corridors, and way to expand the space of the world. Most of the Metro tunnels (which include both the rail and worker service tunnels) look the same. Yes, it makes sense contextually for them to have a consistent aesthetic, but it also is a reflection of the standard corridor space seen in the history of first-person shooter games.

There are very few other people in the Metro tunnels of Fallout 3, and it is most often talking to people that reveals the narrative of the game. Is this a missed opportunity to employ the kind of mise-en-scene embedded narrative describe by Jenkins in “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”? Perhaps, though there are a few bits and pieces of narrative strewn about the Metro network. More important, in my opinion, than any sort of narrative imposed on the space, is what the organization of the space actually means.

Metro stations are either stand-alone enter and exit through the same door dungeons, or connected mazes–labyrinths of danger. The layout of the space is supposed to be confusing. In this post-apocalyptic world the purpose of the Metro has not only been uprooted, but it has gone unreplaced. It is the domain of monsters and outcasts. It surprises the player by dumping them out in a part of the overworld they might not have expected, opening up new spaces for more narratively meaningful exploration.

I conclude by reflecting on the opening quote which seemed to be unrelated to the topic of the post. The Metro in Fallout 3 simulates the real space of Washington D.C., the space of travel in the game world, and the spatial conventions of the video game genre. What I have found enjoyable about the exploration of these spaces is that I’m never sure which one I’m going to get, as if Bethesda is the unintelligible Metro conductor telling me that this is Foggy Bottom and the doors open on the right but when I get out I’m in Rosslyn and it’s 15 minutes until the next train. In a good way, of course.