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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?

parkour

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.

Posted in Spaces, The City.

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By Bobby – September 3, 2009

Back in Action

Why, hello there. Did you miss me?

I’m hoping to revive my blog as my new semester begins. I’m starting on my PhD here at Georgia Tech with a lot of cool things on the horizon. This summer I began co-authoring a book on Newsgames with Ian Bogost and Simon Ferrari. I was tasked with writing the infographics and platforms chapters, while also contributing a bit to the chapter on documentary games (though we have Simon to thank for most of that). It’s been a pretty cool experience and definitely the best way to spend a summer. We’re continuing to work on the Newsgames project, adding to the blog and seeing what a whole new group of students has to say about this topic we’ve been entrenched in for the last year.

I’m also the research-wrangler for a new group in the Experimental Games Lab! It’s being coordinated by my advisor Celia Pearce and will involve anyone who is interested in any aspect of the topic. We’re researching spaces–game, virtual, physical–from all sorts of angles. The topic is pretty broad, so it’s going to start with areas that further the group’s individual research needs. I’ll be posting about some of the research here while also working on a website for the research group.

Eventually I’m going to put my thesis online, which I promised back in the spring. I still believe it needs a professional edit, just to ensure there are no dumb mistakes I missed in my 100+ pages. I’ll be pulling papers out of it to submit to journals and conferences, as well as some more blog posts like the one on public and private spaces.

Oh! And the Low Score podcast continues to roll on with it’s 27th episode. I always forget that I can post that here, so you really should give it a subscribe!

Posted in Administrative.

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By Bobby – August 27, 2009

Single Player Discourse In Games

[Originally appeared on the Georgia Tech News Games blog.]

The Newsgames Project was begun by identifying a number of areas of inquiry that seemed to address the big picture issues. You can see these in practice through the main categories of the website. One of these, discourse, was identified through Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s book The Elements of Journalism. News is social because it affects groups of people and results in a desire for new facts, ideas, and opinions. Kovach and Rosenstiel feel that discourse not only promotes informative dialogue between citizens, but also acts as a way for people to talk to the newsmakers about their news.

When we think of discourse in this context, we are prompted to think about socially based discussions. Newspapers allow readers to write letters to the editor in which they voice their opinions on a story. Of course, this forum isn’t as democratizing as we might hope. It’s been often cited that online news outlets counter this by providing easier methods of feedback and unlimited space for participation, though a quick glance at the comments section of any news story prompts questions of the quality of this feedback. News radio often allows listeners to call in to argue (or perhaps more commonly, agree) with the host. The University of Virginia’s David Golumbia finds this “revelation” suspect, however.

While the Internet has been lauded for giving power to the people–providing outlets for feedback or turning consumers into creators by providing a distribution channel for various forms of citizen-created media–Golumbia wrote that we most commonly end up replicating existing structures rather than creating new forms of discourse. It is not about our newly found ability to talk back that makes digital media powerful–after all, we’ve had feedback outlets long before the Internet. Instead, we should look to digital media for new forms of discourse that do not have their place in the current structure. So how do we handle discourse within games?

When we think of social structures for games, we either turn to multiplayer games or external discussions about single-player games that often rely on support structures outside the game. We can imagine playing a newsgame in which two opponents take opposite sides and (often quite literally) hurl information back and forth. Or we envision tackling a single player game and then talking about it on a web forum or comment thread. Useful, for sure, but I endeavor to propose ways in which discourse can take place internally between the player and the game. I recognize that I am not the first to think of news this way, but having surveyed many newsgames (or related games), I have yet to encounter anything that actually does this. To understand how discourse can function in a single-player video game experience, we must ask questions about the nature and purpose of discourse and find a model which works with the elements that make video games unique.

We have the opportunity in games to create systems of feedback that can reinforce or negate actions. If procedural rhetoric is based on the authoring of arguments through processes, and one of the tenants of journalism is to strive to represents both sides (actually, the many angles) of the story, then designer-journalists can create forms of play that attempt to reveal these issues. If presented all at once, the effect is fairly standard. However, a well crafted news game can become a single player discourse system.

What exactly are the components of a single player discourse system? Most importantly, it does not rely on oral/written discourse in the traditional sense. If the game is based on procedural rhetoric, it’s critical that the player be able to respond in kind. It’s a system that builds in opposing viewpoints, challenges the actions of both the player and itself, and does not seek a single answer. Single player discourse systems within games are based on dynamics that allow flexibility in which the player can convince the software that their points are valid. It is about finding different results that can be juxtaposed to reveal what might have been concealed. The act of playing these games simulates the kind of social conversations we most commonly think of as discourse based around news.

The system is by no means perfect, however. One of the important elements of discourse is that it introduces new ideas. Can a game designer take into account every possibility? Of course not. We might excuse this, saying that our current news structures don’t attempt this either, but we can also imagine a game able to take into account external inputs. Or, we can imagine counter-argument games as Ian Bogost noted in Persuasive Games and Simon Ferarri plans to elaborate on in his future research. In these cases we have introduced social inputs into solitary activities.

By conceiving of these kinds of single player discourse games, we negotiate the issues we’ve had as a research group where so many of the “newsgames” we’ve played are either editorial or are just too dry. We also ensure that our feedback is spoken in the same language as our source, taking advantage of the properties of the medium of choice. Hopefully, the effort required to participate in the discourse will be more stimulating, engaging, and more rewarding. And, lastly, we can use the lessons learned in creating and playing in single player discourse systems to expand our own abilities to argue, reason, and negotiate new ideas and information.

Posted in Posted Elsewhere, Single Player.

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By Bobby – April 17, 2009

Game Spaces Public and Private

During the course of my thesis research on game cities, I have found that considering spaces as public and private reveals fundamental elements that guide game design. Public spaces are often the result of the medium of the game’s desire or need to adventure out into the unfamiliar world. Public spaces are open to adventure, danger, and the unknown, whereas personal private spaces in general are familiar and safe. In her 1961 tome The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote about the sidewalk as an active place that must be guarded to sustain the pedestrian dynamics of the city. Erving Goffman’s Behavior in Public Places provided a study of personal behavior in public spaces that also contribute to social order (Goffman 1963). Public spaces become safe when there are forces that maintain social order; private space become unsafe when they are invaded when we enter unknown places.

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.
thuggrind
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.
thuggrind
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.
thuggrind
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.

Posted in Spaces, The City, Thesis.

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By Bobby – March 22, 2009