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INTRODUCTION 

i

Copyright by 

Steffen P. Walz 

& 

ETC Press 

2010 

ISBN: 978-0-557-28563-1 

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010920990 

TEXT: The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons 

Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivative 2.5 License 

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/) 

IMAGES: All fi gures in this book are the property of the respective parties mentioned 

in the Figure captions. Unless mentioned otherwise, fi gures and tables are © 2010 spw. 

http://etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/ 

Design & Composition by John J. Dessler 

Copyediting & Proofreading: Jenna Krumminga, Samantha Ferrell

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

This book would not have come into being without you, fellow gamers: 

Katrin & Ida – thank you for your love and patience; Renate Rack-Schöbel, Rainer 

Schöbel and Leo, who let me think and rest; Ludger Hovestadt, for granting me 

some space, time, and play; the Davidsons for all the fun; Sibylla Spycher and my 

former academic peers of the Computer Aided Architectural Design Group at the 

ETH Zurich; Gerhard M. Buurman, Department of Design / Interaction Design & 

Game Design Study Program, as well as principal Hans-Peter Schwarz at the Zurich 

University of the Arts (ZHdK); Kees Christiaanse at the ETH Zurich; faculty, staff 

and students at the Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University, 

Pittsburgh, PA; Erwin Herzberger, Gerd de Bruyn and Martin Knöll in the Department 

of Architecture, University of Stuttgart; Karl Rege in the Department of Computer 

Science, University of Applied Sciences Winterthur; Jan Borchers and his Media 

Computing Group, RWTH Aachen University as well as Rafael “Tico” Ballagas, Nokia 

Research Center, Palo Alto, CA; Jussi Holopainen, Elina M. Ollila, Ingrid Schembri 

et al. at the Nokia Research Center; Mark Ollila at Nokia X-Media Solutions, Media 

& Games; Harri Pennanen and Nina Tammelin at Forum Nokia; REX Regensburg 

Experience Museum GmbH; fellow Space Time Play editors Friedrich von Borries 

and Matthias Böttger from raumtaktik, Berlin, as well as our associate editors 

Drew Davidson, Heather Kelley and Julian Kücklich, and all STP book contributors 

(unfortunately, too many to list here); Zhao Chen Ding at the Beijing University for 

Clothing Technology; Sungah Kim at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul; Senior Editor 

Robert Steiger and his team at Birkhäuser Publishing, Basel; Thomas Dlugaiczyk 

and his team at IGDA Berlin & the Games Academy; V2 (particularly Michel van 

Dartel and Anne Nigten) as well as NAI Rotterdam for hosting; Celia Pearce at the 

Georgia Institute of Technology for inspiring discussions all over the place; Norman 

v

vi 

Brosterman for pointing out to me where to fi nd Fröbel’s illustrations; fellow Forum 

Nokia Champions Paul Coulton and Reuben Edwards at Lancaster University for 

continuously raising the bar; David Thomas at the University of Colorado Denver 

for his awesome blog http://buzzcut.com and his shared interest in the topic; Frank 

Lantz, Kevin Slavin and everyone else at area/code for puzzling me across media; 

Sony Computer Entertainment Switzerland for sending a lot of PS2 games; Buschhoff 

Stanztechnik GmbH for sponsorship; The Wild Divine Project, Eldorado Springs, 

CO, USA for letting us use their software development kit license free of charge; 

my former colleagues Mathias Ochsendorf, Philipp Schaerer, Odilo Schoch, David 

Sekanina, and Torsten Spindler, as well as the following former student assistants 

at the ETH Zurich who helped me to make things happen: Stephan Achermann, 

Monika Annen, Benjamin Dillenburger, Claudia Fuhr, Caroline Pachoud, Seong Ki 

Lee, Nicole Leuthold, Anne Mikoleit, Martin J. Tann, and, beyond our collaboration 

at the ETH, Daniel “DJ Brilliant” Wahl; my business partner, Thomas Seibert; Jenna 

Krumminga and Samantha Ferrell for attentively copyediting and proofreading this 

document; the fi ne publishing folks at the ETC Press including book designer John 

J. Dessler; everyone who has given me permission to reproduce photos, images or 

illustrations in this book; and, last but not least, my parents, Gerda and Peter Walz. 

Thank you all for your ongoing support. 

This book bases upon my doctoral dissertation accepted by the ETH Zurich in 

2008. The dissertation work as well as working on this book has been substantially 

funded by the National Competence Center in Research on Mobile Information and 

Communication Systems (NCCR-MICS), a center supported by the Swiss National 

Science Foundation under grant number 5005-67322. 

Let’s play.

PREFACE 

You are an architect. Imagine that stones, handles, chairs, handrails, doors, walls, 

stairs, streets, buildings, halls and towers do not evolve from grasping, lifting, 

carrying and connecting, but that they are formless, motionless - and symbolically 

thought - material for games. These games juggle with paradoxes, because logics 

do not suffi ce. In an analyzing fashion and for the purpose of construction, these 

virtualities pervade places, times and materials, and they manifest themselves by 

the way of movements, forms and, sometimes, tangibly, materially. This extension of 

architecture into the virtual realm as well as the latter’s reconnection into actuality is 

the foil for Steffen P. Walz’s “Toward a Ludic Architecture”, an intelligent composition 

of rhetorical fi gures that, for the fi rst time ever, succeeds in seriously crossing 

computer games and built architecture. Congratulations! 

Prof. Dr. Ludger Hovestadt 

Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design, ETH Zurich 

Zurich, June 2009 

vii

CONTENTS 

viii

CONTENTS 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .v 

PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii 

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 

1. Ludic Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 

1.1. Ready! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 

1.2. Steady! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 

1.3. Go! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 

2. About Games, Play, and Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 

3. Problem Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 

4. Methodology and Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 

5. Signifi cance and Contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 

PLAYSPACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 

1. The Ambiguity Dimension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 

2. The Player Dimension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 

2.1. The Diversity of Players 

and Player-Centric Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 

2.2. Human-Centered Design and Situated Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 

2.3. Conclusion: The Player in Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 

3. The Modality Dimension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 

4. The Kinetic Dimension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 

4.1. Notions of Movement and Rhythmin Architectural Theory . . . . . . 29 

4.2. Notions of Movement and Rhythm in Dance Notation . . . . . . . . . 35 

4.3. Notions of Movement and Rhythm in the Investigation of Play . . 39 

4.4. Excursus: Movement by Valence and Affordance . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 

4.5. Play as Movement and Putty between Player, Object, 

and Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46 

4.6. A Kineticist Defi nition of Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 

4.6.1. Play-Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 

4.6.2. Play Rhythm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51 

4.6.3. Play Defi ned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 

4.7. Summary: Kinetic Playspace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 

CONTENTS 

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CONTENTS 

x 

5. The Enjoyment Dimension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 

5.1. Caillois’ Play Typology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .63 

5.2. Caillois’ Model and Kinesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 

5.3. Contemporary Models of Play Stimuli 

and Player Types Cross-Compared . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 

5.4. Play Pleasure Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 

5.5. Interimsic Summary: Play Pleasures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 

5.6. Pleasures of Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 

5.7. Play-Actuated Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 

5.8. The Pleasure of Immersion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 

6. The Culture and Context Dimension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 

7. Conclusion: Playspace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 

GAMESPACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .89 

1. Approaches to Space in Game Design Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 

1.1. Space of Possibility and Magic Circle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 

1.1.1. Space of Possibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 

1.1.2. Magic Circle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 

1.2. Allegory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 

1.3. Contested Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 

1.4. Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 

1.5. Typology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 

1.6. Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 

1.7. Qualities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 

1.8. Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 

1.8.1. Primary and Secondary Functions of Ludic Space . . . .110 

1.8.2. Additional Primary Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .113 

1.8.3. Summary: A Merged Model of Functional Forms . . . . . .116 

1.9. Summary: Space and Spatiality in Game Research . . . . . . . . . 117 

2. Approaches to Games in Architectural Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 

2.1. The Rhetoric of “Architecture as Game” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 

2.2. Games for Architectural Experimentation and Visualization . . . 121

2.3. “Space Time Play”: Game Design and Architecture . . . . . . . . . 122 

2.3.1. Book Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .123 

2.3.2. Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .123 

2.3.3. Dramatic Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .124 

2.3.4. Formal Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125 

2.3.5. Summary: The Genius Loci of a Game . . . . . . . . . . . . .127 

2.4. Summary: Games in Architectural Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 

3. Conclusion: Gamespace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 

PLAY-GROUNDS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF LUDIC ARCHITECTURES . . . . . . . . . .133 

1. About Play-Grounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 

1.1. Utopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 

1.2. Heterotopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 

1.3. Dystopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 

2. Possible Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 

3. Impossible Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 

4. Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 

5. “Nature” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 

6. Tessellation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 

7. Board . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 

9. Labyrinth (and Maze) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 

10. Terrain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 

11. Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 

12. Playground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 

13. Campus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 

14. Square . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 

15. Theater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 

16. Stadium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240 

17. Kindergarten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 

18. Amusement Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250 

CONTENTS 

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CONTENTS 

xii 

19. Panopticon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 

20. Trompe l’œil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260 

21. Television . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 

22. Folly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 

23. Dollhouse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 

24. War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272 

25. Casino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274 

26. Mall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 

27. Castle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283 

28. City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290 

29. Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 

32. World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316 

33. Outer Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318 

34. Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 

35. Ambiguity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 

GAME OVER! INSERT COIN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .335 

1. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 

2. Final Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336 

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .341 

1. Writings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 

2. Games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362 

3. Films and Television Shows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365

INTRODUCTION 

“Eventually, everything connects.” 

(Charles Eames, Architect) 

“It’s all about connecting the dots.” 

(Ralph H. Baer, Videogame Inventor) 

1. Ludic Architecture 

This book is a theoretical exercise toward a ludic architecture – i.e., an analytical 

and designerly understanding of contemporary play and games through the lens of 

architectural paradigms. Note that this treatise is not concerned with programming 

or more technologically-inclined topics. Rather, it suggests a discourse of play and 

games as human practices in space, seeking to conceptually frame these pleasurable 

practices as architectural categories and places-to-play - playces, if you wish. 

Results from digital game studies are worked into these refl ections, creating a basis 

for an analytical framework of games as architectures. This framework serves as the 

foundation for critically discussing exemplary spatial formats from which play and 

games grow. As an introduction – and for your inspiration – read through the following 

scenes that illuminate the topic. 

1.1. Ready! 

Unfamiliar with Alan M. Turing’s work, Konrad Zuse, the solitary German computing 

machine pioneer, conceptualized and built the fi rst mechanical component of 

his Rechenmaschine, the Z1, in 1945, nine years before the offi cial inception of 

INTRODUCTION 

1

INTRODUCTION 

2 

the Electronical Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) at the University of 

Pennsylvania. In the end, the Z1 was just a primitive electro-mechanical device, far 

less reliable than its successor, the Z3 – the fi rst working Turing-complete computing 

machine. Both systems, however, consisted of a mechanical memory storage 

component, a calculating component, a command controller unit, a number input, 

and a number output – core elements of today’s computing machinery. The Z1 was 

programmed using ticker tapes created from expensive 35mm fi lm stock. For the 

ticker tape to be input into the Z1, a hand-driven - potentially engine-driven - crank 

had to perform one revolution. Zuse called the unit of ticker tape revolutions needed 

to process a Z1 command (such as carrying out an addition or a multiplication) Spiel, 

or, in English, game (Rojas 1997). 

In 1947/48, Alan Turing developed a chess machine on paper and also conducted 

experiments with a chess machine prototype, as pointed to in one of his many seminal 

papers, Solvable and Unsolvable Problems (Turing 1954). In 1950, his American 

colleague Claude Shannon wrote a paper titled Programming a Computer For Playing 

Chess (Shannon 1950), in which he envisions possible use-cases for computing 

machines based on his game machine. Many of the machines outlined have since 

come into existence – machines for designing, for regulating, for translating, for 

music-making, for logical deduction. 

Much earlier, in the 19th century, Charles Babbage had already been convinced that 

his Analytical Engine would be capable of processing a chess game; to demonstrate 

simpler mechanics, Babbage conceptualized a Tic-Tac-Toe game machine, cf. 

Pias (2002:198). The world’s fi rst computer game, however, may well be Alexander 

Sandy Douglas’ OXO game – a single player Tic-Tac-Toe game also known as 

Noughts and Crosses. OXO is, without a doubt, the fi rst game with a graphical user 

interface: gameplay was displayed on the 35x16 pixel cathode ray tube space of the

Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) computer at the University of 

Cambridge. There, Douglas implemented OXO in 1952 as an illustration for his PhD 

thesis concerning human-computer interaction (Winter 1996). See Figure 1, which 

shows an OXO session running in Martin Campbell-Kelly’s EDSAC emulator software. 

session running in Martin Campbell-Kelly’s EDSAC emulator software. 

Figure 1 

OXO, a Tic-Tac-Toe instance: The world’s fi rst computer game using a graphical display, written by 

Alexander S. Douglas in 1952 for the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge. The image 

shows a screenshot of the game running in the EdsacPC emulator, Version 6 for Windows 95 or later. 

Reproduced by permission from Martin Campbell-Kelly. 

It is no coincidence that Babbage, Zuse, Turing, Shannon, and Douglas spent time 

thinking about games and how they could be implemented in the computing of 

INTRODUCTION 

3

INTRODUCTION 

4 

hardware, software, or both. As Claus Pias points out, games – the strategy game of 

chess in particular – assisted in envisioning the computer (Pias 2002). This historical 

argument is seconded conceptually by Juul, who concludes that games’ “defi niteness 

in the rules” (Juul 2005:38) suggests that there is a basic affi nity between games and 

computers. Why? Mass-market computers are digital machines that use discrete, 

i.e. discontinuous values (such as binary data) to input, process, transmit, and 

store information according to formal instructions. Compare this short and certainly 

superfi cial defi nition against the notion that games are rule-bound systems in which 

confl ictive, goal-oriented interaction takes place under seemingly safe conditions for 

the player, whose “fundamental motivation (...) is to learn.” (Crawford 1982/1997:15). 

That games and computers are similar in the way they manipulate information has led 

media philosopher McKenzie Wark to conclude that “All games are digital. Without 

exception. (...) From the start, games were proto-computers” (Wark 2007:79). 

Though it could be argued that “Interactiveness is not a binary quantity; it is a continuous 

quantity with a range of values” (Crawford 1982/1997:11), we can still assume that 

games are, formally speaking, superbly suited for computational processing and that 

computational hardware and software architecture represent best-practice instances of 

ludic application, having much increased the complexity of games and formalized games 

more precisely than ever before in history. As advanced problem-solving machines 

with which we can playfully interact, computers are the perfect match for games when 

we look at the latter as “a problem-solving activity, approached with a playful mind“ 

(Schell 2008:37).

1.2. Steady! 

In July of 2001, Electronic Arts (EA) published Majestic (EA 2001), a new kind of 

commercial game that blurred the lines between computer game and everyday life, 

between virtual space and physical space. A science-fi ction conspiracy adventure 

that included elements of bio-warfare and global terror, Majestic integrated a great 

number of media and technologies with which the player could experience the game: 

in addition to an application featuring a Buddy List with bots and other players, 

indistinguishable from one another at fi rst glance, the game also immersed the player 

through AOL Instant Messaging (AIM), e-mail and video messages, Websites, phone 

calls, SMS messages and faxes, cf. Taylor and Kolko (2003). 

Majestic failed to become a commercial success due partly to technical reasons but 

also because of some design fl aws and unfortunate timing – the game was released 

six weeks before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, causing the publisher 

to pause the (downloadable) game service. Still, Majestic was a pioneering game – a 

software-hardware architecture that reached beyond the constraints of the classical 

videogame console-living room experience or the desktop PC-offi ce mélange. In this, 

Majestic was one of the fi rst games to feature “pervasive” or “ubiquitous” gameplay 

across diverse media. 

1.3. Go! 

In the summer of 2007, Anna and Peter, a young couple from Zurich, visit Regensburg, 

Germany. At the tourist information offi ce, they notice the tourist game of REXplorer 

advertised as a “city-experience” and decide to try it out. At home in Zurich, in 

preparation for their trip, Peter had visited the Website of the Regensburg Experience 

Museum REX, watched the REXplorer trailer, and browsed the Websites of high- 

INTRODUCTION 

5

INTRODUCTION 

6 

scoring REXplorer players, where images the tourists had taken were shown, as was 

their path through the city 1 . Anna and Peter rent the REXplorer detector and set out 

to investigate the “paranormal activities” in the city. 

As they leave the offi ce to start playing, Anna holds the game controller, which reminds 

her of a Geiger counter. When they turn the corner of the Altes Rathaus, Anna notices 

a heartbeat vibration indicating that the detector is excited and that the couple has 

reached a point of interest. Anna knows that there is a spirit here that she can awaken 

by casting a spell. She looks at Peter, who fl ips over the brochure map they have with 

them, looks at the different gestures, and points to “wind.” After glancing at the legend 

to get an idea of the gesture shape, Anna holds down the gesture button and waves 

the device through the air accordingly. 

A passer-by stops and stares, open-mouthed. 

Once the spell gesture is complete, Anna releases the button, and a short “tornado” 

video with audio playback confi rms that she has successfully completed the wind 

gesture. A fi gure is shown on the detector screen, and a spirit with a friendly but dark 

voice begins to speak to the players2 : 

REXplorer! It’s nice to see you. I am a salt trader. People like me used 

horses to pull heavy ships full of expensive salt up the river Danube 

to Regensburg until around 1820 A.D. Usually, the excursions 

lasted four weeks at a time. Yep, my life is tough and dangerous. 

Thieves plague the salt trading routes, but I have a loving wife who 

1 A trailer and other materials are available at http://rexplorer.arch.ethz.ch. 

2 Note that the original voice acting is in German, and that passages from the game have been translated by the 

author.

constantly prays in a nearby church for my safe return. Only the fi re 

of her love keeps me alive. Would you be willing to deliver a message 

to my woman? Then show me the appropriate gesture. 

After listening carefully to the puzzle, Anna understands that she must cast the “fi re” 

spell to accept the quest. She looks at Peter and asks: “Which one was fi re, again?” 

Peter shows her the gesture legend and Anna successfully completes the fi re gesture 

to accept the quest. Then she hears: 

I thank you from the bottom of my heart! It pleases me that you are 

willing to deliver my love letter to my wife at the St. Ulrich Church 

near the Cathedral. Oh! My colleagues are already waiting for me 

at the river. Good luck! Take care of yourselves. 

Peter checks the brochure map and quickly fi nds the next location. He looks to Anna 

and asks: “Where are we now?” She presses the map button on the detector, which 

then shows them their current position and the destination of their open quest. After 

orienting themselves, they start walking towards the St. Ulrich Church to complete 

their mission. On their way, they stop over at the Regensburg Cathedral, which looks 

quite beautiful before the bright blue Bavarian sky. They take pictures of themselves 

and of the monument using the detector’s photo function. 

After an hour and half, Anna and Peter return the detector, which has told them, in its 

unforgettable, sardonic voice, that it is starting to grow tired and that walking back to 

the tourist offi ce would be quite swell. Once back at the tourist offi ce, Anna and Peter 

return the game controller and receive their refunded deposit. The friendly tourist 

offi ce staff downloads the couple’s gameplay session data from their detector, 

including their route, completed quests, and photos. From this data, Anna and Peter’s 

INTRODUCTION 

7

INTRODUCTION 

8 

personal, geo-referenced gameblog Website for the session is automatically created. 

The URL for the blog is sent to their e-mail addresses and printed onto a postcard 

they receive before leaving the tourist offi ce. Walz et al. (2006), Ballagas and Walz 

(2007), and Walz and Ballagas (2007) discuss several aspects of REXplorer in-depth, 

such as the game’s design, its player-centered iterative development including playtesting, 

and its inherently persuasive strategies that promote game-based learning. 

Figure 2 depicts two players enjoying REXplorer in front of Regensburg’s city core 

ensemble. 

The three scenes described above reveal that today, 

ludic architectures, which in and of themselves 

are structurally and representationally digital, 

have now extended into the realm of physicality, 

creating a hybrid gamespace in the process. In this 

age of hybrid, connectivist gamespaces such as 

that of REXplorer, learning(-by-playing) becomes 

all the more a “process of connecting specialized 

nodes or information sources” (Siemens 2005:7). 

Theorizing about ludic architectures, then, means 

connecting information sources concerned with 

architecture, play, and games, and examining 

how all three ultimately manifest as architectural 

formats 

Figure 2 

Two players enjoying a REXplorer game quest on the Steinerne 

Brücke in front of Regensburg’s UNESCO world heritage 

protected city core ensemble, including the cathedral.

2. About Games, Play, 

and Architecture 

The scenes presented above demonstrate that digital games have history and a 

future – when it comes to games, we all “face the development of new typologies 

of space” (Borries/Walz/Böttger 2007:11 3 ): “To choose a game is to choose an 

architecture” (Wigley 2007:484). This comment has a more profound undertone if 

you consider that today, commercial games are “the emergent cultural form of our 

time” (Wark 2007:22) that will eventually surpass even the movie industry and other 

entertainment media. Games are, perhaps, “architecture’s fi nal frontier” (Wiltshire 

2007). 

We can be relatively sure that games are changing our notion of space and time. 

This is made clear by innovative urban games such as REXplorer that superimpose 

physical architectures with a digital layer4 or by other recent games such as Majestic 

that involve different forms of media and sneak unexpectedly into our living rooms. 

3 Note that throughout this book, texts from the book Space Time Play. Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: 

The Next Level will be frequently referenced. In fact, Space Time Play – co-edited by this author with two 

colleagues and published by Birkhäuser Publishers in the fall of 2007 – can be considered a reading prerequisite 

to and/or a vademecum for this book. 

4 Games such as REXplorer are often and interchangeably called “ubiquitous” or “pervasive” games. IBM 

introduced the term “pervasive computing” back in 1998 to describe a research and business concept by which 

computers are embedded into our surroundings. Ten years earlier, the research concept of “ubiquitous computing” 

had been introduced by Mark Weiser from XEROX Parc (Weiser 1996). The term encompasses the 

“third wave in computing” (ibid.), in which one person interacts with many computers – as opposed to both the 

mainframe stage of computing, during which many people shared one computer, and the PC phase, in which a 

one-to-one rationale was prevalent (i.e. one computer per person – or, of course, one person per computer if we 

regarded the computer as a resource). Mattern has described the differentiation of the terms ubiquitous computing 

and pervasive computing as follows: “While [Mark] Weiser uses the term “Ubiquitous Computing” rather in 

an academic-idealistic way, describing an unobtrusive, human-centric vision of technology, the term “Pervasive 

Computing” has been coined by the industry with a slightly different emphasis: This term also centers around the 

idea of permeating and omnipresent information processing, but with the specifi c short-term goal of utilizing it in 

e-commerce scenarios and web-based business processes” (Mattern 2003 cit. after Hinske et al. 2007:24). 

INTRODUCTION 

9

INTRODUCTION 

10 

Another example is the latest Nintendo console, the Wii, which allows for wireless 

gestural player input by means of a game controller with built-in accelerometers and 

a Bluetooth connection. In the tennis game shipped with the Wii Sports (2006) set, 

the player can swing the controller as if swinging a tennis racket to hit an oncoming 

ball in real time in a 3D representation of a tennis court rendered onto the TV screen 

to which the console connects (Kelley 2007b:24f.). 

Yet the change is also generational. Today, games are not merely for children - they 

constitute a major adult business, and major architecture is created through them. 

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the fi rst game generation grew up playing Space 

Invaders, Pac-Man, Frogger, and Donkey Kong. Indeed, the author of this book will 

admit that he himself spent quite some time playing games on the world’s fi rst video 

console with exchangeable game cartridges, the Atari VCS (Atari 1977); that as a 

pre-schooler, he was the proud owner of a Philips G7000 (Philips 1978); and that 

later, while attending secondary school, he played and learned to program BASIC 

on the Z80 CPU-based budget home computer Amstrad CPC 61285 – the European 

alternative to 8-bit home computers such as Commodore’s C64 (Commodore 1982). 

With the exception of university and high school labs and networks, PlayNET (1984), 

an online service for C64s in the US between 1984 and 1987, was the fi rst computerto-computer 

online communication network to utilize graphics and interactive menus 

and deliver computerized multiplayer gaming through a 300- or 1200-baud modem 

(Morabito 1985). 

PlayNET licensed its networking soft- and hardware solutions to Quantum Link or 

Q-Link, a US and Canada-only online service provider for Commodore’s C64 and 

C128 computers that changed its name to America Online (AOL) in October 1991 and 

went on to become one of the driving forces behind the evolution of the World Wide 

5 In Germany, Amstrad computers such as the CPC 464, the CPC 664, and the CPC 6128 with a doubled 

memory of 128K were marketed by the Schneider company and branded as Schneider computers.

Web 6 . Thus it was the home computer-based PlayNET that helped kick start today’s 

online gaming culture (focused on games such as World of Warcraft as well as on 

increasingly popular free-to-play browser games) that spans social spaces across 

the planet. 

The soft- and hardware of digital games have gone through quite an evolution in 

the past decades, and scholarly refl ection is having a tough time keeping up. But 

just because games are well suited for rule processing, does not mean all games 

encompass digital realms. Board games have been played for thousands of years 

across cultures like analogue rule-processing machines that we players crank, 

metaphorically speaking, turn-by-turn, movement-by-movement. At the same time, 

athletic competitions continue to constitute an important aspect of Western civilization. 

But whether sport competition, computer game, or board game, at the heart of all those 

formalized, rule-based ludic activities that we call games, is play – an anthropological 

constant and a phenomenon that is, mind, not exclusive to humans. 

If games are indeed architecture’s fi nal frontier, then this book aims to contribute to 

an architectural understanding and appreciation of play and games. The following 

problem statement details how this will be achieved. 

3. Problem Statement 

In the past, scholarly discourse has examined games and play, including digitally 

processed games, from many perspectives in an effort to explain them as cultural 

artifacts. The so-called narratologists have interpreted games as novel forms of 

narrative (Murray 1997; Manovich 2001) or texts to read (Bolter and Grusin 2000). The 

6 See http://www.qlinklives.org for a historical record maintained by one of the Q-Link co-founders. 

INTRODUCTION 

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INTRODUCTION 

12 

ludologists have insisted that games should be analyzed sui generis (Aarseth 1997), 

being mainly systems of rules that govern play, regardless of whether they are digital 

or analogue (Salen and Zimmerman 2004). Others have suggested a middle ground, 

arguing that the dualism of narratology-ludology is quite artifi cial and asserting that 

a ludological perspective cannot exclude the narratological approach (Frasca 2003). 

Eventually, this approach was formulated into a model that analyzes videogames as 

a trans-medium that features both a set of rules and a fi ctional world (Juul 2005). 

Thus digital games as cultural artifacts have been alternately understood as rulebound 

ludic activities, interactive narratives, trans-medial combinations of the latter, 

or procedural environments composed of unit-operational software-based objects 

(Bogost 2006). Each of these attempts implicitly or explicitly assumes that games 

are, have, or take place in spaces. One could certainly agree that, for example, a 

rule-bound play activity must take place somewhere; that an interactive narrative 

immerses the player in a navigable story set in a certain place with certain spatial 

qualities; and that a unit-operational system creates an environment for the player to 

play in and with. 

With the help of more than 140 authors, the book Space Time Play (Borries/Walz/ 

Böttger 2007), co-edited by the author, has broken new ground and attempted to 

shed light on the relationship between computer games, architecture, and urbanism. 

So far, however, there is no in-depth treatise that aims to architecturally frame play 

and games as human practices in space and of space, examining the forms in which 

ludic activities take place. This book attempts to fi ll this gap in the academic discourse 

and to work towards a ludic architecture, i.e. a comprehensive and critical discussion 

of play and games through the lens of architectural paradigms. Such a contribution 

is needed to accommodate the development of ludic architectures, particularly when 

they extend into the physical world as in the REXplorer example.

The questions that can help guide us in framing such a ludic architecture include: 

● What are the parameters of a conceptual space of play, and how can 

we consider play as an architectural category? How is play architected? 

How does it relate to space, and how does it produce space? 

● What are the parameters of a conceptual space of digital games – what 

can we gain from locative, representational, programmatic, dramaturgical, 

typological, perspectivistic, form-functional, technological, and phenomenological 

approaches in research literature? Are these approaches 

adequate for our overall task? 

● What does a sketched analytical framework for games-as-architectures 

sui generis look like? 

● In what prototypical spatial types are play and games rooted – what 

could we learn from these types via critical and episodic inquiry informed 

by the parameters mentioned above? 

4. Methodology and Overview 

This treatise on the nature of ludic architecture is structured as follows: 

● In the fi rst section, PLAYSPACE, we examine the conceptual space of 

play, seeking to defi ne dimensions that are relevant in looking at play 

as an architectural category. We differentiate this conceptual space into 

an ambiguity dimension, a player dimension, a modality dimension, a 

kinetic dimension (wherein we strive to defi ne play as a relational human 

practice in space), an enjoyment dimension, and, eventually, a culture and 

context dimension. 

INTRODUCTION 

13

INTRODUCTION 

14 

● In the subsequent section, GAMESPACE, we fi rst consider play as an 

essential part of games and vice versa. We then review and update 

existing notions of space and spatiality in digital game (design) research 

as well as notions and applications of games in architectural research 

with the goal of mapping a conceptual gamespace. Finally, we sketch 

out a preliminary analysis framework for investigating the spatiality of 

games, in which the playspace and gamespace dimensions are set into 

relation. 

● In PLAY-GROUNDS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF LUDIC ARCHITECTURE, 

we apply this framework to critically and essayistically discuss “playgrounds”, 

i.e. prototypical and historically persistent spaces of play and 

gameplay before and beyond the digital game. These play-grounds are 

connected by conceptual links that can be explored by users/readers 

and implicitly suggest ludic trajectories and a spatial discourse. 

● We conclude this work with the GAME OVER! INSERT COIN section, 

which offers a summary of our fi ndings and an outlook. 

5. Signifi cance and Contributi on 

This book, which frames play and games architecturally, contributes to a number 

of fi elds: 

● The disciplines of Game Studies and Game Design, as well as related 

entertainment media and entertainment technology industries. 

● The disciplines of Architecture & Computer Aided Architectural Design 

(CAAD), contemporary Urban Planning theory and practice, and related 

industries.

It is hoped that this treatise will help bridge the fi elds of Architecture and Game 

Design to the extent that academia will be able to increasingly work at the intersection 

of both disciplines. Some rough guidelines for achieving joint progress in an academic 

context are offered below: 

● Throughout their university training, architectural students should be 

taught to consider games as dynamic, innovative, and challenging 

architectural outlets that can be design results or components of the 

design process. The fi eld of CAAD in particular can benefi t from games 

as tools and results; Walz and Schoch (2006) demonstrate how this 

can be achieved by examining a pervasive game class centered on a 

location-based learning and meeting game for students and faculty of 

the ETH Zurich that superimposed and accurately refl ected pre-existing 

sites and usages. Other classes on games and architecture have been 

taught by the author at the Department of Architecture at the University 

of Stuttgart, resulting in a number of architectural theses that used game 

mechanics to create or even automate architectural space, cf. Walz 

(2006a). On the other hand, game design and development students 

as well as those students learning how to produce, sell or create art for 

games and other entertainment media should learn from the get-go to 

consider games in terms of spatial design. 

● In the research context, academically-minded architects should take 

advantage of games and entertainment media beyond the visualization and 

performance power of game engines in order, for example, to investigate 

how a building or a location can become an interactive partner or a 

narrative to be explored over time – as in a biofeedback game prototype in 

which the player is connected to a physical space’s functionalities (Walz 

et al. 2005). At the same time, research in entertainment media and game 

INTRODUCTION 

15

INTRODUCTION 

16 

design can benefi t from ludicly-inclined architects who conceptualize 

programs geared toward, for example, mobility, place-making, future 

learning, or problem simulation, regardless of whether the programs 

are executed virtually, physically, or in hybrid situations, using high or 

low technology.

PLAYSPACE 

Playing is a special type of human activity – an anthropological constant. In order to 

think about the nature of play, we must clarify beforehand that there is, of course, a 

difference between the terms play and games, although languages such as French or 

German do not differentiate between the two. In German, there is only one noun, Spiel, 

which is used when speaking of both game and play, and one verb, spielen, meaning 

both to play and to play a game. Our discussion of play in this book is based on the 

assumption that play is the foundation of a game, and that neither can exist without 

the other. 

We look at games and play as human practices in space, and in doing so, initially 

examine play in the context of architecture. What are the parameters of play? To what 

practices does play give rise? How do we design the space of play, and how does play 

relate to games? What are, in total, the dimensions of a conceptual playspace? 

In this section, we outline the dimensions of this conceptual playspace in order to 

move closer towards answering these questions. The approaches applied vary and 

include theories and fi ndings from a variety of fi elds so that throughout the course of the 

examination, we develop our own defi nition of play by way of the following subsections: 

● Play as ambiguous category: The ideologization of the term play is 

discussed, on the one hand following up on a prevalent academic 

discussion initiated by Sutton-Smith (1997), and on the other hand 

underlining that play is subject to contextual and rhetorical uses all across 

the sciences. 

PLAYSPACE 

17

PLAYSPACE 

18 

● Play as subjective experience: Without the player, there is no play in 

space, and when designing (game)play, participatory design methods 

are crucial to creating an enjoyable ludic activity (Fullerton 2008). This 

subsection elaborates on both these assertions. 

● Play as modality: Beyond the subjective experience, play takes place 

either in a physical, imaginary, virtual, or hybrid setting. A model inspired 

by Bartle (2004) is introduced that organizes these aspects of playspace. 

● Play as rhythmical kinesis: In this subsection, we develop an 

architecturally-framed defi nition of play. Towards this end, we briefl y 

consider notions of movement and rhythm in architecture before 

examining dance as movement because it allows us to speak of both a 

spatial and a playful activity. Eventually, with the help of Game Studies 

pioneer Buytendijk (1933), we propose looking at play as a particular kind 

of rhythmic movement that can be physical or virtual and that connects the 

player with the play-environment and a play-other. This way of looking at 

play allows us to think and speak of it in terms of space and architecture. 

● Play as enjoyment: Against the backdrop of our kineticist model of 

play, we refl ect on and cross-compare pedagogical, anthropological, 

and game design taxonomies of play stimuli and player types (e.g. Fritz 

2004), deriving an extended model of play pleasure. In addition, we 

review representative aspects of play enjoyment, including absorption 

and perceived diffi culty. 

● Play as designed phenomenon: We discuss, representatively, how 

given physical environments are perceived to be play-suitable and feature 

positive valence (Hendricks 2001).

● Play and games – games and play: We elaborate on the interrelation 

of play and games in order to bridge to the following section, in which we 

scrutinize both the formal nature and spatiality of games. 

Taken as a whole, this section prepares us to identify and review existing concepts of 

space and spatiality with regard to games. In this context, games are understood as 

formalized systems of play. 

1. The Ambiguity Dimension 

In the past, the phenomenon of play has been investigated by many scholars from a 

wide variety of fi elds. In Homo Ludens, cultural anthropologist Johan Huizinga argues 

that human culture itself bears the character of play, suggesting that play is not only of 

prime importance to, but also a necessary condition for, enculturalization (1939/1971). 

With regard to the design of the built environment, we read Le Corbusier’s oft-cited claim 

from Vers une Architecture that “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnifi cent 

play of volumes brought together in light” (Le Corbusier 1928/2008:102), establishing 

“stirring relationships” (1928/2008:194). Refl ecting on the information age, William J. 

Mitchell plays on Le Corbusier’s belief in progress, stating: “Architecture is no longer 

simply the play of masses in light. It now embraces the play of digital information in 

space” (Mitchell 1999:41). 

But what is play? Developmental psychology, for example, has long concluded that for 

human children, play involves imaginary situations mandatory for learning and child 

development (Vygotsky 1978:93). Indeed, Piaget (1951) found that play is important 

for deep learning, which has led contemporary educational learning theorists to claim 

that, generally speaking, “players are also learners” (Becker 2007:24), even more so 

PLAYSPACE 

19

PLAYSPACE 

20 

when playing well-designed games that are capable of creating intrinsic motivation in 

the player (2007:25). 

In order to better understand play, let us take a step back and consider the words of game 

design scholars Salen and Zimmerman who point out that many “studies of play focus 

on identifying the function or purpose of play. The implicit assumption is that play serves 

a larger purpose for the individual psyche, the social unit, the classroom, the species, 

and so on” (2004:309). This fi nding – that play is best explained by demonstrating that 

it defers to another concept – can be fi ne-tuned against the backdrop of an already 

classic study by Brian Sutton-Smith based on “overwhelming evidence that the meaning 

of games is, in part, a function of the ideas of those who think about them” (Avedon 

1971:438). In The Ambiguity of Play (1997), the social science of play pioneer and 

professor of education dissects the varied, rhetorical uses of play across disciplines 

and purposes. Play, Sutton-Smith argues, is an ambiguous term. It is used in different 

contexts with different underpinnings, often shadowing activities and describing them 

imprecisely and vaguely, thereby persuading the audience to think of the process or 

activity ambiguously. Thus play cannot be explained by defi ning the way it functions, 

but by identifying those who use it as a means to convey a certain communicative 

strategy (1997:3). 

An architectural theorist, for example, is likely to bring architectural meaning to the 

study of games and play and naturally, will want to defi ne and possibly explain playing 

in terms of space. In his excellent meta-study, Sutton-Smith goes even further, claiming 

that “practically anything can become an agency for some kind of play” (Sutton-Smith 

1997:6). To support this argument, Sutton-Smith lists activities that are said to represent 

forms of play or experiences of play, ranging from private to very public:

● mind or subjective play; 

● solitary play; 

● playful behaviors; 

● informal social play; 

● vicarious audience play; 

● performance play; 

● celebrations and festivals; 

● contests, i.e. games and sports; 

● risky or deep play (ibid.). 

Based on Sutton-Smith, we could presume that there is no such thing as a biological 

nature of play, since a given rhetoric of play only serves as a communication strategy – 

that is, a means to an end. The Ambiguity of Play reminds us that whenever someone 

uses the term play, we should pay careful attention to the context in which the term 

is used. 

2. The Player Dimension 

In addition to the ambiguity of play discussed in the past subsection, the playspace 

we describe here always embodies a player and, by extension, subjectivity. Without a 

player, there is no play; and even more importantly, subjectivity in play has a particularly 

important role. Let us briefl y investigate this role in the context of both design methods 

and empirical fi ndings in human-computer interaction. 

PLAYSPACE 

21

PLAYSPACE 

22 

2.1. The Diversity of Players 

and Player-Centric Design 

On the one hand, we can derive this special role of the player from the diversity of 

players: there are infant, preschool, childhood, adolescent, and adult players, all 

of whom play somewhat differently. There are male and female players. There are 

gamblers, gamesters, sports, and sports players, and there are playboys and playgirls, 

playfellows, playful people, playgoers, playwrights, playmakers, and playmates 

(Sutton-Smith 1997:5f.). 

The diversity of players is obvious in less designed and more subjective play experiences, 

and the audience plays an even more important role in designed play as well as in 

games. In game design, and in particular in the design of digital games, player-centrism 

is just one of many approaches – like, for example, market-driven or technology-driven 

approaches – favored because it usually produces the most enjoyable experiences 

(Adams and Rollings 2006). A player-centric approach understands and designs ludic 

activities from the point of view of the player. Fullerton underlines that playtesting – 

a design method in player-centered design – “is the single most important activity a 

designer engages in (...). Play testing is something the designer performs throughout 

the entire design process to gain an insight into how players experience the game” 

(2008:196). 

Whether conducted quantitatively with the help of questionnaires or game-play log 

fi les or qualitatively with the help of video taping, narrative interviews, or participant 

observation and fi eld diaries, playtesting helps to improve a designed ludic activity. In 

addition to creating a game experience that entertains, a designer of a ludic product 

must understand, as thoroughly as possible, the player’s expectations, motives, and 

needs. Another duty of the player-centric game designer is to comprehend the player’s

ackground, mindset, and desires and to empathize with the player by imagining what 

it will feel like to experience the game, cf. Adams and Rollings (2006:38). 

In an article about pervasive game design, this author has listed a number of questions 

that illuminate core challenges in considering the player dimension of playspace 

at the beginning of a project, even before a design idea has come into being: 

● Who is the player? What is the typical player’s background? How would 

you describe the player – as a competitor, a contemplator, a strategist, a 

socializer, etc.? What kind of medial and technological expertise does the 

player bring to the game? 

● What are the player’s primary and secondary activities before, during, 

and after the expected game situation? What are the player’s motives for 

being where he or she is and doing what he or she does outside of the 

game? How will the game change this? 

● What are potential concerns the player may have with regards to 

playing? What is the player’s “gameness,” including allotted time, budget, 

theatricality, and constraints? 

● (When) Does the player have company? 

● Where is the player, and how does he or she move about? At what pace? 

What is the activity space of the player in his or her current location? 

(Walz 2007:106). 

Two historical roots of player-centrism in digital games will be briefl y outlined in the next 

two sections. Understanding these roots is a prerequisite to refl ecting on the role of 

participatory design in architecturally-framed play, as we will see in the last subsection 

of the player dimension discussion. 

PLAYSPACE 

23

PLAYSPACE 

24 

2.2. Human-Centered Design and Situated Acti on 

The concept of player-centered design emerged in conjunction with the concept of a 

“user-centered” approach to design (Norman and Draper 1986). Today, user-centered 

design is commonly referred to as a human-centered design approach and appears 

frequently in interactive system design. Both human-computer interaction experts and 

game designers have long recognized that human-computer interfaces and interactions 

should be designed iteratively (Buxton and Sniderman 1980; Nielsen 1993; Gould and 

Lewis 1985; Adams and Rollings 2006; Fullerton 2008) because the requirements for an 

interactive system cannot be completely specifi ed at the beginning of the lifecycle (Dix 

et al. 1998). Instead, designs need to be prototyped and tested by actual participants or 

players so that any false assumptions or unforeseen problems will be revealed. These 

problems can then be corrected in the next iteration of the prototype, which should then 

again be tested to ensure that the problems are truly resolved. 

The player-centric and human-centered approach are complemented by the concept of 

“situated action.” Together, they have shown empirically that we can only understand 

human action as the result of a social situation and thus through the subjectiveness 

of the experience of that situation. This applies to human-machine communication as 

well. In her book Plans and Situated Action (Suchman 1987), Lucy Suchman develops 

a human-computer interaction theory that takes into account results from cognitive 

science research and Suchman’s own experimental work – including, for example, her 

studies of and designs for Xerox machine interfaces. In the book, Suchman rejects 

the view that action is pre-planned and argues instead that plans for acting towards a 

situation can be seen as resources. Suchman shows that people act not prescriptively, 

but according to social and material contexts – that in fact, their actions are entirely 

infl uenced by their situational contexts. Behavior can thus be described as “situated 

action.” Machines, then, are not just “things,” but rather co-creators of this situatedness

(1987:55ff.). Building on Suchman, Reeves and Nass (1996) conducted empirical 

experiments that popularized the notion that people treat computers, television, and 

other media as if they were “real” people and “real” environments, taking for granted 

that which a given medium conveys. In other words, the notion that media have become 

indistinguishable from real life: 

Media are treated politely, they can invade our body space, they 

can have personalities that match our own, they can be a teammate, 

and they can elicit gender stereotypes. Media can evoke emotional 

responses, demand attention, threaten us, infl uence memories, and 

change ideas of what is natural. Media are full participants in our 

social and natural world (Reeves and Nass 1996:251). 

Stanford University researcher BJ Fogg – who studied under Nass and Reeves – has 

taken this kind of research even further. In the context of researching and developing 

persuasive technologies, Fogg more precisely categorizes how people respond to 

virtually all computing products: “Interactive technologies can operate in three basic 

ways: as tools, as media, and as social actors” (Fogg 2003:22). 

Both Suchman, Reeves and Nass, and Fogg have empirically demonstrated that 

to a given audience, a medium or communicative properties of this medium are not 

perceived, say, on a physical-virtual continuum (“More virtual” – “Less virtual”), but 

rather in a straightforward situated fashion. In addition, all three parties recommend 

that designers take these phenomena into account during their design processes. 

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2.3. Conclusion: The Player in Architecture 

The player is central to designing an enjoyable ludic activity. The player is also 

central to understanding the role of play outside of a particular situation. The player 

dimension of an architecturally-framed notion of play underlines the humanity of play 

and challenges architects’ thinking about play to include participatory design methods 

into their repertoire. 

Beginning in the 1920s, when increasing urbanization of Western society spawned the 

systematic research and development of modern design, modernists like Theo van 

Doesborg of the Dutch art and architecture group De Stijl began calling for a system 

of art and design based on rationality and objectivity (cf. Cross 2007:41), and architect 

Le Corbusier proposed that a house is an objectively-designed “machine for living” 

(ibid.). Cross: “[In De Stijl and Le Corbusier’s philosophies], and throughout much of 

the Modernist Movement, we see a desire to produce works of art and design based on 

objectivity and rationality; that is: on the values of science” (ibid.). 

Yet, this spirit of merely rationalizing the player is slowly changing. Since the 1970s, 

several approaches have demonstrated how architecture and urbanism can profi t from 

participatory design thereby creating a new kind of proximity between people and the 

built environment. Recent examples include: 

● The Kaisersrot7 research and software developed at the ETH Zurich, 

which integrates the computer as a “consensus-machine” that generates 

and optimizes design solutions for both individual buildings and largescale 

urban design, processing stakeholder wish lists so that an equilibrial 

state is reached (Lehnerer 2007). 

7 Cf. www.kaisersrot.com

● When used for participatory city planning, “scenario games” in the 

spirit of Buckminster Fuller’s World Game can contribute to successful 

placemaking as well as increase awareness for environmental hazards 

(Bunschoten 2007). 

● Rule-based, participatory urban planning implies “a partial loss of 

authorship” for architects and urban planners, but gives individuals 

more freedom to choose and infl uence sites (Christiaanse and Lehnerer 

2007:373). 

As the built environment becomes increasingly computationally equipped, the player 

dimension of playspace will become more and more important for architectural design. 

Designers should always be aware that they never design the actual player experience, 

only the framework wherein that experience will take place. 

3. The Modality Dimension 

As a human activity, the act of playing is naturally subjective. Even in the virtual world 

of God of War (Sony Computer Entertainment 2005), the player “is” the player-avatar 

Kratos, though really, he or she is only being represented by a graphical and animated 

fi gure. Peter Vorderer has summed up this duality of subjective representation, fi nding 

that games – and video games in particular – synthesize entertainment media and toys, 

placing the player in the role of witness on the one hand, and the role of participant on 

the other (Vorderer 2000:30f.). 

Although we introduced player-centrism as a guiding design and analytical principle 

in the last section, it is still necessary to differentiate player-centrism into several 

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modalities of playspace representation. This becomes particularly important when we 

consider the advent of pervasive games, which ubiquitously superimpose physical 

space with interactable computer-generated interfaces and content. 

Inspired by virtual-world design pioneer Richard Bartle (2004), we assume the following 

modalities: 

● Physical: Players, spaces, and objects that are material. 

● Imaginary: That which is not material. 

● Virtual: That which is not material but has the form or effect of that which 

is material. 

From this model, we can deduce that “Virtual worlds are places where the imaginary 

meets the real” (Bartle 2004:1). Virtual worlds are implemented by a computer – or 

a network of computers – “that simulates an environment” (Bartle 2004:1). In our 

reading, this notion of virtuality includes Web phenomena such as Websites. Pervasive 

– or, interchangeably, ubiquitous games – pervade virtuality so that play activities 

are (permanently) superimposed on the physical world. As a result, a new modality 

emerges, which we propose to describe as follows: 

● Hybrid: That which is not material but has the form or effect of that which 

is material mixed with that which is material to the extent that one can no 

longer be separated from the other without losing its form or intended or 

emerging effect. 

Using these modalities, we can say that a player plays in a physical, imaginary, virtual, 

or hybrid modality and thereby encapsulate the modality dimension of playspace. From 

the subjective perspective of the player, though, modality will not matter much as long 

as the player experience remains playful and unbroken.

4. The Kineti c Dimension 

The context in which we will discuss play in this subsection is that of movement; the goal is 

to show how play, movement, and rhythm interrelate and, based on this demonstration, 

to formulate a working defi nition. As mentioned above, this approach also attempts to 

demonstrate how play and architecture share the properties of movement and rhythm 

at their core. In order to do so, we will now discuss notions of movement and rhythm in 

architecture, after which we will take a look at an exemplary notion of movement and 

rhythm in a fi eld closely related to play – that is, dance – so that fi nally we can discuss 

at length the function of movement and rhythm in play itself. 

4.1. Noti ons of Movement and Rhythm 

in Architectural Theory 

By thinking of play in terms of movement and rhythm, we attempt to think of play 

architecturally as a rhythmic activity tied to and enabled by space and objects in space 

and itself a producer of space. We hypothesize that implicitly or explicitly, movement 

and rhythm appear across design ideologies in architectural theory and practice, can 

be considered to lie at the core of designing a built environment, and serve as a precondition 

for spatiality. In the following section, examples from contemporary and often 

confl icting architectural theories and practices will prove the truth of this hypothesis. 

These examples illustrate different ways that we can think about and defi ne movement 

and rhythm. 

In the Chartre d’Athènes directed at future architecture and urban planning students, Le 

Corbusier explains that “Architecture is volume and movement” (Le Corbusier 1962:28). 

In other words, we wander through architecture, and this modality of movement 

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determines how architecture is experienced. Movement places the visitor into positions 

and involves him or her in processes, guides views, enforces velocity, and presents 

or conceals parts of the whole. The way we move through a designed environment is 

responsible for our expectations of that environment. Thanks to material and immaterial 

emphases and the ordering of interior and exterior space, movement affects, shocks, 

or surprises us, reveals secrets, and, most importantly, asks us to actively participate 

in a space intellectually, physically, and relationally. Le Corbusier believed in dead 

architectures and living ones; the latter, he argued, present an interlinking of events – 

rhythms, i.e. pauses and tempi of space and light – that the visitor experiences. The 

result is that the visitor is affected by the space and interacts with it (1962:29f.). 

Fröbe (2004) fi nds that the described promenade architecturale is the central element 

in Le Corbusier’s architectural and urban designs, programming rhythm into the 

relationship between user and architecture – a play of volumes-in-light for the user, but 

also with the user. From Marxist and Situationist-related philosopher Henri Lefebvre 

(1991), we have learned to consider this enacted relationship between a human being 

and an architecture as more than a rhythmical program of movements without social or 

political connotation that assumed a universal human being void of ideology. Instead 

of treating space as a mere aesthetical category, Lefebvre proposes that there are 

different levels of space, ranging from crude, natural, “abstract space” to “social space,” 

the latter brought forth by the interaction between humans and their surrounding 

space (1991:26). 

Lefebvre suggests a tripartite constitution of this (fundamentally social) spatiality: 

the perceived material “spatial practice,” the conceived “representation of space,” 

and the “lived” spatiality of the representation itself, called “representational space” 

(1991:38f.). Lefebvre envisions to evaluate spatial practices with the help of “rhythm 

analysis” (1991:205), and to experiment with spatial practices rhythmically using the

spheres of music and dance. Consequentially, Lefebvre suggests the creation of a 

“rhythmanalysis” (sic!) discipline (Lefebvre 1996:219ff.), in which the city is analyzed 

through, for example, the rhythms created by bodies and their movements, daily 

sleep cycles, gestures, traffi c, exchanges, sounds, sudden events such as accidents, 

festivities, moods, seasons, weather, light and darkness, colors, smells, the presentabsent, 

tides, and waves. 

In a fabulous application of Lefebvrian theory to the ludic-landscapist realm of 

skateboarding, Borden (2001) investigates the movements of gyrating, gliding, rotating, 

miming, performing, declaiming, climbing, descending, and traversing as a particular 

“skateboarding-architecture” produced by and between skateboarder and skateboarding 

terrain. Citing Lefebvre, Borden concludes: “Like music and dance, skateboarding 

creates ‘repetitions and redundancies of rhythms’ and ‘symmetries and asymmetries’ 

irreducible to analytic thought” (2001:113). To Borden, the interaction enacted by and 

between skateboarders and their terrain allows us to think of architecture “not as a 

thing but a fl ow” (Borden 2001:9). 

Borden thereby suggests that the physical concepts of movement and rhythm relate 

to the psychological concept of “fl ow” (Csíkszentmihályi 1975), which many consider 

to be at the core of gameplay situations capable of absorbing players (Chen 2007). 

Csíkszentmihályi’s understanding of fl ow includes activities designed to make optimal 

and, most importantly, enjoyable experiences easier to achieve. Flow-inducing activities 

such as ritual, play, dance, or art facilitate concentration and involvement by way 

of controllable rules, skill learning, attached goals, and feedback (Csíkszentmihályi 

1991:72) – the type of fl ow that results, we see, is more related to formalized, game-like 

activities than to playful activities. We will later return to the concept of fl ow in order to 

detail how fl ow is typically induced. Whereas the psychological state of fl ow is attached 

to a kind of deep absorption, architectural fl ow is based on the assumption that a certain 

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type of architecture can cause a rhythmic to-and-fro fl ow, which need not necessarily 

result in a psychological fl ow state. The psychological fl ow concept is thus not the only 

way to think about the relationship between player and play-other, particularly not in the 

context of more lightweight, less formalized play activities. 

Writing from a far more functionalistic and, like Le Corbusier’s, aesthetisizing standpoint, 

urban planning theorist Kevin Lynch (1960) concerns himself with the look of cities and 

the way they present themselves to their dwellers as coherent, visible, and clear – 

in total, as beautiful and highly “imageable.” Lynch suggests that certain large-scale 

design elements can heighten the city’s legibility and facilitate, for example, orientation. 

In Lynch’s view, the more easily a city can be read, the more beautiful it is. Lynch’s 

suggested design elements for achieving this “imageability” include clear, coherent, 

and visible “paths” (e.g. streets, canals, railroads), “edges” (walls, shores), “districts,” 

“nodes” (squares, street corner hangouts), and “landmarks” (points of reference such 

as towers and domes) (Lynch 1960:46ff.). This choice of elements refl ects Lynch’s 

belief that fundamentally, “a city is sensed in motion” (Lynch 1960:107). 

In a later work about the semantics of the city, What time is this Place?, Lynch (1972) 

investigates humans’ innate conception of time and how it relates to change and 

reoccurring events – i.e. naturally-generated rhythms such as sunrise and sunset as 

well as artifi cial city rhythms in an ever-changing urban landscape caused, for example, 

by catastrophe, building activities, or demolishing. Lynch fi nds that time and change 

create our sense of being alive, and that it is therefore crucial for time and change to 

be represented meaningfully in the urban landscape. Beyond the timely order created 

by watches, the rhythm of change must be celebrated and carefully planned – in 

prototyping environments, for example. Lynch’s core idea is thus the “architect of time” 

who enhances the legibility of time in the city by, for example, visibly layering materials 

from different eras, planning vegetation in the city, designing shadows that passersby

can watch move, or publicly displaying image and fi lm stock that documents change 

(1972:248ff.). 

In keeping with this metaphor of city rhythm, Rem Koolhaas – another, more 

contemporary European architect (and opponent of Le Corbusier) – glorifi es tempo 

and movement (Trüby 2003), but neither as means to create a relationship between 

a space and a user nor as means to achieve a Genius Loci, a holistic, site-specifi c, 

unique architectural characteristic. Rather, Koolhaas sees tempo and movement as 

expressions of globalization that assure constant change and the promise of (or excuse 

for) generic architectures without predefi ned programs (Koolhaas 2003). For Koolhaas 

and his concept of the Generic City, it is not only the rhythm of spatial impressions 

that defi nes architecture, but also the rapid rhythm of change that dictates how an 

urbanity should be designed so that it can accommodate both that change itself and 

the movements causing it. 

We can compare Koolhaas’ Hollywood-coulisse of the Generic City with Constant’s 

idealistic New Babylon, a Situationist and radical draft for a future city freed from 

utilitarian labor in an oncoming ludic age: “Completely covered, artifi cially climatized and 

lit, and raised high above the ground on huge columns. Inhabitants are given access 

to powerful, ambience-creating resources to construct their own spaces whenever and 

wherever they desire. Light, acoustics, color, ventilation, texture, temperature, and 

moisture are infi nitely variable. Movable fl oors, partitions, ramps, ladders, bridges, and 

stairs are used to construct veritable labyrinths of the most heterogeneous forms in 

which desires continuously interact” (Lootsma 2007). In the urban game New Babylon, 

the city’s very structure is subject to change and movement, and the Homo Ludens 

constantly adventures through this large-scale, inconsistent playground, always on 

the move. 

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One current and intriguing example of this vision of mobilizing architectural construction 

is architect David Fisher’s proposal for the Dynamic Towers, two high rise buildings 

– one in Dubai, the other in Moscow – made up of voice-controlled levels that selfrotate 

on a horizontal axis so that the building becomes its own power plant and a kind 

of housing toy: “When human and spatial form(s) relationships become interactive, 

Architecture comes alive” (Naos 2000). 

The architects and urban planners, theorists and practitioners cited above are motivated 

by contradictory design philosophies, but all acknowledge the key role of movement 

and rhythm in architecture and urban design – whether they understand these as the 

movement of the user in relation to the built environment, the movement of chance, or 

the habitual movement of structural play. 

We ourselves can clearly see how the consequences of the mobile age have rubbed 

off on architectural vocabulary – just think of airports, railways, the Autobahn, motels, 

car-friendly city planning and zoning, modular furniture, etc. Today, movement – or, 

metaphorically speaking, liquefaction8 – also impacts the architectural design process 

and building service and maintenance. The CAAD group at the ETH Zurich, for example, 

develops strategies and tools to overcome the container-space “dictate” by way of a 

total computerization and liquefaction of the architectural development and operation 

chain. Design drafts for buildings are programmed to achieve “individuality through 

movement” (Hovestadt 2006:78); CNC machines are employed to “print” pavilions; and 

networked, programmable structures and functions not only solve spatial composition 

problems, but also allow for emergent and adaptable (we can say: rhythmical) systems 

in architecture in building services, for example. 

8 In this context, cf. Asendorf (2004), who discusses movement and the concept of “liquid spatiality” in modern 

architecture.

The natures of movement and rhythm interrelate, as can be seen from the above 

examples, drawn from the fi elds of architecture and urban planning. They can occur 

relationally, aesthetically, topologically, navigationally, socially – in total: strategically. Yet 

although these philosophies are distinguishable as design rhetorics, we are proposing 

that all are implicitly or explicitly based on the following intrinsic assumptions: 

Architectural Movement 

Architectural movement is a relocation process of one or more subjects, objects, 

or spaces in space over time. 

Architectural Rhythm 

Architectural rhythm is the variation of measured movements in space 

over time. 

We have now outlined and defi ned how movement and rhythm are considered in 

architectural thinking and design, but before we examine notions of movement and 

rhythm in the study of play in greater detail, we will make a little excursion into a bridging 

fi eld that embodies, at a fundamental level, both movement and rhythm (see Lefebvre 

and Borden) and play: that is, dance. 


in Dance Notati on 

Play can become a kind of dance. In fact, Huizinga (1987) argues that dance is a 

particular and particularly perfect form of play: both phenomena are identical in nature. 

Because this is the case, and because, Huizinga believes, when we mention play, we 

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somewhat imply dance, he neglects to explore the topic at greater depth (Huizinga 

1987:181). This is an unfortunate decision on the part of the pioneering game scholar, 

since a proper understanding of dance would certainly shed light onto the nature of play. 

Caillois, another giant of game studies, goes a little further, subsuming dance as a kind 

of play and holding that dancing represents a form of disorderly movement that causes 

pleasure (and giddiness) and that falls under the greater heading ilinx, play and games 

based on the pursuit of vertigo (Caillois 2001:25). More clearly than Huizinga, Caillois 

points at that which constitutes dance: movement. But what is our understanding of 

movement and rhythm in the study of dance and in and of themselves? 

Perhaps the most representative and movement-focused research approach is that 

of Kinetography Laban or Labanotation, a movement notation system similar to music 

notation that “indicate[s] the accurate rhythm of movement” (Hutchinson 1977:3). It is 

particularly intended for the fi eld of dance and generally aims to analyze and “record 

objectively the changes in the angles of the limbs, the paths in space, and the fl ow 

of energy [as well as] movement motivation and the subtle expression and quality” 

(1977:4). 

Labanotation – originally called Schrifttanz, i.e. scribe dance – is named after one 

of the founders of European Modern Dance and community dancing, the dancer, 

choreographer, and theoretician Rudolf Laban (1879-1958). Laban developed this visual 

recording system in the 1920s, distilling basic movements from existing movement 

sequences and translating these movements into a family of icons. Labanotation holds 

that movement is the result of the release of energy through a muscular response to an 

inner or outer stimulus that produces a visible result in time and space. Note that Laban’s 

notation does not record the initial stimulus or the exact muscular response; instead, the 

change produced by muscular action is recorded. This also includes resulting changes 

such as the placement of limbs in space-time, body shape, or inner body tensions that

accompany the initial change. Dance is thus understood as a language of expressive 

gestures. One way to notate movement using Labanotation is the Structural Form, 

which records the body and its parts, space (i.e. direction, level, distance, and degree 

of motion), time (i.e. meter and duration) and dynamics (i.e. quality or texture – like, for 

example, strong, heavy, elastic, accented, or emphasized). 

Note how Laban’s system assumes that the purpose of any action may be to relate to 

one’s own body, another person, an object, or a space (or part of space). The notion of 

rhythm, eventually, is linked to translating a basic recurrent beat or rhythmic pattern in 

music into physical action (1977:16). What does this mean in the context of play? 

Because computing technologies allow for the framing and constructing of motion, in 

real-time digital games, not only does the player prescribe the movements of the playeravatar 

(or, more generally speaking, the movements of the player-representation), but 

at the same time, the software program triggers player movements, detecting collision 

and scrutinizing whether or not the notational instructions are carried out in an orderly 

fashion. Refl ecting on Labanotation, Pias argues that in this context, we can think of 

gameplay as a kind of dance (2002:34). Based on Pias, but also on Laban, we can 

propose a more general and more dialectical way to look at play through the lens of 

dance. First, a stimulus – which can be a solo event, a beat, or a rhythmic pattern 

– provides the player with something to respond to or with which to synchronize; in 

response to this stimulus, the player enacts a movement. This movement (or rhythm) 

places the player in a novel relation to another player, an object, or a space, possibly 

triggering a response. 

Recently, Laban’s system has inspired other notational attempts. For example, in her 

German language doctoral dissertation, Gesche Joost (2006:65ff.) presents a visual 

notation system as an alternative analysis and information visualization method for 

a rhetorically oriented fi lm analysis, intended to serve both as a tool and a language 

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that transcends the composition of an opus. A notational system similar to that 

of Laban or Joost that would allow for the recording and even designing of play or 

gameplay has not yet been fully conceived, but will be an important topic in future game 

design research. 

Analyzing the relationship between bodily actions and the corresponding responses 

from technology in two Sony Eyetoy games for the Sony PlayStation 2, Loke et al. 

(2007) have applied, among other movement-interaction frameworks, the Structural 

Form in Labanotation according to Hutchinson and other specialists in the fi eld. Their 

contribution draws on the increasingly phenomenological philosophy in interaction 

design that all human actions, including cognitive acts, represent embodied action and 

that the bodily experience of movement is a way to access the world and objects in 

the world (2007:692). This stance of a “lived space,” of course, can be traced back 

to Lefebvre. 

The analysis of the two games – a martial arts game and a musical beat mimicking 

game – operationalized gameplay into four basic actions: (a) selection (a wave 

gesture movement); (b) striking a moving object against a fi xed target (a reach or 

fl ick movement); (c) striking a fi xed target (a slashing or punching movement); and 

(d) striking a moving target (a slashing, punching, slapping, or swatting movement). 

The authors found that the existing notation did not allow researchers to capture the 

“lived movement as performed through interaction with the Eyetoy interface” (Loke 

et al. 2007:700). Therefore, the authors extended the Structural Form to include 

interface aspects, differentiating body parts into Hands, Arms, Upper Body, Legs, and 

Support for the movement transcription. This extension makes it possible to transcribe 

gameplay performance in reference to what Labanotation classifi es as a “Dab” effort 

– a movement light in weight, direct in space, and sudden in time. For example, game 

events are represented alongside the body staff: a circle represents a fl ying CD that 

emerges from the center of the screen moving towards the upper right corner of the

screen. In particular with regard to pervasive games that increasingly involve physical 

body movements, Loke et al. demonstrate how to use Labanotation as an analysis tool 

and potential game design tool. 

Given our human ability to move and to both react to and create rhythm, the discussion 

of play as movement that follows will certainly resonate. 


in the Investi gati on of Play 

In his time, German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who was born 

in Stuttgart in 1770 and who studied – together with Schelling and Hölderlin – theology 

in Tübingen, developed a radically new form of logic: dialectic. Dialectic thinking 

embodies a speculative Denkbewegung – in English, a thinking movement. This 

movement begins when one thinks about something that exists. Then, from the starting 

point, a difference or ”other” emerges. The movement eventually manages to overcome 

this difference, thereby producing new knowledge and a new starting point. Hegel’s 

dialectic thus not only posits how opposites unite, but also attempts to explain the 

constitutive movement and process of all things, material and immaterial – of existence 

itself (Ludwig 1997). Hegel, we could say, is not only the philosopher of movement who 

interprets perfectly designed thinking in terms of movement and, conversely, moving in 

terms of thinking; rather, he is also the philosopher whose dialectical moving describes 

a kind of play – that is, a speculation between thesis and antithesis that culminates in 

the (temporary) fusion through movement of the two initial opposites in a moment of 

concrete universality (Mitscherling 1992). 

Such a philosophical investigation of play-movement could be criticized as either 

too esoteric or too speculative (though given Hegel’s understanding of speculative 

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philosophy, this would not so much be criticism as praise). Sutton-Smith would maybe 

dedicate a chapter to Hegel called, “Rhetorics of Idealism.” Hegel’s identifi cation of the 

special relationship between play and movement, however, only guided later thinking, 

helping to pave the path towards a seminal and phenomenological work dedicated to 

the study of games, play, and movement: F. J. J. Buytendijk’s Het spel van mensch 

en dier als openbaring van levensdriften (1932), published in German as Wesen und 

Sinn des Spieles (Buytendijk 1933). In the following paragraphs, the German language 

version is used to describe Buytendijk’s concepts. 

This theoretical work by the Dutch comparative psychological anthropologist presents 

a structural interpretation of children’s and animal’s play. Offering many behavioral 

examples, Buytendijk analyzes how both play and games dialectically transcend the 

opposition between player and play-other, which can take the form of another player, 

a plaything, or the environment. Note that this form of dialectical argumentation links 

Buytendijk to Hegel, although the former does not reference the latter. Buytendijk 

himself, though, is referenced by Johan Huinzga in the opening pages of Homo Ludens 

(Huizinga 1971:10). 

There, Huizinga criticizes Buytendijk for explaining play as a seconding vehicle that 

serves a biological purpose, arguing that this kind of theory fails to investigate the 

holistic nature of play and games, what and how they are, and what they mean to the 

player (1971:12). Given Huizinga’s general stance, this is certainly a valid judgment: 

Huizinga proposes that play and games interrelate with human culture, that they are, 

fundamentally, the base and factor of culture, fi nding their expression in myths and rituals, 

law and order, traffi c, handicraft and art, poetry, scholarship, and science (1971:13). 

Perhaps it is because of Huizinga’s unfavorable review – and the wide infl uence of 

Homo Ludens – that Buytendijk’s work appears to have never been properly translated 

into English and is seldom, if ever, cited by researchers.

The impression Huizinga gives us of Buytendijk is, however, to some extent misleading. 

Buytendijk does indeed ask: “What is play? What are games? And why do we play?” 

(Buytendijk 1933:9ff.). And in the foreword to the German translation of his work, Kurt 

Lewin, a leading modern pioneer of social psychology, underlines the work’s breadth of 

perspective; “weltmännisch,” Lewin calls it (Lewin 1933:8), in English, “urbane,” arguing 

that it attempts to explicate the general lineaments of play and games. Of course, 

Huizinga is right about Buytendijk’s biologistical argument, which mainly attempts to 

illustrate how play and games span human (child and adult) and animal behavior, 

connecting the two, and how play and games can be interpreted psychologically and 

anthropologically as expressions of life drives in both humans and animals. Huizinga 

dismisses this framework as common knowledge (Huizinga 1971:11). But like Huizinga, 

Buytendijk understands “man as player” from childhood to adulthood, always seeking to 

understand play as passively expecting or actively seeking luck in life (see a late article 

by Buytendijk that appeared in the architectural magazine Deutsches Architektenblatt, 

in which he examines the meaning of play and games (Buytendijk 1995)). Yet, for 

Buytendijk, the “primitive” play and the rule-based game both pursue fi ctional, “as-if” 

purposes (Buytendijk 1933:159). 

That Kurt Lewin wrote the foreword to the German translation of Buytendijk’s book 

is not a coincidence; before we proceed with a presentation of Buytendijk’s work, 

we must fi rst make a small digression to introduce Lewin’s relevant ideas and briefl y 

trace the history of their reception. This will allow us to better appreciate the impact of 

Buytendijk’s theory of play and games and the concept of movement therein. 

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4.4. Excursus: Movement by Valence 

and Aff ordance 

Kurt Lewin’s early work – the portion on which we will concentrate – is concerned 

with the stimulative nature of objects and environments in relation to a subject. In the 

1930s, Lewin tried to develop a formal, non-mathematical heuristic for psychology. 

The foundations for this language were presented in English in his book Principles 

of Topological Psychology (Lewin 1936), the fi rst in a series of works dedicated to 

explaining the situational behavior of a person in terms of the forces (or vectors) acting 

on him or her. Five years earlier, however – that is, two years before Buytendijk published 

Wesen und Sinn des Spiels in German – Lewin had already published (in German) 

several major ideas inspired by his experiments with children, cf. Lewin (1931/1982). 

Lewin’s central idea from this time is best paraphrased (and best known) as Lewin’s 

Formula, a highly infl uential principle in perception and design-oriented areas of the 

social sciences: 

B=ƒ(P,E) 

where Behavior is a function of the Person and the Environment. Basically, Lewin’s 

formula is an approach to explaining the attractiveness of spaces or objects for 

motivating behavior in an individual. Lewin’s formula builds on the assumption that any 

given situation models a “force fi eld” in which forces – functional possibilities caused 

by people, objects, or spaces – act upon an individual from different directions and with 

different intensities while, at the same time, the individual acts back. To describe a single 

defi ning force in such situations, Lewin introduced the term “Aufforderungscharakter,” 

or “stimulative nature,” usually referred to simply as “valence.”

Valence addresses the phenomenon that properties of objects or environments are 

either positively or negatively motivating actions and that thereby, objects – including 

toys, the topic of Lewin’s research at the time – and environments trigger movement 

and determine the direction of behavior in any individual (Lewin 1931/1982:177). The 

valence of objects and environments can be attractive or repulsive to a person, thereby 

determining situational movement – for example, reaching for a toy or climbing onto 

something (ibid.). On a larger scale, valence also causes locomotion from region to 

region within a fi eld or from one fi eld to another. In all cases, valence adheres to an 

individual’s wants and condition. To describe the sum of force fi elds in a person’s life, 

Lewin later introduced the term “hodological space.” This space can be expressed in 

the form of a psychologically defi ned topology in which paths and vectors between fi elds 

represent not the shortest paths, but the paths of least resistance (Lewin 1982:66f.). 

Note that the concept of the stimulative nature of objects and environments was also 

the inspiration for Gibson’s “theory of affordances” (Gibson 1977), which we mention 

here to demonstrate the historical evolution from Lewin to today. Yet in this work, we 

will focus more on Lewin’s valence theory. 

Using the neologism “affordance,” Gibson explains that physical objects and 

environments have latent and objectively measurable “action possibilities” that allow 

and animate – i.e. “afford” – an agent to perform an action. Affordances, then, can be 

thought of as natural relationships between an agent and the world. Action possibilities, 

then, depend on the agent’s ability to recognize these affordances and carry them 

out. Note that Gibson’s reading of allowance implies that an object or an environment 

can become actionable in virtually every way the agent wants it to and is capable of 

making it. For example, a soccer ball can be rolled or kicked, but also sat on or used 

for something less obvious. This plethora of possible relationships between agent and 

object or environment underlines that in Gibson’s reading, an affordance need not 

be visible. 

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This kind of natural, objective, and visually-based possibility of interactions between an 

agent and an object’s or an environment’s gestalt, surfaces, colors, layout, or textures 

differs from a second, widely popular approach to the principle of affordance. Norman 

(1990), in a designerly publication, limits action possibilities to an affordance that is 

easily discoverable by an individual. Such an affordance “suggests” an activity and, 

according to Norman, can thus be considered “good” design. 

The difference between these two understandings of affordance, although not explicitly 

stated, can be seen in the Affordance entry in the Universal Principles of Design. 

There, Lidwell/Holden/Butler (2003:20) offer the example of round wheels being more 

conducive to rolling than square ones and of a door handle affording pulling in that it 

suggests the act of pulling, by the way of form factor, position on the door etc. Whereas 

in product design, the designer works with physical objects such as door handles that 

can have both actionable possibilities and perceived affordances, in screen-based 

design, designers needs to make sure that “clicking on [the] object is a meaningful, 

useful action, with a known outcome” (Norman 1999:40). 

In addition to the principle of perceivable affordance, as exemplifi ed with the door 

handle, further design principles for so called “user-centered design” (a term coined by 

Norman 1990) include the following: 

● providing a good conceptual model for the participant, featuring a 

consistent presentation of operations and results and a consistent 

system image geared towards the goal of assuring understandability and 

coherence of design; 

● making things visible; 

● designing good mappings so that the individual can determine the 

relationship between actions and results;

● providing feedback for the participant concerning the results of actions 

(Norman 1990:52ff.). 

Norman’s work has become a major textbook in the disciplines of human-computer 

interaction as well as in interaction, graphical, and industrial design. His concept of 

discoverable affordance has, in other words, become commonplace and well-loved for 

the way it stresses understanding the participant’s goals, plans, values, beliefs, prior 

experiences, and embeddedness as a kind of ecology that can assist in motivating an 

agent to interact with an object or an environment (Gibson 1979). 

In his philosophical quest to discover a way to create the ideal of an experienced 

serendipitous space for each individual through dwelling, Otto Bollnow (1963) 

demonstrates Lewin’s importance for architectural building. Bollnow extends Lewin’s 

hodological space, which focuses on paths, with the concept of an activity space 

experienced by the individual via walking paths, a totality of nodes, and, ultimately, 

human hands that enable the individual to hold on to and grab objects in space 

(1963:202ff.). This activity space, Bollnow reasons, requires “leeway,” 9 (1963:210ff.) 

which designers must grant – for only when they do, and man settles in a space to truly 

dwell in it, trusting both in the building and in the greater context, can “true living” be 

achieved (1963:310). 

This brief digression demonstrates how Lewin’s legacy can be traced not only 

in psychological disciplines, but also in the context of mediated interactions and 

in architectural theory. It also provides a rough-and-ready preparation for better 

understanding the relationship of games and space and the impact of Buytendijk’s 

concepts, some of which we consider cardinal for the study and the design of games. 

Time and again, we will refer to Lewin and the stimulative nature of objects and 

9 Note that in the German language original, Bollnow uses the term “Spielraum,” meaning “play space” or “play.” 

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environments discussed above. And now, we will end our digression and proceed to 

introduce Buytendijk’s ideas. 

4.5. Play as Movement and Putt y between Player, 

Object, and Environment 

Based on extensive observation of both children and adults as well as young animals, 

Buytendijk infers that all play and all games are executed through movements. These 

movements, he further contends, represent not only a means to an end, but also a 

substantial component of the ludic activity and as such, can be both “real” and “virtual” 

(Buytendijk 1933:62). 

To illustrate this, Buytendijk discusses the game of chess, which seems to be void 

of physical, or “real” body movement, and instead features “virtual” movements 

(1933:63f.). This view roughly coincides with the defi nition presented at the beginning 

of this book, which, in accordance with Bartle (2004), defi ned the “real” as that which 

is, the ”imaginary” as that which is not, and the ”virtual” as that which is not real, yet 

has the effect or form of something that is real. According to Buytendijk, the movement 

of the chess fi gure is not actually a physical movement of the body, although it could 

be argued that moving one’s arm, hand, and fi ngers does, in fact, constitute physical 

movements. But for Buytendijk, the movement in chess is symbolic and, in being 

symbolic, virtual: the chess pieces symbolize a real king, a real queen, a real battlefi eld, 

etc. Although chess is a board game and, as such, not implemented by a computer, it 

is nonetheless a virtual game that simulates an environment. 

In order for play and/or a game to take place, there must be movement. This movement 

has its roots in Bewegungsdrang – in English, an urge for movement (roughly, motor 

activity) – composed of two related phenomena: liking to move and needing to move’

(1933:67). Buytendijk identifi es qualities of these movements, the most important of 

which follow: 

● All play is play with something or someone, and togetherness takes place 

through movement (1933:44). Without an entity to play with (including 

oneself), there is no movement and no play. 

● The dynamic of all play is created through the balanced alternation 

between tension and termination (Lösung, or solution) (1933:122). 

● The dynamic of play has its roots in surprise – that is, the “wayward 

variety” (1933:115) of the entity against or with whom the player plays. 

Play means not only that a person plays with something, but also that 

something plays with that person (1933:117). 

● In order for play to take place (through movement), there must be 

repetitive Hin und Her, to-and-fro, between player and play-other 

(1933:70). The nature of play, then, is rhythmic. That is: play comprises 

ordered measurable movements between player and plaything. This toand-fro 

can take place, for example, within the player; or between a chess 

player and chess fi gure; or between a soccer player and soccer ball; or 

between lovers. Qualities of movement include, for example, intensity, 

pace, proportion, and pattern, taking place during the amplitude between 

tension and termination (1933:particularly pages 62ff. and 114ff.). In 

consideration of our earlier discussion about movement and rhythm in 

architecture and dance, we can state, then, that play and dance are 

related by rhythm, and that through rhythm, interaction unfolds, like a 

dance between two entities. Buytendijk himself considers dance to relate 

to play in that both feature rhythmic movements, but argues that dance, 

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like swinging and oscillating, is far more rhythmically explicit in the way 

that its tension and termination are organized (1933:120). 

● Play occurs through an internal drive that seeks deliverance and/or is 

triggered by allurements in the play-other (1933:100) – that is, “juvenile 

dynamics” (Buytendijk 1933:114ff.). The desire for environmental and 

object attachment (1933:146) explains why play takes place in the fi rst 

place. Rule-based play consolidates play-movements so that games 

become more ordered – become, so to speak, “adulted” play (1933:151f.). 

● Every type of play requires some kind of playing fi eld, and many types of 

play entail play rules (1933:118). 

● The playing fi eld defi nes the outer borders of the dynamic to-and-fro of 

play and constrains the movements spatio-temporally (1933:118f.). Note 

how this concept of the playing fi eld mirrors the concept of the magic 

circle put forth by Salen and Zimmerman (2004), who borrowed the term 

from Huizinga (1971) and adjusted it to their needs of their argument. 

● Play rules are the virtual inner borders of the to-and-fro that defi ne what 

cannot happen during play (as opposed to defi ning what has to happen) 

(Buytendijk 1933:119). 

Even if we do not accept the basis of Buytendijk’s argument because it seems all 

too biologistical, and even if many of his assertions are tied to the study of child and 

animal play, following the communicative strategy of a “progress rhetoric” (Sutton- 

Smith1997:42), the qualities of play he lists, taken by themselves, are inspiring and 

contribute signifi cantly to the contemporary (English-language) discourse in game 

studies and game design, which has always overlooked Buytendijk, the “other” Dutch 

pioneer.

Bearing Buytendijk in mind, as well as our discussion of movement and rhythm in 

architecture and dance notation, we can think of play as an activity tied to movement 

in which we react to rhythm and strive to act rhythmically. This notion is quite similar 

to the argument that regardless of whether interacting with toy, puzzle, or game, a 

player strives to recognize and master patterns because “Once we see a pattern, we 

delight in tracing it and in seeing it reoccur” (Koster 2005:27). If Koster is correct in 

saying that “Fun in games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is 

the act of solving puzzles that makes games fun. In other words, with games, learning 

is the drug” (Koster 2005:40), then we can elaborate on Buytendijk’s work and say that 

playing is a fi ctional practice. 

4.6. A Kineti cist Defi niti on of Play 

Let us reconsider the widely cited defi nition that “play is free movement within a more rigid 

structure” (Salen and Zimmerman 2004:304) now that we have examined Buytendijk’s 

observations and discussed movement and rhythm in the preceding subsections. Is the 

defi nition valid for our attempt to present an architecturally framed defi nition of play? 

We propose an alternative view, for which we borrow some of Buytendikj’s concepts, 

sans biologism and drive argumentation. From Lewin, we borrow the idea of valence. 

And from architecture and dance notation, we borrow the understanding that movement 

always implies a relation to a particular space, and that in play, it is subject to a possible 

rhythmization. 

To prepare for our defi nition, we will fi rst discuss the special role of movement in the 

context of play, following which we will discuss the formal nature of play rhythm. 

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4.6.1. Play-Movement 

In order to strictly differentiate the term “movement” from the concept of “playmovement,” 

we will henceforth refer to the latter as “kinesis”, derived from the Greek “ 

”, meaning movement or motion. Let us look briefl y at two alternative uses of 

the term. 

In physics, objects – such as a soccer ball that has been kicked – have extra energy 

when in motion. This type of energy is called kinetic energy. It is a physical quantity and 

a function of velocity co-located with the object; it depends both on the inner nature of 

the object and the relationship between object and so-called inertial frame of reference. 

Our soccer ball, in other words, is subject to gravity, and when kicked, kinetic energy 

changes the gravitational fi eld of the ball. In cell biology, the term kinesis denotes the 

non-directional movement or the illusion of directed movement of a cell or an organism 

in response to a stimulus like, for example, temperature or humidity; it can also denote 

a change of activity in that cell or that organism. 

In play and the study of play as proposed herein, kinesis refers to all movements, 

physical or virtual, that a player enacts to relate to a play-other, i.e. another player, 

a play object, or a play space. Without a play-other, there is no kinesis, and without 

kinesis, there is no play relationship. At its core, kinesis is a spatial activity because 

all play-movements imply space. And as opposed to a mere movement, a playmovement 

is always an attempt to relate to someone or something else. Kinesis thus 

comprises, for example, pointing, fl icking, grabbing, holding, clicking, dragging, pulling, 

pushing, punching, constructing, maneuvering, walking, running, jumping, stretching, 

sneaking, ducking, climbing, rotating, aiming, kicking, hitting, combating, assisting, 

and cooperating, as well as more verbal movements such as trading, bidding, bluffi ng, 

negotiating, and, always, imagining.

Unlike creative media such as books or fi lms, digital environments represent space 

that we can move through: “The computer’s spatial quality is created by the interactive 

process of navigation” (Murray 1997:80). We believe that movement is indeed a 

central feature of play as a human practice in space that makes it possible to think of 

play and digital environments such as computer games as being constituted through 

relational movements. 

4.6.2. Play Rhythm 

Play rhythm can come into existence via kinetic interactions between player and playother. 

In certain cases, the player adjusts to an outer rhythm. Note that the concept of 

play rhythm differs from the concept of valence. Valence describes positive or negative 

stimuli. A rhythm describes the process of to-and-fro kinesis between player and 

play-other. 

In our earlier discussion of movement and rhythm we proposed to detail general rhythm 

types from the point of view of the player. Play rhythmic types, then, indicate how the 

play rhythm comes about formally, not motivationally. Play rhythmic types express the 

general play rhythmic relationship between a player and a play-other. We can divide 

this relationship into the following types: 

● Self-created rhythm: A player creates a sequence of measured 

movements over time (for example, whistling). 

● Co-created rhythm: Together with another person, an object, or a space, 

a player jointly creates measured movements over time (for example, 

fi nger wrestling, playing the piano, playing ball). 

● Extrinsic rhythm: A player, an object, or a space creates or exhibits 

measured movements over time (for example, a beat, a pumping, an 

opening/closing, a landscape for skateboarding). 

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Play rhythm types are not mutually exclusive and can intermix during play, when, 

for example, an extrinsic rhythm becomes the basis for co-created play rhythm. 

Extrinsic rhythms in particular can be either proposed (the player volunteers to adjust 

movements to a sequence of measured movements) or imposed (the player is forced 

to adjust movements to a sequence of measured movements). For example, in the 

videogame Rock Band (2007), the player is forced to adjust movements to a sequence 

of measured movements imposed by the bundled play-object of the console, controller, 

and display. The difference between proposed and imposed play can be traced in the 

ways that game rules tightly structure kinesis, creating predetermined gameplay (so 

called “hard rails”) or non-linear gameplay. Jenkins and Squire describe how in the 

3D platforming game Rayman 2 (1999), caverns, bridges, tunnels, paths, and ledges 

have been designed as “narrative rationales for various constraints on our movement” 

(Jenkins and Squire (2002:69), imposing the rhythm of spatial exploration. In the case 

of imposed play rhythms, the tension and termination amplitude will tend to match the 

waveform of the play rhythm. 

Kinetic to-and-fro and play rhythm can emerge in player-player interactions, like the 

jump interaction between two of the author’s students from Tsinghua University’s 

Academy for Art and Design in Beijing, who demonstrate a childhood activity during a 

pervasive game design workshop. See Figure 3.

Figure 3 

Kinesis among participants in a pervasive 

game design workshop conducted 

by the author at Tsinghua University in 

Beijing in 2007. 

Play rhythm can also emerge from kinesis between an individual and an environment. 

In the SimCity series (since 1989), for example, the player, like a child sitting crosslegged 

in a sandbox, is either “attempting to build a city like the one on the [game] 

box or actively destroying a successful town with one of the game’s built-in disasters” 

(Thomas 2007b:211). Alternatively, play rhythm can emerge from kinesis between the 

player and an object. This is the case in all toy-play, and in the way children learn to 

interact with the world by playing (see Oerter (1999)). 

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Play rhythm in games can also emerge from interactions between space and space. 

Consider, for example, the Nintendo GameCube and Nintendo DS game Animal 

Crossing (2002), in which “the gameworld is synched to the console calendar and clock 

so that events in the game occur simultaneously with events in the real world, including 

major holidays, weather, seasons and the transition between night and day” (Kelley 

2007a:180). Physical toy objects such as Sony’s robotic dog Aizo react to the player’s 

kinesis of stroking, but also interacts with its environs in that, for example, it perfectly 

navigates alongside house walls, never walking into them. 

Eventually, play dynamic is created from the way that play rhythm relates to the 

amplitude of tension and termination. In the Rock Band predecessor game Guitar Hero 

(2005), the player must tap buttons on a guitar-neck-like controller along to the rhythm 

of a song represented by dots on “guitar string” lanes. Playing a song thus becomes 

paying attention to the play rhythm. In this case, the external play rhythm matches the 

tension and termination amplitude between the buttons, the tension and termination 

amplitude defi ned by the song length, and, fi nally, the smaller (amplitudinal) portions of 

the song, such as verse, chorus, and bridge parts. 

In a fi rst-person shooter, eliminating a rapidly approaching enemy bot requires playrhythmically 

fi ring bullets, understanding the play-rhythmic movements of the bot, and 

many other kinetic factors, but differs from the overall tension and termination amplitude 

created by the bot. The overall spawning frequency of bots as well as their distribution 

in relation to the spatial layout of the game map, however, creates a play rhythm closer 

to the tension and termination amplitude. 

The kinetic processes described above explain how play rhythms are formed. Let us 

now look at how these formations can be organized alongside the concepts of player, 

space, and object. If we take space to mean any type of medium, there is a correlation 

between this three tier model of player-space-object and human-computer interaction

esearch that empirically investigates how people use or respond to virtually any 

computing product: “Interactive technologies can operate in three basic ways: as tools, 

as media, and as social actors” (Fogg 2003:22). Fogg’s research is a continuation of 

the widespread notion that people treat computers like real people, real places, and 

real objects (Reeves and Nass 1996). Reversing the quotation, we can assert that 

tool, media, and social actor are the fundamental categories into which we can classify 

play rhythm. 

Such an elementary fi rst-order scheme for play rhythm agency has been organized 

in Table 1. Note that the arrows express the kinesis between player and play-other: 

The arrows visualize kinesis, which in turn output kinesis from the play-other. For the 

purposes of this table, player A plays by herself or himself, engaging, for example, 

in an intellectual play activity. Meanwhile, player B plays with herself or himself or 

with an object or space. The table, in other words, understands spectatorship as a 

play pleasure. 

Player A Player B Space Object 

Player A Player A Player A Player A Player B Player A Space Player A Object 

Player B Player B Player A Player B Player B Player B Space Player B Object 

Space Space Player A Space Player B Space Space Space Object 

Object Object Player A Object Player A Object Space Object Object 

Table 1 

An elementary first-order scheme for play rhythm agency. 

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Our concept of play rhythm relates to the notion of interactivity in games and play. 

Sellers (2006), for example, describes interactivity in the context of soft- and hardware: 

A computer program (or any other device) can be said to be interactive 

if it: presents state information to the user, enables the user to take 

action indirectly related to that state, changes state based on the user’s 

action, and displays that new state. (2006:13) 

From a less computer-centric, more ludic perspective, Salen and Zimmerman argue 

that play implies interactivity in that playing is interacting: when someone plays with 

someone or something, he or she inherently interacts with that other person or thing10 (Salen and Zimmerman 2004:58). Based on this assertion, we propose looking at 

interactivity in play as the potential for a play rhythm. 

Our fi rst-order play rhythm matrix can be extended into n-order play rhythms matrices. 

For example, in order to interact with an object, another object may be needed. Figure 

4 shows a dear colleague at an arcade, playing a high-striker attraction called King of 

the Hammer, teaming up with a giant plastic mallet object to strike King of Hammer’s 

rubber padded lever object. This situation can serve as an example of second order 

interactivity. 

10 Although often defi ned, interactivity is an ambiguous term whose exact meaning can be hard to capture; a 

comparison of the very different defi nitions that have been offered over time reveals as much. In the groundbreaking 

German book Interaktivität. Ein transdisziplinärer Schlüsselbegriff, edited by Leggewie and Bieber 

(2004), researchers from diverse backgrounds discuss the concept from their individual scholarly perspectives, 

which range from the anthropological to the psychological. By comparing the book contributions, Leggewie and 

Bieber fi nd that the term itself is fuzzy, yet profound, varying in defi nition and usage from article to article. 

Although their book reveals a lack of defi nitorial grip, Leggewie and Bieber identify three key terms which appear 

throughout the contributions and which can function as interactivity’s begriffl iche Objektträger (2004:14), in 

English, conceptual slide (Raum, Körper und Interface (ibid.), in English, Space, Body, and Interface (translated 

by spw)). Note how the three conceptual lenses of player, space, and object correspond with the differentiations 

we have identifi ed in our discussion of movement and rhythm in architectural theory, in dance notation, and in the 

section dedicated to the notion of play-as-movement and to-and-fro between player and play-other as proposed 

by Buytendijk.

Figure 4 

An exemplary possibility of second 

order interactivity: A player in action 

at a high striker attraction, using a 

plastic mallet to strike the rubber 

padded lever. 

Let us abstract the concept of 

a second-order play rhythm 

(which we can then also use 

to represent any n-order play 

rhythm) so that we can work with 

it in design processes. Consider 

a hypothetical case in which 

a player plays with an object through another player: i.e. Player Player Object. 

This could be the case in, say, a role-playing multi-player game in which player 1, 

called Tinuviel, asks player 2, Ragnar, to please pick up a healing potion on her behalf 

because Tinuviel’s inventory is overfi lled. To render our notation more exact, we would 

need the following: 

S = Space 

P = Player 

O = Object 

p = physical 

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v = virtual 

= kinesis 

where 

S1 (p) P1 (p) O1 (p) S (v) P1 (v) P2 (v) O2 (p) P2 

(p) O2 (p) S (v) P2 (v) O3 (v). 

Read aloud, this sequence expresses that over time in a physical space 1 (a living 

room), a physical player 1 (seated on a comfortable couch), who is situated in the 

virtual world of a game (World of Warcraft), uses a physical computer system (a 

notebook on the lap) to ask a player avatar played by player 2, who sits at his offi ce 

desk on the other side of the planet, to please consider picking up the healing potion 

over there as a favor, which, after some consideration, player 2 eventually does. With 

games that increasingly cross media and are played in both computer-simulated and 

physical spaces, such a notation can be helpful to describe interaction sequences for 

both design specifi cation and project documentation purposes. 

In this book, this notation serves as a rough sketch and as an example for the many 

possibilities we have for recording play rhythm over time. Much more thorough future 

research must be conducted to further develop these ideas. 

4.6.3. Play Defi ned 

In conclusion, we propose the following human-centric defi nition of play, which we 

will use for building on our prior discussion throughout the remainder of this book.

Play 

Play has four dimensions: 

● Whether physical or virtual, play is grounded in and executed 

through movement: The nature of play is kinetic. 

● Kinesis bridges a player with one or more players, play-objects, 

and/or play-environments (or combination thereof) that feature 

some kind of valence and, in their own ways, play back. 

● This dialectical to-and-fro creates and/or adjusts to a play rhythm, 

which relates to alternations between tension and termination: 

From both, a play dynamic emerges. 

● Play takes place on a play-ground and simultaneously defi nes 

that play-ground (i.e. by defi ning its boundaries in space and 

time). 

Our kineticist and play rhythmic model differs signifi cantly from Salen and 

Zimmerman’s model of free play within a more rigid structure. The model that has been 

developed here 

● explicitly differentiates between physical and virtual types of movement, 

thereby making it possible to analyze both mediated play and physical 

play within one framework and from one starting point – namely, motion; 

● underlines the relationship of player and play-other (e.g. another player, 

an object, an environment, or a combination thereof); 

● helps us to understand how that with which the player plays has properties 

that make it more attractive or less attractive to play with; 

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● expresses the rhythmical nature of play dynamics; 

● ties the activity of play to a playing-fi eld, giving it space and time; 

● enables, from the very core of ludic activity, a discourse about play and 

games in relation to an architectural design understanding. 

4.7. Summary: Kineti c Playspace 

In our defi nition, kinesis defi nes the real or virtual movement that is embodied and 

co-located with play. Based on this defi nition of play, and loosely referring to Lewin’s 

special form of hodological space, we can conclude that every play situation creates a 

lived kineticist space over time. This kind of time-based space is created by the sum of 

tos-and-fros between all play elements. If one accepts the condition that “Architecture 

is the art of moving through space” (Naos 2000), one could even argue that such a 

kineticist space sculpts a kind of architectural play-frame; at the very least, one can 

visualize this fi rst and fundamental conceptual dimension of playspace. 

We can imagine a number of images that allow us a glimpse at how to capture kinesis, 

although none of them were produced with the concept of kinesis in mind. Rosemary 

Fiore has done a number of these long exposure shots of classic arcade games, taping 

one second of gameplay per frame; in one of her art pieces, we see the kinetic space 

co-created by the player and the game system of Tempest (Atari 1980). To illustrate 

how the spatial layout of a game such as Asteroids (Atari 1979) changes during the 

course of a level, Jesper Juul contributed similar long exposure shots to Space Time 

Play, cf. Juul (2007:34), see Figure 5. Finally, Figure 6 portraits golfer Natalie Gulbis 

and the path of her golf swing displayed in a long exposure shot; this image, of course, 

only visualizes the proximate kinesis of the golf player and golf club, leaving out the golf 

course and the golf ball’s trajectory.

Figure 6 

Long exposure shot of professional golfer 

Natalie Gulbis, showing the path 

of her golf club. © Donald Miralle. 

Photo reproduced by permission. 

Figure 5 

A time-lapse image of the classic 

video game Asteroids, illustrating 

how the spatial setup 

changes across a game level. 

Reproduced by permission 

from Jesper Juul. 

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5. The Enjoyment Dimension 

The terms “fun” “pleasure,” and “enjoyment” are similar in meaning, are often used 

interchangeably, and appear frequently in conversations about play. In a semantic 

study comparing their meanings, Blythe and Hassenzahl (2003) fi nd that enjoyment is 

a context-specifi c and superordinate term. We therefore use this term in our section’s 

title, in an effort to emphasize the enjoyment dimension of our conceptual playspace. 

Blythe and Hassenzahl further note that fun is culturally and experientially connotated 

as a form of distraction, whereas pleasure is connotated in terms of absorption. 

Nevertheless, the body of research we are using to investigate play uses pleasure as 

an agreed-on term not only to describe absorption, but also to describe more lightweight 

attractions. Therefore, we use pleasure throughout this book to imply both fun and 

“deeper” kinds of enjoyment. 

On the basis of the kinetic model of play proposed in the preceding section, we can now 

pose certain questions that will aid our discussion of the enjoyment dimension: What 

types of play pleasures can we distinguish? And how can these distinctions help us? 

By differentiating among types of play, we can investigate how player and play-other 

relate – that is, how kinesis can be further operationalized. We do this because we 

assume that particular play types oblige the player’s motivational expectations in a 

specifi c fashion11 (Fritz 2004, on the basis of Lewin’s valence and force fi eld theory); 

that, in other words, understanding play types lets designers please certain player types 

through design and thereby create suitable playspaces and gamespaces. Towards this 

design purpose, a number of relevant models are introduced and cross-compared, and 

a play pleasure model is developed and related to the kineticist argument. 

11 German: “kommt durch seine Reizkonfi guration den motivationalen Erwartungen der Spieler in spezifi scher 

Weise entgegen” (Fritz 2004:47).

To round up the discussion, other aspects of the enjoyment dimension are highlighted. 

Three questions are briefl y discussed: 

● What role does technology have in play enjoyment? 

● What types of emotions are triggered by playing? 

● How do players become deeply absorbed in a play dynamic; what makes 

playing enjoyable over time? 

All three questions contribute to an architectural framing of play. The fi rst question points 

out that play often embodies or is created with the help of some kind of technology. 

The second question underlines the fact that play is an activity that causes types of 

enjoyment. And the third question reminds us that in order for play sessions to take 

place over time and truly absorb players, certain requirements must be met. 

5.1. Caillois’ Play Typology 

In his seminal work Man, Play, and Games, Caillois (1962) put forward an oft-cited 

model of four fundamental play categories that builds directly on Huizinga’s Homo 

Ludens and attempts to understand play culturally and as a phenomenon that exists 

both “in and out of games”, as Salen and Zimmerman (2004:82) put it. In the book, 

Caillois divides ludic activities into agôn, games of competition, alea, games of chance, 

mimicry, games of simulation and role-play, and ilinx, games of vertigo and rapture. 

Caillois combines the four categories with a conceptual pair that helps to differentiate 

between wild, freestyle, improvisational play, which Caillois calls paida, and ludus, or 

rule-bound, formalized play (1962:27). Table 2 reproduces Caillois’ classifi cation of 

play and games in a simplifi ed fashion, with some examples taken from Man, Play, and 

Games for each cell in the grid. 

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PAIDA 

LUDUS 

AGÔN 

(Competition) 

ALEA 

(Chance) 

MIMICRY 

(Simulation) 

Unregulated sports Counting out rhymes Children’s 

initiations, masks 

Sports, chess, 

billiards 

Betting, roulette, 

lotteries 

Theater and 

spectacles 

Table 2 

Simplified classification of play and games after Caillois (1962). 

ILINX 

(Vertigo) 

Children whirling, 

horseback riding 

Skiing, mountain 

climbing 

According to Caillois, agôn – which comes from the Greek word , meaning 

competition – is the domain of play into which activities such as racing and wrestling, 

but also chess, football, and sports in general fall – i.e. competitive play and games, 

featuring elements such as combat, confrontation, rivalry, contest, or dueling. All 

games of agôn share the feature that players playing them seek to demonstrate their 

superiority in specifi ed areas (1962:14). 

Alea, from the Latin word for dice, is used to characterize any play that is subject to 

chance. In games such as betting, roulette, and lotteries, as opposed to games of 

agôn, “winning is the result of fate rather than triumphing over an adversary.” Less 

structured alea activities include, for example, counting-out rhymes (1962:17). 

Mimicry describes games and play activities of imaginary milieus and illusory 

characterizations, in which the player “makes believe or makes others believe that he is 

someone other than himself. He forgets, disguises, or temporarily sheds his personality 

in order to feign another” (1962:19). Typical mimicry activities include putting on masks, 

or staging theater plays. 

Lastly, ilinx, is used to describe play whose aim is to achieve vertigo, i.e. games “which 

consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and infl ict a

kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise ludic mind. In all cases, it is a question of 

surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign 

brisqueness” (Caillois 1962:23). Ilinx, then, is meant for games or activities that alter 

one’s perception like, for example, dancing or skiing. 

5.2. Caillois’ Model and Kinesis 

Taking into consideration our general play defi nition and the concept of kinesis, we can 

trace particular types of kinesis in all of Caillois’ categories: 

● Agonal kinesis includes, for example, athletic movements. Play dynamic 

is created by the to-and-fro between e.g. a running athlete and a tartan 

track as well as between competing athletes who watch their moving 

opponents; 

● Alea kinesis includes the virtual movements of chance, the movement 

fate imposes on players, and the to-and-fro between chance results, 

probabilities, and the player’s risk-taking; 

● Mimicry kinesis includes theatrical movements to stage an illusory 

character, virtual movement to convert something into make-believe, and 

the to-and-fro between character(s) and audience that creates a makebelieve 

situation; 

● Ilinx kinesis includes movements that cause vertigo in the player (such 

as descending a ski slope), movements made by the player in order 

to experience vertigo (such as spinning), and the to-and-fro dynamic 

between, for example, the skier and the steep mountain. 

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As can be seen, Caillois’ categorizations can be framed by the concept of kinesis. 

In turn, the concept of kinesis fi ts into and in fact fi lls out Caillois’ four categories. 

Caillois thus provides a useful foundation for distinguishing play types. And yet, from 

a designerly point of view, the connection between play, player, and play-other can be 

further specifi ed. In the succeeding subsection, we will take a look at how. 

5.3. Contemporary Models of Play Sti muli 

and Player Types Cross-Compared 

In this subsection, a number of models of play and interrelated player types are 

presented that both are based on and go beyond Caillois. These models are crosscompared, 

resulting in a new model, which is then set into relation with the concept 

of kinesis. 

Jürgen Fritz, whose works have never been translated from German into English, 

has conducted decade-long empirical research into both non-mediated and mediated 

play and games, using qualitative methods such as player interviewing and playability 

observations. Based on this research, Fritz has extended and further differentiated 

Caillois’ model of agôn, alea, mimicry, and ilinx in an effort to understand why players 

play. For this purpose, Fritz introduces an empirically based theory, which holds that 

play and game situations should be seen as “play constructs” combining, in varying 

intensities, eleven important sources of stimulus. These play constructs, Fritz suggests, 

can be described as “Reizkonfi gurationen” – in English, “stimulus confi gurations” 

(SCs), or combinations of stimuli found in the play construct that oblige “the player’s 

motivational expectations in a specifi c fashion” (Fritz 2004:47). Stimulus confi gurations 

can be found in fellow players, in objects, or in spaces (2004:45ff.). Playing, then, is a 

means of pleasing expectations; and play stimuli can also rouse play.

Fritz’ dialectical theory resembles and also corresponds to Buytendijk’s play dynamic 

without referring to it. Buytendijk’s to-and-fro conforms with the Fritzian bonding 

between stimulus confi guration and the player’s motivational expectation. At the same 

time, Fritz’ argumentation bears striking similarity to Lewin’s concept of the positive and 

negative stimulative nature of object or environmental properties, which was introduced 

earlier to demonstrate the similarity of Buytendijk’s thinking with the development of 

major design principles in human-computer interaction and general interaction design. 

In fact, Fritz (2004) mentions Lewin once, on page 171, but only in the context of 

cultural forces that defi ne how a player experiences play and games. Fritz’s model 

extends Caillois’ and merges it with Lewin’s, with Buytendijk, metaphorically speaking, 

standing by. 

Fritz’s eleven stimuli are described below; Caillois is referenced when appropriate. 

These stimuli can also be read with the kinetic model in mind: try and imagine what 

types of play-movement the individual stimuli imply. 

● Contesting: Fritz suggests placing sports games such as soccer into this 

category, which Caillois referred to as agôn. First-person shooter games 

also fall into this category, particularly multiplayer game maps. 

● Risk-taking: This type of play stimulus embodies courage or adventure. 

● Leaving it to chance: Caillois calls this play type alea, but Fritz assigns 

it its own category. 

● Amusing: The play situation caters to the player’s humor and provides 

entertainment with, for example, the help of comedy elements. 

● Pursuing vertigo: Caillois calls this ilinx; one example of which is riding 

a roller coaster. 

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● Meditating: With the help of biofeedback sensors and meditation 

exercises, games such as the meditation game The Journey to Wild 

Divine (Wild Divine Project 2003), measure player generated psycho- 

physiological output such as heart beat frequency and skin conductivity 

as a means of training relaxation. 

● Collecting: This stimulus centers on completing and/or systematizing a 

collection. 

● Role-playing: Caillois calls this category mimicry. 

● Savoring: Fritz means aesthetic and sensual experiences triggered 

by atmospheres; this category also includes gazing at landscapes and 

performance situations. 

● Creating: According to Fritz, the source of this stimulus is the possibility 

of “transcending oneself” 12 (Fritz 2004, S. 46); in other words, a player 

can generate, construct, and design. 

● Problem-solving: A play situation contains a puzzle, a mental challenge, 

or something to unravel. 

Fritz’s play stimuli can be compared to the four basic player types that Richard Bartle, 

designer of the fi rst multiuser dungeon (MUD), has suggested: achievers, explorers, 

socializers, and killers. In a study, Bartle (1996) found that players often have a primary 

play style and will only switch styles if it suits them. Whereas achievers want to overcome 

obstacles and accumulate rewards, explorers want to discover and understand the 

12 Note that the German term Fritz uses is Selbstentäusserung, which would literally translate to self-disposal 

and which, in both English and German, can also have a negative connotation. In fact, Fritz means to describe a 

positive feeling and implicitly refers to the concept of fl ow, which, as we have described, can cause self-detachment, 

cf. Csizszentmihalyi (1990).

gameworld and its mechanics, while socializers want to interact with other players 

and possibly role-play and, fi nally, killers want to cause distress to other players or 

the system. In a Website experiment entitled “playce,” conceptualized and launched 

by the author as an online portfolio in October 2006 at http://spw.playbe.com, Bartle’s 

four basic player types were translated into four miniature arcade games. The playce 

website is a place to play – hence the name, which combines the words “play” and 

“place.” At the same time, the name is also a play on words. The name of one of the 

author’s companies is “playbe”, making playce the natural progression if one follows 

the western alphabet. 

Figure 7 shows a screenshot of the Website’s main menu, with stills of the four mini 

games. There, the visitor can explore projects the author has been involved with during 

the past years. The visitor can either navigate the playce with a classic navigation / 

menu bar (on the bottom of the screen) or choose one of the four play modes on the 

left side of the screen to access the design spaces for which the author has created 

projects, such as CD-ROM, World Wide Web, or TV series in development. Each 

game’s mechanic caters to a certain type of player while simultaneously serving as a 

way to navigate the playce Website. In other words, one browses the site by playing, 

a procedure which could be called, for example, “navigaming” or “playvigating.” Once 

the visitor has carried out a mechanic successfully (e.g. killed, achieved, explored, 

socialized), she will be taken to her selection. Mind that the visitor can interrupt a play 

dynamic by moving the mouse from the left side of the screen, where the play action 

takes place, to the content zone on the right side. The Website combines game and 

interaction design with media experimentation, all the while posing the question of 

how play types may serve as interfaces to content, or, put another way, how typical 

application processes can be made more accessible through the use of game-like 

interfaces. More generally speaking, the Website is one example of how mini games 

and play types can be used to serve purposes beyond mere entertainment. 

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Figure 7 

Main menu of the author’s 

portfolio website at http:// 

spw.playbe.com. Four 

miniature arcade games 

let visitors navigate the 

content by catering to their 

preferred ‘playvigation’ 

mode. 

The author did not draw on any explicit navigational inspiration for the Website in 

the World Wide Web. The Website’s interaction metaphor, however, was certainly 

inspired by a research project carried out in 2001 by Dennis Chao from the University 

of New Mexico13 . In the project, Chao modifi ed the popular fi rst-person shooter video 

game Doom (1993) so that it could be used as an interface to an operating system 

administration task. The mod, called PSDoom, displays representations of UNIX 

processes instead of letting the system administrator use standard text-mode UNIX 

tools to view and manipulate these processes. For example, the system administrator 

13 Cf. cf. http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/fl ake/doom/chi/chi.html.

turns into a player who shoots at processes – i.e. “bloodthirsty mutants” – so that 

eliminating the mutants “kills” the UNIX process. In another example, just hitting a 

mutant in the game would lower the process priority. 

The playce Website takes the idea of using a game-like interface for a certain application 

task into the realm of the World Wide Web, applying it to the everyday task of navigating 

– that is, seeking and choosing menu items and content on a Website. In toto, Bartle’s 

player types have been an inspiring model for the playce Website, which has translated 

the types into navigational patterns. 

Another way of differentiating among player types was suggested by Fullerton 

(2008:92) in reference to a three-part TV series by Kennard, Brown, and The Institute 

of Play (2000), which addressed player types and pleasures of play by assuming 

the perspective of the player. Fullerton mentions that her list – which has been fully 

reproduced here as it appears in her book Game Design Workshop – is not exhaustive, 

and that some of the player types have not been equally addressed by digital games, 

leaving many new areas of play open for designers (Fullerton 2008:93): 

● The Competitor: Plays to best other players, regardless of the game 

● The Explorer: Curious about the world, loves to go adventuring; seeks 

outside boundaries – physical or mental 

● The Collector: Acquires items, trophies, or knowledge; likes to create 

sets, organize history, etc. 

● The Achiever: Plays for varying levels of achievement; ladders and 

levels incentivize the achiever 

● The Joker: Doesn’t take the game seriously – plays for the fun of playing; 

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there’s a potential for jokers to annoy serious players, but on the other 

hand, jokers can make the game more social than competitive 

● The Artist: Driven by creativity, creation, design 

● The Director: Loves to be in charge, direct the play 

● The Storyteller: Loves to create or live in worlds of fantasy and imagination 

● The Performer: Loves to put on a show for others 

● The Craftsman: Wants to build, craft, engineer, or puzzle things out 

(2008:92) 

As can be seen, Fullteron’s categorization is similar to both Bartle’s and Fritz’s; Fullerton 

herself even mentions this similarity to Bartle (ibid.) and explicitly builds on Caillois, 

whom she discusses in a preceding section. These overlaps make possible a crosscomparison 

of player types and pleasures, which the author has visualized in Table 

3. The table sets the aforementioned categorizations into relation with one another, 

using Fritz’s model as an anchor. At the same time, the table combines Fritz’s list with 

other play and player types derived from both Bartle and Fullerton, as well as new 

pleasure types, which are written in bold italics. Note that like Fullerton’s model, this 

classifi cation is not exhaustive, but rather represents a listing of major types. There are 

unlimited ways to ambiguate human activity as play activity; see also our discussion of 

the ambiguity of play earlier in this section. 

Some explanation is needed concerning the play pleasures introduced here: 

● Adventuring: Like Bartle’s explorer, who wants to discover and 

comprehend the workings of the gameworld, The Explorer in Fullerton’s

Caillois (1962) Fritz (2004) Bartle (1996) Fullerton (2008) 

Agôn Contesting Killer The Competitor 

Risk-taking 

Alea Leaving it to chance 

Mimicry Role-playing Socializer The Performer 

Amusing The Joker 

Meditating 

Ilinx Pursuing vertigo 

Collecting The Collector 

Savoring 

Creating 

Problem-solving 

The Artist 

The Craftsman 

Adventuring Explorer The Explorer 

Achieving Achiever The Achiever 

Directing The Director 

Storytelling The Storyteller 

Table 3 

A cross comparison of player types. Newly identified stimuli in the spirit of Fritz (2004) have been 

italicized. Note that The Craftsman and The Artist as a person who enjoys producing something 

new have been joined in this table, since their common goal is to create; however, certain elements 

of the craftsman (who “wants to puzzle things out“) can also be found in the problem-solving 

category suggested by Fritz. 

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● listing loves to adventure. This leads us to assume that there is a play 

pleasure of adventuring. 

● Achieving: Players who are motivated by incentives and who play to 

achieve are driven by the play pleasure of achieving. 

● Directing, storytelling: These play pleasures are those not covered by 

the other categorizations, but they are mentioned by Fullerton. It seems 

appropriate to consider narrative and steering pleasures in the context of 

play as well. 

We are only slightly anticipating our discussion of the nature of games when we mention 

here that our list of play pleasures illustrates the emergence of (digital) game genres. 

Genres refl ect re-occurring combinations of play stimuli. In action games, for example, 

we fi nd contesting and achieving; in adventure games, exploration and storytelling; and 

in role-playing games, role-playing or directing. 

But let us forget about games for a moment and return to our current subject, play. 

We will now conclude this subsection by relating the pleasures of play to the principle 

of kinesis. 

5.4. Play Pleasure Spaces 

Caillois (1962) suggested four fundamental categories for each free-form and rulebound 

play; Bartle (1996) examined four basic player types; Fullerton (2008) listed 

player types with dominating play preferences; and Fritz (2004) proposed a play 

stimulus model that we extended in the previous section by complementing it with the 

stimuli missing from the work of the other authors mentioned here.

From our defi nition of play as a kind of movement that bridges player and play-other 

and affords space, it follows that each type of play must embody some kind of playmovement, 

i.e. kinesis. Table 4 shows a listing of representative kinetic types that 

correspond to our play pleasures. When enacted during play, they create distinguishable 

play pleasure spaces, which are listed in the right column. 

Play stimulus Exemplary type of kinesis Play pleasure spacee 

Contesting Any movement aiming to outmatch, e.g. hitting or racing. Contest space 

Risk-taking 

Movements with limited predictability (i.e. movements 

whose results are hard to foresee). 

Risk-taking space 

Leaving it to chance 

Role-playing 

Movement is only to some extent controlled by participant; 

instead, play-movement is imposed, cf. to the earlier discussion 

on rhythm in dance notation. 

Make-believe movements with an assumed self executed, 

against a backdrop, before the background of an ordinary 

self, and the condition of knowing the differences between 

both selves. 

Chance space 

Role-playing space 

Amusing Laughing 14 . Amusement space 

Meditating Virtual movements of focusing mind and body. Meditation space 

Collecting Point to point movement. Collection space 

Pursuing vertigo Spinning or sloping, for example. Vertigo space 

Savoring Moving the eyeballs; being moved. Savoring space 

Creating Movements needed for originating. Creation space 

Problem-solving 

Movements that break something down into smaller problems; 

brainstorming movements; simplifi cation movements. 

Problem-solving space 

Adventuring Exploring and boundary seeking. Adventure space 

Achieving Leveling up. Achievement space 

Directing Steering and controlling. Direction space 

Storytelling Conveying events orally, or otherwise. Story space 

Table 4 

A listing of representative kinetic types that correspond to our play pleasures. 14 

14 Concerning the “laughing” entry in the Table: it is worth mentioning that in countries like India and China, 

laughing clubs train members to indulge in “forced” laughter for stress relief. See, for example, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-11/08/content_728096.htm. 

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5.5. Interimsic Summary: Play Pleasures 

So far in this subsection, we have determined play pleasure types that cater to the 

motivational expectations of the player. These pleasure types are the fundamental 

building blocks for designing play, and they also represent a second dimension of 

playspace, underlining the feelings of fun commonly associated with play. Whether 

experienced individually or in combination, play pleasures and their associated kinesis 

types are important triggers in the emergence of a given playspace. We have collected 

these play pleasure spaces in Table 4. 

Other factors also help defi ne the enjoyment dimension. Three of these will be discussed 

in the remainder of this subsection: 

● The enjoyment of technology. 

● Enjoyable emotions caused by playing. 

● The enjoyment of absorption (in the sense of immersion). 

5.6. Pleasures of Technology 

In the introductory countdown section of this treatise, we demonstrated that today, 

the increasingly digital nature of games coincides with the ubiquitization of digital 

technologies. Later, in the preceding section, we outlined play as a human, kinetic 

practice in space. But naturally, we must also consider the role of (computing) technology 

in the enjoyment of play; that is, consider pleasures induced via technology. Here, 

we will focus on several representative aspects of this relationship between player 

and technology:

● The pleasure of the collective unconscious: Technologized play as a way 

to digitally recycle myths. 

● The pleasure of toy-medium: Technologized play affording activity 

possibility and necessity. 

● The pleasure of enabling technologies that allow for “enchanting” novelty. 

● The pleasure of exploiting the affi nity between computers and games. 

The pleasure of the collective unconscious. Is J.C. Hertz correct when she writes 

that “Videogames are where technology melts into the occult. This is a place where 

missile launchers and mojo are both legitimate weapons. All the old monsters, harpies, 

dragons, and divinities are excavated from their mythological sediment, sampled, 

looped, remixed, crossfaded, and digitally recycled” (Hertz 1997)? Of course, Hertz 

is referring to Jungian psychology (though without directly mentioning it), which holds 

that there is a kind of psychic inheritance, a collective unconscious, which consists 

of so-called archetypes or mythological images. Jung’s archetype of the shadow, 

for example, comprises those monsters and dragons about which Hertz writes. The 

shadow is an archetype of instinct and irrationality and is therefore innocent because 

it knows no morals. The shadow archetype fi rst seems to represent the dark side of 

our lives. But in fact, it allows us to live out and store that which we cannot admit in 

everyday life. The shadow can be both evil – think of Dr. Jekyll’s Mr. Hyde – or a source 

of creativity. Unsurprisingly, Jung’s shadow typically appears in dreams and visions as 

the ego’s opponent (bear in mind that Jung was writing before the advent of the age of 

personal computers and videogames) (Jung 1990). In this reading, technologized play 

– and, indeed, play in general – is seen as an ego’s unconscious counterpart. 

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The pleasure of toy-medium. The book Funology. From Usability to Enjoyment (Blythe 

et al. 2004) considers enjoyment from a human-computer interaction perspective and 

discusses how technologies can cause, support, or lead to enjoyment. In this line of 

thought, media psychologist Klimmt (2001) considers the stimulative nature of computer 

game software, fi nding that interactive entertainment can be considered a synthesis of 

medium and toy, which, generally speaking, affords the player action possibilities as 

well as action necessities. Though Klimmt does not investigate the enjoyment that 

computer hardware or technological form can provide, we would argue that the product 

design of the hardware also caters to the player’s motivational expectation, e.g. in that 

its form factor affords to hold it in a certain fashion. Learning from product designers, 

human-computer interaction designers conduct empirical research on how to create 

emotional reactions with their products, seeking to satisfy, to please, or to appeal 

(Hassenzahl 2004:41). 

Whether explained with the help of Jungian psychology or gestalt psychology, which 

is most interested in how we relate to objects and environments during play, it is 

noteworthy that “most of the technology now used in videogames had its origins in 

military research. When you trace back the patents, it’s virtually impossible to fi nd an 

arcade or console component that evolved in the absence of a Defense Department 

grant” (Hertz 1997:129). 

The pleasure of enabling technologies and the affi nity between computers and 

games. The intimate relationship between games and technology is not the result of 

military funding alone. Two examples of a computer-game “coupling” serve to highlight 

this relationship: 

● Enabling coupling: Technologies drive game development and vice 

versa. A new technology can enable the development of a new type of 

gameplay or gameplay element, which can then afford pleasure to its

users. This is particularly true for the not yet consolidated, growing fi eld 

of pervasive computing, which gives rise to new innovations in sensing, 

locating, or networking almost every day. For example, traditional 

gamepad-based input for video games has been revolutionized, and not 

just for an audience of hardcore gamers; the primary controller for the 

Nintendo Wii video game console, the Wiimote (short for Wii Remote), 

can be thought of as a pervasive computing technology. The Wiimote is 

a three-axis, rotational position, motion-sensing device designed for onehanded 

wireless (i.e. remote control-style) use. The major technologies 

used to achieve this form of human-computer interaction are: 

• Bluetooth, which enables communication between Wiimote and 

console; 

• an accelerometer and an image sensor built into the Wiimote; 

• a Sensor Bar, a second component wired to the console and 

placed on top of the TV display to enable visual feedback. The 

sensor bar emits infrared light detected by the Wiimote’s image 

sensor, thereby allowing for accurate positioning and pointing 

(Wisniowski 2006). 

In addition to its input capability, the Wiimote features audio and rumble 

output capabilities, which enhance controller-based immersion, as well 

as some memory storage. Although the elements themselves have been 

around for a while, merging and combining them with well-designed 

hardware, software, and a gameplay situation involving the player, 

the player’s physical context, and other factors have served to create 

technological enchantment. 

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● Reciprocity coupling: The most substantial type of relationship between 

game (as formalized play) and computing technology is a reciprocal one. 

Juul argues that there is “a basic affi nity between games and computers” 

(Juul 2005:5) in that computers are particularly fi t for processing formal 

play. Wark goes even further, arguing that “all games are digital. Without 

exception. (...) From the start, games were proto-computers” (Wark 

2007:79). The affi nity between games and technology affects the way 

we look at technology: if a formal play situation is perceived positively, 

then the technology it represents will be perceived positively too. In other 

words, enjoyment of software infl uences enjoyment of hardware and 

vice versa. 

5.7. Play-Actuated Emoti ons 

One of the most convincing empirically derived categorizations of the types of fun 

players experience in games has been suggested by Nicole Lazzaro and her player 

experience research company XEODesign. Lazzaro and XEODesign focused on what 

players enjoy most about their experiences of play and how games inspire emotion 

without using story elements (Lazzaro 2004). Although this book is primarily dedicated 

to games, we are inserting this subsection here to illustrate that play has a positive 

effect on players and that this effect is not just the result of play stimuli. 

Using qualitative data including video recordings of players playing, player 

questionnaires, and verbal and non-verbal emotional cues during play, 30 adult players 

were observed for 90-120 minutes while they played at their regular play locations. A 

total of 15 friends and family members of the participants remained nearby during the 

observation sessions and were interviewed. Players played a wide range of popular,

commercially available and professionally produced video and computer games. This 

meant that the play they experienced was framed by a defi ned situation not only in 

terms of playing locale (i.e. living room, console, and virtual gameworld), but also in 

terms of game rules, input / output possibilities, etc. This kind of well-defi ned – that is, 

well-designed – situation is entirely different from the play we have been discussing up 

until now. Fritz et al. have been trying to come up with a system that allows for a general 

classifi cation of play, whereas Lazzaro works with commercial products designed to 

entertain. Still, we are looking at her fi ndings because they allow us to bridge key types 

of play with experiences of pleasure caused by systematized playing. 

Lazzaro’s data material was grouped using affi nity analysis methods, leading to four 

key assumptions about player behaviors as well as about processes facilitating or 

inhibiting enjoyment (2004:2): 

● Hard fun: Creates emotion by structuring experience around the pursuit 

of a goal. Typical players enjoy overcoming challenges, solving puzzles, 

and strategizing, often aiming for “fi ero,” or personal triumph. 

● Easy fun: Inspires emotion that results from the sheer enjoyment of 

playing and of being immersed in the play activity. Typical players enjoy 

intrigue, exploration, and adventuring as well as unusual situations. 

● Serious fun or Altered states: Creates emotion through player-internal 

sensations triggered by the experience of playing, such as excitement, 

relief, or simply a respite from the everyday. 

● People fun: Creates emotions such as amusement or schadenfreude 

via social experiences such as competition, collaboration, or bonding 

(2004:4ff). 

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Returning again to our play pleasure types, we see that some of them fi t into the above 

model, which seeks to categorize players based on the way they experience pleasure. 

Lazzaro’s model, in other words, complements our play pleasure types. Future research 

could attempt to merge both models with the help of empirical fi ndings. 

5.8. The Pleasure of Immersion 

The psychological concept of “fl ow,” which was introduced by psychologist Mihaly 

Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1990), attempts to explain how a person can become 

deeply and delightfully absorbed in an activity and thereby sense true pleasure. As 

discussed earlier, the concept is vaguely echoed in Iain Borden’s analysis of the 

lived skateboarding architecture, which holds that architecture, when enacted by and 

between a skateboarder and his or her terrain, is “not a thing but a fl ow” (Borden 

2001:9). 

Csíkszentmihály observed that people can reach an enjoyable state of mind in which 

they are maximally productive only if the challenges they must overcome are not too 

easy. If the challenges are too easy, people tend to become bored; if the challenges are 

too hard, people become apprehensive. Csíkszentmihály found that an experience of 

fl ow is accompanied by the following15 : 

1. Clear goals, i.e. one’s expectations are attainable and the rules of the 

situation are discernible. 

2. Concentration and focus, so that no other activity interrupts the 

immersion. 

3. A loss of feeling of self-consciousness. 

15 Note that Csíkszentmihály proposes that not all of the factors need to be present in order for a person to 

experience fl ow.

4. Distorted sense of time: one’s experience of time is altered. 

5. Direct and immediate feedback, so that one can adjust behavior according 

to apparent successes or failures. 

6. Balance between ability level and challenge. 

7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity. 

8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, i.e. actions become effortless. 

9. People become absorbed in the activity – action and awareness merge. 

(Csíkszentmihály 1975:72) 

Csíkszentmihály’s notion of fl ow is an oft-cited, almost common denominator for 

managing diffi culty in play and game situations. In order to maximize player enjoyment, 

and in order to enable players to enter into a state of peak productivity, game designers 

seek to balance anxiety and boredom, often dynamically over time. Adams and Rollings 

(2006:376ff.) suggest that this can be achieved by adjusting the perceived diffi culty of 

the game by programming the intrinsic skill required by a challenge, the stress of time 

pressure, the amount of power the game gives to the player to overcome a challenge 

(e.g. the avatar’s resistance to damage), and the player’s in-game progress and 

gathered experience in dealing with challenges and interface. 

The model of fl ow, and particularly the way Adams and Rollings adapt it (though only 

for the particular case of formalized, complex play), underlines the fact that a playspace 

can come about not only in terms of movement, rhythmic relation, positive valence, 

and caused emotions, but also in terms of perceived diffi culty, shaping tension, and 

termination amplitudes. 

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6. The Culture 

and Context Dimension 

So far, we have noted that play – or even a play rhythm – occurs if an expectation is 

met or an emotion is roused by a play-other, which can be another player, an object, 

or a space. We have categorized play and categorized pleasures resulting from play, 

and we have also discussed how enjoyment of play is subject to diffi culty level and that 

enjoyable play results in distinguishable emotions. But what role does the context of 

the play-other play in the enjoyment of play, and more generally, the existence of play 

at all? 

To answer this question, play-ground designer Barbara Hendricks assists us. In a 

(landscape) architectural approach to designing playgrounds, Hendricks (2001) points 

out that play for children should be designed from a “child’s eye” view of the world. 

She writes: 

Good design for children’s outdoor play is possible – but it means 

challenging many of the prevailing adult ideas about outdoor landscapes. 

Designers fi nd it diffi cult to talk or write about their plans and expectations 

in terms of children’s behaviour at play. They are trained to work with 

and think about physical structures and facilities rather than about the 

behaviour of the user of these spaces. Professional designers often see 

their role as educating the “unsophisticated” public. 

When we look at the kind of places children choose to play in when it 

is possible to choose, these places tend to have an appearance of being 

forgotten or vacated by adults. They look somewhat unkempt. They may 

be places that have just grown up with little or no help from a landscape 

designer. Children seem to like places that look un-designed. That children

choose these places is not to suggest that children prefer environments 

with a lower quality of material or that they have a preference for nature. 

Children also love to play in garbage dumps if they are allowed to do so. 

What they like is the non-predictability of these non-designed landscapes 

(Hendricks 2001:90f.). 

Hendrick’s fi nding reminds us not only of the importance of player-centric design and 

of how predictability can infl uence the child – and adult – player. 16 Hendricks also 

underlines how an environment pleases a player’s motivational expectation through 

a phenomenon, which we will subsume under the general heading designedness of 

valence. Given our identifi cation of three distinct play-others – another player, a playobject, 

and a play environment – we can now address the following three questions: 

● How does the designedness of another player affect play via, for example, 

acquired patterns of thought, behavior, or taste, which are expressed, for 

example, in habitual use of language, dress codes, etc.? 

● How does the designedness of an object affect play? 

● How does the designedness of an environment affect play? 

The three questions are formulated to provide the designer-reader with a kind of 

checklist. But for the sake of the argument’s fl ow and as a result of our concentration 

on the conceptual play-space, we will here focus only on the last question. 

One way to frame the designedness of a given space with regards to its attractiveness 

as a play-ground is to identify design properties. These properties interplay with the 

concept of valence in that they set the stage for valence possibility. In the case of 

16 Note that console games are, at least visually and aurally, fully designed environments wherein even unpredictability 

is predictable given that the player knows and comprehends the rule base and event catalog of the 

game. 

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environments, these properties can be, for example, aligned on a continuum of 

opposites. Continua for the designedness of an environment include: 

Natural - Designed. 

Pre-existing - Purpose-built. 

Vegetated - Unvegetated. 

Deserted - Crowded. 

Accessible - Inaccessible. 

Silent - Performed. 

Odorless - Scented. 

Daylighted - Artifi cially lighted. 

Naturally shaded - Artifi cially shaded. 

Unkempt - Maintained. 

Inhabited - Abandoned. 

Empty - Filled. 

Sparse - Dense. 

Loose - Firm. 

Unsheltered - Sheltered. 

Unlined - Lined. 

Unmarked - Marked. 

Disproportioned - Proportioned. 

Uncomposed - Composed. 

Unstructured - Structured. 

Rural - Urban. 

Private - Public. 

Outdoor - Indoor. 

Dangerous - Safe. 

Physical - Virtual. 

Note that these continua are non-exclusive; that means that a rural environment can 

be quite composed – think of plow furrows and how they draw patterns into the ground. 

Also, note that this exemplary list of continua is not exhaustive, and that there is no 

point trying to prove non-empirically how any of these pairs of opposites work as an 

attraction or repulsion factor in play situations. Yet designers need to consider these 

opposites when designing for play and also to consider potential confl icts, especially 

when working with pre-existing environments.

For example, a pre-existing physical urban environment that is maintained and 

inhabited will be used according to certain programs. A European pedestrian city core, 

for example, is typically home to several public plazas, several fl at green spaces, often 

with fountains, several broad, often tree-lined streets with seating possibilities, and 

numerous restaurants, stores, and public as well as company buildings alongside 

them. Such an environment affords certain activities such as, respectively, meeting 

and gathering, relaxing and gazing, leisurely walking, standing, and gazing, lunching/ 

dining, shopping, and going to work. From a play-ground perspective, a green fl at lawn 

also affords “running, games, throwing balls, a place to build up something, a place to 

lay in the sun, a place to talk with friends” (Hendricks 2001:93). 17 

The inherent play stimuli of the green space confl ict with the aspects of its regular, city 

core program. No wonder that in urbanized areas, play has been confi ned to dedicated, 

controllable playgrounds (see for example the DIN EN 1176 / 1177 standards, which 

regulate the construction, safety testing, and maintenance of playground surfacing and 

equipment in most EU countries18 ). In fact, in Germany, larger housing projects must be 

planned to include a playground facility. In the inventory of “play-grounds” introduced 

later in this work, children’s playgrounds are discussed in more detail. 

Most importantly, the designedness of an environment – or an object or another player 

– is not only a question of design culture, but also of how the potential playground is 

embedded into a certain culture of norms, values, and other more everyday behavioral 

scripts. In that, the designedness dimension of our play-space also reminds us of the 

cultural dimension of play – of how a space is always embedded into contexts. 

17 Video game designer Keita Takahashi, creator of the PlayStation 2 ball-rolling puzzle-action game Katamari 

Damacy (2004) – from the Japanese , or Katamari Damashii, literally, “clump spirit” – envisions designing 

undulating physical playgrounds in order to overcome the traditional playground’s fl atness (cf. Hermida (2005)). 

18 Cf. http://www.din.de. 

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7. Conclusion: Playspace 

In the preceding section, we developed a new theoretical model of play that is 

architecturally framed, psychologically based, and formulated along dimensions of a 

conceptual playspace. 

We highlighted the ambiguous nature of play as well as the special role of the player; 

then, we investigated how play has its roots in and is executed through movement 

by and between player and play-other, creating play rhythm, and that play always 

has boundaries in time and space. In addition, we derived the notion of movement 

and rhythm from the fi elds of architecture and urban planning as well as from dance 

research and from the pioneering work of F. J. J. Buytendijk (1933). 

We then developed play pleasure types by way of a cross-comparison of classical and 

current play pleasure and player type models. We thereby illustrated that play not only 

caters to the player’s motivational expectations, but that it also interrelates with the 

technology through which it is presented. Eventually, we examined how play actuates 

emotions and discussed the fact that the enjoyment of play depends on the activity’s 

degree of diffi culty and on the designedness of the play-other. In the latter discussion, 

we looked at exemplary factors that defi ne the context and culture, i.e. designedness 

of potential “play-grounds.” 

On the basis of this new model of playspace, we can now move on to frame games 

architecturally, thereby approximating a conceptual gamespace.

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Games and play are interrelated phenomena. Salen and Zimmerman, for example, 

argue that games are a subset of play in that they formalize play, on the one hand, and 

on the other hand, that play is an essential game component (Salen and Zimmerman 

2004:303). Without one or more players, there is no play; and without playing, the formal 

system of a game is not set in motion, but sits idling. This reciprocity is complemented 

by the concept of “meaningful play”: in games, players can participate with “designed 

choices and procedures” (2004:60), and these programmed choices are made explicit 

to the player, like following the rules of a board game or using a game controller to 

move an avatar. Player choices result in game system outcomes, and the relationships 

between actions and outcomes are specifi ed by rules. In digital games, these rules 

“are buried in layers of program code and are often diffi cult to identify” (2004:148). 

From these action, outcome units, interactive meaning, and, in turn, meaningful play 

arise (2004:63). 

Other research further complicates the peculiar relationship between play and games. 

Game theorist Jesper Juul, for example, holds that games contextualize play actions, 

and that in games, rules facilitate actions by differentiating between potential moves 

and game occurrences (2005:18f.). Raph Koster, lead designer of the massive 

multiplayer role playing game Ultima Online, suggests that playing a game implies 

pattern recognition, and that playing a certain kind of game involves recognizing and 

learning to master a particular kind of pattern (Koster 2005:36). In a likewise patternbased 

approach to game design research, researchers Björk and Holopainen write 

that “playing a game can be described as making changes in quantitative game states, 

where each specifi c state is a collection of all values of all game elements and the 

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relationships between them” (Björk and Holopainen 2005:8). Rules, in this reading, limit 

the actions a player can take while playing as well as limiting the game’s boundaries, 

thereby governing how game components are instantiated in the game (2005:15). 

Furthermore, players perform actions in a game through varying modes of play, which 

are associated with goals, achievements, and other game components. 

For example, in the game Pac-Man (1980), the player can play either in a single- or 

two-player mode. The player moves the ever-moving Pac-Man up, down, left, or right to 

change direction, or until a wall is hit; on a higher action level, the player avoids ghosts, 

eats pills, and hunts ghosts after eating power pills. Direct interaction gameplay and cut 

scenes after loss of a life offer alternating modes of play (2005:28f.). 

Maybe it is precisely because the relationship between play and games is quite 

staggering that there are so many defi nitions of games, each with its own shortcomings 

and strengths, as Björk and Holopainen note. They themselves refrain to defi ne 

games and instead offer an entire game design pattern systematics and all its implicit 

assumptions (Björk and Holopainen 2005:8). 

What is the solution to this jungle of defi nitions? To add another defi nition? How can we 

architecturally approximate games? 

From our model, we see that the conceptual game-play relationship builds on how 

the kineticist relationships between player and play-other are regulated and limited 

and how valence triggers play. Salen and Zimmerman’s aforementioned model of 

meaningful choice somewhat resembles our concept. In our discussion, though, we 

have accentuated the notion of space: 

● We have derived our defi nition of play from movement in space and the 

way that the player plays with a play-other (which can be a space).

● We have shown that the concept of play rhythm is spatial at heart in that 

it builds on measured movements over time. 

● We have demonstrated that fundamentally, play-as-movement affords a 

space where play takes place over time. 

Taking this architecturally framed notion of play as a starting point, the following 

relational roadmap traces a plausible path towards the architectural framing of games: 

a.) In the following section, we will fi rst review and update existing notions 

of space and spatiality in digital games based on recent game and game 

design research as well as on architectural research. The goal is to map 

a conceptual gamespace. 

b.) We will then suggest an analysis framework for investigating the spatiality 

of games, in which the fi ltered dimensions are set into relation with the 

dimensions of playspace. 

c.) Finally, in the main section, we will use this framework to critically and 

essayistically discuss “play-grounds,” i.e. prototypical and historically 

persistent spaces of play and gameplay. 

Throughout the discussion, we will refrain from explicitly defi ning games. But by the 

mere fact of following this roadmap, we are creating a defi ning spatial discourse that 

leads toward a ludic architecture. 

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1. Approaches to Space 

in Game Design Research 

Given that games formalize play (a human practice in space): What are the dimensions 

of a conceptual gamespace? In order to answer this question, in this section we will 

frame gamespace by reviewing recent and architecturally relevant works in the fi eld 

of game design research as well as by looking at architectural research concerned 

with the role of space and spatiality in games. The goal of these reviews is twofold: To 

fi lter the major existing contributions towards a spatial understanding of games, and to 

identify the shortcomings of those contributions. 

We will focus on the following approaches from the fi eld of game studies and game 

design research: 

● the concept of the magic circle in which games take place as well as a 

game’s space of possibility (Salen and Zimmerman 2004); 

● the notion of spatiality in digital games as an allegory of physical space 

(Aarseth 2007); 

● the view of games as narrative architectures (Pearce 1997; Jenkins 

2007; Murray (1997)); 

● the understanding of digital games as the art of contested spaces 

(Jenkins and Squire 2002); 

● attempts towards a typology of computer gamespaces (Wolf 2002; 

Boron 2007);

● the discussion about the role of perspective in digital games (Manovich 

2001; Schwengeler 2008); 

● the use of architecture as a tool to analyze the spatial qualities of games 

(McGregor 2007); 

● functionally inspired frameworks of gamespace (Adams 2002; Küttler 

2006). 

Note that the body of research in this area is still limited. All cited discourses are 

based on publications in conference proceedings or book chapters or sections. So 

far, there is no integrated, full-length theory of spatiality or space in games, not to 

mention an overview like the one we are about to present. Nitsche (2008), albeit a 

major achievement, focuses on the use of 3D graphics in video games, asking how 

and through which qualities particularly the third dimension achieves to generate 

fi ctional environments in the player’s imagination.” Also note that the term spatiality 

is used particularly in relation to the Lefebvrian and associated notions of lived space 

(Lefebvre 1991). 

Next, three recent approaches from the world of architectural research are highlighted: 

● A rhetorical discourse claiming that architectures turn into games. 

● An experimental approach that uses game technologies to create 

architectural virtual reality models. 

● A cross-disciplinary discourse meant to pair the two design disciplines of 

game design and architectural design, framed with the help of the book 

Space Time Play (Borries/Walz/Böttger 2007), which was co-edited by 

the author. 

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1.1. Space of Possibility and Magic Circle 

In their magnum opus Rules of Play. Game Design Fundamentals, Salen and 

Zimmerman (2004) developed two spatially inspired concepts that are relevant to 

our discussion. 

1.1.1. Space of Possibility 

A game designer creates game rules and a game structure and defi nes the context of 

a game. The designer thereby constructs, indirectly, a “space of possibility” (Salen and 

Zimmerman 2004:67). Salen and Zimmerman coin this term to express a number of 

concepts: 

● the nature of a game as a designed context; 

● all possible game actions that can occur during gameplay; 

● all possible meanings that can emerge from the game design; 

● all possible relations between game elements that render a system; 

● the interactive functioning of this system, which allows for navigation and 

exploration (ibid.). 

The space of possibility, in short, describes the fact that games are interactive systems 

that create meaning through player action and that a game structure can play out in 

many ways, some of which are unpredictable. Salen and Zimmerman do not provide a 

more formal or mathematical defi nition of their umbrella term; the space of possibility, 

although charming as an image, remains vague, as it mixes a variety of dimensions 

that would be hard to compute or visualize. Therefore, the concept – which represents

so holistic an approach that it can no longer really be applied in a concrete way – will 

not be further exploited in the following sections. 

1.1.2. Magic Circle 

The magic circle is an idea introduced by Dutch anthropologist Johan Huizinga, adapted 

by Salen and Zimmerman (2004:94ff.) and since then widely discussed and accepted 

in game studies and game design research, cf. Adams and Rollings (2006:7). In Homo 

Ludens (1971), Huizinga writes that 

All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off 

beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of 

course … This arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the 

stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in 

form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged 

round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary 

worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act 

apart (Huizinga 1971:10). 

Although the magic circle is only one example in Huizinga’s list of “play-grounds” and 

is referred to as an equivalent of ritualistic spaces, Salen and Zimmerman use it as a 

shorthand to describe how games create special – we could say contractual, i.e. rulebound, 

voluntary, and agreed upon – distinct places in space and time that feature 

boundaries. The concept of the magic circle adumbrates “in a very basic sense (...) 

where the game takes place” (Salen and Zimmerman 2004:95). 

The concept of the magic circle may seem vague at fi rst, but can be exemplifi ed: 

Games as a framed reality of their own safeguard the player from an external reality; 

see Crawford, who asserts that “Confl ict implies danger; danger means risk of harm; 

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harm is undesirable. Therefore, a game is an artifi ce for providing the psychological 

experiences of confl ict and danger while excluding their physical realizations. In short, 

a game is a safe way to experience reality” (Crawford 1982/1997:Chapter 1). When 

entering the reality of a game, a player crosses the frame, i.e. the boundary of a game. 

When pausing a game and resuming it shortly thereafter or a year thereafter, the 

player steps out of the magic circle of the game and its formalized activities (Salen 

and Zimmerman:95). Thus within or inside the magic circle, there is a game; without or 

outside the magic circle, there is no game. 

Notice how the concept of the magic circle seems to serve as a means of separating 

the “real” world from the “gameworld,” as if games were safe havens. In fact, this 

protectionist view declares games to be non-secular, special, and ultimately, holy. 

Oerter (1999:17f.) argues that games and rituals are related phenomena and that we 

can observe overlaps between the function of rituals in games and the function of 

rituals in religious practice. Rituals are signifi ed by both repetitive behavior and selfaggrandizement; 

they appear to have clear phylogenetical roots – that is to say, they 

are biologically founded. Paradoxically, rituals set up a rigid, secondary structure 

prescinding us, Oerter argues, from the uniformity of everyday life in order to help 

us deal with our existence. Quotidian uniformity is therefore temporarily and spatially 

replaced by ritualistic uniformity expressed through existentially heightening activities 

such as playing or worshipping. 

Salen and Zimmerman’s concept of the magic circle is the equivalent of our kineticist 

notion of the play-ground that springs forth from the activity of play. But Salen and 

Zimmerman reserve the magic circle category solely for rule-based play, thereby 

diminishing the role of playing for the sake of formalization. Still, we can name this 

approach to space in games the locative approach to gamespace.

1.2. Allegory 

Pioneering ludologist Espen Aarseth has stressed that “the defi ning element in 

computer games is spatiality” (Aarseth 2007:44), arguing that computer based games 

are essentially concerned with representing and negotiating spaces and, more to the 

point, that spaces in digital games are allegories of physical space: “They pretend to 

portray space in ever more realistic ways, but rely on their deviation from reality in order 

to make the illusion playable” (2007:47). 

Aarseth does not expand upon the original meaning and usage of the term allegory, but 

we will now do just that, as it is important for this discussion. In the classic academic 

discipline of rhetoric, the allegory – from the Greek eirein, meaning to speak – is the 

rhetorical fi gure of false semblance, i.e. of extended and sustained metaphor. The 

metaphor, for its part, can be defi ned as a comparison made by referring to one thing 

as another. A textual example of a metaphor is, “Life is a beach.” 

An allegory, by rhetorical defi nition, is an extended or sustained comparison made by 

referring to one thing as another. In Roman rhetoric, the allegory was known as the Latin 

words allegoria or permutatio, and Quintilian, an orator and course book author of the 

3rd century A.D., considered the allegory a conceit (Fuhrmann 1990:129). Allegories 

often appear over the length of a whole discourse or piece of content. To return to our 

previous example, “Life is a beach,” consider that a novel about life would take place at 

a beach and, in describing beach situations, would actually refer to life situations such 

as birth, sleep, hunger, love, and death. 

According to Aarseth, a gamespace is but a reductive operation that leads to a 

representation of space that is not spatial in and of itself, but symbolic and rule-bound. 

A computer game, then, represents a set of automated rules expressed in space. This 

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reductive operation, which constitutes the gameworld always as an allegory of space, 

has one objective, argues Aarseth: to serve (and to defer to) gameplay (2007:45). 

In more architectural terms, we could say that a given gamespace renders the 

game’s rule base and programs gameplay. Adams suggests that “Games, whether 

computerized or not, may be thought of as lying along a continuum between abstract 

and representational. The more abstract the game, the more it relies on arbitrary rules 

to defi ne the game world and the gameplay. The more representational it is, the more 

it relies on similarities between real-world situations familiar to the player, and gameworld 

situations.” (Adams 2003:2). 

As we work towards achieving our goal of framing gamespace, we will term this 

approach the representational approach to gamespace. 

1.3. Contested Space 

“(...) most often, critics describe games as narrative art, as interactive cinema, or 

participatory. But perhaps we should consider another starting point, viewing games 

as spatial art with its roots in architecture, landscape painting, sculpture, gardening, 

or amusement-park design (...). Game worlds are totally constructed environments” 

(Jenkins and Squire 2002:65). Putting aside the question of whether or not computer 

games can be qualifi ed as “art”, as we are not concerned with it here, let us focus on 

the fact that Jenkins and Squire consider the totally constructed digital environments of 

games to be hybrids of the following “contested spaces” (ibid.): 

● Sports, in which players often contest over goals or respective positions 

on a fi eld. 

● Board games, in which contests are won and lost depending on 

movements on the board.

● Literary and cinematic works that climax in spatial contests such as shootouts 

or space battles (ibid.). 

Jenkins and Squire further argue that computer gamespaces, as totally constructed 

environments of contest, offer affordances, encourage activities such as exploration, 

provide resources, effectively evoke emotions, and, overall, provide a stage that 

programs play. We agree with many of their observations, some of which resemble, 

from the point of view of play, topics that have already been discussed, such as play 

pleasures. From a narratological perspective, their suggestion that games constitute a 

mix of sports and story is all the more convincing when highlighted by another source: 

“The most common form of game – the agôn, or contest between opponents – is also 

the earliest form of narrative (...). The Greek word agôn refers to both athletic contests 

and to dramatic confl icts, refl ecting the common origin of games and theater” (Murray 

1997:145). 

Being less etymologically minded, we consider it highly questionable that all digital 

games contain contests, especially considering of our discussion of play pleasures. We 

are also skeptical of the assertion that all games are inspired by sports. Consider, for 

example, activities such as role-playing or exploration, which do not necessarily involve 

the attempt to beat an opponent. 

The most valuable observation, in my opinion, is made by Jenkins and Squire when 

they argue that some games have “hard rails” while other games have “soft rails.” The 

former tightly program the player’s movements, while the latter allow for multidirectional 

play (2002:69). Some games consist of predetermined paths that a player must follow 

in order to reach an objective; others program the player to explore solutions using 

many different paths and often feature various alternate endings. Game environments, 

in other words, can be divided into proposed promenades and imposed promenades. 

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Overall, however, Wigley is right, even where emergent gameplay is concerned: “To 

choose a game is to choose an architecture (...)” (Wigley 2007:484). If we think of digital 

games as totally constructed environments, we can think of this approach towards 

gamespace as the programmatic approach, the approach closest to Le Corbusier’s 

promenade architecturale in that it traces the actual process of gameplay during a 

game – traces, that is, how kinesis and play rhythms are organized over time. 

1.4. Narrati ve 

It has been argued that not all games have stories and that though many games have 

narrative ambitions, it is unlikely that they will tell stories the way other media do. In 

the pioneering Interactive Book. A Guide to the Interactive Revolution (Pearce 1997), 

my colleague Celia Pearce coins the term “narrative architecture”. Pearce argues that 

architects, when designing a building, knowingly or not, create “nonlinear experiences 

with variable paths or outcomes.” (1997:26) Pearce extends her argument, looking 

not only at physical architecture as a medium - a “spaceplay” (ibid.) the designer has 

come up with – but also at virtual spaces, multimedia works and games; the latter 

which, from her perspective, can be aligned with theme parks. Players, so to say, 

enter an environment, visit locations in a certain order and begin to make use of the 

space so that it comes alive. Games can thus be seen as narrative spaces in which 

storytelling takes places environmentally (Jenkins 2007). Jenkins claims that there are 

at least four ways that “spatial stories can evoke preexisting narrative associations; 

they can provide a staging ground on which narrative events are enacted; they may 

embed narrative information within their mises-en-scène; or they provide resources for 

emergent narratives” (2007:57). 

Jenkins not only points out that narrative possibilities can be mapped onto and into 

gamespace, but also that games are often embedded into larger narrative systems that

communicate story information with the help of books, comics, fi lms, and other media 

(2007:57f.). This model reveals that the narrative space of games unfolds within the 

games themselves, but also around the games and that the way a game’s story is told 

environmentally has both functional and structural implications. 

In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray argues that digital environments such as those 

in digital games feature four unique and essential properties: they are procedural, 

participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic (Murray 1997:71). According to Murray, digital 

environments are procedural because the defi ning, intrinsic ability of the computer is “to 

execute a series of rules” (ibid.), which are fed into the computer engine in the form of 

algorithms and heuristics. Murray further holds that digital environments are participatory 

because they are responsive to input – an observation that, when considered together 

with computers’ inherent capacity to process rules, “is what is most often meant when 

we say that computers are interactive” (1997:74). Digital environments represent space 

we can move through: “The computer’s spatial quality is created by the interactive 

process of navigation” (1997:80). Finally, the infi nite expanses of digital environments, 

all potentially networked, enable their fourth characteristic – namely, that they induce 

encyclopedic expectation whereby “all the world’s resources seem to be accessible, 

retrievable, immediate” (1997:84). Both Jenkins’ and Murray’s framework allow us to 

look at digital games as narrative, dramaturgical spaces. 

Pioneering adventure games such as (Colossal Cave) Adventure (1976/1977) or 

Zork (Infocom 1980; originally developed by MIT students 1977-1979), for example, 

are presented entirely textually and serve as outstanding examples of the way game 

uncertainty is organized spatially and fi ctionally and the way a game can be viewed 

as an integrated narrative gamespace. Both Adventure and Zork exemplify Jenkins’ 

claims that spatial stories can evoke preexisting narrative associations. In Zork, for 

example, the player encounters a text-only interactive underground world fi lled with 

technological and fantasy elements. “The surroundings particularly enrich the game and 

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give context to the puzzles and fi gures encountered, providing backstory and helping to 

defamiliarize the everyday” (Montfort 2007:65). Both Zork and Adventure can be said 

to be strongly narrative in that they are quite textually descriptive and that their stories 

are embedded into their mises-en-scène. Though Jenkins doesn’t mention it, there is 

also a technological explanation for the latter phenomenon: both Adventure and Zork 

took advantage not only of the then prevalent command line paradigm, but also turned 

a weakness into a strength by turning the uncertainty created by the textuality of both 

games into a positive experience of exploring both game narrative and gamespace. 

Murray analyzes Zork in the context of her properties of digital environments, considering 

the game to be a fantasy world of dungeons that responds to typed commands. 

Based on Zork, Murray suggests that the key to creating a compelling participatory 

narrative world (something we would call positive valence) is to script the interactor 

– in our terms, to provide a formulaic, comprehensible, and usable repertoire of playmovements 

like, for example, “Go north,” “Open the window,” and “Drink water,” and to 

further extend this repertoire (Murray 1997:79). At the same time, Zork is traversable; 

its space is navigationally created by the interactor (1997:80). An event in Zork such 

as a trapdoor crashing shut after the player has gone “Down” through it is directed at 

and caused by the player – that is to say, the play-other responds in a surprising way. 

Together, participation and navigation on the basis of the computer processing rules 

co-create dramatic power, or that which we could call the dramaturgical approach to 

gamespace. 

In contemporary digital games, we can fi nd an abundance of Murray’s encyclopedic 

property. In the interactive and cross-media fi ctions of Alternative Reality Games, 

players visit Websites to fi nd clues, use databases to research puzzles, and chat with 

other players to collaboratively solve the fi ction’s challenges. In fact, these games 

require that all the world’s resources be accessible, retrievable, and immediate in order 

for the narrative to successfully unfold.

1.5. Typology 

In a manner similar to Jenkins and Squire (2002), who were mentioned earlier in the 

Contested Space section of this book, Wolf examined screen-based digital gamespaces, 

concentrating on gameplay modalities refl ected by visual representation (2002:51ff.). 

Though later, Boron critically extended Wolf’s observations (2007), Wolf was the fi rst to 

attempt to set different representations and particularities of gamespace into relation, 

and name them. In the chapter “Space in the Videogame” of his book The Medium of 

the Videogame, Wolf lists eleven types of gamespaces, ranging from no visual space/ 

all text based, to interactive three-dimensional environments: 

● One screen, contained. 

● One screen, contained, with wraparound. 

● Scrolling on one axis. 

● Scrolling on two axes. 

● Adjacent spaces displayed one at a time. 

● Layers of independently moving planes (multiple scrolling backgrounds). 

● Spaces allowing z-axis movement into and out of the frame. 

● Multiple, nonadjacent spaces displayed on-screen simultaneously. 

● Interactive three-dimensional environments. 

● Represented or “mapped” spaces. 

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Wolf’s typology is inconsistent, although it manages to comprehensively map the 

historical evolution of gamespace from text spaces to one-screen spaces to 3D 

environments. In an attempt to formulate a spatial taxonomy, Wolf mixes qualities 

of gamespaces such as depth of space and point of view or traversability/navigation 

and representation of space. But though he mixes diverse spatial qualities of game 

experiences within his analysis, Wolf does not foresee or at least discuss mixed types, 

i.e. hybrids. Combinations of types 4 or 5 with 6 are, however, quite frequent, in this case 

serving as the basis of a typical sidescrolling Jump-and-Run game. Boron (2007:28), 

for example, complements Wolf’s rather rigid – but, all in all, helpful – typology by 

introducing more types of gamespaces, like, for example, isometric yet 3D-look-alike 

gamespace. 

Still, a typological approach to gamespaces should refl ect the many different ways a 

game can take place with or without the assistance of computing technologies. Note 

that the cited authors discuss digital display-based, i.e. visual spaces only. Adams 

(2003:4f.) mentions that even in digital games, we cannot think of visual space without 

auditory, tangible, olfactory, or other sensually evoked spaces. And in a pioneering 

study, Stockburger (2007) refl ects on how sound affects the spatiotemporal nature of 

games, fi nding that in each game, there is an intrinsic rhythm that creates a sonic 

space that “aurally traces and defi nes the outer borders of the gameplay process and 

thus links the player’s body to the machine” (2007:112). Type, then, can be analyzed 

according to the following two major inquiries: 

What are the primary physiological – i.e. exteroceptive and proprioceptive – methods 

by which the player perceives the game? For humans, exteroceptive possibilities 

include vision, audition, gustation, olfaction (see, for example, the Noble prize winning 

paper by Buck and Axel (1991), whose research opened the door for the genetic 

and molecular analysis and design of olfaction), tactition (see Robles-De-La-Torre 

(2006), who investigates the role of touch technology in several application scenarios),

equilibrioception (i.e. balance), and, although not everyone may be able to perceive 

fl uctuation in magnetic fi elds, magnetoception. Proprioceptive methods include the 

way a game is perceived body-internally, mainly by the relative position of the body 

and/or limbs, independent of vision (again, see Robles-De-La-Torre (2006)). Other 

senses are called interoceptive senses. One example of such a sense is nociception, 

i.e. pain reception, a term coined by Charles Sherrington in The Integrative Action of 

the Nervous System (Sherrington 1906), offering a design space for games that has 

been successfully examined with the help of the PainStation (2001) game machine 

installation. PainStation penalizes players of a Pong arcade game using heat impulses, 

electroshocks and a miniature lashing whip built into the machine. 

1.6. Perspecti ve 

Panofsky’s (1927) infl uential essay tied the idea of perspective to the idea of how 

an artistic image depicts space, how the image is produced technically, and how it is 

perceived, as opposed to classifying the depicted form. What role does perspective 

take on in our context? 

It could be argued that our eyes render a physical space as a series of images, that this 

stereoscopic image projection can be mathematized, and that like everything else we 

see, it is subject to perspective. However feasible this argument, speaking of a physical 

experience solely in terms of an image experience – which, if one takes pervasive 

games into consideration, can be partially computer generated, thus complicating the 

issue – seems far too narrow to explain the experience of (formalized) play practices. 

In the context of digital games, we can, however, discuss the way that a space and 

a navigator through this space together produce types of perspectives. Naturally, this 

discussion would resemble Le Corbusier’s discussion of the promenade architecturale 

as well as our discussion of play as a co-created activity. 

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Schwingeler (2008) focuses on the way perspective is rendered in computer game 

“images,” adapting Wolf’s typology for demonstrating the concept of perspective games 

and building theoretically on Manovich, who contends that 

Computerization of perspectival construction made possible the 

automatic generation of a perspectival image of a model as seen from 

an arbitrary point of view – a picture of a virtual world recorded by a 

virtual camera” (Manovich 2001:389). And further: “The perspective 

algorithm, a foundation of both computer graphics and computer vision, 

is used to generate perspectival views given a geometric model and to 

deduce the model given a perspectival view (Manovich 2001:395). 

So according to Manovich, geometric, i.e. algorithmic vision, is subject to automation. 

Schwingeler suggests a name for this hyper-subjective view of the player in games: 

arbitrary perspective (2008:140ff.). Perspective in videogames is simulated and fully 

mathematized, as Wolf and Boron demonstrated. Manovich and Schwingeler, for 

their part, show that in comparison to Renaissance perspective, the construction of 

perspective in videogames engenders infi nite possible points of view. This fi nding can, 

in turn, be related back to Salen and Zimmerman (2006), who commented that “space, 

it seems, is in the eye of the beholder” (2006:67). 

Taking all this research together and relating it to our modality dimension of play, we 

suggest three possible player perspectives for primarily visually transported games 

or play situations: 

● A fi rst-person perspective for fully physical experiences. 

● An arbitrary perspective for fully computer-simulated, i.e. virtual 

experiences. 

● A hybrid perspective for experiences involving both physical and virtual 

experience.

1.7. Qualiti es 

McGregor (2006) suggests that we use architecture as a tool for analyzing the spatial 

qualities of games. She furthermore outlines (2007) a collection of six dominant, 

recurring patterns of spatial use in screen-mediated games. The following patterns, 

McGregor claims, represent overarching confi gurations of gameplay and gamespace, 

and the six serve to “describe the majority of gameplay and game space interactions” 

(2007:539): 

● Challenge Space: Where the environment directly challenges the player. 

● Contested Space: Where the environment is a setting for contests 

between entities. 

● Nodal Space: Where social patterns of spatial usage are imposed on the 

game environment to add structure and readability to the game. 

● Codifi ed Space: Where elements of gamespace represent other nonspatial 

game components. 

● Creation Space: Where the player constructs all or part of the gamespace 

as part of gameplay. 

● Backdrops: Where no direct interaction between the gamespace and the 

player occurs. 

McGregor herself realizes that there are major correlations between Caillois’ typology 

and her patterns of spatial play. However, she only considers these correlations to be 

overlaps that “remind us that videogames are both play and a space to play” (McGregor 

2007:1). Let us look at McGregor’s patterns in more detail. 

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Overt challenge spaces, McGregor argues, are “present in our urban environment yet 

for practical and safety reasons are isolated from everyday spaces. (...) In challenge 

spaces architecture is an adversary and the landscape an opponent” (2007:549f.). 

Küttler (2007), on the other hand, mentions the adversarial potential of gamespace – 

for example, in skateboarding – as a possible gameplay enabling function. 19 

This comparison between challenge-space-as-function and challenge-space-asenemy 

demonstrates that when space itself becomes the player’s challenge, it can be 

viewed from at least two perspectives. The fi rst is the game designer’s perspective on 

gameplay, in which the spatial trope of space-as-challenge is a function of the design 

that blocks unhindered movement. The second is the player’s perspective on gameplay, 

in which the function turns into an adversary and the hindrance is recognized only 

partially – that is, from challenge zone to next zone. Designers use space to model 

activity; players play in order to experience space (in addition to other elements that 

shape the play experience). McGregor’s patterns are interesting, yet serve mainly 

to spatialize Caillois’ basic model. In addition, by stating that “videogames display 

recurrent patterns of spatial use, taken from reality, formalized and altered by the 

demands of gameplay” (McGregor 2007:8), McGregor echoes Aarseth’s fi nding that 

computer games are fundamentally concerned with forms of spatial representation with 

which we are already familiar; in short, that the spatiality of computer games is always 

allegorical (Aarseth 2007:44ff.). 

There are, however, two interesting exceptions in McGregor’s model, that go beyond 

Caillois. These are codifi ed space and backdrops. 

Codifi ed space, argues McGregor, serves gameplay as a conduit. In strategy games, 

for example, data is spatialized as terrain, building, or object. Terrain, building, or object 

19 Compare this to Borden’s analysis of skateboarding architecture as an entity co-created by skater and built 

landscape.

are then used as menus that can be accessed by the player precisely because they 

all represent forms of spatialized data. By manipulating the spatial representation, the 

player manipulates the data. McGregor herself realizes that the concept of codifi ed 

space can be linked to Henry Jenkins’ concept of the embedded narrative, according 

to which elements of narration are read through spatial elements (2007:6). If we accept 

codifi ed space as a category of its own neither derived from Caillois nor covered by 

our play pleasure categorizations, then the question is: What kind of other stimulus or 

stimuli can stand in for this playspace? Or is this category based on a unique, as yet 

unidentifi ed play type? 

On the one hand, it could be argued that the fi rst and foremost play pleasure in strategy 

games is by defi nition strategizing, which means testing tactics over time. On the other 

hand, it could also be argued that all games, unless they contain elements of chance, 

require strategizing in that during gameplay, the player must continually test out actions 

that may or may not help reach an objective. 

It could also be argued that strategy games feature the play stimuli of problem-solving, 

directing (as in managing), and achieving in equal measure to strategizing and that 

codifi ed data manipulation is not a gamespace pattern per se, but an activity prevalent 

when playing a computer game, in which each individual activity – say, riding a horse 

– represents the manipulation of data – in the case of the horse, horse data. All objects 

in computer games are subject to data manipulation, and all are, formally speaking, 

represented by something other than themselves. In videogames, visible architecture 

is, as is argued in Learning from Las Vegas, neither a duck symbol nor ugly and ordinary 

(Venturi/Scott Brown/Izenour 1977), but a rendered and more or less interactable and/ 

or navigable entity made of data. 

Backdrops are architectures that neither affect nor form gameplay directly; there is no 

direct play rhythm that springs from them. McGregor thus calls them “spatial pastiches” 

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(McGregor 2007:8). As a category for speaking about gamespace and game spatiality, 

McGregor’s backdrop is a valuable conceptual contribution. We suggest, however, that 

one instead look at atmosphere in the context of function, as outlined in the following 

section. In summary, McGregor’s approach can be called a qualitative one in that it 

studies how gameplay and gamespace interact to generate re-occuring spatial qualities. 

1.8. Functi on 

In this subsection, we will briefl y introduce and critically discuss what we will call the 

functional view of ludic space, exemplifi ed by Adams (2002) and Küttler (2006), who 

expands and modifi es Adams’ model. 

1.8.1. Primary and Secondary Functi ons of Ludic Space 

In an article for online game development portal Gamasutra.com, Adams (2002) 

introduces the concept of architectural functions to the discussion of space and 

spatiality in videogames. In a hands-on discussion mainly directed at professional level 

and game designers, the term architecture is used to connote the “traditional role of 

designing constructed edifi ces and landscapes” (Adams 2003:3). According to Adams, 

then, architecture embodies graphically constructed ludic space in videogames. 

Adams distinguishes between two different functions of architecture in videogames. 

The fi rst function is to present the player with challenges and shape and support the 

actions available; in other words, to support the gameplay of the game. The secondary 

function, on the other hand, is “to inform and entertain in its own right way” (ibid.). Table 

5 paraphrases the most important forms crucial to each function. From our perspective, 

these functions are kinetic properties that determine how play rhythms come into 

being. Note that the “exploration” fails to describe what Adams means in architectural

terms; as a substitute, we suggest using the term “orientation,” which also embodies 

the concept of disorientation (i.e. that the spatial situation affords limited orientation or 

none at all). 

Adams (2002): Functions of architecture in videogames 

Primary function Gameplay role 

Constraint Provide boundaries; guide player; constrain player; challenge. 

Concealment 

Obstacles or tests of skill 

Offer protection to player; hide game elements from player; surprise 

player. 

Challenge player’s logic and observation; challenge player’s 

hand-eye coordination. 

Exploration 

Orient player; help player understand gamespace; in mazes: 

disorient player - orientation 

Secondary function Gameplay role 

Familiarity Offer place and event related cues to the player. 

Allusion Refer to real architectural styles to evoke mental images. 

New worlds Create a sense of unfamiliarity. 

Surrealism Warn player about game’s surreal rules. 

Atmosphere 

Inspire an emotion via an object that gives visual form to that 

emotion. 

Cliché 

Set scene and establish / meet player expectation, but without 

referring to real-life architecture (see familiarity). 

Table 5 

An overview of functions in relation to their gameplay role after Adams (2002). 

One could argue that Adams’ general view of architecture as landscape and structure, 

as well as his view of architecture in videogames, seem quite conventional. Although 

Adams himself even suggests as much, it is undeniable that his contribution has 

been highly valuable, at least for the fi eld of game design, in that it helped establish a 

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vocabulary of spatial confi gurations and their effect on gameplay. In our opinion, the 

underlying assumption of Adams’ model can be traced to the father of architectural 

modernism, Lewis H. Sullivan, and his widely known design law, derived from natural 

observation, that “form ever follows function” (Sullivan 1896). So how does Adams 

relate to Sullivan? 

We can illustrate the relationship between the two by applying Sullivan’s “law” to an 

ideal videogame. A design brief for such a hypothetical game would likely mention that 

the desired result should: 

● have a form that makes clear to the player what type of game it is (for 

example, an action-adventure game); 

● express to the player both its inner life – “the native quality” (ibid.) that 

many would agree is the game’s rule-base – and the nature of its materials, 

construction, and purpose; 

● reveal its structure when played; 

● avoid unnecessary decoration (cf. Sullivan 1896). 

Although (or because) Sullivan’s “law” may indeed be somewhat conventional and 

has been widely criticized as a principle of a biologistic Modernism, it is part of the 

accepted architectural discourse and a compulsory topic in architectural and other 

design schools. 

1.8.2. Additi onal Primary Functi ons 

In her German language master’s thesis in architecture at the University for Applied 

Sciences Bochum, Küttler (2006) refers to both Sullivan and Adams – so implicitly to the 

former, explicitly to the latter. Küttler expands Adams’ model and makes some valuable

observations that complement his functional hold on gamespace. Unfortunately, Küttler 

dismisses Adams’ orientation function without clearly explaining why. 

We can understand Küttler’s categorization as a hands-on and helpful approach to 

aspiring designers for considering kinetic forms embedded into the gamespace. 

Because Küttler argues descriptively, often forsaking a structured and obvious 

system of sub-classifi cation, we have here supplemented her categorization with the 

italicized terms: 

● Boundaries: Adams calls this category constraint, cf. Adams (2002). 

A game needs borders. These can be macro borders that defi ne the 

gameworld (e.g. an ocean shore as the end of the world) or micro 

borders that guide, restrict, or divert the player (e.g. a street, an open 

door, obstacles blocking the player’s path). In a very concrete sense, 

boundaries are representations of the demarcational concept of the 

magic circle. 

● Game content and game goal: Architectural design and urban planning 

can be both the content and objective of a game. The game’s main 

function, then, is designing, constructing, and managing, all of which are 

embodied in the “creation” play stimulus, as mentioned earlier (Fritz 2004). 

Adams and Rollings (2006) suggest a whole genre for this function, which 

they call “construction and management simulations.” Likewise, Küttler, 

Adams and Rollings cite Sim City as the most typical computer game that 

represents free-form construction and construction from default settings 

(Adams and Rollings 2006:596). 

● Challenge and opponent: Adams calls this category “obstacles or tests 

of skill” (Adams 2002). Küttler means that architectures in games often 

represent challenges that must be overcome by the player or sometimes 

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even opponents that must be vanquished by the player. Küttler offers the 

example of the Tony Hawk skateboarding game series, in which a player 

must look for a ramp on which to perform an ideal stunt; for that player, 

the environment actually becomes the opponent against which one must 

play. In her contribution to the book Space Time Play, Küttler reviews Tony 

Hawk and, in doing so, clarifi es the terminology. When architecture in Tony 

Hawk becomes the challenge of the game and topography the opponent, 

Küttler explains, the role of architecture can also serve as ally. When the 

player spots a perfect edge for carving (Küttler 2007:125), for example, 

the environment is not longer foe, but friend. Küttler suggests we call 

this phenomenon an utilizability function. But is Küttler’s characterization 

suffi ciently precise? Not all environmental challenges, topographical or 

not, automatically render an environment an opponent. Thus we suggest 

differentiating between degrees of functional opposition. Depending 

on the type of kinesis involved, these degrees could be characterized 

as follows: 

• Challenge: The gamespace or property thereof minimally 

challenges the player (for example, a gap to jump across). 

• Opposition: The gamespace or a spatial property thereof 

opposes the player in a problem situation for which a solution 

exists. 

• Antagonism: The gamespace or a spatial property thereof 

strongly oppose the player throughout gameplay or for a portion 

of gameplay. 

• Assailantism: The gamespace or a spatial property thereof 

attacks the player.

● Protection: In Adams’ model, this is known as “concealment” (Adams 

2002). As the player’s ally, the gamespace can protect or support the 

player in performing an activity. For example, environmental shading 

in stealth games serves the protection function. Similar to the degrees 

we have defi ned for functional opposition, we can also detect varying 

qualities of spatial support, which we can term functional support. 

We suggest some exemplary, architecturally sound terms to describe 

positive interactions between player and gamespace: alliance, 

adjustment, support, etc. 

● Symbol: Like McGregor (2007), Küttler recognizes the symbolic 

function architecture can have in gameplay and cites construction 

simulations in which functionalities are symbolized by architecture. 

● Game progress reward: Graphical representations can serve as 

a reward and, simultaneously, an incentive. In both God of War 

PlayStation 2 games, the lavishly beautiful graphics encourage the 

player to keep on playing, to explore the next section in the game. 

The same can be said of the architecture in ICO (Team Ico / Sony 

Computer Entertainment 2001). Pre-rendered cut scenes serve a 

similarly encouraging function. 

● Architecture as an interface to player reality: In designated digital 

environments such as Second Life (Linden Research 2003), playercreated 

content such as clothing, houses, vehicles, animations, 

or games is not only permitted, but constitutes the basis of the 

world’s attraction. Today, we understand that a game such as Spore 

(2008) takes the idea of player creation much further, letting clients 

create not only world objects, but also creatures, which can then be 

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shared with other players during gameplay. Players create their own 

gameplay and gameplay world within the constraints of the game’s 

design. Because Küttler’s term is a bit clumsy, we suggest renaming 

this category player-created architecture. 

1.8.3. Summary: A Merged Model of Functi onal Forms 

Küttler (2006) provides four new functional categories for how architecture in games 

supports gameplay, while paying no further heed to Adams’ “exploration” function. If we 

merge both models, insert fi ndings from other researchers, and include the suggestions 

presented in our own critical discussion, we can identify eight primary functions in the 

construction of ludic architecture: 

● Constraints and boundaries 

● Concealment and protection 

● Opposition 

● Orientation 

● Objective 

● Symbol 

● Reward 

● Player creation 

Secondary functions, as can be seen from Adams’ list, are functions that program 

mindset and emotion in the player. As Fullerton argues (2008), they serve dramaturgical 

ends, whereas primary functions serve formal ends. Secondary functions are thus

esponsible, for example, for what can be called spatial premise. We will thus call primary 

functions formal functions and secondary functions dramaturgical functions. The 

latter assist in arousing feelings of association and curiosity in the player, to which the 

gameplay then caters. Stylistically speaking, the expectations raised by dramaturgical 

functions can be ignored, rather than met. For example, it can be charming to set a 

game in the desert, give it a Western feeling, and then merge it with an alien zombie 

theme. 

It is thus clear that the list of dramaturgical functions suggested by Adams can be 

extended endlessly and that the inscenation of gamespace is, rhetorically speaking, a 

question of stylistics discussed, as it were, throughout Space Time Play (Borries/Walz/ 

Böttger 2007). 

1.9. Summary: Space and Spati ality 

in Game Research 

In this section, we gathered major academic and design approaches for explaining 

how space in games is constructed and how it constructs games. Based on these 

approaches, we can conclude here by offering several typical questions one should 

ask about games when considering their spatial construction and programming. 

These questions should be helpful for anyone analyzing or designing games. Table 6 

provides an overview of the concepts introduced, each concept’s major inquiry, and a 

classifi cation of the various types of approaches. The table sums up the dimensions 

of our conceptual gamespace from a game research perspective; these are the 

locative, the representational, the programmatic, the dramaturgical, the typological, the 

perspectivistic, the qualitative, the form-functional, and the form-emotive dimensions. 

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Concept Contributor(s) Inquiry Approach 

The Magic 

Circle 

Salen and Zimmerman 

(2004) 

Where and when does a game take 

place, and how is it demarcated or does 

it demarcate itself from the everyday? 

Allegory Aarseth (2007) How does the digital game represent 

and implement space and with the help 

of what kind of physicality deviation? 

Contested 

space 

Jenkins and Squire 

(2002) 

Narrative Pearce (1997); Murray 

(1997); Jenkins (2007) 

Type Wolf (2002); Boron 

(2007); spw 

Perspective Manovich (2001); 

Schwingeler (2008) 

How are the game environment and 

game elements implicitly and explicitly 

constructed to program kinesis and play 

rhythms (i.e. gameplay)? 

What experience does a spaceplay 

designer intend to bring forth? How is 

the narrative embedded into the game? 

How can the player participate? And how 

can the story be navigated? 

What are the primary physiological 

methods by which the game is 

perceived, and what are the main spatial 

qualities these methods use? 

Which of the theoretically infi nite number 

of perspectives does the player take on 

to play the digital game, over time? 

Quality McGregor (2007) How do gameplay and gamespace 

interact, and what kind of re-occurring 

qualities do they generate? 

Primary & 

secondary 

function 

Adams (2002); Küttler 

(2006) 

How is the gameplay of a videogame 

supported and instantiated by game 

architecture, and how does this 

architecture affect the player? 

Locative 

Representational 

Programmatic 

Dramaturgical 

Typological 

Perspectivistic 

Qualitative 

Form-functional 

and formemotive 

Table 6 

An overview of introduced gamespace concepts and a classification of the various types 

of approaches.

Our table illustrates that the wide variety of computationally driven as well as coming 

hybrid ludic spaces can be approached from a number of perspectives. Eventually, 

the table also underlines that for both designerly and analytical purposes, a more 

wholesome view of space and spatiality in games is needed; this will address a game 

situation from at least the standpoints we have identifi ed. 

2. Approaches to Games 

in Architectural Research 

Recent digital game-related university research in architecture can be roughly divided 

into the following classifi cations: 

● A rhetorical discourse claiming that architecture is a game. 

● Experimental approaches using game technologies for creating 

architectural virtual reality models. 

● A cross-disciplinary discourse aiming to pair the two design disciplines of 

game design and architectural design. 

Note that we will not examine forms of game applications that are explicitly aimed 

at providing play pleasure. We also do not spend much time investigating the use of 

game technologies like 3D game engines. The main interest here is to frame play and 

interactive entertainment architecturally in a research context. 

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2.1. The Rhetoric of 

“Architecture as Game” 

The fi rst research discourse we will mention is the investigation of “architecture as 

game.” It is being spearheaded by experimental architect Kas Oosterhuis from the 

TU Delft, where Oosterhuis’ Hyperbody Research Group conducts research into 

the interactivation of building structures and components. The group examines, for 

example, the degree to which prototypical computer controlled physical building 

structures change their shape or move themselves with the help of tube structures and 

“muscle” joints, often as a consequence of an interaction with a human participant. 

Consequently, at the fi rst Game Set and Match conference organized by Oosterhuis 

and his group, it was proclaimed that “Architecture becomes a game being played by 

its users,” whereby users set the parameters of the built “science fi ction” environment 

designed by architects (Oosterhuis 2006:3f.). 

Similarly, at the second Game Set and Match conference in 2007, Oosterhuis and 

Jaskiewicz (2007) called for cooperative, “multiplayer design” in architecture, which 

they believe will accelerate the design process of “single-player design” and enable the 

exploration of all potential design alternatives: “Designing architecture is serious play. It 

is a game whose goal is to create a great building. It is a game designer’s need to play 

according to the rules of physics, economy and society. It is by nature a multiplayer 

game in which many specialists need to work together to increase their prospects to 

win” (2007:358). Regardless of the impressive projects created by Oosterhuis’ group, 

such as the interactive and kinetic Muscle Tower – the rhetoric set out in the words 

cited underlines Sutton-Smith’s thesis that fi elds tend to use play rhetorically if they 

aim at persuading. This kind of ideological arguing is usually palpable in the more 

artistically oriented design disciplines, and Oosterhuis and his team are no exception.

In toto, we can conclude an ideological dimension of game-space, as it is not clear 

which goal the proclaimed game of architecture serves - what rules it is played by; 

whose purposes it defers to etc. 

2.2. Games for Architectural Experimentati on 

and Visualizati on 

From very early on, fi rst-person shooters such as Doom (1993) and, in particular, their 

level editors, have been used in Computer Aided Architectural Design research and 

teaching as a means by which to explore and construct virtual realities that exist within 

the constraints of a computer display, cf. Engeli (2003). 

In the discourse that has emerged regarding this topic, games and game technologies 

are framed as vehicles used to realize spaces that are not intended to be mere 

gamespace, but rather as demonstrations of how space can be virtually realized. Given 

their performance power and unsurpassed programming fl exibility, it should come as 

no surprise that the interaction and rendering possibilities of game engines are widely 

used to virtually experiment with space and to create walkthroughs for clients. Because 

the discourse on this subject focuses mainly on the usage of game technologies, it can 

be said to contribute a technological dimension to gamespace literature. 

Let us contextualize this dimension. More broadly speaking, “Entertainment is a key 

driver for the development of technology” (Cheok et al. 2007:128). We can turn this 

argument around and state that technology development is also a driver for digital 

game development and, by extension, that game technologies are increasingly used 

outside of the game industry. Because technologies are constantly evolving, new 

models of gameplay are being constantly introduced at the concept level, during the 

prototype stage, for beta games, and, fi nally, for full-blown game experiences. In the 

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future, novel game technologies will constantly contribute to architectural and CAAD 

experimentation. 

2.3. “Space Time Play”: 

Game Design and Architecture 

A third discourse – by far the most relevant contribution not only to the fi elds of 

architecture/CAAD and urban planning, but also to game design and game studies 

– is represented by the book Space Time Play. Computer Games, Architecture and 

Urbanism: The Next Level (STP), co-edited by the author. STP, which is often cited 

throughout these pages, is an attempt to bring together game designers, scholars, 

architects, and urban planners in a discussion on the relationship between space and 

digital games. The book’s concept and structural organization will be briefl y discussed 

in the following section. This discussion serves as a complement to the preceding 

review of spatiality concepts in game studies and game design, adding what can be 

called the “uniqueness” approach to the picture. STP’s dedication to bringing together 

experts from various fi elds is refl ected in the two questions that precede the book’s 

introduction: 

● Why should an architect care about computer games? 

● What can a game designer take from architecture? 

Compared to the research presented in the preceding sections, the book provides 

an explicitly stated dialectic perspective. STP not only inquires into the unique way 

that space confi gures gameplay and vice versa, but also asks how games can be 

useful to architects and urban planners either as a source of technology, a method of 

simulation during the design process, or an actual design result – or any combination

thereof. In many ways, STP was intended to serve as a vade mecum to Toward a Ludic 

Architecture, and has been quite effective in doing so. In the following section, the 

intent and structure of STP are briefl y outlined, as is its role in this book. 

2.3.1. Book Concept 

STP was conceptualized as a journey through the spaces of computer and videogames 

in the form of a book. It was intended as an exploration of the unique spaces experienced 

in games – the spaces collaboratively and playfully generated in digital networks and 

the hybrid ones created through the overlapping of the digital and the physical. Starting 

from scratch, we editors aimed to produce a comprehensive and interdisciplinary 

compendium on the subject, one that would examine the history and present of digital 

gamespaces and thereby provide diverse perspectives on the future of our mediainfl 

uenced conceptions of behavior and space and on the game culture of tomorrow. 

The title of the book was inspired by Siegfried Giedion’s 1941 book, Space, Time and 

Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, which puts modern architecture and its 

typologies in their social and chronological context. Conceptually, STP attempted to 

show that as in Giedion’s day, we again face the development of new typologies of space 

– spaces that are found in videogames, spaces that emerge from the superimposition 

of the physical and the virtual, and spaces that are constituted by the convergence of 

“space,” “time,” and “play.” 

2.3.2. Outline 

In STP’s introductory outline, we argue that computer games are part and parcel of 

our present, and that the audiovisual language of games and the interaction processes 

associated with them have worked their way into our everyday lives. Yet without space, 

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we point out, there is no place at which, in which, or even based on which a game can 

take place. Similarly, the specifi c space of a game is bred from the act of playing, from 

the gameplay itself. We editors propose that the digital spaces so often frequented by 

gamers have changed and continue to change our notion of space and time, just as fi lm 

and television did in the 20th century. 

Games create sustainable environments that go beyond the realm of fi lm and 

television. With the spread of the Internet, online role-playing games have emerged 

that are often less focused on winning and losing and more focused on the cultivation 

of social communities and human networks that are eventually extended into ”real” 

life. Equipped with wireless technologies and GPS20 capacities, computer games 

have abandoned their original home – the stationary computer – and made their way 

into physical space as mobile and pervasive applications. So-called Alternate Reality 

Games cross-medially blend together, such as, the Internet, public phone booths, and 

physical places and conventions in order to create an alternative ludic reality. Architects 

and urban planners are using game engines to visualize their models and fabricate 

walkthroughs. Games serve as methods during the architectural design process or can 

even result from design processes – when, for example, various physical monuments 

are overlaid with a virtual component that connects the monuments with the help of 

game mechanics. Games can trigger and support both utopian and dystopian thinking, 

and we STP editors argue that it is up to architects, urban planners, and game designers 

to forge the future of ludic interactive space-time (Borries/Walz/Böttger 2007:11ff.). 

20 Short for Global Positioning System. GPS is a satellite navigational system formed by 24 middle earth orbiting 

satellites and their concurrent receivers on earth. GPS was developed and is still maintained by the U.S. 

Department of Defense, though it was originally named NAVSTAR (Navigation System with Timing and Ranging). 

By exchanging data among themselves and with a receiver (mounted, for example, in a car), a minimum of three 

satellites enable the GPS system to calculate the longitude and latitude of the receiver, as well as its height (what 

does it mean to calculate the receiver’s height?). You can fi nd a variety of GPS and geodetic related resources at 

the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Geodetic Survey Website: http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/geodetic_links. 

shtml.

2.3.3. Dramati c Structure 

With STP, we dramatized the fact that the spaces of computer games range from twodimensional 

representations of three-dimensional spaces to complex constructions of 

social communities, to new conceptions of, applications for, and interactions between 

existent physical spaces. The synergies between computer games, architecture, and 

urbanism are refl ected upon from diverse perspectives in essays, short statements, 

interviews, descriptions of innovative projects, and critical reviews of commercial 

games. 

2.3.4. Formal Structure 

STP contains fi ve “levels” – that is, chapters that address the topic through a number 

of lenses: 

● In the fi rst level, The Architecture of Computer and Videogames, the 

contributors outline a short spatiotemporal history of the architecture of 

games. They seek to answer two questions: What are the elements that 

constitute spatiality in games, and what type of interaction do they afford? 

Also in this section, architects express a great deal of interest in the spatial 

qualities and characteristics arising from milestone computer games and 

the ways in which these could impact contemporary architecture. 

● In level two, Make Believe Urbanism, the contributions focus on the 

social cohesion of game-generated spaces. Authors focus on two general 

questions: How are digital metropolises constructed, and how are their 

community spaces produced and maintained? 

● The third level, Ubiquitous Games, demonstrates how physical space 

changes and expands when it is metamorphosed into a “game board,” 

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a new locality, or a place-to-play (which, on other occasions, has been 

referred to as “playce,” cf. Walz and Ballagas (2007) as well as Walz 

(2007)). 

● Serious Fun is the name of the fourth level, which presents examples of 

games that serve both architects and urban planners as instruments for 

designing and planning. 

● The concluding fi fth level, Faites Vos Jeux, refl ects upon the cultural 

relevance of games today and in the future; contributors examine the 

current and future desirability of certain gamespaces. 

To navigate the book, a reader does not need to adhere to the proposed level structure. 

Though STP is formally organized into the aforementioned “levels,” its table of contents 

also offers a structural overview of the book’s content organized according to format 

(i.e. essay, interview, etc.). 

It is important to note that no contribution exceeds a length of six pages. This 

represents a conscious effort on the part of the editors to keep the reader browsing and 

to provide a bricolage perspective on the questions that guide the book. The length 

limitation on contributions also forced authors to streamline their arguments and be as 

straightforward as possible. 

One of the book’s central messages is visually expressed by the block of author 

names featured on the back cover – namely, that the total conceptual space of a game 

is formed by many unique contributions, and that the spaces we fi nd in games are 

unique not only by design, but also because each player uniquely experiences those 

games during each game session. This “uniqueness approach” complements the other 

approaches to digital gamespace, as discussed earlier in this book.

In toto, the fi nal collection of contributions in STP can be thought of as the empirical 

data on which Toward a Ludic Architecture is built. 

2.3.5. Summary: The Genius Loci of a Game 

STP brought together game studies scholars and game design researchers in an 

effort to catalog and critically discuss the new typologies of space resulting from 

computer games. In addition to managing a wide array of voices, the book celebrated 

an approach towards games as unique architectures; these can be seen as its two 

primary accomplishments. This “unique architectures” stance, then, can be considered 

the fi nal dimension of our conceptual gamespace: the consideration of game worlds as 

autonomous world phenomena governed by specifi c game rules that produce specifi c 

combinations of play stimuli and play rhythms in order to entertain users. 

In the spirit of Norberg-Schulz (1980), who vehemently argues that places both natural 

and artifi cial should be understood as totalities – that is, as aggregate phenomena 

of qualities irreducible to single idiosyncratic features – we call this the genius loci 

dimension of gamespace. Even if computer games thus far only feature a limited set 

of repetitive fantasy and science fi ction motifs, game architecture is always unique 

in the sense of Norberg-Schulz’s “phantastic” and, as an allegory of physical space, 

mysterious. The promenade architecturale in games is not only ludic; it is magical. 

STP Levels 3 and 5, in particular, demonstrate how the fi ctional play-worlds of games 

are being increasingly superimposed onto physical architecture, a process that results 

in the creation of the next level of game architecture. In order for this process to evolve, 

architects must concern themselves with computer games, and game designers must 

be willing to learn from architecture. 

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2.4. Summary: 

Games in Architectural Research 

We have identifi ed three major gamespace dimensions from an architectural and urban 

planning perspective. These have been gathered together in Table 7, which provides 

an overview of the rhetorical, technological, and Genius Loci dimensions. 

Concept Contributors Inquiry Approach 

Architecture as a 

game 

Game technology as 

vehicle of architectural 

experimentation 

Game Genius Loci All contributions to 

Borries/Walz/Böttger 

(2007) 

Oosterhuis (2006) Where and when does a 

game take place, and how 

is it demarcated or does it 

demarcate itself from the 

everyday? 

Engeli (2003) How can games and 

game technology be used 

for research and teaching 

in architecture and 

CAAD? 

Why should architects 

care about computer 

games, and what can 

game designers learn 

from architecture? 

Table 7 

An overview of the approaches identified from architectural research. 

Rhetorical 

Technological 

Phenomenological

3. Conclusion: Gamespace 

In the previous section, we mapped out the dimensions of a gamespace. For this 

purpose, we reviewed and updated major research advances in the fi elds of both game 

studies and game design, as well as architecture and urban planning. The dimensions 

derived based on this information represent ways to become aware of, to analyze, and 

even to conceptualize gamespace. 

In conclusion, we will relate the gamespace dimensions to the playspace dimensions, 

for the purpose of formulating useful and meaningful questions that can assist game 

researchers as well as architects in analyzing ludic activities as human practices in 

space and to frame their analyses architecturally. 

The sketch presented here – see Table 8A - 8B – represents a fi rst attempt to consider 

the next level of architecture and game design and should be treated as a draft, not 

a fi nal copy. It is hoped that in the future, this framework will be further specifi ed and 

optimized and will serve as a bridge between the disciplines of game design and 

architectural design / CAAD. Note that the matrix below does not incorporate the 

playspace dimension of ambiguity nor the related rhetoric dimension of gamespace; 

Sutton-Smith has treated these topics at length, and the fi eld of serious and persuasive 

games is interesting, but not related to our discussion. We also neglect to include 

McGregor’s categorizations, as they are covered by other dimensions. 

Our exercise of moving toward a ludic architecture will now be completed by applying 

ideas from our conceptual playspace and gamespace to existing play-grounds – 

inventories of spatial confi gurations that can be viewed as a kind of archaeology. In 

other words, we will now take an historically motivated look at the play-grounds we 

play on. 

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DIMENSIONS OF PLAYSPACE 

DIMENSIONS OF GAMESPACE Player Modality 

Locative 

Representational 

Programmatic 

Dramaturgical 

Typological 

Perspectivistic 

Form-functional & 

form-emotive 

Technological 

Phenomenological 

Where in the game is the player, and 

where is the game for the player? 

How is the player represented in the 

gamespace? How is the game represented 

to the player? 

What does the player do in the game, and 

how does the player do it? 

How does the player traverse the narrative 

space? How does the narrative affect 

the play experience? 

How does the game locale affect or 

determine the way the player perceives 

the game? 

How does the perspective affect the way 

the player is present in the game? 

How do spatial functions affect the 

player? 

How do technologies affect the player 

spatially, and how can the player affect 

game technologies in space? 

What makes the game a unique space for 

the player? 

In what modalities of location, when, and 

for how long does the game take place? 

What kind of spatial representation is 

chosen for which modality and vice 

versa? 

How does gameplay vary over modalities? 

How are transitions handled, and is 

consistency achieved? 

How is the narrative designed for each 

modality, and how does modality affect 

the narrative? 

How do play modalities affect or determine 

the way the game is perceived? 

How does perspective change from 

modality to modality, and how are the 

changes designed? 

How are functions spatially relayed? Using 

what modality? 

How do technologies enable facets of 

modalities and new types of space, and 

how do modalities affect technologies? 

What is the sui generis quality of the 

game achieved with the help of modalities? 

Table 8A 

A draft framework for analyzing and potentially designing ludic activities as human practices in space.

Kinesis Enjoyment Context and Culture 

How does the location affect kinesis and 

play rhythms between player and playother 

and vice versa? 

How does the game’s spatial representation 

affect and determine kinesis and play 

rhythms between player and play-other? 

What are the rules of the game? How are 

kinesis and play rhythms formalized? 

In what way does the narrative unite player 

and play-other? How does the narrative 

relate to (or purport) play rhythms? 

Through which channels do player and 

play-other relate? 

In what ways does the perspective bind or 

connect player and play-other and enable 

play rhythms? 

Which functions cause specifi c types of 

kinesis and play rhythm and vice versa? 

How do technologies enable kinesis and 

play rhythms? 

What kind of unique kinesis and play 

rhythms do we trace? 

Table 8B 

Draft framework continued. 

What is the play pleasure set of the 

game’s locale? What emotions does the 

site inspire? How does the enjoyment 

defi ne the locale? 

How and to what extent is the spatial representation 

responsible for enjoyment? 

How does enjoyment affect representation? 

What part of gameplay triggers what kind 

of play pleasure? 

What part of the story embodies what 

type of play pleasure? How does enjoyment 

affect the drama? 

What kind of perceptive channel is associated 

with each play pleasure? When 

does a sensation become unpleasant? 

How does the perspective infl uence the 

enjoyment of the game? What types of 

play pleasures are preferable? 

How are primary and secondary spatial 

functions coupled with enjoyment types? 

Which technologies and technological 

products are enjoyable for which type of 

play pleasure? 

How does the gamespace achieve a 

singular play pleasure? 

How do the context and culture of the 

play site affect the play site? 

How does the spatial representation 

affect the culture and context and vice 

versa? 

How do culture and context determine 

the gameplay of a game? 

How do context and culture affect the 

narrative? How does the narrative affect 

or relate to context and culture? 

How do context and culture affect the 

choice of the primary physiological 

channel and vice versa? 

Do culture and context determine 

perspective? How does the perspective 

affect the game’s context? 

How do context and culture determine 

the game’s functional structure? 

How do color and context affect the application 

of technologies? How do game 

technologies affect the space of culture? 

How have context and culture affected 

the uniqueness of the game, and how 

does that uniqueness impact culture and 

context? 

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PLAY-GROUNDS 

132

PLAY-GROUNDS: AN 

ARCHAEOLOGY OF LUDIC 

ARCHITECTURES 

“There is a long cultural tradition of spatial games – games like hide-and-seek and 

treasure hunt (...) which, of course, go back centuries before the computer” (Mitchell 

2007:408). Are spatial games, then, only to be thought of in terms of hide-and-seek and 

treasure hunts? 

In the following pages, a number of architectural formats are presented and considered 

as spaces that allow for or embody play activities or even games – in other words, ludic 

practices in space well beyond treasure hunts and hide-and-seek. To a certain extent, 

this short inventory also serves to illustrate precursors to (ubiquitous) games – these 

precursors can serve as design metaphors that designers can consider for their work. 

Yet, the role of computing technologies is not the main focus of these discussions; 

games are sometimes referenced, but not always. Rather, we intend to present an 

archaeology of playspace and gamespace as a means to achieve the overall goal 

of formulating a ludic architecture – a non-exhaustive pool of possible spaces that 

represent ludic qualities. Pay special attention to links between entries, which are 

bolded and underlined to indicate that they represent interesting trajectories. 

One inspiration for this episodic organization are the writings by Georges Bataille, 

the brilliant, crazy, and highly entertaining poet-theorist who interpreted architectural 

metaphor and form as means to cement an existing order and “literal manifestation 

of social structuration” (Leach 1997:20). In light of this view, architectural theorist Neil 

Leach deems Bataille “a theorist against architecture.” But Leach is mistaken; Bataille, 

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134 

especially in the short and episodic entries in his still-incomplete Documents dictionary, 

aimed to express, often drastically, the way that architectures in and of themselves can 

express the soul of a given society – a kind of space, that is. 

We call the following ludic constructions of space play-grounds, a term we borrow 

from Huizinga (1971:10) and prefer to the concept of the magic circle or Buytendijk’s 

playing-fi eld mentioned earlier in this work. Using the magic circle concept would be 

inappropriate, for our discussion aims to discuss the ludic qualities of physical spaces 

rather than analyze these spaces as gamespaces. In the following episodes, games 

are only referenced where appropriate. As Alberto Iacovoni points out in Game Zone, a 

marvelous pamphlet on the interplay of play, games and architecture: 

The term playground generally indicates the areas that are set aside 

in gardens and urban parks for children to play: delimited, controlled 

spaces that are protected from the intrusion of the adult world by a high 

rail fence (...). The desolation of these playgrounds is the mirror image 

of a society which leaves very little space to playing, unless it is behind a 

fence, beyond the box offi ce of a theme park, imprisoned and neutralized 

within the confi nes of “free time” (Iacovoni 2004:19). 

In this book, by contrast, the term play-ground expresses the possibility that play 

can take many forms and take place in many locations. Note that play-grounds are 

not immediately game-grounds, which is why we refrain from applying Salen and 

Zimmerman’s concept of the space of possibility to our discussion. 

The inventory of architectural formats is structured as follows: 

● fi rst, we discuss the role of the previously outlined concepts of game 

spatiality in this inventory;

● we next discuss the overarching spatial principles of play-grounds in 

the context of the phenomenological ideas of utopias, heterotopias, and 

dystopias; 

● fi nally, we present the inventory in list form organized according to the 

ludic quality of each play-ground – for example, what type of play does 

the play-ground program? Often, the form of the entry is that of a collage: 

it is linked to other entries or presented as a compilation of remarkable 

features. This allows readers, in a certain sense, to play and be inspired. 

The general organizational rule for the entries is architectural scale – from 

the mind to XXL scale (the World), and beyond. 

1. About Play-Grounds 

In the following discussions, we will, time and again, include aspects from the analytical 

framework that combine playspace and gamespace dimensions. This means that we 

will refer to categories of enjoyment, to kinesis and play rhythms, and to aspects of 

game spatiality such as allegory, contest, narrative, type, perspective, and function. 

We consciously apply the latter despite the fact that it is derived from digital games 

because we consider play-grounds as being subject to the inherent digitality that games 

entail, and as being subject to an overall computerization of physicality as has been 

demonstrated with the game of REXplorer. 

Before we begin our discussion, however, we will offer a few words on the concept of 

allegory. From Aarseth’s (1997) point of view, the concept may only be used as a lens 

through which to view computer games. Yet, physical spaces can be allegories of other 

spaces as well. This is certainly true of built environments created during the Baroque 

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PLAY-GROUNDS 

136 

epoch, where allegorical architecture symbolizes a structure of complexity wherein 

images and meaning are interwoven like a net to create illusionary spaces (Burgard 

2000). Baroque architecture and landscaping – and the allegory as the epitome of 

Baroque design – are particularly interesting for us and will appear frequently throughout 

our discussion. 

How, you may ask, did we choose which entries to include in this inventory and which to 

exclude, especially given that the inventory is by no means intended to be exhaustive? 

Sometimes entries were chosen for their architectural expressiveness (e.g. the 

Trompe l’œil or Folly), sometimes for their unique designs (e.g. the Tessellation or 

the Panopticon). Some were chosen for chronological reasons, (e.g. Cave, Labyrinth 

(and Maze)), others for their ability to specifi cally express play, (e.g. Stadium, 

Kindergarten, and Playground), yet others for their imageability as cultural myths 

(“Nature”). All entries are archetypical, and their uniqueness is therefore discussed. 

Some of the entries encompass more than one type of play-ground. The Casino, for 

example, embodies qualities that can be found at the midway, the tavern, or the arcade; 

Bogost (2007) mentions this as well. Other major play-grounds may seem to be missing 

from our inventory, but are, in fact, present. The street, for example, is mentioned in the 

context of the urban Playground entry, and the (pleasure) garden and rollercoaster fall 

under the Amusement Park heading. The inventory is thus a play-ground in and of 

itself: its interconnections must be questioned and puzzled over by the reader, by you. 

Note that the results of the design and playtesting phase of REXplorer are woven into 

the play-ground entries where appropriate, as are some game prototypes the author 

has been designing over the past years. 

This game-like linking of play-grounds represents an application of the connectivist 

learning theory introduced by Siemens (2005) and mentioned in the introduction of this 

work. Our ludic trajectories also take into consideration the videogame inspired learning

theory of “conceptual playspaces” introduced by Barab/Ingram-Goble/Warren (2008), 

which suggests using game(-like) mechanics for structuring educational content. 

1.1. Utopia 

A utopia is a counterspace, an ideal society that is either intentionally established 

(Sternfeld (2006), for example, collected contemporary quasi-utopianist attempts in 

the USA in a beautiful photography book) or theoretically conceptualized, typically in 

a piece of literature. Early texts on the topic of utopia include Plato’s De Republica 

and Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious writings about the Garden of Eden, all of 

which can today be considered forms of political and religious utopianism. But the term 

utopia itself was coined by a book of the same name, written by Sir Thomas More and 

published in 1516. 

In the book, the imaginary island country of Utopia – derived from the Greek ou-topos, 

meaning not-place – is described by a traveler. The island is home to a society based on 

a perfect socio-political and legal system. All aspects of communal living are perfectly 

programmed, there is no such thing as private property, religions are tolerated, and 

atheism is outlawed. 

Two aspects of Utopia are most relevant to our context. The fi rst of these is More’s 

explicit intention to provide delight, which is expressed in the actual and full title, 

originally in Latin: “On the Best State of A Commonwealth and On the New Island of 

Utopia. A Truly Golden Handbook, No Less Benefi cial than Entertaining.” 21 _The second 

is the way that the island’s capital Amaurotum was not only societally, but also spatioconstructively 

designed as an allegory of the perfect city. We would thus content that 

21 Translation taken from the revised Logan-Adams translation of Utopia published by the Cambridge University 

Press in 2002. 

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137

PLAY-GROUNDS 

138 

Utopia is a piece of fi ction whose goal is to delightfully immerse the reader in the rules 

of a perfectly organized game. Utopia describes not only a physical space meant to 

entertain those who read about it, but also a perfect living space meant to delight those 

who inhabit it. A utopia programs perfect behavior and therefore, perfect enjoyment. 

Zinsmeister (2004:78f.) traces the way that Utopia not only directly inspired 

Renaissance literature and design, but how the urbanistic designs depicted in the 

book also anticipate the ideal of the modular, gridded, controllable city, which, in 

combination with Leonardo da Vinci’s Homo Vitruvianus, still informs an architectural 

politics of total functionalism and measuring. In a 2001 keynote address to the London 

based Sustainable Placemakers Forum, architect Bernard Hunt reminded his audience 

that “Such people as Ebenezer Howard with his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow, Le 

Corbusier with his Ville Radieuse, and Frank Lloyd Wright with Broadacre City set out 

utopian visions of a better world made possible by man’s progress in placemaking – 

and, for better or worse, their thinking inspired their times and profoundly infl uenced the 

shape of development in the 20th century” (Hunt 2001). 

Venturi/Scott Brown/Izenour (1977:134) state that Vitruvius held that architecture is 

a question of fi rmness, commodity, and delight, and that Gropius – or maybe only 

his Bauhaus followers – taught that fi rmness (structure) plus commodity (program) 

equals delight (form). In this reading, then, form is equal to delight. But can applying 

the suburbanizing principles of social reformist Howard actually and inherently produce 

delightful dwelling? We can tell that Howard’s garden city model inspired Walt Disney’s 

original urban designs for a city in Florida called EPCOT, in which everyone “will 

have the responsibility to maintain this living blueprint of the future” (Disney 1966). 

And let us consider: Do Le Corbusier’s principles of seriality and modularity (Le 

Corbusier 1975:59) really guarantee environmental enjoyment in the sense of a play or 

game experience?

At least one thing is sure: functionalism caused the Situationists to break the rules, to 

invent and practice their own rules and thereby create psychogeographically-refl ected 

play-grounds for the drifting player-fl aneur of dérive (see also the Society entry in 

the inventory below). Hou Je Bek (2007) describes how computation can take hold 

of this practice and become a critique to functionalized space in itself: The Universal 

Psychogeographic Computer (UPC) suggested by the Dutch group socialfi ction.org 

lets participants solve a jigsaw puzzle or calculate the number Pi while taking a walk: 

during the walk, participants follow walking instructions written in pseudo computer 

program code (Hou Je Bek 2007:308f.). 

There is a clash between, on the one hand, play-grounds that only allow for delight and 

playing because they have been totally functionalized and therefore exist perpetually 

on the brink of dystopia and, on the other hand, play-grounds that come into being 

because they are intended to serve as a critique of the other, quasi-dystopic playgrounds. 

And yet neither type of play-ground can exist without the other. This confl ict 

can be traced in movies such as The Truman Show, which “anticipates the computer 

game The Sims (...) and thematizes the closed and fully controlled space of lifesimulation 

on the basis of a normative canon of values and consumerist strategies for 

success” (Nohr 2007:470). 

The confl ict is certainly embedded into the way we design nature and the way we feel 

overwhelmed with the designedness of our environs. The PS2 game Shadow of the 

Colossus (2005) features a twist on this confl ict. In it, a battling player-hero must climb, 

fi ght and slay harmless colossi that are completely non-assailing, often with the help 

of the surrounding environments of ruins and geological formations, see Figure 8. The 

game, then, is really about “man versus nature, the player versus the environment as 

represented by the colossi” (Thomas 2007a:461); it has been described as “perhaps 

the most extraordinarily and unearthly of evil videogame architectures (…). Lairs within 

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lairs.” (Rossignol 2009). Because the player avatar kills the behemoths, one could 

argue that the player becomes the evildoer himself, transforming an untouched utopian 

setting into a dystopian one by the way of playing the game. However, because in 

order to play the game, the design of the game forces the player to kill (and, in the very 

end, punishes the successful player for his wrongdoings with death), it is the game 

designers who ultimately induce evilness and moralistic dilemma into the player’s 

actions, interweaving them with the game’s architecture. 

Figure 8 

The player versus the environment 

as represented by the colossi: 

A seemingly utopian, but 

utterly dystopian confl ict from 

the PlayStation 2 video game 

Shadow of the Colossus. © 

2005 Team Ico / Sony Computer 

Entertainment. Reproduced 

by permission. 

That colossi, albeit less (or presumably) evil ones, are intended to please and astound 

the masses has been shown by the utopianist drafts of French Revolution architects such 

as Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Whereas Ledoux’s architecture

parlante has been accused of being representative of the Ancien Régime (which funded 

his work to a great extent), Boullée preferred the grand and abstract yet still playful and 

revolutionary design gesture. His 150 meter (500 ft) high perforated Cénotaphe sphere 

for Sir Isaac Newton (Figure 9), which simulates the spherical surface of the starry 

sky, stands out as an example of an architecture expressive of its purpose and as a 

stage of enlightenment that offers play pleasures such as vertigo, adventuring, and 

problem-solving. It is an allegorical dramaturgy that is also a technological statement 

of utopianist immensité. 

Utopian cities and spaces rather often represent the notion of an enlightened-delighted, 

perfect, superhuman society that has battled nature by design in an attempt to achieve 

perfect square form-functions and perfect superhuman circles and spheres. But 

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Figure 9 

Étienne-Louis Boullée: Design 

vision for Cénotaphe à 

Newton (1784). Reproduced 

from Wikipedia.

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perfection is not what we get: “In reality, architects and builders have no choice but 

to proceed in the opposite direction. In the absence of an ideal society, they turn their 

attention to the shell, the city itself, as an ideal form. And in the twentieth century, this is 

increasingly replaced by themed entertainment, arcades, mega-malls, and amusement 

parks” (Herwig and Holzherr 2006:15). And, one might add, by the digital game, either 

virtual or, increasingly, hybrid. 

1.2. Heterotopia 

In his 1967 lecture Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias (Foucault 1997), Michel 

Foucault investigates how space becomes institutionalized and how structures of power 

are demarcated. Foucault is, in fact, looking for those places in society that actually 

lie outside of society, but which can still be localized. Foucault is looking for spatial 

arrangements of the everyday – cinemas, cafés, beaches – that are simultaneously 

“represented, challenged, and overturned” (1997:352). Foucault, we could say, is 

looking for societal play-grounds. 

He fi nds that we cannot localize utopias – they have no real space and are totally 

perfect, rendering them unreal spaces. But society does have spaces, spanning various 

ages and contexts, that fi t Foucault’s profi le – realized utopias that “perform the task of 

creating a space of illusion that reveals how all of real space is more illusory (…) forming 

another space, another real space, as perfect, meticulous and well-arranged as ours 

[is] disordered, ill-conceived and in a sketch state” (1997:356). Foucault’s examples 

of these heterotopias – simultaneously demarcations and inscriptions of the everyday 

– include the museum, the brothel, the cemetery, and the epitome of all heterotopias, 

the ship.

The ship fl oats – moves, in fact, in tune with the rhythm of the ocean – from port to 

port. The ship is a closed program poised in the infi nite, dramaturgical space that is 

the ocean. Along with the ship come dreams of economic growth, treasure, and desire. 

From the beginning of its existence down to the present day, the ship has always been 

a reservoir of our imaginations. 

There is an enduring heterotopia that Foucault could not and did not identify: the played. 

In other words, the realized play-ground of play pleasure (see the Playground entry 

above). When not played on or with, a play-ground remains an empty space – it needs 

a player, and sometimes one or more spectators, to come to life. Although the played 

play-ground is, formally speaking, demarcated from everyday space, using Foucault, 

we can read it as a heterotopian other feeding from and mirroring the everyday. We can 

thus think of playing as a heterotopian practice or, to extend the concept of Lefebvre’s 

veçu, as a form of veçu miroité, i.e. mirrored lived space (1991). 

This much we know: Just as Foucault has identifi ed heterotopian types, we can identify 

heterotopian forms and programs typical of the computer game. To name a few, we will 

mention the tennis court, the dungeon, the mansion, the carnival, the castle (see the 

Castle entry), the shadow path, the panzer, the small town, the mushroom kingdom, the 

noir urbanity, the island, and the planet (see the World entry). Heterotopian computer 

game forms can also be abstract; think of geometrical space, sonic space, and, of 

course, mirroring Foucault’s metaphor of desire, the space ship. All these heterotopian 

types program but also cater to a particular set of ludic activities. The dungeon programs 

and caters to role-playing in a system of maze-like tunnels wherein treasure is hidden 

and monsters such as trolls may be encountered and battled. The space ship programs 

and caters to six degrees of freedom-fl oating, trading, and encountering other space 

ships, species, and specimens of space. 

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In computer games, any given space can become a heterotopian space of simulation 

– as long as this heterotopia defers to the game’s design and rules and, ideally, 

simultaneously programs ludic activities set forth by the game’s design. 

1.3. Dystopia 

Utopian thinking and writing has given rise to the creation of anti-utopias as well. If utopias 

typically manifest counter-everyday spaces that supposedly provide their inhabitants 

with a happy life, then dystopias are societies characterized by extreme negative 

qualities such as repression, poverty, hunger, violence, or environmental hazards – 

challenges, we could say, to be overcome. Early milestone fi ctional dystopias include 

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World from 1932 and the classic silent fi lm Metropolis by 

Fritz Lang from 1927. The latter is set in a Gothic skyscraper corporate urbanity state, 

where desperate underground workers (the “hands”) sustain the lives of the ruling and 

privileged class (the “head”) that lives high above them in luxury. 

Many videogames have embraced similar and explicitly dystopian themes. Consider, 

for example, the fi rst-person shooter role-playing game BioShock (2007). In the brutal 

and disquieting but highly moralistic game, the player roams through the beautifully 

inscenated, Art Déco-inspired underwater city of Rapture. Rapture was originally 

intended as a Garden of Eden by its builder and overseer Andrew Ryan, but then 

became populated by aggressive, genetically modifi ed mutants and robotic drones. 

In other words, it transformed into a fl awed utopia in which ordered society collapsed. 

By the way of the decaying narrative architecture, the player is led to believe that is 

is Ryan he must eliminate. Yet, “as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that, although 

you [the player, spw] will inevitably kill Ryan, his architecture tells you nothing about 

the nature of the enemy you face. Indeed, the true enemy has nothing to do with the 

stylized nature of this lair at all” (Rossignol 2009).

Dystopias, whether stylized as in the case of Rapture or as lairs in themselves, are 

play-grounds that feature inherent confl icts and thus inherent goals for player-heroes 

to achieve in that they exhibit word-fl aws or imbalances that the player must overcome 

in order to turn the dystopia at least into a regular, if not a heterotopian world. The 

dystopian play-ground that encourages the player to sustain the dystopian condition 

and to prevent other players from taking control provides an exciting reversal on this 

confl ictive topos of overcoming given circumstances. 

In consideration of dystopian worlds as a basic form of ludic architecture, we draw 

your attention to the following interview excerpt, in which ubiquitous computing theorist 

Adam Greenfi eld, now Head of Design Direction at Nokia, argues: 

Cities are all about diffi culty. They’re about waiting: for the bus, for 

the light to change, for your order of Chinese take-out to be ready. 

They’re about frustration: about parking tickets, dogshit, potholes and 

noisy neighbors. They’re about the unavoidable physical and psychic 

proximity of other human beings competing for the same limited pool 

of resources...the fear of crime, and its actuality. These challenges 

have conditioned the experience of place for as long as we’ve gathered 

together in settlements large and dense enough to be called cities. 

And as it happens, with our networked, ambient, pervasive informatic 

technology, we now have (or think we have) the means to address some 

of these frustrations. In economic terms, these technologies both lower 

the information costs people face in trying to make the right decisions, 

and lower the opportunity cost of having made them. 

So you don’t head out to the bus stop until the bus stop tells you a bus 

is a minute away, and you don’t walk down the street where more than 

some threshold number of muggings happen - in fact, by default it doesn’t 

even show up on your maps - and you don’t eat at the restaurant whose 

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forty-eight recent health code violations cause its name to fl ash red in 

your address book. And all these decisions are made possible because 

networked informatics have effectively rendered the obscure and the 

hidden transparent to inquiry. And there’s no doubt that life is thusly 

made just that little bit better. 

But there’s a cost - there’s always a cost. Serendipity, solitude, anonymity, 

most of what we now recognize as the makings of urban savoir faire: 

it all goes by the wayside. And yes, we’re richer and safer and maybe 

even happier with the advent of the services and systems I’m so 

interested in, but by the same token we’re that much poorer for the loss 

of these intangibles. It’s a complicated trade-off, and I believe in most 

places it’s one we’re making without really examining what’s at stake 

(Greenfi eld 2008). 

In contrast to the all too perfect utopia (that which pervasive computing may bring upon 

us) and the heterotopian space that allows for playing out alternative realities, dystopias 

provide pleasure by setting up entirely unenjoyable, i.e. frustrating places that must 

be playfully escaped, saved, destroyed, or equilibrated. Utopias, heterotopias, and 

dystopias can all be measured by their artifi cial and confl ictive, i.e. problem-solving 

potential. Whereas utopias are idealized, hyper-artifi cial spaces that we may never 

reach (a problem in and of itself), heterotopias temporarily realize our imaginations. 

Dystopias, eventually, encourage us to be involved in their systems in order to partially 

or fully dissolve them. The interview excerpt discusses the way that, ludically speaking, 

the quasi-dystopia of the city can become a utopia that may turn out to be a dystopia. 

In the following section, we will examine play-ground topoi that resemble qualities 

described in the above section, thus further problematizing the dialectics of ludic 

architecture between control and agency.

2. Possible Worlds 

Hegelian philosophy suggests that everything starts with an idea, with a possibility, and 

that all that is real is just a realization of an idea. We can imagine playing. That is, with 

our minds, we can make ourselves believe; and this pretense is a signature feature 

of our very being. In fact, the basis of games is our capability to imagine a possible 

situation and to construct a new and secondary kind of reality, according to both Oerter 

(1999:9ff.) and Piaget (1951). Game designer Noah Falstein describes this practice as 

”mental fun”: “We practice and improve our mental abilities in our leisure time just as we 

exercise our muscles and build social relationships” (Falstein 2004). We can compare 

Falstein’s concept of mental fun to Jesse Schell’s concept of games that take place in 

zero dimensions, i.e. without a board or a manifest site. As an example, Schell points 

to the conversational game Twenty Questions, in which Player One imagines an object, 

and Player Two asks “yes” or “no” questions in an effort to guess the object (Schell 

2008:134f.). 

What is the coordinate system of the imaginary modality? What is its locale, its program? 

Are possible worlds always subject to mental realms? In an investigation of immersion 

(induced by virtual reality) and the affi nity of the immersion concept to theories of fi ction 

based on the notion of possible worlds and ludic make-believe, Marie-Laure Ryan 

observes that all these theories share: 

A reliance on the semantic model of a set of possible worlds in which 

a privileged member is opposed to all others as the one and only 

actual world. The distinction actual/non-actual can be characterized 

absolutely, in terms of origin, or relatively, in terms of point of view. In 

the absolute characterization, the actual world is the only one that exists 

independently of the human mind; merely possible worlds are products 

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of mental activities such as dreaming, wishing, forming hypotheses, 

imagining, and writing down the products of the imagination in the form 

of fi ctions. VR [Virtual Reality] adds to this catalog of “accessibility 

relations” a mode of apprehension that involves not only the mind, but 

also the body. For the fi rst time in history, the possible worlds created 

by the mind become palpable entities, despite their lack of materiality 

(Ryan 1999:117f.). 

We have to disagree with Ryan. This “bodily mode of being in the world” (1999:137) is a 

phenomenon that, well before the invention of virtual reality and interactive media, was 

achieved by many architectural spaces that, form-functionally, aim at make-believe or 

serve as a stage for make-believe. Some of these play-grounds have been collected in 

the non-exhaustive inventory presented here. 

From our perspective, computer simulation (which enables virtual reality) makes 

possible the development of different, new, and more complex types of games. 

Furthermore, computerization serves as a strong reminder that for thousands of years, 

we spatially and culturally demarcated play and games from everyday life, designated 

them as our “little feasts in the quotidian” (Bausinger 1999). With computerization, this 

dichotomy between The Game and The Quotidian ceases to exist; heterotopias can 

become pervasive, and, eventually, maybe even quotidianized. Let us briefl y meditate 

on the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip “There’s treasure everywhere!” to illustrate this 

hypothesis. 

The cartoon – written and illustrated by Bill Watterson (1996) – shows the six-year old, 

imaginative boy Calvin and his stuffed and energetic pet animal, Hobbes, who has 

come alive. Hobbes is Calvin’s partner in crime, not only anthropomorphing into a best 

friend, but also into a sardonic commentator – a play-other. In this strip’s particular fl ight 

of fantasy, Calvin digs for buried treasure. In the fi rst panel, Hobbes asks “Why are

you digging a hole?” Answers Calvin, streaked with dirt and wearing a tropical hardhat: 

“I’m looking for buried treasure”. In the second panel, Hobbes continues to ask: “What 

have you found?”. Calvin lists, “A few dirty rocks, a weird root, and some disgusting 

grubs,” handing Hobbes a sample. Taken with the rock he looks at, Hobbes smiles in 

the last panel, again asking “On your fi rst try?”. Beaming, Calvin responds: “There’s 

treasure everywhere!” 

Hobbes is interested not only in the activity – hole-digging – but also in the objects 

Calvin encounters, which may not seem appealing to most readers. To Calvin, though, 

the items are treasurable; they possess high affordance. What for, we don’t know, and 

Calvin and Hobbes may not know either. That is because as objects, the treasures 

come alive only in the moment in which they are instantiated in a certain context. It 

is interesting to note that in this strip, Hobbes does not represent Calvin’s potential 

maturity and externalized conscience as he normally does. Instead, both characters 

are immersed in the fascination of pantopian play. “There’s treasure everywhere” then, 

is also a motto that is, at its heart, Situationist (see the Society entry of the inventory). It 

also implicitly reads: “Everything can be treasure!” – and, by extension, enjoyable. Calvin 

and Hobbes are participating in a situation of indeterminate possibilities, of an infi nite 

amount of possible kinesis with magical rocks, roots, grubs, pets, holes, treasures, 

and games. The excitement that is at play here is the in-the-moment excitement of 

possibility – or, as Jorge Luis Borges describes it in his short story, The Garden of 

Forking Paths: “At that moment I felt within me and around me something invisible and 

intangible pullulating” (1962:99). 

Whereas the permeating of computing technologies allows “possible world everywhereness,” 

we can also understand the comic strip as a call to understand any 

given space as a possible play-ground. Think of all those risk-taking City exploration 

activities involving, for example, forgotten utility tunnels, abandoned subway stations, 

or inaccessible urban network structures such as pneumatic mail or pneumatic 

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transportation 22 . In a clarion call to “acute exploration” of the metropolitan landscape, 

Stilgoe (1998) suggests that one go for a walk or bicycle ride in order to critically probe 

how certain places and processes, such as main streets and the postal service, are 

taken for granted, and to thereby become aware of “the mundanity of social interaction, 

of the built environment, and the technologies that bridge both” (1998). 

Eventually, you, the player, negotiate where, with whom, and with what you draw the 

magic circle to play-move within a possible world of possible worlds. Note, however, 

that in the comic strip, we only see the play-ground in which Calvin and Hobbes are 

immersed, not the context and culture in which that play-ground is situated and not 

the parties who may be repelled by the imaginary modality. So in the spirit of Rosa 

Luxemburg, let us design possible worlds in which freedom is always the freedom of 

dissenters, and lived imagination is always and exclusively imagination for the one 

who imagines differently. Enforcing possible worlds onto non-players may liberate the 

latter from social conventions and help them see their environment in a new light; but 

a Kantian improvement of the world by way of gameplay must refl ect that universal 

and particularistic interests must be brought together. It would be wrong to believe 

that political, social, economic, communication, or game systems in place of everyday 

release our selves per se. These systems simply win over users, replace the conquered 

systems, and introduce new rules, which other possible programs then attempt 

to break. 

The game REXplorer, which helps tourists explore the history of Regensburg, 

Germany, can serve as prime and temporary example of a groundbreaking game 

system and gameworld. In REXplorer, as described in the introduction, historical spirits 

are stationed at points of interest throughout the physical city of Regensburg, and 

22 Note that some of these activities are illegal and inherently dangerous. Organizations such as the Berliner 

Unterwelten e.V., society for the exploration and documentation of subterranean architecture, offer guided Berlinfrom-below 

tours, for example, and in the mid 19th century, the Pneumatic Despatch Company built a short-lived 

transportation system in London with tubes large enough to fi t passenger carriages (Samuda 1841).

players use a special “paranormal activity detector“ (i.e. a device composed of a mobile 

phone and GPS receiver encased in a protective shell) to interact with location-based 

and site-specifi c spirits. A novel mobile interaction mechanism of “casting a spell“ (i.e. 

making a gesture by waving the wand-like detector through the air) allows players to 

awaken and communicate with the spirits in order to receive and resolve quests. The 

game is designed to make learning history fun for tourists and to infl uence their path 

through the city. 

REXplorer is a part of the Regensburg Experience (REX) museum, which is full of 

interactive exhibits that allow visitors to experience different aspects of the city’s 

cultural heritage, such as medieval music and poetry. REXplorer is designed to extend 

the visitor experience beyond the museum walls and to showcase the most signifi cant 

attraction of Regensburg, its mostly Gothic and Romanesque urban silhouette and 

architecture. Regensburg is a UNESCO World Heritage site and the best-preserved 

medieval city in Germany, mostly untouched by the widespread bombing campaigns 

of WWII. REXplorer changes visitors’ perceptions of their destination by enabling 

players to narratively and physically link city sites, thus creating an interconnected 

mental map. 

The target audience of REXplorer mainly consists of younger visitors with German 

language profi ciency. The theme of the game is techno-magical: Visitors are asked, 

as scientifi c assistants, to examine paranormal activity recently discovered in the 

Regensburg medieval city center over the course of an hour. Fictional scientists, the 

players are told, have discovered that the phenomena are somehow linked to a child’s 

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Figure 10 

In the Possible World of REXplorer, 

a real gravestone is inscribed 

with a mysterious secret 

language, which serves as the 

starting point for the spell-casting 

gestures used in the game. 

gravestone inscribed with a mysterious secret language shown in Figure 10. The 

gravestone is a real artifact in the Regensburg Cathedral, and real historians have 

determined that the symbols, used instead of letters, were meant to cover up the identity 

of the buried child, who is thought to have been the illegal offspring of a Regensburg 

cleric – a scandal in the 16th century! 

For fi eld research, the scientists have developed a special detector device that is able 

to measure paranormal activity at specifi c sites in the city center. The detector has 

artifi cial intelligence capabilities and is able to talk directly to the players. This makes

the device a character in the game, anthropomorphically encouraging players to relate 

to it as a team member trying to help them achieve their goals. The detector reacts 

to a variety of gameplay situations including, for example, when the player idles for 

a longer period of time. Most importantly, the detector notifi es players when they are 

in the vicinity of paranormal activity (and points of historical interest) through its own 

excited heartbeat, which serves to further emphasize its human qualities. The detector 

character is made even more accessible and entertaining by the voice actor who plays 

it in so highly expressive, excited, and often self-ironic a manner. 

When near a historically signifi cant site, players draw one of the gravestone symbols 

through the air as though they were casting a spell with a magic wand. Each symbol 

draws power from one of four medieval elements (earth, water, fi re, or wind) and 

establishes a communication channel to the spiritual world, allowing the either historical 

or mythological spirits to tell their cliff-hanger stories through the device’s loudspeaker. 

Each story challenges the players to fulfi ll a quest by going to a different point of 

interest in the city. Players need to listen carefully to the spirits in order to capture the 

verbal clues that indicate which gesture to use to accept a quest. When the quest is 

completed at another site by interacting with another spirit, the original cliff-hanger 

narrative is resolved, and a new quest is offered. For each completed quest, players 

receive points, which allow them to level up from a rookie research assistant to a 

master research assistant during the course of their game session. 

The player’s progress during a game session is tracked and used to create a personalized 

player blog through which the possible world of the game lives on. In short, REXplorer 

superimposes an informational, ludic layer upon the physical city of Regensburg. 

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Figure 11 

An Impossible World game level in Echochrome. 

© 2008 Sony Computer Entertainment. 

Reproduced by permission. 

irregular, confl icting perspectives allows Escher to construct a waterfall that splashes 

into a basin, from which an aqueduct leads downhill in sharp turns, only to end up back at 

the top of that same waterfall and thereby create a paradox loop (Ernst 2007). Waterfall 

plays with our visual sense, creating uncertainty and defying the laws of geometry. 

The result is that we seek to problem-solve the impossible and the vertigo it entails; an 

impossible world, you see, is a play-ground of illusion. To better understand this type 

of Playground – the illusion with which we crave to dance in our everydayness – see 

Casino. 

In an impossible world, the world itself is the puzzle; together with the player, it cocreates 

illusionary movement and play rhythm. 

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4. Body 

Let us investigate examples of how the body – biologically, culturally, and as an element 

of an interactive system – can be viewed as a play-ground. Note that for the purposes 

of this book, the investigation rests on the assumption that kinesis is integral to the 

way we relate to the world and to others. Today, physical and computational worlds 

are being increasingly integrated. In light of this fact, human-computer interaction 

design researchers hold that the physical body plays ”a central role in shaping human 

experience in the world, understanding the world, and interactions in the world“ 

(Klemmer/Hartmann/Takayama (2006:1). 

In cosplay, short for costume–play, people dress in costume and then dramatize 

and re-enact their favorite Manga comic or videogame characters. The videogames 

are thereby spatialized and brought to the streets (see Figure 12, which shows two 

cosplayers at the Tokyo Game Show 2005). Cosplay as a form of re-enactment thus 

belongs in the tradition of live action role-playing, which typically relies on pen and 

paper media for its rule base and costume as the main medium through which it is 

conveyed. Cosplay is particularly popular in Japan and other Asian countries, where 

the activity is socially acceptable. Architecturally speaking, the body in cosplay is a 

space covered by a costume façade, which creates a superfi cial fantasy similar to the 

Trompe l’œil. This represents one of many possible representational functions of the 

body as play-ground.

Figure 12 

Cosplayers impersonating their favorite video game characters at the Tokyo Game Show 

2005. (Left) Wario. (Right) Donkey Kong. 

Our bodies and bodily functions can create enjoyment as a result of play activity that 

involves the body on many different levels. These levels can be roughly divided into: 

● physical play-grounds (see also Buytendijk 1933): Figure 13 shows how 

participants in a pervasive game workshop led by the author use the 

physical body to create games; 

● emotional play-grounds (Lazzaro 2004); 

● mental play-grounds (see the Possible Worlds entry in the inventory); 

● sensual play-grounds. 

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Figure 13 

Participants from Shih Chien 

University in Taipei present 

body-based game mechanics 

during a game design workshop 

co-taught by the author 

in January 2007. 

Let us look at examples of how body enjoyment is achieved. Traditional Chinese foot 

massages – in western countries, a branch of so-called alternative medicine – belong 

to the last category, i.e. sensual, player-centered play-grounds. These massages can 

be quite painful for a fi rst-timer, but may turn out to be a fi rst step down the path towards 

better health. Many medical doctors criticize refl exology for a lack of scientifi c evaluation 

and proof of effi cacy. In Switzerland, for example, only licensed medical practitioners are 

permitted to perform refl exology; this, it is believed, will raise and guarantee therapeutic

quality on the basis of accepted medical knowledge. This is not the proper place for a 

thorough discussion of the medical accuracy of foot massages, however. Rather, let 

us look at refl exology from a game and interaction design perspective as a sensual 

play-ground. 

In Chinese refl exology, the foot, like a Board (see Figure 14), is divided into acupuncture 

points and areas. By pressing the right spot, at the right angle, with the right amount of 

pressure, with the right fi nger posture, refl exologists claim that they can stimulate and 

unblock fl ows in the patient’s body – because acupuncture points are Mapped to 

specifi c parts of the body – and thereby 

improve blood circulation or alleviate 

ailments like indigestion, diarrhea, or 

menstrual pain. Whether relief is 

achieved because nerve circuits are 

stimulated or because endorphins are 

released is unclear. Scientifi c evidence, 

however, suggests that refl exological 

techniques can reduce stress and be 

useful for relaxation (Natural Standard 

and Harvard Medical School 2005). 

Thus if an actuator skillfully presses the 

right spot, a feeling of relaxation can 

result. The body, in other words, has 

been treated like a sensual and zoned 

play-ground. 

Figure 14 

A kind of Board: Taiwanese reflexology 

depiction of foot massage zones. 

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Similarly, in the technological project Massage Me (2007), buttons sewn into a massage 

jacket interpret back movements and pass these on to a videogame console as control 

signals: “Otherwise wasted button-pushing energy is transformed into a massage and 

the addicted game player becomes an inexhaustible masseur” (Perner-Wilson and 

Satomi 2007). 

Buytendijk (1933:121ff.) describes the Liebesspiel – in English, fl irtation – as the purest 

of all games. We would go one step further and say that fl irtation involves all aspects 

of the body-as-play-ground. Note that the German term describes not only playful 

fl irtation, but also the acts of mating and love-making – that is, the act of, literally, loveplaying 

itself. 

The play-ground of “loveplay” is created at the confl uence of physical, emotional, 

mental, and sensual enjoyment, which, in western societies, often takes place in bed. 

The architecture of the bed is particularly fi t not only for mating, but also for horizontal 

body programs such sleeping, dreaming, waking up, recovering, resting, giving birth, 

and dying. The construction of a bedroom, however, to separate the bed architecture 

from other spaces (and thus separate the related bed programs from other programs, 

such as cooking and eating) is a relatively novel housing concept that only became 

commonplace in the 19th and 20th centuries24 (Dibie 1993). 

The play-ground of the body and the architecture it inspires are subject to the way culture 

frames space. This relationship is taken to a new level when body functions such as 

heart rate or skin conductivity are connected to a physical space. The design technique 

of coupling player and environmental play-other was executed by a group of students 

supervised by the author, who created the biofeedback game prototype Bioplay5000, 

whose biofeedback hardware couples the player with computer-integrated building 

functionalities such as light control as well as with a camera based motion recognition 

24 Its roots, however, can be traced to the ancient Roman cubiculum.

system, (see http://www.building-ip.ethz.ch/education/Biofeedback as well as Walz et 

al. (2005)). In Bioplay5000, body and space achieve a new and intimate programmatic 

entity achieved via play and enabled by Technology. 

In the case of the REXplorer game, the player’s body and the game’s play-other (i.e. 

the game controller) form a new kind of interactive unit in that the game uses a novel, 

ubiquitous mobile interaction technique of casting a spell by way of gesturing. Hummel 

(2000) has found that the physical movement of gesturing with the arm is more likely to 

create an engaging play experience than merely staying still. 

In REXplorer, as has been mentioned earlier, players gesture while holding the game 

controller, an aluminum shell wrapped with a protective, soft, and stretchable textile that 

houses a Nokia N70 smartphone and a GPS receiver. The textile overlay transforms 

the standard phone keypad into an eight-key game interface. Players must hold down 

one of these buttons while performing a gesture and release it to indicate the end of the 

gesture. Gesture recognition is accomplished using camera-based motion estimation, 

as in Ballagas et al. (2005). As motion samples are collected, they are rendered on 

screen so that players can see their gesture progress in real time. Once the gesture 

is complete, the motion trail is normalized, and the data is passed through a gesture 

recognition algorithm. A legend of gestures is provided in a souvenir brochure that 

players receive at the beginning of the game. The spell vocabulary consists of symbols 

inspired by a mysterious secret language from a historical artifact, a gravestone 

located in the Regensburg cathedral. In designing the game, we carefully selected a 

few relatively simple symbols whose motion vectors were as orthogonal as possible 

to simplify the gesture recognition process, for which we developed a specifi c gesture 

recognition algorithm. 

Once we had devised the spell-casting concept, we used an iterative player-centered 

design process to ensure that the spell-casting input would be intuitive, enjoyable, and 

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appropriate to the game’s concept targeting tourists as well as to the game’s narrative. 

At several stages in the design process, we conducted and video taped playability 

testing with several integrated prototype iterations both off and on site. These tests 

were followed by focus group interviews, which we used to identify patterns of behavior. 

Our main fi ndings regarding the acceptance of gesture input follow: 

● Players were surprised by the high level of gesture tolerance. Aaron: 

“What I thought worked really well was even when you made a round 

‘C’, the device still would recognize it – in any case, it has a really high 

tolerance.” 25 

● In noisy environments, the smoothness of the gesture trace visualization 

from the motion data was very important to the spell-casting experience 

because players had preconceptions about the robustness of the 

recognition system. Smoothness was improved over time by, for example, 

employing a momentum heuristic. 

● Because some players experienced repeated recognition failures at 

locations with a lot of motion noise, we introduced an alternative spell 

selection mechanism with a one-button interface. 

● Older players in particular found the publicness of the gestures socially 

awkward. The vast majority in the target group, however, mentioned that 

the gestures were an important part of the experience, adding, as they 

did, to the sense of magic and mystery. In a focus group interview, Maria 

said, “We had fun with the fact that it was hard to trace out the gestures. 

When it works every time, then it’s boring. It shouldn’t be too easy.” 26 

25 Original German, translated by author: “Was ich ganz gut fi nde ist, dass selbst wenn man ein rundes ‚C’ 

macht, das Gerät selbst das noch erkennen würde – recht grosse Toleranz auf jeden Fall.” Note that playtester 

names have been changed. 

26 Original German, translated by author: “Wir hatten Spass daran, dass es schwierig war, es hinzumalen. Wenn

_ Emotional reactions were also common when players successfully 

performed a gesture. During a game session, Irene commented, “Bravo... 

yeah!” after performing a gesture correctly. 

Ballagas/Kuntze/Walz (2008) as well as Ballagas and Walz (2007) discuss results 

from playability testing REXplorer in detail. The coupling of bodily gesture and game 

interaction, so much is clear, instantiates the play-ground that is the body. 

5. “Nature” 

Orienteering originated in 19th century Scandinavia as a military exercise and 

developed into a competitive sport around 1900. We can think of it as a predecessor 

to all standardized scavenger hunts and an infl uencer of pervasive games involving 

point-to-point quest solving. We can think of it, in other words, as a mix of contesting, 

adventuring, and problem-solving, as pure terrain kinesis. 

Swedish Major and Scout leader Ernst Killander, the “father of orienteering,” organized 

the fi rst large-scale event in Stockholm in 1918 and continued to develop the rules 

of foot orienteering thereafter (Palmer 1997). Today, all Scandinavian countries host 

national orienteering championships, and many national and international competitions 

and events offer courses that vary in diffi culty from beginner to advanced. 

Orienteering is a physical, running-intensive game in which players read and interpret 

a specialized topographical Map (see Figure 15, which shows a representative 

map used by acquaintances of the author during a Bay Area orienteering run in 

2005), use a compass to orient themselves, and choose routes in physical space 

es auf Anhieb klappt, dann ist es ja langweilig. Es darf nicht zu einfach sein.” 

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in order to locate and visit a series of control points shown on their map. Whoever 

reaches the fi nish line in the shortest amount of time, checking in at the control 

punch stations, wins. Because the shortest path from one point to another is not 

necessarily the fastest, players not only compete over respective fi tness levels, 

but also over mental skills such as navigation and map reading. In fact, the main 

challenge in orienteering is to navigate while running, i.e. to coordinate oneself. 

Figure 15 

Exemplary orienteering map - difficulty level “yellow”, for the Joe Grant south run April 17, 2005, 

with map legend. Map reproduced by permission from Lea Widdice.

Unsurprisingly, a 1997 member survey of the Bay Area Orienteering Club (BAOC) – 

the 4th largest organization of its kind in the US –found that among the almost 200 

members who completed the questionnaire, “members’ personal goals for orienteering 

center primarily around recreation and self-improvement, specifi cally (1) Become a 

better navigator; (2) Improve fi tness; (3) Compete with self; (4) Have a nice walk in the 

woods” (BAOC 1997). 

In orienteering, the rules of nature (or the rules of a naturalized environment) must 

be mastered by a player who is simultaneously rapidly moving and collecting stamps. 

The relationship between game and architecture in orienteering is thus a curious one 

because orienteering really comprises three games: one of introspection, in which the 

player competes against himself; a second in which the athletic contest between player 

and play-others is central; and, fi nally, a third in which the contest between player and 

play-ground is central – the play-ground being a dangerous natural landscape. 

Even if we assume that many ”natural” spaces used for orienteering have, in fact, been 

manually naturalized to appear as though they were untouched by man – have, in 

other words, become designed landscapes – we can still conclude that in orienteering, 

the player plays against himself and against nature’s architecture. The ultimate 

challenge in orienteering is the annual wayfi nding meeting and competition in Venice 

(also mentioned in the City entry). Ironically, then, the equivalent to the videogame 

incarnation of the bad guy, the boss-monster, in orienteering is a city, the least natural, 

but also the most designed of all play-grounds; even more ironically, that city is Venice, 

possibly the most jungle-like of all urban play-grounds. 

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6. Tessellati on 

The tessellated play-ground is pieced together by or for the player, using, for example, 

a collection of plane tiles of a regular shape. The use of equilateral triangles, squares, 

or hexagons of identical size produces a regular tessellation with the utmost symmetry, 

while the use of two or more different regular polygons results in a semi-regular 

tessellation. In both types of tessellation, every vertex must have the exact same 

confi guration. A jigsaw puzzle, then, creates tessellation too, as it creates neither gaps 

nor overlaps. It is not, however, necessarily regular in strict geometrical terms, although 

it features recurring regular shape types. Tessellation embodies the form-function of 

form-functions. 

Patel (2006) analyzes and compares the coordinate systems of square, regular triangle, 

and hexagon grids (i.e. tessellations) by considering the position of grid parts. Patel 

suggests an integrated coordinate (i.e. positioning) system for these simple shapes by 

defi ning nine (3*3) possible relationships between grid parts. These relationships can 

be expressed as algorithms from A to a list of Bs, i.e. 

A B1 B2 B3 

for each grid subdividing shape, describing a total of 27 algorithms. For example, the 

simplifi ed form for the relationship “neighbors” is 

(u,v) (u,v+1)(u+1,v)(u,v-1)(u-1,v). 

Using Patel’s algorithms, it is possible to quickly compute tessellations useful for 

gamespaces. Piecing together Lego bricks can be considered a form of threedimensional 

tessellating-play, in which each Lego brick is equal to a so-called honeycomb 

(“Polyhedra which can be packed together periodically, to fi ll space exactly with no

gaps, may be thought of as cells in a space-fi lling honeycomb” (Inchbald 1997:213)). 

The three-dimensional human face puzzle toy Ole Million Face, created in the 1920s 

by Carey Orr, an editorial cartoonist from Chicago, and later popularized in the US as 

Changeable Charlie (Gaston Manufacturing), is another example of three-dimensional 

tessellating-play. 

Another more recent and exciting example of a honeycomb-like play-ground is Reinhold 

Wittig’s dice pyramid board game Das Spiel (Edition Perlhuhn), in English, The Game 

(see Figure 16). Das Spiel comes with a triangular base plate and 281 four-colored 

dice. Das Spiel is actually a game framework, for it can be used to play many different 

types of building or un-building pyramid games using the dice. Whereas Das Spiel is, 

spatially, a limited honeycomb volume (because there is one fi nal die on top of the 

pyramid), building with Lego can provide, at least theoretically, endless play. 

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Figure 16 

A honeycomb-like play-ground: 

The pyramidal game framework 

Das Spiel (Edition Perlhuhn 1979).

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168 

In Board games, tile shapes are used as play pieces that are moved around on a game 

board. In games of chance, for example, the pieces may be used as chips, in which 

case the formal role the tile plays in the game (e.g. as a stand-in for money) is more 

important than its shape. Tile-laying can also be used to create the board of the game. 

In this case, the tiles have a combined functionality, serving not only as shapes or 

volumes used for layout and/or geometrical purposes, but also as fundamental vehicles 

of value (for example, as instruments of scoring or fulfi lling the game objective) that can 

be used to dynamize the game. Three examples of tile-laying games include the board 

game Carcassonne, the letter-tile game Scrabble, and the board-tile-laying game THE 

aMAZEing LABYRINTH. 

Carcassonne (Hans im Glück 2000) is a tile-laying game designed by Klaus-Jürgen 

Wrede; note that the very act of tile-laying is a kinesis act. In it, players start with one 

terrain tile and then take turns drawing a facedown terrain tile, which is then placed 

adjacent to the tiles already facing up. The drawn tile can only be used to extend a 

feature (such as a street) on an up-facing tile. 

In the tile-laying word game Scrabble (Hasbro / Mattel) – originally conceived in 1931 

by architect Alfred Mosher Butts as Lexico and later refi ned in cooperation with James 

Brunot, who had Scrabble trademarked in 1948 (National Scrabble Association 2008) – 

players draw lettered tiles to score points by forming words on a game board divided into a 

15-by-15 grid. 

In THE aMAZEing LABYRINTH (Ravensburger 1986), created by Max Kobbert and 

designed by Herbert Lentz, the player must reach treasures by traversing a board 

made up of movable tiles. In each turn, the player must move a row of tiles either 

horizontally or vertically before moving her token, thereby changing the maze of tiles to 

her advantage and her opponent’s disadvantage.

Tessellations can be of a semantical nature as well. The OULIPO group – short for 

“Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle,” which translates roughly as “workshop for potential 

literature” – was founded in 1960 by novelist and poet Raymond Queneau together with 

François Le Lionnais and ten of their friends, who were committed to researching the 

possibilities of incorporating mathematical structures into literary works, cf. Mathews 

and Brotchie (1998). In Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (Queneau 1961), 

the reader is asked to cut ten 14-line sonnets into strips; that way, he converts one 

poem into 1014 possible poems that he can create by combining the strips in different 

ways in a type of “design your own sonnet” game. Aarseth calls Queneau’s experiment 

a “sonnet machine” (Aarseth 1997:10) and cites it as an example of ergodic literature 

– a work of art “that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that 

has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguish between successful and 

unsuccessful users” (1997:179). “In ergodic literature,” Aarseth continues, “nontrivial 

effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (1997:1). Queneau’s sonnet 

machine is, to be more exact, a tessellatable text, a paper-based play-ground of 

narrative creation. This “low” Technology allows the narrative to unfold spatially so that 

it somewhat resembles the Surrealist folding paper game Cadavre Exquis (in English, 

Exquisite Corpse), in which a sentence or drawing is created in sequence by a number 

of participants who cannot see what their predecessors have contributed. 

Variation can serve as a twist on this type of turn-based, sequential, chance tessellation. 

In his early book Exercises de style, fi rst published in 1947 by Editions Gallimard, 

Queneau tells an inconsequential story in 99 different ways and 99 different styles – 

once as a sonnet, for example, once telegraphically, once in phonetic spelling, and so 

on. Inspired by Queneau, Madden (2005) adopted the notion of using one starting point 

to create 99 variations of a similar thing and applied it to his own medium, the comic 

strip. Another incarnation of tesselation, then, is the emergent meaning of tesselation. 

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It should by now be clear that the tessellated play-ground is dimensional, that it can 

have geometric, constructive, symbolic, kinetic, or combined functions, and that it can 

present itself in various mediums. At its core, tessellation lets us experience pattern 

recognition and puzzling by forming mosaic play-grounds that serve as demonstrations 

of perfected, i.e. utopian architectures. Consider the possibilities of such perfected 

architectures for urban planning, keeping in mind the wise caution of Swiss urban 

planner Carl Fingerhuth to interpret cities not as jigsaw puzzle tessellations with clear 

end-states, but as open-ended domino game tessellations instead (Fingerhuth 2004). 

7. Board 

The board game is the play-ground that abstracts all other physical spaces but is still a 

physical space in itself. The board, then, is the pan-allegorical play-ground. 

Play boards come in all different shapes and sizes and are made of many different 

types of materials. Geometrically speaking, boards are often four-sided polygons. The 

most common possible board shape is the square, which has four equal side and four 

equal (right) angles. 

Typically, a board is also subdivided into smaller and repetitive spaces, which together 

constitute a formal grid structure for the game, as described in Tessellation. These 

spaces are called tiles (Patel calls them “faces”), and each tile is enclosed by edges, or 

line segments, and vertices. See Figure 17.

Figure 17 

Grid elements of a triangular grid. Reproduced by permission from Patel (2006). 

The grid of a game represents the game’s playing terrain. Patel (2006), who gives 

equal attention to digital games, board games, and physical sports games in his 

discussion, divides grids into the following categories: maps (example: the computer 

game Civilization); playing surfaces (example: soccer), boards (example: chess), and 

abstract spaces (example: Tetris). 

Beyond quadrilaterals that serve as framing structures, other important and recurring 

board-internal grid structures, i.e. form-functions, include: 

● the node grid: a 19x19 line grid with 361 nodes used, for example, in the 

game Go, in which game tokens are placed on grid nodes and vertices 

connect the nodes; 

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● the spiral: symbolizes the cycle of life (as in the Gänsespiel, in English, 

The Game of the Goose (Glonnegger 1988/1999:44ff.)); 

● the square grid: axes are orthogonal, and cells can be located using 

Cartesian coordinates (x, y); see also the Tessellation entry for further 

discussion; 

● the triangle grid: used in 3D graphics for mappings; relatively unfamiliar 

in games, due, perhaps, to its large perimeter and small area; 

● the hex grid: like other Euclidean plane uniform tilings – i.e. square and 

triangle – the hex grid allows for seamless structuration and full modularity. 

The Settlers of Catan (Kosmos 1995), created by Klaus Teuber, lets 

players freely construct the game world before playing. Hex grids are 

often used in war board games, as they allow for easier approximate 

distance measuring of shortest paths by way of hex cell counting (since 

hexes feature a small perimeter, but a large area). And because hexes 

have only edge-bordering neighbors, none that are connected solely via 

vertices, movement rules in a hex grid need not be overly complex. Of 

course, the hex grid features a coordinate system with two axes, but a 

less intuitive one than the square grid. 

Regular tiles make it possible to locate and address areas on the board and to monitor 

the movement and trajectories of materials from area to area. Grid taxonomies like 

Patel’s (2006), which relate square, triangle, and hex grids to create algorithms, allow 

for the rapid computation of rules for the creation-board spaces. This has interesting 

implications for various facets of Technology, including geographic information 

systems (GIS), satellite-based positioning systems (such as GPS or the planned 

Galileo system), and positioning systems based on, for example, WLAN access point 

fi ngerprinting or GSM cell of origin or signal strength measurements (Meyer 2008).

These technologies – whose accuracy depends on factors like project budget, locale 

invasiveness, and sustainable signal sources – render the physical world subject to 

mathematical and metrical analysis (Thrift 2004:588f.). With perfected physical world 

tessellating and positioning, the physical world can then become a game-board-like 

play-ground. 

During the design process of REXplorer, our board game prototypes served both as 

demonstration tools and as a worlds-in-miniature that made easy gameplay testing 

possible. In fact, this form of prototype is very useful for content testing during early 

development stages because it allows content to be read aloud as the players progress 

through the game. It helps express spatiality, allows players to get a feel for travel 

times, oversees proximities of sights, promotes narrative consistency, and helps to 

ensure that the underlying game is fun. Dice and event cards can be used to regulate 

players’ 

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173 

Figure 18 

Early board game prototype of REXplorer, 

used for playtesting. The board 

displays a top view of Regensburg’s city 

center. Landmark buildings have been 

carved from wood and placed onto the 

board, heightening the designer’s sense 

of “being there” and imagining the actual 

architectural situation.

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174 

theoretical progress through the city streets, providing a more realistic simulation of the 

way people actually move in the city. Figure 18 shows such a board game prototype 

of REXplorer. 

Boards and, if they exist, board zones, imply other elements for a game to take place. 

Additional physical game elements – and thus, typological elements – include game 

pieces. These game pieces come in various forms, like, for example, pawn, peg, token, 

bit, mark, counter, stone, and, of course, man. They are controlled by and represent 

the player on the play-ground of the board, and, as such, imbue the board game with 

further dimensionality. In the physical world considered as a game-board, the game 

piece is no longer represented by a physical object, but by the player herself. 

Boards themselves, of course, do not need to be fl at. In the two-player board game 

Abalone (Abalone Games 1989) – designed by Michel Lalet and Laurent Lévi and 

endowed with great geometric and algorithmic appeal – a hexagonal board features 61 

circular pockets in which marbles can rest. Players may push up to three marbles at a 

time from nest to nest, either inline – i.e. parallel to the marble – or broadside – i.e. not 

parallel to the marble line. Balls pushed off the nest area are out of the game, and the 

goal is to be the fi rst player to eject six of the other player’s balls. 

In board games, then, the board, which comprises gestalt and internal spatial 

organization, expresses the program of the game in the following ways: 

● in terms of the magic circle, in that it clearly marks off the game from 

other spaces and constrains the game in this enclosed space; 

● allegorically, in that it represents another space; 

● contestually, in that it defi nes the circumstances in which the confl ict is 

carried out;

● narratively, in that it provides a theme, e.g. a shape, a (graphical) 

premise, a fi gural depiction, etc.; 

● typologically, in that it has a distinct look and feel and is made of specifi c 

materials; 

● perspectively, in that its core components are both gestalt and imagery; 

● functionally, in that it serves as boundary and constraint, acts as a 

symbol, and evokes a certain spatially induced emotion or association; 

● technologically, in that it is constructed in a specifi c way with specifi c 

materials; 

● phenomenologically, in that it expresses and assists the game site- 

specifi cally; 

● and overall, kinetically, in the way that it allows, enforces, and restricts 

movement. 

To conclude this analysis, we can state that typically, a board is a necessary and 

suffi cient condition for playing a game. 

8. Cave 

Both although and because it is not man-made, the cave is the ultimate and, 

architecturally speaking, original locale. A real cave (as opposed to its allegories – 

i.e. our houses and apartment blocks) is designed by elegant natural mechanisms 

that men cannot (yet) easily reproduce. The cave is the starting point of architecture 

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because it is both demarcated and demarcating; in other words, because it shelters the 

Body. A cave demonstrates how time carves space. As architectural philosopher Otto 

Friedrich Bollnow puts it, “still today, the apartment is a cave in a mountain (and all the 

more so, as modern metropolises develop into artifi cial cement mountains)” 27 (Bollnow 

1963:193). 

In such a natural time-carved space as the cave complex in Lascaux, France, the 

walls tell stories. For media philosopher Vilém Flusser, the Lascaux wall paintings are 

decipherable, two-dimensional codes that not only reduce actual space, time, and 

circumstances into scenes, but also serve as maps and substitutes for circumstances 

both past and future. They are, in this double sense, “imaginations” (Flusser 1997:23f.); 

see Possible Worlds. Flusser argues that these code imaginations programmed our 

ancestors into “a form of magical being” (1997:24), a being made up of a set of scenes 

that create an imaginary world – a world of images, of allegories. With the invention 

of scripture, a revolution took place in this imaginary world: the image-scene was deframed 

and unfurled, and its contents restructured into lines. Texts, then, derive from 

images, and single text symbols (i.e. letters) signify images or ideas. Because they are 

read in lines, texts program linear thinking (ibid.). Based on Flusser’s observations, we 

can think of the imaginary world not only as a world void of texts, but also as a world 

of scenic storytelling whose walls are a spatial medium and in which the kinesis of the 

scene takes place not linearly, but somewhat panoptically. This, then, is a fi rst function 

of a cave: to serve as a medium of spatial allegories, thereby anticipating frescos, 

tapestries, hangings, church windows, Baroque as well as interactive façades, and, 

fi nally, screen-based games (see the Trompe l’œil entry). 

27 Translated by the author from the original German: “(...) heute noch [ist, spw] die Wohnung eine Höhle im 

Berg (und ist es vielleicht umso mehr, je mehr die modernen Großstädte sich zu künstlichen Zementgebirgen 

entwickeln).” One example of the inverse – a naturally carved cave that mutates into a building – is the Predjama 

cave castle in Slovenia, built within a Karst cave mouth in a limestone cliff and featuring a Gothic façade.

In his work The Republic 28 , Plato used the cave itself as an allegory; and Plato, we 

know, disesteemed image-making. In his cave allegory, prisoners are chained deep 

inside a cave with their gazes fi xed to a wall. A fi re is erected behind the prisoners, 

and between their backs and the fi re, there is a walkway along which puppet fi gures 

and objects are carried, casting shadows onto the wall at which the prisoners stare. 

The prisoners see only shadows, and because they attribute the sounds of the outside 

world to those shadows, they assume that they are watching reality unfold. One day, 

however, a prisoner escapes and heads out of the cave. Though blinded at fi rst, the 

prisoner slowly grows accustomed to the sun and realizes that everything in the cave 

is an illusion; in short, he becomes enlightened. But upon returning to the cave and 

reporting the truth to the other prisoners, he is dismissed as having ruined eyesight. 

Thus according to Plato (with whom Flusser seems to agree), the cave represents an 

illusionary, i.e. imaginary, and cinematic space, yet in quite a negative sense: 

Now the cave or den is the world of sight, the fi re is the sun, the way 

upwards is the way to knowledge, and in the world of knowledge the idea 

of good is last seen and with diffi culty, but when seen is inferred to be the 

author of good and right--parent of the lord of light in this world, and 

of truth and understanding in the other (Plato, The Republic, transl. B. 

Jowett) 29 . 

Images, then, immerse us “prisoners” in an illusion, blocking true understanding. The 

cave is the magical play-ground for this illusionary storytelling and, by extension, 

mechanism of control (for those who present the prisoners with the puppet shadows 

are, after all, designing the prisoners’ experience). No wonder that in modern theater, 

the audience is seated in the cavea, or audience space (see also the Theater entry). 

Wark (2007:002ff.) describes videogame players as the contemporary inmates of a 

28 Find The Republic as a free ebook at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497. 

29 Ibid. 

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178 

Platonic cave, holed up in gamespace, hunched over screens, working-playing, hands 

compulsively jerking controllers. Yet Wark also permits the possibility of release, 

suggesting that we can decide if we want to be a player who is a “prisoner of work” or 

a gamer who enjoys the game regardless of what is at stake, but has no other choice 

but to play through to the end. 

After their function as archetypical and contemporary30 play-grounds of pictorial 

storytelling, the second function of caves is their capacity to be play-grounds of spatial 

adventuring and vertigo thanks to the fact that they feature a minimum of navigational 

complexity, eventually becoming mazes with twisty little passages, all alike (see also 

the inventory’s Labyrinth (and Maze) entry). This is the conceptual framework through 

which cave and labyrinth unite. 

The Mammoth Cave in southwestern Kentucky, for example, is the vantage locale and 

spatial base for the fi rst computer adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther 

& Woods 1976/1977), mentioned earlier in this work. Will Crowther, an avid caver and 

ARPAnet developer responsible for routing protocols, put together a vector map of a 

section of the Mammoth Cave system, of which Colossal Cave is a part, from which 

he later created the game, which was then expanded by Stanford University graduate 

student Don Woods. In a detailed comparison of physical source cave architecture 

and the game architecture created by Crowther’s source code, Jerz (2007) sums up 

his fi ndings: 

The research expedition to the real Colossal Cave in Mammoth Cave 

National Park confi rms that the map of Will Crowther’s original 

30 The Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (known by the acronym CAVE) is an immersive virtual reality environment 

fi rst developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Chicago back in 

1992. The name CAVE refers to Plato’s cave allegory, of course, which is appropriate for a site where perception, 

physicality, and illusion meet – and, in this modern CAVE, technology too. In this room-sized cube environment, 

rear-projected wall images, stereoscopic LCD shutter glasses, and the movements of the CAVE visitor convey 

a three-dimensional image. Today, CAVEs and CAVE-like environments are being used at universities and research 

facilities worldwide.

“Adventure” closely follows the geography of the real cave, but with 

fantasy and puzzle elements. The original source code shows that 

Crowther selectively deviated from realism; the tension between the 

altered geography and the mostly naturalistic text illustrates Crowther’s 

respectful intimacy with the natural wonders of Colossal Cave. Woods 

added complexity and polish, with a careful eye for improving the user’s 

experience (and, occasionally, proofreading). His contributions more 

than doubled the size of the original data fi le (from 728 lines to 1809) 

and more than quadrupled the size of the code fi le (from 709 lines to 

2949). When expanding the geography, Woods improvised freely, yet his 

additions form an agreeable tension with Crowther’s naturalistic setting 

(Jerz 2007:85). 

Yet whereas in the original cave, the caver plays a space that encourages exploration, 

Adventure encourages the player to explore a labyrinthine, text-only interactive 

narrative via spatial adventuring and to discover a gamespace by narrative exploration. 

Figure 19 shows a mashup of an environmental map of a cartographed section of the 

actual Mammoth Cave along with a fl owcharted game map of the textual space in 

Adventure and an excerpt of Crowther’s FORTRAN code, taken from Jerz (2007:59). 

Note that Adventure (and, theoretically, any other computer simulation) contains forms 

of Impossible Worlds, that is, maze passages that would be impossible to build in 

the physical world. Impossible Worlds thus represent a signature difference between 

physically and virtually represented labyrinths and mazes. 

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Figure 19 

An environmental map of a section of the Mammoth cave in Kentucky mashed up with a fl owcharted 

game map of the textual space in Adventure as well as with an excerpt of Crowther’s FORTRAN 

code. Note how the following lines map to the numbering in the map: 

9 YOU ARE IN A SMALL CHAMBER BENEATH A 3X3 STEEL GRATE LEADING TO THE 

9 SURFACE. A LOW CRAWL OVER COBBLES LEADS INWARD TO THE WEST. 

10 YOU ARE CRAWLING OVER COBBLES IN A LOW PASSAGE. THERE IS A 

10 DIM LIGHT AT THE EAST END OF THE PASSAGE. 

11 YOU ARE IN A DEBRIS ROOM, FILLED WITH STUFF WASHED IN FROM 

11 THE SURFACE. A LOW WIDE PASSAGE WITH COBBLES BECOMES 

11 PLUGGED WITH MUD AND DEBRIS HERE, BUT AN AWKWARD CANYON 

11 LEADS UPWARD AND WEST. 

11 A NOTE ON THE WALL SAYS, “MAGIC WORD XYZZY.” 

12 YOU ARE IN AN AWKWARDLY SLOPING EAST/WEST CANYON. 

13 YOU ARE IN A SPLENDID CHAMBER THIRTY FEET HIGH. THE WALLS 

13 ARE FROZEN RIVERS OF ORANGE STONE. AN AWKWARD CANYON AND A 

13 GOOD PASSAGE EXIT FROM THE EAST AND WEST SIDES OF THE CHAMBER. 

Image mashup and line matching reproduced by permission from Jerz (2007).

In stark contrast to the Platonic cave, Verner Panton’s cave-like architectural 

explorations sought to fully melt form-functions and spatial elements in order to create 

a kind of living space both horizontal and vertical. One lasting example of his design 

philosophy is the Living Tower (1968), which looks like a cross-sectional area of a cave 

and affords playful exploration and adventuring of architectural possibility. Similarly, 

Phantasy Landscape Visiona II, shown at the Cologne fair in 1970, infl ates the Living 

Tower into a volumetric and psychedelic playscape wherein cave-dwellers explore a 

space-adventure (Von Vegesack and Remmele 2000). Figure 20 depicts Visiona II. 

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Figure 20 

Verner Panton: Phantasy Landscape 

Visiona II (1970), 800 x 600 x 240 cm, 

commissioned by Bayer AG. Photo reproduced 

by permission from Verner 

Panton Design, Basel.

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In 2007, it was again a Cologne fair where another cave-like architectural vision was 

fi rst shown. Perhaps it was intended as a play on the cave allegory, perhaps as a 

play on Panton’s Visiona II; or maybe it is simply a recognition of the fact that the 

cave remains a fundamental sheltering site stored in the collective mind. Whatever 

the motivation behind it, Zaha Hadid’s Ideal House Cologne (2007), commissioned 

by the IMM Cologne Fair, melts walls and furniture seamlessly into a living cave both 

functionally and emotionally usable31 for its inhabitants (see Figure 21). For the Ideal 

House, Hadid and her team employed a design technique known as “caving in,” i.e. 

iteratively hollowing out an original starting volume. 

Figure 21 

Zaha Hadid: IMM Ideal 

House Cologne. Photo 

imm cologne 2007 - koelnmesse. 

31 For more, see the following article about Hadid and her IMM Ideal House: http://www.bauunternehmen.com/ 

artikel_34567_ideal+house+cologne+.htm (German language only).

Both Panton and Hadid attempt to bring cave-emotion to life – Panton through 

adventuring, Hadid through meditating and savoring. The playfulness inherent to caves 

consists of more than just a capacity to narrate spatially and to spatialize narrative; 

through its medial gestalt and time-carvedness, it can become an environmental toymedium 

in itself. 

By combining storytelling elements with labyrinthine structures and the form language 

suggested by Panton and Hadid, the cave-toy will eventually re-emerge as a contemporary 

magical space. The primary design techniques that will be applied to achieve this new 

cave-living are theming, embedding puzzles, concealing, deceiving, interactivating, 

and coupling. 

An exemplary play-theming cave is the loft offi ce of San Francisco game studio Three 

Rings Design, Inc., developers of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, a massively multiplayer 

online puzzle game. Three Rings’ interior architecture (see Figure 22) was designed 

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Figure 22 

Jules Vernes-themed loft 

office of San Francisco, CA 

game studio Three Rings Design, 

Inc. Photo reproduced by 

permission from Because We 

Can, LLC.

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by Oakland-based fi rm Because We Can, who outfi tted the loft to look and feel like 

The Nautilus from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. In the offi ce, you can 

fi nd an attacking octopus couch, a secret lounge area hidden behind a bookcase, fake 

levers and electric diodes for the “engine room,” and many other Victorian and steam 

punk-inspired elements. Most of the components were CNC cut, and all of them are 

non-permanent (Wired 2007). 

A good example of the embedded puzzling technique is architect Eric Clough’s 

renovation of the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Klinsky-Sherry family in New York City. 

Clough inserted a puzzle-based scavenger hunt into the family’s 4,200-square-foot 

residence, which included, among other things, a clue book hidden behind paneling, 

ciphers on radiator covers, yielded drawers in custom-built furniture containing clue 

riddles, decorative door knockers–that can be removed and joined together to create 

a crank that opens hidden panels, and, fi nally, concealed puzzles such as a magnetic 

cube that must be pieced together to open more secret panels (Green 2008). Naturally, 

when it takes the form of a scavenger hunt, embedded puzzling remains a onetime 

event that is not repeatable. The author is quite familiar with both this lack of 

repeatability, and the event character of location- and puzzle-based Alternate Reality 

Games because in 2002, he himself conceptualized one of the pioneering games of the 

pervasive game genre: M.A.D. Countdown32 (MC). 

MC takes place in both the physical and virtual worlds at the Zurich School for Art and 

Design. In the game, players are divided into teams of fi ve and assume the role of 

emergency heroes who must locate and disarm a fake but tangible atomic bomb planted 

as part of a conspiracy against the arts. During a day-long countdown, the rescue team 

must fi nd fragments of the bomb deactivation code both in the physical world and on 

the virtual 6th fl oor of a school building. The virtual 6th fl oor is a two-dimensional, point- 

32 Cf. http://www.madcountdown.com.

and-click, top-view world displayed on the wirelessly networked Pocket PCs with which 

each player is equipped. MC’s treasure hunt incorporates many other media as well, 

including, for example, puzzle Websites, automated calls to a physical phone booth, 

messages on answering machines, dislocated books, and poster-sized puzzles, see 

Figure 23. Walz (2005) describes the game in detail. 

Figure 23 

A collage of exemplary M.A.D. Countdown interfaces, objects, sites, scenes, and design material. 

The concealment technique, for its part, is not an architectural novelty; we can also 

trace it in digital games, in the form, for example, of Easter eggs, bonus stages, and 

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secret passages. In physical architectures, a multi-purpose palette of concealment 

architectures would include the following: 

● curtained off, recessed alcoves (i.e. caves in a cave wall); 

● fortifi ed safe rooms: spaces built into residential buildings in case of threat 

(break-in), emergency event, or catastrophe (hurricane); 

● secret or double (formerly, servant) passageways33 : allow stealthy entry to 

and exit from a room or building or, alternatively, connect buildings (e.g. 

the 800 meter Passetto di Borgo, a hollow wall escape corridor that links 

Vatican City with the Castle of Sant’Angelo34 ); this category also includes 

more complex architectures of complication (see also the Labyrinth (and 

Maze) entry); 

● booby traps in ancient Egyptian pyramids; 

● traboules, passage or stairwell (tower) constructions that connect streets, 

often through hidden yards or via different levels; traboules can be found 

in a number of French cities, but mainly in Lyon. 

The design technique deception is applied in the Trompe l’œil; see the 

corresponding entry. 

So far, the design technique interactivation exists only in conceptual form; one day, 

though, it will be used to enable the building structure itself to playfully interact with 

the dweller. The 2004/2005 master program of the CAAD group at the ETH Zurich, 

for example, produced an ironic fi lm in which a protagonist enters an offi ce building 

33 Company Creative Home Engineering sells recessable book shelves, rotating fi replaces, bookcases, and 

custom built furniture, cf. http://www.hiddenpassageway.com. 

34 Cf. http://www.saintpetersbasilica.org/Exterior/Passetto/Passetto.htm.

overlaid with a visual game-interface layer. The “eye” of the building then reveals that 

the building’s structural elements are actually “playing“ with the protagonist, scoring 

points by infl uencing his navigation. An automatic door shuts unexpectedly. Remote 

controlled furniture falls onto the protagonist’s path and thus becomes an obstacle. 

Lights are turned off a millisecond before the protagonist reaches the switch. 

Coupling can be achieved when the living-cave and the player or the player’s Body 

become - temporarily or permanently - one system. In the prototype biofeedback 

game Bioplay5000, for example, we have shown how a player can control building 

and multimedia functionalities with his body functions. When coupled with the system 

we have conceived, the player can “blow out“ the lights - the system recognizes the 

signal dip caused by heavier breathing, as well as the position of the player (cf. Walz 

et al. 2005). 

It appears, then, that architectures capable of fully immersing the Homo Ludens Digitalis 

in a ludic space are just around the corner. Naturally, this raises certain questions 

for the future. Will the hypothetical cave-as-game-apartment reward healthy sleeping 

behavior? What will happen when the cave as a play-ground is combined with other 

play-grounds, such as Television (think the TV show Big Brother turned interactive 

game)? As the author noted in 2006 on his portfolio Website (http://spw.playbe.com): 

As a designer, I imagine a “game generation:” People who grew playing 

mostly computer and videogames for all their lives, people whose prime 

technological and medial references consist of tools, mechanisms, and 

interaction patterns inherent to both entertainment experiences and the 

ubiquity of computing technologies. A coming “Homo Ludens Digitalis,” 

writes game and pedagogy theorist Michael Wagner, carries with 

her and thus initiates a cultural shift towards a “hypermedial reading 

competence,” where the ludofi cation of society has us experience media 

not only interactively, but, more importantly, tactically. Like McKenzie 

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Wark – who speaks of a ”military entertainment complex” – I believe that 

this shift is deeply political. 

With the co-evolutionary advent of pervasive computing, interactive 

experiences (and entertainment experiences in particular) are no longer 

bound to sedentary or mostly screen based medial situations such as console 

or PC gaming. Mobile computing devices such as smartphones, sensor 

and actuator-rich environments and controllers, positioning services, 

and computer integrated environments, as well as the pervasiveness 

of the Internet have already begun to transform the game generation’s 

apartments, buildings, plazas, and cities into technological playgrounds, 

where ”appropriate design sets the stage for human experience. (...) This 

experience is mediated by this stage, by a place, at best” (McCullough 

2004). 

The art and craft of make-believe place-making challenges architects, 

urban planners, and game and interaction designers, and it is likely to 

(need to) take advantage not only of the game generation’s competencies 

as described above, but also refl ect the expectations of the Homo Ludens 

Digitalis, who has been trained to win not only in gamespace, but in the 

gamespace of the everyday. 

I suspect that in the game generation’s world, everyday and everywhere 

surveillance will become a functional consequence of these expectations. 

Furthermore, what I refer to as “surveiltainment,” will represent a sine 

qua non condition – that is, a constituting and self-evident precursor of 

the game generation’s ways of living in as well as playing with its world. 

A number of arguments support this assumption: 

(a) ubiquitously computerized, dynamic (make-believe) places are nothing 

but computer based surveillance systems, even if they permit cheating or 

are used in ways unexpected by their designers;

(b) games, by their very nature, are surveillant, dynamic, yet intrinsically 

motivating learning systems. These systems always know how to reward 

the player and let the player seem to master the game while in fact assuring 

that the game masters the player; 

(c) because games are, at their interactive core, about motivation and 

learning, and because computers are extremely fi t for processing rules 

(the core of games) – and thus fi t for performing games – surveiltainment 

is the cultural consequence of computerized capitalism. 

In other words: the successful application of games for so-called ”serious” 

purposes other than entertainment by way of omnipresent technologies 

will entail the emergence of new forms of profi t and power execution. 

Interaction designer John Thackara warns and reminds us that in the 

context of experience services, content should be something one does, 

not something one is given. Pervasive game designer Jane McGonigal, 

then, may be right in arguing that all gameplay is performance and all 

performance gameplay and that ultimately, gamers aim at creating a total 

aesthetic experience – a social utopia, a Wagnerian “Gesamtkunstwerk.” 

Nonetheless I believe that in the spaces and times of the game generation, 

we may think that we make experiences, but it could easily be that the 

experiences make us – our routines, our rituals, our collective memories, 

our cultural repositories, and our heterotopian societies (cf. Thackara 

2006, addendum spw) (Walz 2006b). 

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9. Labyrinth (and Maze) 

Labyrinth and maze are spatial complications of the “detour principle” (Kern 1982:13). 

They program a rhythmic form of swinging kinesis between player and a kind of building 

that may have its roots in an ancient dance choreography of the same name (1982:19). 

These forms have become, both architecturally and metaphorically, prominent spatial 

confi gurations in computer-based games that afford players the chance to explore 

gameworlds and, by adventuring, relieve the initial vertigo they cause. Whether 

virtual or physical, these kinesthetic confi gurations are architectural stages with 

explicitly inscribed kinetic rules, experienceable only thanks to a subject’s physical or 

mental Mobility. 

From the architectural perspective of a player within, labyrinths and mazes are “bounded 

spaces to be traversed; their main purpose is to delay the walker as he goes from point 

A to point B” (Fernández-Vara 2007:74). Upon closer inspection, we fi nd that there 

exist two fundamental constructive methods to achieve this delay: 

● The unicursal method, in which the distance between points A and B is 

extended by creating a path ordered in a circuitous, winding, meandering 

fashion. This design method generates the classical labyrinth (Kern 

1982:23). Indeed, unicursal bounded spaces are called labyrinths, which, 

as Moles/Rohmer/Friedrich point out in a discussion of the relationship 

between labyrinths and graphs, are “nothing more than the expression in 

simple words of a behavioral graph of movements of being, an application 

of Graph Theory to real space” (Moles/Rohmer/Friedrich 1977:3). 

● The multicursal method, in which (a) paths are forked so that the walker is 

forced to guess which path will take him to point B in the shortest amount 

of time, and (b) dead-ends are incorporated into the path structure. This

design method generates a maze, a special type of labyrinth that was 

originally conceived as a literary setting and only later transformed into 

a visual reality (Kern 1982:23). Mazes force players to make choices – 

like, for example, choosing between forking paths, “the simplest fi gure of 

nonlinearity” (Aarseth 1997:91), or choosing among functionalities such as 

linking/jumping, “the hypertext master fi gure” (ibid.) so masterfully applied 

by Kolb (1994) in a still groundbreaking non-fi ction hypertext that discussed 

how hypertext alters the way an argument can spatially and non-linearly 

unfold. In less rhetorical and literary theoretical terms, the maze, then, can 

be understood as a spatial device with a clear entry point and assumed exit 

point, featuring ambiguous and consciously disorienting paths. A maze is a 

building that hinders free navigation, yet like a labyrinth, renders the act of 

walking through it exciting. 

Put another way, “Labyrinths have many meanings. Two of them stand out: the fear of 

getting lost and the pleasure and challenge of exploration. These opposing meanings, 

not uncommon in symbols, explain partially our fascination with them” (Passini 1999). 

On the basis of Passini’s observation, we can apply our systematics to investigate 

the primary functions that both confi gurations serve. These include: constraint, 

concealment, obstacle/test of skills, and, above all, exploration. Together, all these 

functions unite to disorient the player by defying and challenging his or her ability to 

comprehend a given spatial layout. 

Although, as we have seen, the unicursal labyrinth creates a mild form of disorientation, 

it is a disorientation that often inspires quiet contemplation, if not outright meditation. A 

main secondary function of the labyrinth is more aesthetic: we enjoy the art and craft 

of the meander, the twisting of the passages, and the knowledge that we are safe in 

a “wild” but designed space. Labyrinths and mazes lie at the heart of architectural, 

urban, and game design: they are architecture’s major rhetorical fi gure in that every 

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single building, by virtue of its formal nature, includes a kind of labyrinth. The very 

formal nature of a City is labyrinthine too. It is not surprising, then, that architects have 

always used labyrinths as a kind of unique building signature and Map: a building’s 

labyrinth contains an encoded description of the building’s geometry as well as sitespecifi 

c numeric symbolism (Hébert 2004). Perhaps the most famous example of such 

a labyrinthine building signature is the walkable, eleven-circuit labyrinth embedded 

in the fl oor of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres, the soaring Gothic cathedral 

located in Chartres, France. 

Labyrinths and mazes can be compared not only in terms their cursality (i.e. how they 

necessitate player choice for exploration progress), but also by determining the degree 

to which the functions mentioned above are present in the given labyrinth and maze 

play-grounds. The relationship between different mazes and labyrinths is summarized 

in Table 9; emerging play stimuli are cited in parenthesis. 

Unicursal Labyrinth Multicursal Maze 

Purposed disorientation function Weaker Stronger (vertigo) 

Purposed aesthetic function Stronger (contemplating, storytelling) Weaker 

Role of player choice for progress Weaker Stronger (problem-solving) 

Overall player requirements Weaker Stronger (contesting) 

Table 9 

Labyrinth versus maze: A summarizing comparison. 

By combining both typologies and assuming a purely constructed space (i.e. one 

lacking, for example, extra obstacles), we can see that the labyrinth is a play-ground 

best conceived as a spatial device for creating linear experiences that features some 

degree of disorientation, but doesn’t require the player to make numerous choices

in order for the game to progress (as does, for example, a narratively oriented 

game). A maze, on the other hand, is a play-ground for non-linear play that seeks to 

disorient the player and requires spatial decision-making as a necessary condition of 

game progress. 

If additional play stimuli or functions are added to the pure labyrinth made of path 

and walls, active participation and choice-making become more important. Let’s 

look at an example: the motion ride Abenteuer Atlantis (AA) – in English, Adventure 

Atlantis – which moves players automatically through a labyrinth. Although highly 

computerized, the ride will be discussed here in the general context of labyrinths (both 

physical and virtual) because it is highly revelatory of the prospects for the labyrinth as 

play-ground. 

AA is an advanced interactive shooting darkride designed for families and housed in 

the Europa Park, one of Europe’s largest theme parks. AA opened in March 2007 and 

is a hybrid between a darkride and a shooter game in the spirit of pioneering shooting 

darkrides such as Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin at Disney’s Magic Kingdom 

theme park in Orlando, Florida. 

AA takes place in an enclosed space and consists of 58 connected gondolas, each of 

which can accommodate two to three passengers. The basic premise is that players 

are embarking on an expedition to the depths of the ocean in search of the mythical 

city of Atlantis. The gondolas move on a looped track at a maximum speed of 0.4m/ 

sec, transporting up to 1,800 players/hour. With “laser harpoons,” infrared light guns 

mounted on the gondolas, players can (repeatedly) shoot at more than 80 infrared 

enabled targets during their ride and thereby score up to ca. 400,000 points. Player 

scores are presented on the expedition vehicle’s panel, as well as on a public display 

monitor located at the ride’s exit (Ertz 2007:28f.). 

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High scores are recorded on the ride’s Website at http://atlantis.europapark.de, where 

a very simple Java based shooter game lets players virtually pre- or post-experience 

the ride. Both the AA Web game and the AA darkride are, to borrow the words of Celia 

Pearce, “spatial media” (2007:201). But how is the medium of the ride spatial? A looping 

ride is a curvilinear, volumetric apparatus erected in space. The ride has evolved over 

time, coming a long way from one of its earliest incarnations, the traditional amusement 

park ride known as Tunnel of Love, a hideaway for young couples. The ride’s historical 

roots can be traced back to the original meandering, linear indoor experience: the 

labyrinth, of course. Interpreted as a game, then, the AA ride can be viewed as a 

curvilinear, yet seated fi rst-person shooter action game with limited degrees of freedom; 

the game is quite literally “on rails,” cf. Sellers (2006:14). 

In AA, the player has some range of motion, and can swirl around in her seat using 

a joystick mounted to the gondola’s panel. She cannot, however, swirl around a full 

360° or leave the gondola to explore. The special controller used for this game ride 

adds to the immersion experience, but the game’s core stimuli are contesting stimuli, 

to which the player responds via the mechanics of shooting and hitting while moving 

continuously: because during a ride, a target out of sight is a lost target, the central 

challenge in AA is to aim and hit targets while being physically moved by an external 

engine. We can read AA as a game system manifesting itself as a conveyor belt, 

thereby happily merging the logic of capitalist mass production with the logic of the 

militaristic moving target. Rides such as AA open up a whole new world of possibility 

for the labyrinth and, at the same time, merge the digital game play-ground with the 

play-ground of the Amusement Park attraction with the help of Technology. 

Labyrinths and mazes appear in all shapes and sizes across play modalities. Figure 24 

shows a door lock labyrinth. Figure 25 shows the architect’s signature on the fl oor of the 

cathedral in Chartres, and Figure 26 depicts a walkable maze on permanent exhibition

at Stuart Landsborough’s Puzzling World in New Zealand, a highly recommended 

walkthrough museum dedicated to Impossible Worlds. Lastly, Figure 27 shows a 

screenshot of the arcade hit Pac-Man (1980), displaying the game’s maze that has 

inspired the pervasive game PacManhattan (2004). 

Figure 24 

Turning door (un-)locking into a playful activity: 

The Defendius Labyrinth Security Lock made of 

titanium alloy. Photo reproduced by permission 

from Art. Lebedev Studio (www.artlebedev.com). 

Figure 25 

Depiction of the fl oor labyrinth in the 

cathedral of Chartres as the architect’s 

signature and a kind of map to the 

structure of the site. 

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Figure 26 

The walkable “Great Maze”. Photo reproduced by permission from Stuart Landsborough’s 

Puzzling World, New Zealand. 

Figure 27 

Pac-Man © 1980 2009 Namco Bandai 

Games Inc. Reproduced by permission.

10. Terrain 

Play activity and play-ground can become temporary properties of one another via 

a terrain. In the summer of 2006, during the FIFA World Cup in Germany, the author 

was invited to Stuttgart to role-play the master of ceremonies for a soccer related 

performance installation created by an artist friend. The installation concept was to 

transform a space not originally intended for soccer gameplay into a semi-permanent 

soccer gamespace. The idea is reminiscent of the Situationist détournement strategy, 

which was discussed, for example, by Borries (2004) in reference to Nike’s guerilla 

branding and athletic take-over of Berlin’s non-sports-related locales. 

Figure 28 shows how drawing a mid-sized soccer fi eld onto a garage’s concrete 

courtyard changes our perception of both the architecture of the garage and the game 

of soccer. This change was visually verifi ed by teams of children who played a soccer 

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Figure 28 

A garage parking lot transformed into 

ludic terrain: Performance art installation 

in Stuttgart, Germany, during the 

Soccer World Championships 2006.

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tournament on the concrete “fi eld” as part of the installation. From a window on the 

second fl oor, the author served as the performance-game’s live commentator. 

We, the audience – simultaneously spectators and installation components – quickly 

realized that any given terrain in the City could be tested to see if it was fi t for fi eld 

sports, even without a hired referee (again, see Figure 28). Spread the idea: Temporary 

magic circles in the shape of soccer fi elds can be created with the help of nothing 

more than, for example, some cardboard stencils and spray cans. All sizes – all over 

town! No need to build miniature wooden goals or goal nets, we can manage without. 

Players need only negotiate the location of the goals. The installation demonstrated 

how quickly a neutral terrain could become a play-ground – a lived, i.e. played, space – 

in the presence of players. Interestingly, the kids had been asked to “perform playing,” 

and quickly ended up just playing without thinking of the performance any longer. 

In his materialist history Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the 

Body, Iain Borden analyzed in great depth how skateboarders perform the city, how 

they engage with the terrain they choose to use, and how their body-space can 

only be understood in combination with the architecture they use because both are 

reconstructed when one encounters the other (Borden 2001:185). 

Once skaters move into the city, away from private houses, suburban roads, and 

skate park architectures, Borden fi nds that they usually prefer to skate in neglected 

space – i.e. space characterized by architecture that lacks meaning and symbolism, 

that has form, but no (longer) function. Using a term coined by Roland Barthes 

and Henri Lefebvre, Borden refers to these reduced, totally designed spaces 

as “spatial degree zero” – reduced to totally functional language, totally functional 

objects, totally functional spaces, totally functional time. These spaces look and feel 

exactly alike; monotony replicates their steps, banks, handrails, curbs, parking lots, 

gaps, benches, blocks, streets, roundabouts, and plazas, all of which lack individual

identity. Because they are totally functional, they are ideal play-grounds. Borden argues 

that “the life of the city should incorporate all manner of spaces where people can 

gyrate, glide and rotate, mime, perform and declaim, climb, descend and traverse – 

that is to say, where they can act out their opinions” (Borden 2007:332). This is exactly 

what skaters do when they skate; by performing, they have fun and implicitly argue 

that motion play can fi ll the void of zero degree space. Figure 29 shows a map of 

skateboarding sites in Berlin. 

Figure 29 

Berlin “MobMap” skateboarding map, mentioning environmental features such as stairs, ledges, walls etc. 

Reproduced by permission from MOB Skateboards Roth & Neuss GbR, Giessen. 

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Similarly, the Tony Hawk branded skateboarding videogame series – launched in 1999 

with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater – lets players experience the way in which urban spaces- 

as-play-grounds trigger fun. At fi rst, “topography becomes the opponent, a spatial 

challenge the player must overcome” (Küttler 2007:125). But the more a player learns to 

master the architectural challenges, the better he understands that just like in a physical 

skateboarding space, the architecture is not only his enemy, but also his potential ally – 

without it, he would not be able to perform certain gameplay tricks like grabs, fl ips, and 

lips. As Borden explains, “Our urban spaces are not there just for purposes of work, 

tourism, retail and other supposedly important affairs, but also for having fun, for letting 

go, for, in fact, being ourselves in our full range of emotions and bodily extensions” 

(Borden 2007:334). The difference between physical skateboarding and videogame 

skateboarding is that the game terrain is not designed for zero degree functionalism, 

but rather intentionally designed to program one hundred percent skateboarding fun. 

In addition, the videogame playing e-skater does not criticize a space by performing 

it, but rather performs the space in order to master it and optimize her experience. In 

videogames, the virtual activity of skateboarding becomes totally functionalized. 

We all know that the activity of skateboarding may be easily misunderstood and 

dismissed as mere child’s play. The logical extension of such dismissal, however, is the 

assertion that architecture must concentrate on the space of designed building-objects. 

This view unnecessarily limits both architectural theory and practice to a “fetishism that 

erases social relations and wider meanings” (Borden 2001:7). 

Many examples of terrain play-grounds exist, and many more will emerge once 

given terrains are reinterpreted by players. In the Grand Canyon, for example, the 

Skywalk attraction is meant to cause delight by inducing vertigo by taking architectural 

advantage of the terrain. On golf courses, landscapes are sculpted masterfully for the 

sole purpose of making it harder for the player to sink a small ball into a similarly small

hole and thereby cause delight. Parkour, a global terrain play phenomenon invented by 

childhood friends David Belle and Sébastien Foucan almost 20 years ago in the Paris 

suburbs, requires players – or so-called traceurs – to playfully challenge themselves to 

overcome obstacles in the built environment as rapidly and fl uidly as possible, adapting 

their movement to the city’s topographical constraints, cf. Feireiss (2007:280). Just 

like the skater, the traceur charges the city and its diverse restraints as though it were 

a physical opponent. Similarly, in several action and action-adventure videogames, 

the player character can perform free running moves similar to that of the traceur (or 

skater). See, for example, the Prince of Persia Sands of Time series (2003-2005), Free 

Running (2007), or the free running-inspired action-adventure game Mirror’s Edge 

(2008), set in a seemingly utopian urban environment. The form of spatial awareness 

characteristic to the above-mentioned examples (e.g. skating, golf, Parkour, free 

running videogames) is linked to a (often near-esoteric) philosophy of fee paths, fl uid 

movements, and smooth passages – a philosophy, in other words, of play-grounds 

where player and architecture unite to form a Playground of architecture. 

11. Map 

The term “map” is used by players of fi rst-person shooter games35 to describe the 

environment in which they play. All maps scale and virtualize the human Body (and 

fi rst-hand human experience). A concrete top-down map function fi rst appeared in the 

genre’s classic game Doom (1993). In Doom, the player uses this so-called “automap” 

by pressing the tab button on the PC’s keyboard, thereby switching “between the 

35 Note: This section stands out from all other sections because its argument is presented from a computer 

game perspective, as opposed to a physical space perspective. As you will see, this argumentative path is necessary 

in order to examine the nature of the map-like and mapped play-ground, and is valid because maps are, in 

themselves, virtual, abstracted, representative spaces, just like computer games. 

PLAY-GROUNDS 

201

PLAY-GROUNDS 

202 

perceptual and the conceptual modes of space” (Günzel 2007:446). When in automap 

mode, the player can perform a number of play actions, such as marking the current 

position, zooming in or out, overlapping the perceptual mode with the map view, or 

automatically centering the map even if his avatar is moving. 

The automap demonstrates two major functions of maps in visual games: orientation 

and real-time strategic maneuvering in the allegorical gamespace (ibid.). Digital games, 

and particularly fi rst-person shooters, allow players to act with as well as within maps 

by, for example, interactively mapping the gamespace by navigating through it. 

More fundamentally, games – board games, videogames, pervasive games, etc. – map 

rules onto space, whereby gamespace is constituted, carved, or used in a certain ludic 

fashion because it enables a certain type of play (e.g. a fl at fi eld enables running, a 

stage enables role-playing, etc.). Let us look at an example of such mapping. 

In the fall of 2004, the author organized a mandatory weekend excursion for his 

“ArchITectural Game Design” course at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. The class 

traveled to the St. Norbert conference and lodging center in the small village of Rot an 

der Rot in southern Germany. St. Norbert is a former Premonstratensian monastery 

that was given up by the order in 1959. It is a beautiful, Baroque building complex 

composed of the abbey church St. Verena, which is still in operation, the castle-like 

main building with picturesque towers, wide hallways, and high, stucco-adorned 

ceilings, and several additional annexes. Today, as in the 12th century, the remote 

village of Rot is dominated by the cloister and seems to constitute a sacral landscape 

of contemplation. 

In this atmosphere of cultivated peace, students were asked to use the available 

classroom furniture – typical seminar space tables and chairs – and whatever other 

moveable items they could fi nd to reorganize the former cloister’s hallway. The goal

was to prototype the space as both play-ground and map fi t for a simple shoot-out 

game involving NERF-type plastic toy weapons. This type of game prototyping allows 

for physical playtesting beyond the board game, a method that, it is believed, is among 

the most practical and effective playtesting methods for pervasive games. 

After constructing a fi rst level, students played different kinds of shooter game subgenres 

in the space, including Capture the Flag and Survivor. Fortunately, the building’s 

layout supported these types of gameplay: the hallway stretched around a 90° corner, 

with one leg running a length of circa 50 meters and the other leg running circa 30 

meters. The opposing teams set up headquarters at opposite ends of the hallway. We 

elected two referees and agreed that upon being hit with ammo, a player could be 

removed from her team by one of the referees, who would thus need to observe the 

scene closely. Play sessions ranged in time from one minute up to an exhausting ten 

minutes. For each session, we slightly modifi ed the rules of play by, for example, letting 

players remain in the game until they had been hit three times, or by rewarding hits by 

letting successful players move a piece of furniture. 

In each variation, and across several map iterations, the portable objects in the hallway 

were always tipped over so that their surfaces could be used as upright shields. In 

later sessions, players cut out portable Styrofoam shields to supplement the furniture 

protection. Throughout the course of the session, we noticed re-occurring gameplay 

tactics, which, as it turns out, were tactics typical of agonal competition and, more to 

the point, typical of battling games that feature action elements such as hitting, running, 

and hiding. These gameplay tactics included: 

● Self-protection and “lying in wait” (often used in third-person shooter 

games): The undersides of tables were used as trenches as well as safety 

and recovery zones. In videogames, however, players tend to dislike 

“lie in wait” gameplay as it results in unexpected “frags” instead of clear 

PLAY-GROUNDS 

203

PLAY-GROUNDS 

204 

combatant kills. A game’s level design is usually blamed and disdained for 

requiring “lie in wait” gameplay. In our physical game sessions, however, 

we found that “lying in wait” was actually an exciting game element not only 

because of the physical, full body tension that resulted from unexpected 

attacks, but also because of the back-and-forth tension that resulted from 

the knowledge that someone was hiding behind a shield. 

● Path obstruction: Players used the tables in their leg of the hallway 

to regulate their opponents’ movement in gamespace by, for example, 

placing objects in opponents’ trajectories to slow them down or block their 

vision. 

Figures 30A - 30B shows the basic setup of the shorter leg of the hallway and a scene 

from the game in that leg (note the referee on the very left of the image). 

Figure 30A 

Playtesting of elimination 

mechanics with participants 

in a game design workshop, 

taking place in the former 

Premonstratensian monastery 

St. Norbert in Rot an der 

Rot, Germany. (30A) Level 

leg. (30B) Playability session 

with players and referees 

standing by the windows.

As a device for generating, formalizing, and testing the spatial aspects of game concepts 

in their early stages, this play-ground construction method proved to be fast, effectively 

iterative, and physically engaging. Furthermore, its physical appeal makes this type of 

game construction method interesting for participative design situations. Though this 

playtesting method is not suited for re-staging more complex situations, it can be used 

to scale up a situation that has only been tested in miniature form. That way, real 

people and physical movement can be incorporated into the testing process, which will 

thereby better simulate a fi nal product. 

You may perhaps be asking yourself why this example was entered into the inventory. 

The most obvious answer is that it provides a good example of a mapped play-ground. 

But beyond that, it can also help illustrate the idea of mapping as an intervention. Preexisting 

spaces that at fi rst seem unfi t for gameplay can always be designated as play- 

Figure 30B 

PLAY-GROUNDS 

205

PLAY-GROUNDS 

206 

grounds; the result of this renaming is impossible to predict. A former monastery, for 

example, may be considered inappropriate for wild, physical play, especially considering 

that most monastery visitors seek silence. And yet surprisingly, engaging in wild, physical 

play in just such a monastery proved quite a positive experience. The same seemingly 

inappropriate, but actually quite lovely and thought-provoking intervention occurs in the 

graveyard game Tombstone Hold ’Em (2005), in which players play a variation of poker 

in the – you guessed it – big, open, and enthralling space of a public cemetery. 

With the introduction of positioning Technologies and location-based pervasive games, 

the mapping of rules onto spaces and the map-based interactivity described above are 

merging into a new kind of play-ground: mapped and map-like. 

During the design process of REXplorer, maps played a number of important roles 

including, for example, in the prototyping of hotzones, i.e. physical zones in which the 

player can interact with specifi c game challenges. Because GPS can have problems 

in urban spaces due to buildings or even clouds obstructing signals from the satellites, 

it is very important to test a game’s GPS location system thoroughly to ensure proper 

functionality. Our hotzones are defi ned iteratively based on GPS measurements and 

extensive play sessions. We developed a map tool (see Figure 31) that allows us to 

visually defi ne the hotzones based on the GPS measurements derived during testing. 

Using this tool, we were able to iteratively defi ne hotzones and to determine that GPS 

alone is not suffi cient for the accuracy that we require. To support location detection, the 

REXplorer system thus also uses Bluetooth beacons, as well as providing players the 

ability to manually enter their locations when the location detection fails.

Figure 31 

REXplorer map tool that visually defines hotzones based on GPS measurements from 

playtesting. 

Maps are also used in REXplorer’s souvenir brochure and blog. During the game, the 

player’s progress is tracked. The resulting information is used to create a personalized 

souvenir geo-Weblog (blog). The player blog documents the player’s route through 

space by interfacing with Google maps and through time by chronologically listing all 

sites and characters with which the player interacted during her session (see Figure 

32). The blog provides de-briefi ng Web links concerning the game characters that 

appeared during gameplay, so that players have the opportunity to learn even more 

PLAY-GROUNDS 

207

PLAY-GROUNDS 

208 

about the history of the sites they visited. During their game session, players can – and 

are reminded to – shoot pictures and videos of their fi eld research. This image material 

(and its corresponding location information) is then automatically added to the blog as 

part of an interactive map. 

Figure 32 

A souvenir blog documents the player route, visited points of interest, and playergenerated 

content (pictures and videos). Clicking on a point of interest on the 

map links the visitor to in-depth historical information about that point of interest, 

including external links and a bibliography to encourage further exploration 

and learning.

REXplorer’s game controller provides a simplifi ed keypad interface, one of whose 

functions is a map button. Since the players are tourists, they generally have diffi culties 

navigating through a foreign city. To compensate for this, we provide a physical German 

language tourist map in the souvenir brochure, indicating the paranormal activity sites 

(see Figure 33). By pressing the map button, players can also see their current position 

on a smaller on-screen map, as well as the destinations of all current open quests. 

This helps them immensely as they try to navigate through the City in order to fulfi ll 

the quests. 

\ 

MAXIMALE SPIELZEIT: 60 MINUTEN 

Geben Sie das Gerät nach Ablauf der Spielzeit 

bitte in der Tourist-Info am Alten Rathaus ab. 

Danke! 

12 

Das 

magische 

Stadtspiel. 

01 

Domgarten 

S 

Start: 

Salzstadel 

14 13 

11 10 

02 

Dom 

15 

16 

Barbara- 

Blomberg-Haus 

Bischofshof 

08 

23 

Tourist-Info 

03 

Dompfarrkirche 

17 

Krauterermarkt- 

St. Johann 

22 

25 

04 

Domplatz 

18 

Neupfarrplatz 

26 

20 

27 

05 

Dalberg-Residenz 

19 

Neupfarrkirche 

15 

19 

09 

17 

24 

28 

16 

06 02 

18 

06 

Haus Heuport 

20 

Löschenkohl- 

Palais 

S 

05 

07 

Römerturm 

21 

Porta Praetoria 

08 

Zanthaus 

22 

Rathausplatz 1 

Altes Rathaus 

Figure 33 

(Right) The outside of the brochure displays 

a legend for device buttons and gestures. 

Players receive the brochure when they rent 

the detector and start playing the game. (Top) 

The inside of the souvenir brochure features a 

large map with game action locations marked. 

21 

04 

WICHTIG: Während Sie eine Geste ausführen, dürfen Sie 

die Kamera auf der Rückseite des Geräts nicht verdecken! 

01 

03 

07 

! 

WILLKOMMEN, REXPLORER! 

Bitte lesen Sie diese Anleitung vor dem ersten Gebrauch aufmerksam 

durch. Nur so sind Spielspass und die einwandfreie 

Funktion des Detektors garantiert. 

SPIELZIEL 

REXplorer ist ein laufendes 

Forschungsprojekt zu ortsbasierter 

Computernutzung und touristischer 

Unterhaltung im Stadtraum und 

wurde gemeinsam produziert von 

Regensburg Regensburg Experience Experience 

REX Erlebnismuseum 

Regensburg Experience gGmbH 

www.rex-regensburg.de 

Mit freundlicher 

Unterstützung von 

Starten Sie am Salzstadel ( S 

). Untersuchen Sie die Magie 

der Stadt! Besuchen Sie möglichst viele magische Orte und 

kontaktieren Sie www.rexplorer.de 

die Ortsbewohner (siehe Stadtplan) durch 

eine korrekte Geste; erfüllen Sie möglichst viele der Aufgaben, 

die Ihnen gestellt werden. Ihre Route und Ihre 

Ergebnisse werden für Sie auf www.rexplorer.de als personalisierter 

Weblog automatisch zusammen gefasst. Ihre genaue 

Weblog-Adresse erfahren Sie nach Spielende bei Abgabe 

09 

10 Ihres Detektors 11 in der Tourist-Info am 12 Alten Rathaus. 13 

Goliathhaus Neue Waag Haidplatz Goldenes Kreuz Runtingerhaus 

! 

Bitte achten Sie unbedingt auch auf andere Verkehrsteilnehmer - Fußgänger, 

Fahrradfahrer, PKWs und Altstadtbus! Mit der Teilnahme an 

dem Spiel übernehmen Sie die volle Verantwortung für Ihre Bewegungen 

im öffentlichen Raum. Auch für den REXplorer gilt die 

Strassenverkehrsordnung. 

23 

24 

25 

26 

27 

Rathausplatz 4 

Reichstagsmuseum 

Steinerne DER DETEKTOR Kastenmayer- IM ÜBERBLICK Goldener 

Brücke 

Haus Turm 

Baumburger 

Turm 

ORTSWAHL-TASTE GESTEN-TASTE 

OFFENE AUFGABEN 

& PUNKTESTAND 

STANDORT 

ORTSWAHL-TASTE Mit dieser Taste rufen Sie die Ortswahl auf 

und können einen magischen Ort auswählen 

GESTEN-TASTE Drücken und halten Sie diese Taste, um eine 

Geste auszuführen. Dies ist nur an magischen Orten möglich. 

AUF / AB BZW. LAUTER / LEISER Wählen Sie mit diesen 

Tasten in der Ortswahl einen Ort per "AUF" / "AB" aus bzw. 

passen Sie die Lautstärke an. 

OFFENE AUFGABEN & PUNKTESTAND Ein Tastendruck lässt 

Sie Ihre Aufgaben und Ihren Punktestand überprüfen sowie 

nicht erledigte Aufgaben löschen. 

STANDORT Blendet bei gedrückt gehaltener Taste Ihren 

Standort ein. 

KAMERA Ein Tastendruck ruft die Kamerafunktion auf. Ihre 

Bilder werden auf Ihrem persönlichen Weblog zusammen 

gestellt. 

WIEDERHOLEN Taste drücken, um das zuletzt Gehörte zu 

wiederholen. 

Luftbild- und Stadtplanabdruck mit Genehmigung der Stadt Regensburg, Amt für Stadtentwicklung 

AUF / LAUTER AB / LEISER 

KAMERA 

WIEDERHOLEN 

SPIELANLEITUNG 

ORTSWAHL 

1 

1 Aufruf der Ortswahl durch Drücken der Ortswahl-Taste ( ). 

Ortsliste mit den Tasten (auf) und (ab) durchsuchen. 

2 

Gesten-Taste drücken, um den Ort auszuwählen. 

14 

Keplerhaus 

3 

Gewählter Ort und doppelter Detektor-Ausschlag werden angezeigt. 

DIE FÜNF MAGISCHEN GESTEN 

Mit der richtigen Geste lösen Sie die magischen Elemente 

28 Wasser, Feuer, Luft und Erde aus und können so mit einem 

Wurstkuchl Ortsbewohner interagieren. Ortsbewohner geben versteckte 

Hinweise, welche Geste Sie ausführen sollen, um Aufgaben 

anzunehmen. Beispiel: "Die Glut meiner Liebe" erfordert die 

Geste "Feuer". 

Sie haben den Ort ausgewählt? ( 3 ) So geht es weiter: Die 

Gesten-Taste gedrückt halten, Bewegung zügig ausführen, 

Taste loslassen. Nach korrekter Geste meldet sich der jeweilige 

Ortsbewohner. Wenn die Geste nicht erkannt werden konnte, 

erscheint ein rotierendes Gesten-Auswahlmenü. 

ERDE 

WASSER 

INFO 

2 3 

FEUER 

LUFT 

Mit der Info-Geste erfahren 

Sie Wissenswertes zum 

gewählten Ort. 

Spielkonzept und -umsetzung: Steffen P. Walz (ETH Zürich) & Tico Ballagas (RWTH Aachen) 

Prospektgestaltung: Lars Doneith | Illustrationen: Joel Mendoza, Florian Leonhardt 

© 2007 REX Erlebnismuseum Regensburg Experience gGmbH | www.rex-regensburg.de 

www.rexplorer.de 

PLAY-GROUNDS 

209 

PLORER 

Das 

magische 

Stadtspiel. 

Detektorverleih und -rückgabe 

Regensburg Tourist-Info, Altes Rathaus 

Montag - Freitag 09:00 - 18:00 

Samstag 09:00 - 16:00 

Sonn- u. Feiertag 09:30 - 16:00 (November - März 09:30 - 14:30) 

REX - Regensburg Experience 

www.rex-regensburg.de | info@rex-regensburg.de | 0 94 04 - 96 30 80

PLAY-GROUNDS 

210 

12. Playground 

Today, the playground is a highly regulated space built by adults for children up to the 

age of about twelve years. In the EU, public playground surfacing and playground 

equipment must comply with the detailed DIN EN 1176 and 1177 standards, which detail 

issues of construction, safety, and maintenance as well as the liability assumed by the 

playground premise owner. For example, an apparatus with a height of more than 1.50 

meters requires an impact-absorbing layer of sand, fi ne gravel, or bark mulch36 — at 

least 20 centimeters thick; playground equipment not suitable for children younger than 

three years of age must include an entrance safeguard mechanism; and all see-saws, 

swings, merry-go-rounds, spring riders, climbing structures37 , chin-up bars, slides, and 

sandboxes must be checked by janitors every one to three months and by a surveyor 

every year. In the USA, the National Safety Council has formulated similar rules38 . 

36 Bark mulch is not recommended by the author, as it contributes to mold build-up. 

37 The history of the climbing structure – trademarked in 1920 as the Jungle gym – is interesting, as it feeds 

back into the history of the playground. Jungle gym inventor Sebastian Hinton was a lawyer and son of mathematician 

Charles Howard Hinton. Hinton is mentioned in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Secret Miracle and 

in Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell mostly because he was interested in a fourth dimension and coined the 

term tesseract to describe a four-dimensional hypercube structure in which four lines spring from each vertex to 

other vertices. Most likely attempting to build a physical model of the hypercube, Hinton constructed a threedimensional, 

multiple-cube bamboo framework in his backyard in Japan while Sebastian Hinton was still a child. 

Hinton senior theorized that people would never comprehend the fourth dimension while they led their lives in 

the second, always moving on fl at planes. He believed that if people became more comfortable in a real three-dimensional 

space, the intellectual step to the fourth dimension would be easier. Mimicking a Cartesian-coordinate 

system in mathematics, Hinton named one set of horizontal poles X1, X2, X3, etc. Those horizontal poles at right 

angles to the X poles were Y1, Y2, Y3, etc., while the vertical poles were designated as Z1, Z2, Z3, and so on. 

Hinton senior would then call out coordinates, “X2, Y4, Z3, Go!”, and his children – including Sebastian – would 

scramble for that intersection. Later, Sebastian explained that he and his siblings were happy to humor their 

father with these drills, but what they really enjoyed was simply climbing, hanging, chasing, and playing like monkeys. 

And because that type of play was so enjoyable, he eventually decided he wanted to build such a construction 

for his own children; the jungle gym was the result (Duran 2006). 

Sebastian Hinton’s wife was Carmelita Chase Hinton, who founded the progressive The Putney boarding school 

in the 1930s. Shortly before she married Hinton, she had been Jane Addams’ secretary at the Hull House, where 

she took a two-year course on playgrounds (McIntosh Lloyd 1988). 

38 Cf. http://www.nsc.org/resources/factsheets/hl/playground_safety.aspx.

In playgrounds, playing almost always takes place under direct (i.e. legal guardian), 

or indirect (i.e. nanny) control conditions. Essentially, these safety precautions clarify 

the types of play that the playground and playground apparatus enable: risk-taking, 

pursuing vertigo, adventuring, and achieving. 

Of course, the standards mentioned above provide security and protection for our little 

ones. But at the same time, standards seek to discipline the Body, as Foucault has 

told us time and time again; this disciplining the playground shares with the original 

concepts of the Kindergarten and the Campus, and has embraced the playground 

concept already, too. The solar powered playground exercise equipment i.play by 

Playdale Playgrounds Ltd39 comes with a central LED console and switches at different 

heights. Children have to follow commands issued by the the console, dictating which 

switch to activate next; individual or group exercising and performance scores can later 

be entered into an i.play website. Whilst employing the collecting-based play stimuli 

within the context of an action competition, i.play is not only a ludic architecture in the 

age of ubiquitous computing and videogame-like mechanics, but also an advanced 

instrument of hybrid reality discipline. And yet the origin of the urban playground is not 

discipline, but rather the opposite. 

While roundabouts and swings have existed since the pleasure gardens of the 18th 

century (Mumford 1961:379), urban growth and industrialization induced by capitalist 

logic wiped out natural playspaces, meaning play had to be taken from outdoors and 

relocated to densely crowded houses and apartments or over-populated streets: 

“Thus this paved desert, adapted primarily to wheeled traffi c, became also park, 

promenade, a dangerous playground” (1961:427). In the face of these rapidly growing, 

monotonous, industrial, and condensing urbanities, a US reform movement, supported 

by women’s rights activists such as Jane Addams, encouraged the public and 

39 Cf. http://www.intelligentplay.co.uk. 

PLAY-GROUNDS 

211

PLAY-GROUNDS 

212 

municipal administrators to provide spaces that would cater to children’s “insatiable 

desire for play” (Addams 1909:Chapter 1). In her seminal book, The Spirit of Youth 

and the City Streets, 40 Addams advocates public recreation, hands-on education, and 

artistic experience in the form of playgrounds, parks, and sports fi elds located within 

the City and aimed at healing and overcoming urban alienation and providing direction 

and focus. Eventually, major cities answered Addams’ call, slowly but steadily erecting 

supervised playspaces. 

It was only with the increased building of suburbia in the US that the terrain of suburban 

greenbelts was won back for outdoor playing. The spatial organization of public 

“playscapes” mirrors these illusionary naturalizations, offering experiential, modeled 

Figure 34 

A children’s see-saw that drives a water pump 

in disguise, conceived for the United Nations 

funded sustainable village of Gaviotas in Colombia. 

Illustration © 1998 Michael Middleton reprinted 

in “Gaviotas” © 1998 Alan Weisman, used with 

permission of Chelsea Green Publishing (www. 

chelseagreen.com). 

40 The full text of the book can be read online at: http://www.gutenberg.org/fi les/16221/16221-h/16221-h.htm.

terrains that incorporate vegetation and water into play, as well as, for example, log 

xylophones, barefoot paths, and human-scale garden chess – the latter, certainly as 

a means to appeal to older audiences as well. Originally intended as a play-ground 

of urban liberation, the playground has come to be the play-ground of secured and 

sealed-off play. 

In the ultimate example of disciplining the body, playgrounds can become places of child 

work, taking advantage of children’s insatiable desire for play and exploiting kinesis as 

kinetic energy. In 1971, in the Columbian war zone of Vichada, a number of idealistic 

engineers funded by the United Nations co-founded the eco-village of Gaviotas at 

4°33’17”N, 70°54’55”W in an attempt to create a community of sustainable living at this 

very remote site. Over the years, engineers and native Guahibo Indians have come up 

with many innovations and inventions, among them, a children’s see-saw that drives a 

concealed water pump. With every kinesis cycle of the see-saw– rise and descend – 

clean water is lifted from below ground (Weisman 1998); see Figure 34. At Gaviotas, 

the played liquid is a blessing; but at another site, in another context, the innate power 

of children may be played upon. 

The play-ground that is a playground is always a refl ection of its wider context. This 

notion is clearly evident in a novel approach to urban playground design. 

At Burling Slip in Lower Manhattan near South Street Seaport – an area that has few 

playgrounds but is becoming increasingly attractive to residents with children – the City 

of New York’s Department of Parks and Recreation together with “pleasure architect” 

David Rockwell have developed a fi gure-eight-shaped landscape for collaborative play. 

The “imagination playground” 41 (Figure 35) comprises a multi-level space with sloping 

ramps made out of wood that are intended for running and that connect a sand zone 

and water zone. Loose play elements are distributed all over the ground: toys and tools 

41 Cf. http://www.imaginationplayground.org. 

PLAY-GROUNDS 

213

PLAY-GROUNDS 

214 

such as foam blocks, small boats, and tubes, elbows, and gaskets for constructions, all 

maintained and overseen by so-called adult “play workers.” The goal of this playground 

space – which resembles the Situationist New Babylon concept; see the Society entry 

in this inventory – is to encourage social, sensory, interactive, and individual fantasy 

play rather than limit ludic engagement to physical activity (Cardwell 2007). 

Figure 35 

Rockwell Group and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation: Imagination 

Playground in Lower Manhattan, which opened in 2009. Drawing reproduced by permission from 

Rockwell Group.

13. Campus 

Typically, the campus – from the Latin campus, in English, a fl at expanse of land, plain, 

or fi eld – is the ground on which American university buildings are built, comprising 

research and teaching facilities, administration buildings, student accommodation, and 

spaces for leisure activities such as gyms or a stadium. The campus concentrates a 

university’s academic facilities on one site meant to embody its overall mission, thereby 

compacting all aspects of everyday life into an educational play-ground. 

After World War II, the idea of the campus hit Europe, with many “greenfi eld” campuses 

built in the 1960s and 1970s, including the one where the author worked for some 

years, ETH Zurich’s Hönggerberg campus. 

In European urban planning, these introverted and “gated,” yet economically viable 

campuses are currently being criticized for their lack of quality public space and their 

monoculture (Christiaanse 2007). Their typology, it is argued, runs counter to the 

efforts of many academic institutions to reintegrate themselves into the urban public 

realm (Hoeger 2007). One strategy to overcome this alleged remoteness is to make 

a campus culturally, socially, and thus architecturally attractive so that it can serve 

as an urban catalyst for surrounding city neighborhoods. This strategy is exemplifi ed 

by the ongoing ETH Zurich Science City project, which aims to urbanize the remote 

ETH campus Hönggerberg and transform its buildings into a sustainable model for the 

university of the 21st century, adding an Information Science Center, a Sport Center, 

an academic guest house, student housing, as well as a learning and meeting center 

with an event and exhibition area, career center, and computer-integrated library 

(Christiaanse 2007). 

Another, less construction-oriented strategy based more on computer Technology is to 

increase the attractiveness of campuses and thereby create a sense of connectivism. 

PLAY-GROUNDS 

215

PLAY-GROUNDS 

216 

This strategy is exemplifi ed by the game prototype ETHGame. The game was 

developed during the winter of 2004/05 in a design class taught by the author and his 

colleagues at the ETH Zurich in the Department of Architecture. In it, we supervised 

an interdisciplinary group of architecture and computer science students who worked 

together on a pervasive game prototype. The class culminated in a two-week intensive 

workshop and a presentation before school executives involved in strategic e-learning 

projects. 

The ETHGame prototype game is a location-based question and answer quiz-like 

experience in physical space, linking mobile computing and computer-integrated 

buildings. The game takes place across the city-wide ETH Zurich campus, involving a 

virtually unlimited number of student and faculty players and about 250 wireless access 

points. 

In the game, these access points represent interactive locations and their locative 

narratives. The game serves as a vehicle for transmitting and querying knowledge 

about the individual location’s narrative. Thus, each physical location serves as a 

game locus and interface for the game, and the combination of locations serves as a 

seamless cross-campus playground. The pervasive environment of the building sites 

connects players and the game system. 

The fi nal game is playable on campus with any mobile or stationary computer and a 

valid school network account. When a player physically enters a predefi ned knowledge 

space with a mobile device, the game locus asks the player location-dependent 

questions concerning general and technical, discipline- and site-related topics. Figure 

36 illustrates a representative application interface for the locus “Baumensa” – in 

English, the “cafeteria of the architectural department.”

log 

/ Your last login: 18.2.2005 at 16:00 

/ There are 4 new Professors 

/ 

/ 26 days and 15 hrs remaining 

Chica 

Don Carlos 

info zoom 

/ Loci: BAUMENSA 

/ ETH Hönggerberg-HIL-Level D 

/ 3 Players in loci BAUMENSA 

/ 7 Friends are online 

/ User Chica entered loci 

BAUMENSA has a 

question Class 1 for you! 

accept 

not accept 

Danchoice 

D-BWS 

Professor 

academic 

sympathy 

them me 

Don Carlos 

D-ARCH 

Assistent 

academic 

sympathy 

Figure 36 

An exemplary application interface of the ETHGame prototype, in which 

physical locations are superimposed with game rules to foster collaborative 

activity and site and discipline specific learning. Here, the locus 

“Baumensa” - the cafeteria of the Department of Architecture inside the 

ETH Zurich’s HIL building - challenges the player with an architectural 

question. Interface sketch by Daniel Wahl. 

ETHGame’s gameplay involves role-playing an avatar that must collect points by 

answering loci questions. Starting out as a “freshman,” the player tries to become the 

one and only Nobel Prize winner by climbing the virtual hierarchy of the game. Once 

a player reaches the level of “professor,” she keeps collecting points to ensure her 

victory. Only one player can win the ETHGame “Nobel Prize” by correctly answering 

Danchoice 

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the last question of the game. If a previous question has not been answered to a locus’ 

satisfaction, a player must consult with another player who is already in close proximity, 

and together, they must solve the puzzle. Game high scores are displayed on a public 

high score board. Players may also swap points for coffee discounts in the school’s 

cafeterias. 

By ascending game levels through cooperation, answering questions (together with 

other players), and collecting credit points, a player can win the game and be awarded 

the ETHGame’s Nobel Prize. Once begun, the game – which is supposed to last for six 

weeks – could impact or at least inspire the way students and faculty work and learn, 

cf. Walz and Schoch (2006), who detail the design processes of the game as well as 

design studio didactics. 

How did the campus come into being? What culture does it spatialize? Polyzoides (1997) 

argues that campus-making can be considered a unique contribution to urbanism in 

that it provides a kind of compressed urbanity, borrowing from precedents in European 

urbanism, particularly in the arrangement of the central city plaza, the campo (or piazza), 

which then described the central lawn between groups of university buildings, and later 

the university itself. Campus-making in the US, however, was originally inspired by and 

is still carried out according to what Polyzoides calls the Jeffersonian spirit: 

A liberal education was viewed as a means for young Americans to 

defend their democratic freedoms over their life-times. In support of 

that goal, the campus was designed as an idealized setting: a city in the 

countryside or a countryside in a city. There, students were to be exposed 

to the civilizing powers of architecture to impart lessons of civic duty 

and community service. A campus education was intended to convince 

students of the necessity for tradition and the possibility of cultural 

evolution (ibid.).

Since its inception, then, the campus americanensis has served as a certain kind of 

cultural environment, a Societal disciplining environment in which on the one hand, 

alternative lifestyles can be experimented with, and on the other hand, students can be 

initiated into the social norms that they will later follow in a microscopic urbanity – in, 

that is, a Playground for young adults. 

In the 1970s and 1980s, the tag-like game Assassin (also known as the Circle of 

Death) became widely popular in these special campus environments. In tag-style 

games (contemporary variants include Gotcha and Paintball), players stalk and hunt 

one another at all places at all times in an effort to eliminate competitors with imaginary 

or mock weapons so that eventually, only one surviving player remains. ”Weapons” can 

range from NERF-type guns (see Map) to random acts of kindness, which are used 

in the outdoor game of benevolent assassination, Cruel 2 Be Kind42 (McGonigal and 

Bogost 2006). 

In 1981, Steve Jackson, a US designer of role-playing games and tactical war games, 

published a rulebook for these games titled, Killer. In the afterword, John William 

Johnson of Indiana University describes Killer as “a ‘codifi cation’ of an orally transmitted 

folk game which has been diffusing from one [US] university campus to another for 

the past fi fteen years” (Johnson 1981:75). Killer paved the road for live action roleplaying 

and game design in that it standardized rules for hosting one’s own game and 

provided guidelines and scenarios for “human hunt” style, Assassin-like live actionrole-playing 

games. It also described a number of historical origins for such games, 

including Wargaming; tabletop fantasy role-playing à la Dungeons & Dragons, and the 

re-enactment culture in campus towns such as Berkeley, CA (Tan 2003). The Society 

of Creative Anachronism, founded in 1966 in Berkeley by a group of science fi ction and 

fantasy fans, for example, is a worldwide Middle Ages re-enactment and re-creation 

42 For game rules, see http://www.cruelgame.com. 

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organization whose members study and execute everyday Medieval life in everything 

from agriculture to cooking, dancing to gaming, leather working to medicine, poetry to 

pottery, weapon-making to goldsmithing, and weaving to woodworking. Medieval foot 

combat, however, is the organization’s main attraction (SCA 2008). Johnson makes 

clear the way that this and similar organizations infl uenced Killer, and then goes on to 

show how Killer, in turn, infl uenced modern LARP (live action role-playing) culture, see 

the Theater entry in this inventory. 

Salen and Zimmerman, investigating the relationship between the artifi ciality of games 

and their cultural environments, describe the Assassin game of the 1980s as follows: 

“Game play took place not only in a special, isolated game space, but in and among 

the activities of daily life” (Salen and Zimmerman 2004:572). Although it is clear that 

the authors understand “activities of daily life” as everyday campus activities, their 

description is misleading; it is that special, isolated, 24/7 miniature urbanity of the 

campus play-ground that enables all the stalking, hunting, and evading over the course 

of the semester. 

Assassin takes the underlying ideas behind wargaming, fantasy table-tops, and 

combating out of the dorm rooms and onto the wider campus; and campus games are 

“theatrical in nontraditional but thrilling ways. Players are both actors and audience 

for one another” (Murray 1997:42). But Assassin-type games go even further: they 

take the spirit of the campus out of the city-in-a-city and into urbanities, pervading 

the everyday with a prank culture and the concept of joyful “killing.” In contrast, the 

ETHGame prototype attempts to create a collaborative campus play-ground which is 

still agonal enough to be fun.

14. Square 

In De Architectura, ancient Roman architect Vitruvius argues that because the Roman 

forum was traditionally used for gladiatorial games, a plaza should be built in its place 

to not only serve as a public communication and trading space, but also as an arena 

(Vitruvius Pollio 1796/2001a:201). Referencing this designerly advice, early 20th 

century urban planning theorist Camillo Sitte describes the Roman forum – the mother 

of all plazas and squares, combining Greek agora and acropolis (Mumford 1961:223) 

– as a kind of Theater (Sitte 1909/2001:8). In Sitte’s reading, the forum is the urban 

equivalent of the country estate’s atrium: without these, the city cannot function. 

In an aesthetic criticism of 19th century European urbanism, Sitte (1909/2001) 43 

proposes a square typology. At its core, Sitte suggests that we perceive a square as a 

room – that is, as an enclosed area, at best the heart of urban creativity. Sitte strongly 

opposes early modernist urban planning ideas such as ordering spaces symmetrically 

or orthogonally and obsessively concentrating on form and shape. Instead, he uses a 

psychologically informed proportional analysis of the spatial structures of ancient Italian, 

Austrian, and German cities and squares in relation to their monuments to show how 

spatial irregularity and ornament can allure us and thereby make public squares more 

attractive. Modernist architecture – in particular, Le Corbusier’s vision of urbanizing the 

city as exemplifi ed by his conceptual designs, Ville contemporaine pour trois millions 

d’habitants (1922) and Plan voisin pour Paris (1925) – rejected Sitte’s approach in 

favor of clear, simple, anti-ornamental geometrical design. 

The advent of postmodernist urban planning, however, helped revive Sitte’s approach. 

In the US, Jacobs (1961) initiated a discourse about inhospitable cities, criticizing Le 

Corbusier’s wide, garden city-like grid structures for allegedly promoting crime. Jacobs 

43 First translated into English and published in the US much later, cf. Sitte (1945). 

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suggested that the inhospitality of US city cores and streets be overcome by taking a 

lesson from dense, almost congested city areas – those, that is, that have installed 

a system of unconscious social control through a direct juxtaposition of street level 

stores, parlors, and residential living spaces. In her argumentation, Jacobs takes 

on Sitte’s very own reading of agoraphobia – in his opinion, the fear of modernist, 

geometrically concise squares of emptiness and ennui (Sitte 1909/2001) in which 

we feel unprotected and insecure. In other words, that which we could call “negative 

space” (Frederick 2007:6), a kind of space that does not enclose. Still, mind that even 

Le Corbusier’s concept of placemaking attempts to create positive space, though with 

a different understanding of scale and regularity. 

Designers of play-ground experience must fi rst and foremost consider the type of 

place with which they are confronted. Is it a place that follows a functional layout logic, 

where, as Mies van der Rohe put it, “less is more?” Or is it a place that is irregular and 

ornamental, where, as architect Robert Venuri said, “less is a bore?” Just because a 

space seems suitable for dwelling, doesn’t mean it is. Why? Because a place is socially 

constructed – it only comes alive through the people that inhabit it and the ways they 

inhabit it. Put another way, “A city’s meaning is not just in its bricks and mortar, but also 

in our understanding and use of the information about it” (Chalmers 2004). This notion 

can guide the following investigation of a square as a play-ground of public Theater. 

In the Tuscan city of Siena, the world-famous horse race, La Corsa del Palio – known 

locally simply as Il Palio – is celebrated twice during the summer. Both the Palio di 

Provenzano race (in honor of the Madonna di Provenzano) on July 2 and the Palio 

dell’Assunta race (in honor of the Madonna Assunta) on August 16 are preceded by 

four days of festivities and a pageant with many costumed participants called corteo 

storico. Both events take place on Siena’s central square, the Piazza del Campo, and 

attract tens of thousands of spectators.

Siena, a former city-republic just like the Tuscan cities of Florence and Lucca, is the 

most Gothic of the three, and remains an almost fl awlessly preserved UNESCO World 

Heritage medieval city. In fact, the tradition of Il Palio goes back to the Middle Ages, 

when the pugna – that is, public games between city districts, most of them combative 

– were held on the Piazza del Campo. Starting in the 14th century, the contrada – nongovernmental 

city quarter associations that (still) function as urban wards – organized 

pugna in the form of running races that took place publicly across the whole city; this 

type of pugna was called palii alla lunga. After the Tuscan duke banned the bullfi ghting 

pugna in 1516, the contrada organized the fi rst buffalo-back races on the Piazza del 

Campo, which later evolved into the modern Il Palio, which fi rst took place around 1650. 

For more on the fascinating history of the Sienese Palio, see the seminal scholarly 

work by Dundes and Falassi (2005); virtually every tourist shop in Siena carries copies 

of this book, now in its second edition. 

For our purposes, Il Palio is interesting on three levels, which we will consider in the 

following order: 

● First, Il Palio represents a ludic activity and historical tradition that takes 

place on a city square, follows certain intrinsic rules, and takes advantage 

of the urban space where these rules are played out. 

● Second, Il Palio is a spatio-symbolic game between city districts. 

● Third, Siena is one of the wealthiest cities in Italy, boasting a particularly 

low crime rate and featuring the highest social capital in any city of its size 

in western Europe (circa 50,000 inhabitants): “Life in Siena seems ideal, 

like an arcadia if not even a utopia (...), and the question presents itself 

of what we can learn from Siena, and that means from the contrade (and, 

by implication, the Palio) for the organization of urban life in general in the 

21st century” (Drechsler 2006:101). 

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As a ludic activity, Il Palio is best described by its operational rules, which are identical 

for both palii. Below, I have summarized the rules as explained by Dundes and Falassi 

(2005) and Drechsler (2006), concentrating on the race itself, not the surrounding 

ludic festivity: 

● Il Palio is a bi-annual horse-racing contest thrice around the Piazza del 

Campo on the Piazza’s outermost, steeply canted, 7.5 meter ring. Each 

lap is circa 300 meters. 

● Il Palio is organized by the seventeen contrada, each representing one 

Sienese city quarter. 

● Il Palio is, in contrade language, defi ned as “War time.” 

● In each palio, ten contrada participate, according to a rotational system 

and a lottery drawing. 

● In the race, ten jockeys on ten horses each represent one of the 

participating contrada, wearing the appropriate contrade colors and arms. 

The hoses are ridden bareback, and jockeys are allowed to use a whip 

both for their own horse and to disturb their opponents’ horses. 

● On the starting line, there is only space for nine riders; the tenth has to 

stand back. 

● When the horses are in the correct position, a local authority, called the 

mossiere, starts the race by removing the canapo, the starting cord. 

● The fi rst horse to cross the fi nish line with or without a rider, but with 

its head ornaments intact wins, and the winning rider and contrade is 

awarded a banner of painted silk, the palio.

The race is ferocious and fast. Jockeys hit one another. Horses are killed or injured. 

The square is crammed with awe-struck spectators and competing contradaioli, ready 

to fi ght those wearing opposing colors. Like in any staging of cruelty (see Theater) or 

arena game (see Stadium), the public performance of daring horsemanship, mutilation, 

and “physical re-creation” (Drechsler 2006:115) of the contrada is spectacular. Yet, 

after the second palio, as the summer begins to wane, Siena again becomes an 

outstandingly peaceful city. 

The “palio-contrade” complex, as Drechsler thoroughly shows, through contrada 

warding and the palii as a defi ned time of war, assures that Siena remains a safe city, at 

least on the surface. Is this the desirable urban model for the 21st century? Are games 

pacifying the public, and if yes: at what expense? 

We can only conclude that the play-ground of the square, a center of urban life in most 

European cities, refl ects some kind of spatial and social structuration and, because 

of its scale and meaning, is capable of staging and processing central confl icts. Rose 

(1999) points out that Il Palio is only one of many paramilitary, intramural games of 

Medieval origin played in Tuscan, Umbrian, and many other cities. These games often 

refl ect the highly zoned architecture of miniature communes in the hilly urbanities 

where they are played, thereby fostering an intra-urban parochial mentality. Mock 

combats “offered a non-lethal outlet with, hopefully, a cathartic outcome as a substitute 

for the vendetta. Such events were preceded by impressive religious-civic processions, 

formally manifesting the government’s jurisdiction. Today, the direct descendants of 

these paramilitary games come alive each summer” (Role 1999). 

Another example of such an intramural game is the Calcio Storico Fiorentino, a 

Medieval form of mob football revived in the 1930s and played on the Piazza della 

Novere in Florence. The game serves to illustrate that partisanship in today’s soccer 

Stadium to some extent originates in urban or inter-village rivalry. The evolution of 

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these public games between neighboring areas can also be traced in other soccerrelated 

phenomena such as the Shrove Tuesday, an annual ludic fi ght between the 

parishes of All Saints and St. Peter’s in Derby, UK (Schulze-Marmeling 2000:12). 

The contrada, at least in Role’s reading, remain the intracommunal, militaristic, social 

clubs they have been for centuries. Thus for them, organizing Il Palio also implies 

controlling the Arcadian life between the fanatically staged games. This, then, is what 

we can learn from the Palio-contrada complex for the organization of urban life in the 

21st century: The institutionalization of an urban game likely entails other urban and 

social effects in a given Society. 

15. Theater 

Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Italy, inaugurated 

in 1585, is the fi rst example of a covered, freestanding, and autonomous theatre in 

Europe since antiquity. Figure 37 depicts a top-view drawing of the building, showing 

both the audience space, or cavea, which seats around 800 people, and the separated 

stage. In the demarcated cavea – see the Cave entry of the inventory – the audience’s 

gaze is fi xed on the stage so that its members become passive spectators to the roleplaying 

and storytelling action on stage. Later, the audience would also gaze at the 

painted scenography, which displayed the new Baroque illusionary perspective for 

the fi rst time, introducing and anticipating the perspectival illusionism which later was 

designed onto e.g. façades in the city by the same scenographers (Mumford 1961:378). 

Note the startling analogy between the transferal of Baroque theatrical scenography 

into the city and the permeation of digital games into everyday life.

Figure 37 

Andrea Palladio: Teatro 

Olimpico (top view). Drawing 

by Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi 

(1776) / public domain. Reproduced 

from Wikipedia. 

On the one hand, then, modern theater forecloses the intent of Baroque culture to 

please the masses by way of illusionist spectacle (see also the Trompe l’œil entry). 

On the other hand, and more fundamentally, the elements of the Teatro Olimpico 

– stage wall, three entrances (which are the platform for the painted scenes), and 

proscenium stage (i.e. stage portal and area between curtain and orchestra crowned 

by the colonnaded proscenium arch) – reconstruct the theatre of antiquity, in which the 

circularly seated audience is, according to Vitruvius, “immobilized by entertainment” 

(Vitruvius Pollio 1796/2001:210). After all, the Greek , théatron, literally means 

“place for viewing.” 

The spatial boundary between role-play-ground and savoring-play-ground hampers 

the to-and-fro between the two parties without preventing it. We can trace practices of 

overcoming the separation between actor and spectator in Denis Diderot’s theoretical 

treatment of bourgeois tragedy from 1758, Discours sur la poésie dramatique. In it, 

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Diderot (1994), informed by the spirit of Enlightenment, denounces theatrical stylistic 

devices such as a-part speaking or extempore, i.e. improvised a-part sentences, both 

of which are intended to break the quasi-programmed demarcation between stage 

and audience space in order to create kinetic possibility between actor and spectator. 

Diderot suggests that actors should imagine a wall at the front of the stage, separating 

fi rst fl oor and acting area. Ever since, this imaginary but impermeable wall has been 

known as the fourth wall. An accompanying factor for this central concept of naturalist 

theatre in the proscenium theatre building can be traced in the concept of “suspension 

of disbelief”. 

The suspension of disbelief is an essential ingredient for audience enjoyment of 

theatrical live play as well as of other forms of entertainment. The term was fi rst coined 

by poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 181744 to describe the audience’s 

shared willingness to imagine – in other words, accept the validity of a piece of fi ction 

and the space it defi nes, even if the fi ction or certain of its fi ctional properties are 

impossible or fantasy-bound (see the Impossible Worlds entry) - as long as the fi ction 

delivers entertainment. In games, the suspension of disbelief can take on many forms. 

In a digital contest of tennis, a player incapable of physically playing tennis suspends 

disbelief when enacting a tennis player avatar and beating Swiss champion Roger 

Federer in a simulated tennis match. In fact, the basic allegorical character of digital 

games presupposes a suspension of disbelief. 

The notion of breaking Diderot’s fourth wall originated in Bertolt Brecht’s theory of the 

“Epic Theater.” Brecht, a German theater director, playwright, and Marxist, envisioned 

an audience seated in a classical theatre building becoming aware of what it was 

watching, thereby emotionally distancing itself from the on-stage action and growing 

into a body of consciously critical observers. In order to achieve this activation effect 

44 Cf. http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/biographia.html (a Web version of chapter XIV of 

Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, wherein the phrase appears).

– which Brecht called Verfremdungseffekt, in English, “estrangement effect” – actors 

can, for example, directly address the audience, whereby the illusion of play and hence 

the suspension of disbelief are destroyed for the sake of self-realization (Brecht 1964). 

Brecht’s modernist theater embodies a deeply political and social idea of the relationship 

between audience and actors, and can be seen as a critique of passively consumed 

entertainment. This approach not only departs from the work and dramatic theory of 

Brecht’s contemporary Constantin Stanislavski, but also stands in stark contrast to 

other infl uential theater theories such as Artaud’s affective “Theatre of Cruelty,” which 

uses violence and sexuality to put the audience in the middle of the spectacle of the 

play and engulf (and expose) it, thereby keeping it in an affective trance. In a certain 

sense, Artaud was similar to Brecht: he believed that the unprotected, almost surrealist 

theater experience could become a catalyst for societal transformation – a way to take 

full advantage of the Aristotelian concept of catharsis by addressing the unconscious 

chaos of the “great dark myths” (Artaud 1958:31). Brenda Laurel clarifi es for us that 

Brechtian theater, for its part, suggests that catharsis – considered as pleasurable 

emotional closure in the Aristotelian sense – necessarily takes place beyond the play’s 

ending, that is, when the experience of play becomes embedded in everyday life (Laurel 

1993:121). 

Brecht’s Epic Theater concept suggests other, more far-reaching techniques to break 

the fourth wall and, by extension, to create an integrated play-ground of role-playing. 

The most radical technique of the Epic Theatre, the Lehrstück, or “teaching-play,” 

was originally intended for children. In it, there is no longer any regulated boundaries 

between audience and actor: 

The teaching-play teaches by being played, not by being seen. In 

principle, no spectator is necessary for a teaching-play, although one 

can be utilized. The underlying expectation of the teaching-play is that 

the players can be infl uenced societally by performing certain courses of 

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behaviour, engaging certain actions, rendering certain speeches and so 

forth (Brecht 1967:Bd. 17:1024). 45 

Brecht’s experimental-educational Lehrstück attempts to develop a theater without 

an audience, a theater in which players cooperatively role-play to solve dramatic 

confl icts. The vision of the Lehrstück can be traced in a number of contemporary 

theatrical modes: 

● In German-speaking countries, the fi eld of Theaterpädagogik – in English, 

“theatrical pedagogy” – encompasses a set of different Lehrstück-like 

activities. These activities aim, for example, to bring together professional 

actors and acting laymen, to stage collaborative performances for corporate 

and leadership training, to prevent or treat the effects of personal or social 

confl icts, to teach and train processes, and to let players assess social 

relationships, learn to cooperate, analyze situations, probe attitudes, and, 

ultimately, solve problems. The author himself uses Brechtian Lehrstücklike 

techniques at several stages in his game design classes. Figure 38 

shows a group of students from Tsinghua University in Beijing performing 

and analyzing game system procedures during a workshop taught by the 

author, with the topic of an Olympic Games pervasive game. 

● Much of contemporary theatrical and performance practice plays with 

the intimate relationship between audience and actors, often extending 

that relationship beyond the theater building. These practices involve the 

development play-grounds on the brink of public and private space. Single 

45 Translated by the author from the original German: “Das Lehrstück lehrt dadurch, daß es gespielt, nicht 

dadurch, daß es gesehen wird. Prinzipiell ist für das Lehrstück kein Zuschauer nötig, doch kann er natürlich 

verwertet werden. Es liegt dem Lehrstück die Erwartung zugrunde, daß die Spieler durch die Durchführung 

bestimmter Handlungsweisen, Einnahme bestimmter Handlungen, Wiedergabe bestimmter Reden und so weiter 

gesellschaftlich beeinfl ußt werden” (Brecht 1967, Bd. 17, S. 1024).

audience members, for example, are brought into a direct communicative 

situation with actors acting solely for them; the theater situation is thus 

urbanized. In Fiona Templeton’s pioneering city-wide theatrical piece 

YOU - The City from 1988 – cf. Templeton (1990) – actors are positioned 

at various, fi xed locations in New York City. 46 One by one, each audience 

member makes an appointment to go to a small Manhattan offi ce at 

a designated time, where he is then picked up by an actor, who takes 

the audience member to the next rendezvous point, where he is then 

handed over to the next actor. This process is repeated over and over 

again until the “client”/audience member ends up at a café after visiting 

various locations throughout New York City. YOU – The City is thus clearly 

reminiscent of Situationism and clearly related to our Society entry as 

well. As one researcher comments, “You - The City can be read in terms 

of what the Situationists would have called a détournement of the usual 

networks of communication and exchange. Whereas the Situationists 

had plans to replace the stairways in Piranesi’s etchings with lifts and 

recast the street dustbins in ivory, Templeton presents a détournement of 

encounter” (Olsen 2001). In the afterword of her play, Templeton herself 

refers to this form of one-to-one intimacy as a theater that assumes and 

creates relationships, while simultaneously evoking privacy (Templeton 

1990:139f.). The mobile phone theater piece Call-Cutta (2005), created 

by Berlin theater collective Rimini Protokoll, is another example of 

theater becoming an urban theatrical play-ground, while at the same 

time playing with the traditional relationship between actor and audience 

and making it more personal. Call-Cutta is a 60-minute neighborhood 

walking tour through the urban jungle of Berlin, remotely guided on a cell 

46 The author participated in the 2002 Hamburg, Germany version of YOU – The City, called DU / Die Stadt and 

directed by Judith Wilske, cf. http://www.att-hh.de/archiv/du/. 

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phone by call center employees based in Calcutta, who were trained to 

dramatize the experience in that they guide the audience through the 

telephone etc. 47 

Figure 38 

Participants in 

a game design 

workshop at Tsinghua 

University 

Beijing theatrically 

perform a game 

system process. 

In another strain of performance tradition called role-played drama, participating 

performers are simultaneously spectators and actors. Thus, a performing player 

is “acting as an author in performing the character, and also acting as audience by 

watching other players” (Kim 2004:35), jointly realizing a fi ctional world and story. 

Still, this kind of acting, like any acting, depends on the actor’s ability to consciously 

differentiate between an ordinary self, a pretended self, and the ensemble. 

47 Cf. http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project_143.html.

In contemporary times, this dual performer-spectator capacity is the focus of many 

pioneering games in the fantasy genre, the best of which is the tabletop game 

Dungeons & Dragons (1974). Discussing Dungeons & Dragons, Mackay argues that 

fantasy role-playing is a performance art, “worldly entertainment that manufactures, 

through a shared social experience, otherworldly playgrounds from the images of 

American culture” (Mackay 2001:156). Choy (2004), on the other hand, discusses how 

role-playing games can be interpreted and traced as a form of theater as well as a 

form of “framing” meaning. As an example of the former, Choy cites Augusto Boal’s 

educational Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), which seeks to free the masses from 

oppression by involving them in short plays, engaging them in discussion about those 

plays, and then encouraging them to freely improvise48 different versions of those plays 

in order to solve social problems and, in a bottom-up approach, democratize politics 

(2004:56ff.). TO and Brecht’s Epic Theater are similar in that they hand out dramatic 

patterns to the performers – starting points, so to speak. Note that Choy does not point 

out the tremendous infl uence of Brecht’s Epic Theatre on Boal’s performance theory, 

though in fact, the main difference between Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Boal’s TO is only 

that the latter is supposed to take place wherever people and their confl icts take place, 

i.e. in schools, streets, prisons, churches, or other public spaces. TO, in other words, is 

not constrained to the theater building. 49 

48 Improvisational theatre in Europe has a long tradition. The Commedia dell’arte (CDA)– or, more to the point, 

Commedia all’improvviso – originated in Italy in the 16th century, emerging from the tradition of Medieval traveling 

theater troupes. In the CDA, we fi nd typifi ed characters such as the Harlequin, who often invites the audience 

to participate in the improvisational play, which usually takes place outdoors, using little or no props and some 

pre-scripted dramaturgy (Richards and Richards 1990). 

Whereas in the CDA, improvisation is transformed into a semi-regulated performance technique, the impromptu 

theatre tradition on which the CDA was based can still be experienced throughout southern Germany and Austria 

in the so-called “Volkstheaters.” These types of theaters are similar to community theatres, but are more traditionally 

oriented and often stage the same piece year after year. 

49 Cf. the Declaration of Principles of the International Theatre of the Oppressed Organization at: http://www. 

theatreoftheoppressed.org/en/index.php?nodeID=23. 

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Choy also adduces Goffman’s concept of frames of meaning within which subjects 

perform (2004:58ff.). The “performance frame” differs from the “primary frame” (consider 

the words “I will kill you,” which have different meaning when performed as opposed 

to when spoken out in a non-theatrical situation), but both are similar in that they 

afford participants the chance to act along “conventions of etiquette ( … ) to maintain 

engrossment of those who are participating and watching” (2004:60), the latter of which 

is essential to the suspension of disbelief both in the proscenium theater and in dramatic 

role-playing. In role-playing, this suspension of disbelief is mainly held together by a 

specially assigned participant role. In the tabletop fantasy role-playing game Dungeons 

& Dragons, the dungeon master is a selected participant who prepares game sessions, 

serving as storyteller, moderator, and referee, i.e. game rule interpreter. 

Similarly, in live action role-playing games (LARPs), the gamemasters lay out the 

fi ctional framework of the LARP to be staged. Although LARPing modes vary widely, 

the duties of the role-playing gamemaster typically involve preparing and creating 

a consistent role-playing play-ground for players, determining the game mechanics 

(i.e. the verisimilitude of player actions), plotting, guiding, possibly providing goals for 

characters during an adventure, controlling non-playable characters throughout the 

LARP, and interpreting game rules in order to progress the game. 

The main difference between tabletop role-playing and LARP is that in the former, 

“the creation of meanings is mostly verbal and predominantly symbolic” (Loponen 

and Montola 2004:40), whereas in the latter, the use of indices – i.e. a real sword, as 

opposed to, say, a card symbolizing a sword – is preferred (2004:41f.). 

Still, LARPs typically use defi ned spatial “scenes” for role-playing. Montola and Stenros 

(2008:7) identify three major “design ideals” that currently guide LARP makers: (a) 

powerful dramas, i.e. LARPs that use scripted events and an act structure; (b) 360°

illusions with perfectly crafted theatrical playspaces, which need not be realistic, but 

must be atmospheric; and (c) pervasive LARPing, i.e. pervasive role-playing in which 

players and plots actively confront everyday life in urban environments and treat 

everyday objects and environments as if they belong to the diegetic fi ction. As Montola 

notes: “The selling point of pervasive role-playing is the thrill of non-safe ordinariness 

combined with game invading the sphere of the ordinary. It’s not all about the “this is 

not a game” illusion (… ) allowing the players to pretend that the game is real. The 

attraction is in the pleasure of doing real things for real” (Montola 2007:184). This type 

of performative confrontation can and/or even seems to involve involuntary bystanders 

as well as basically everyone outside of the diegetic framework of the player (group). 

This last design ideal technique thus resembles Boal’s drama technique of the “invisible 

theatre,” i.e. a concealed and confrontational performance in a public space, staging, 

for example, sexual harassment (Boal 1992). 

In Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), the spatial setting of the game becomes ambiguated 

(as in: “the game could be anywhere”), and puppetmasters assume roles similar to the 

gamemaster. Christy Dena (2007) differentiates among several design duties: setting 

the scene by creating game elements, making sure that players can “fi nd” the game and 

access it, manually adjusting the game subsequent to player input, monitoring the game in 

real time, and facilitating player collaboration through storytelling and other play elements 

(2007:238ff.). Design duties do not, however, include making clear to the players that 

they are staging an unfolding play, which would represent the ultimate breaking of the 

fourth wall. 

This breaking, which turns the spectator into a player and vice versa, is clearly evident 

in virtual massively multiplayer role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of 

Warcraft (2004). MMORPGs take place on clearly defi ned, virtual stages, and their 

designedness can be compared to the proscenium theatre in that it features a set of 

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clear rules that spatially govern experience. Three-dimensional computer simulation 

demands a clear demarcation of the quasi-theatrical experience from everyday life. Like 

MMORPGs, ARGs also incorporate virtual role-playing spaces into gameplay, albeit 

without immersing the player in a sophisticated 3D world. Rather, typical virtual roleplaying 

activities in ARGs include, for example, sending an e-mail to a game character. 

What all these forms of dramatic role-playing have in common is the intention of merging, 

as seamlessly as possible, the roles of actor and audience member. They also have 

in common a director, who more or less strictly creates and maintains a performance 

frame for the players, who, in turn, maintain this pre-negotiated imaginary gameworld 

for themselves and for others. Indeed, Montola fi nds that “all role-playing is based on 

a power structure that governs the process of defi ning” (Montola 2007:178). In virtual 

environments such as MMORPGs, this power structure is defi ned and maintained by 

the game’s rule set in combination with the digital environment and certain functional 

and dramatic game elements. 

In certain situations, the rule set is the dominant actor. The rule set of the game prototype 

for Spirits of Split (the product of a 2004 game design summer school workshop 

supervised by the author in Split, Croatia), for example, supersedes an active 

puppetmaster during gameplay. In SoS, the whole city core of Split becomes the playground, 

with actors acting for, but also interacting with, spectating tourists. In the game, 

six locals wearing historic dress roam freely through Split’s city center, overlooked by 

the UNESCO World Heritage site, Diocletian’s Palace (see also the Castle entry). 

Tourists must locate the “spirits” (see Figure 39, which shows Diocletian himself!) by 

touring the city and exchanging keys that they have been handed at one of the booths 

at the palace’s gates for cubes, which they receive only when they have located the 

“correct” spirit. The game is over once the visitors have collected all cubes. The 

characters (i.e. the spirits) perform little songs or pantomimes typical of the time in

which they supposedly lived. Visitors are free to take the cubes home as a gift from the 

city. These cubes are similar to the Ole Million Face and Changeable Charlie cube toys: 

by turning the cube sides, tourists can puzzle together six perspectively identical 

images of six of Split’s historical periods, including its imagined future as envisioned by 

its citizens. 

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Figure 39 

The character of “Emperor Diocletian” 

performed by one of the game design 

atelier participants in the tourist game 

prototype Spirits of Split (2004). The 

game takes place on site at Diocletian’s 

Palace, the UNESCO World Heritage 

protected Roman monument that today 

makes up the city core of Split, Croatia.

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238 

The discussed modes of theatrical performance draw a wide-ranging picture of the 

theatrical play-ground. This play-ground can be presented to an inactive audience or 

make the audience its players; it can be organized physically and/or virtually; it can take 

place in a very defi ned space or permeate a whole city or combination of playspaces; 

it can be a verbal activity or involve physical enactment. 

For our purposes of outlining the theatrical play-ground, it is most interesting to defi ne 

it as a continuum of play that, at one extreme, strives to maintain a fourth wall between 

actor and audience, and at the other extreme, strives to break this wall so that ultimately, 

an actor-spectator fi gure can emerge. At the same time, the physical site of the playground 

can also vary. As noted above, it can be the defi ned space of the proscenium 

theatre, it can be several pre-defi ned stations in a city, it can be any given ad-hoc 

location or combination of locations in a city or rural environment, or it can be any other 

mediated site. In the latter case, theater permeates space. 

Figure 40 depicts how examples from our discussion can be plotted on a two-axis 

model. The resulting plot shows, for example, that the special role of the proscenium 

theatre in programming role-playing is similar to the special role of spatial programming 

in MMORPGs: both offer an enclosed, protected play-ground. This implies that taking 

the digital gameworld for granted is not a new quality of theatricality. In an earlier 

and more explicitly theater-related concept offered by Goffman, however, theatrical 

performance – i.e. dramaturgy – is viewed as a metaphor for everyday social life, in 

that we all perform “roles” (e.g. student, teacher, husband, son, etc.) on a given “stage” 

(e.g. kitchen, bedroom) for others (e.g. audience, observers, co-participants) using 

“impression management.” Impression management is a dramatic effect that arises 

from a subject’s task-driven effort to infl uence the audience’s perception about people, 

objects, and/or spaces by way of social interaction. This includes facets of performative 

presentation such as muscular control, speech, dress code, manner, etc., becoming, in

short, “a staged confi dence game” (Goffman 1959:73). 

Proscenium 

Theatre 

4th Wall 

THEATRE OF CRUELTY 

COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE 

SPIRITS OF SPLIT 

YOU - THE CITY 

Pervasive 

Theatre 

LEHRSTÜCK / 

EPIC THEATRE 

360° ILLUSION 

LARP 

THEATRE OF THE 

OPPRESSED 

POWERFUL 

DRAMA LARP 

INVISIBLE THEATRE / 

PERVASIVE ROLE-PLAY 

Figure 40 

A matrix of performance space and the actor-spectator relationship. 

MMORPG 

4th Wall 

Broken 

What types of staged confi dence games, then, do we play when we play MMORPGs? 

What games do we play in online social networks, in which we lay open and display 

our relationships for all to see, in which diaries have become public blogs for everyone 

to read (see the Topology entry), and in which being seen becomes a value, a form 

of social capital (see the Panopticon entry)? 50 What is the relationship between this 

50 For an overview of social anthropological research related to social network sites, cf. Boyd and Ellison (2007). 

ARG 

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form of socially accepted theatricality and the theatricality of protected, highly encoded 

performance stages of the digital role-playing game that reach out into the public in the 

form of LARPs and pervasive games? Will these strains of theatricality complement or 

confront one another? 

16. Stadium 

The stadium is an architectural solitaire; and today, stadia stand out as urban – or even 

national – monuments, architectural icons, or medial architectures. For Koolhaas, a 

stadium is XL, and the stadium’s BIGNESS implies that it does not need a context. A 

stadium represents and functionalizes mass events. It directs the Panoptic gaze of the 

savoring audience (especially before the advent of Television)– towards the center of 

the giant, usually oval or horseshoe-shaped building. 

The soccer stadium can be looked at as a curious combination of a surround theater in 

which seating and/or grandstands circle around a central stage or enclose this stage 

(Ching 1995:257). Or it can be viewed as an athletic Playground, often in the form of a 

fl at lawn, which, as mentioned earlier, enables running and sports contests. In a more 

polemic reading, Peter Sloterdijk (2008) notes that in the 20th century, we have faced 

a double renaissance of ancient spatial forms: that of the Greek stadium and that of 

the Roman arena. Sloterdijk further notes that the latter prevails over the former. Let us 

look at both forms to understand what he means. 

On the outskirts of their polity, in an ancient gymnasium, perfect and perfectly nude 

athletes prepared to participate in the Pan-Hellenic Olympic Games at Olympia, home 

of the gods, where well-oiled parties from all over Greece gathered for fi ve days of 

competition devoted both religiously and culturally to “the body as the active physical

expression, through disciplined play, of the human spirit” (Mumford 1961:136). For many 

years, the barefoot stadion race was the only discipline of the ancient Olympic Games, 

and the stadion runners ran towards the Olympic temple coram deis, as Sloterdijk 

(2008) notes. The Olympian stadion site evolved with the growth and meaning of the 

Olympic Games (Sinn 2004). Originally, the Olympic site consisted merely of start and 

fi nish sills, a packed earth track and grass walls for spectators on the sides. 

The Olympic Games established an open play-ground of urban rivalry discharged 

through public athletic competitions. In architectural and appropriative contrast, the 

Roman arena, and particularly the architectural icon of the elliptical Roman Colosseum 

(a roofl ess oval, surrounding, that is, literally: an amphi-theatre51 ), inaugurated in 80 AC, 

squeezed and enclosed space into a “fatalism machine on a grand scale” (Sloterdijk 

2008); see Figure 41. Fighting inside the Colosseum meant fi ghting for life and against 

death, and, at the same time, for death and against life. Aristocratic politicians sponsored 

inscenations of fate as a spectacle to pacify the masses and “to win prestige and 

public offi ce” (Hopkins and Beard 2005:42). Still, bear in mind that the familiar largerthan-life 

images we conjure of the Colosseum and the performances there are heavily 

infl uenced by fi lms and novels, and that “the performances at the Colosseum varied 

enormously according to the ingenuity of the presenter, the amount of money at his 

disposal, the practical availability of beasts, criminals or gladiators. After all, a hundred 

days of spectacles with executions at lunchtime would surely have soon exhausted 

51 The original Latin name of the Colosseum – or Coliseum – was Amphitheatrum Flavium, as construction 

took place during the reign of the Flavian emperors Vespasianus and Titus between 70-72 and 80 AD. One myth 

holds that it was designed by a Christian by the name of Gaudentius, though Virgil, who died many years before 

the Colosseum was built, held that the identity of the Colosseum’s architect was unclear. What is clear is that 

the construction required an enormous amount of technical and practical architectural and crafting expertise 

(Hopkins and Beard 2005:144ff.). This expertise must also have been responsible for the designs that are not immediately 

apparent to the on-site observer – namely, the underground Maze of preparations and storage rooms, 

of corridors and hoisting shafts, and of lift wells to the trapdoors above, as well as the intricate network of drains 

(2005:136ff.). In a way, we can think of these structures and technologies as the game mechanics, pumping 

beasts to the surface and allowing for surprising opponent 

spawning. 

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the supply of condemned men and women, even in a society as brutal and cruel as 

Rome” (2005:73). The Colosseum was, after all, a “political theatre” (2005:41), where 

people of the ancient Society went to be seen, to watch, to cheer, to re-enforce power, 

to do business, promote, arrange marriages and alliances, and to hail the emperor and 

the elite. 

Figure 41 

Reconstructed architectural drawing 

of the Amphitheatrum Flavium in 

Rome (top view). Note how the drawing 

peels the building layer by layer, 

also revealing the technological game 

mechanics of the space, i.e. preparations 

and storage rooms, corridors 

and hoisting shafts, as well as trapdoors. 

Reproduced from Wikipedia. 

So when Koolhaas argues with the example of Manhattan’s culture of congestion that 

“The Metropolis is an addictive machine, from which there is no escape, unless it offers 

that, too...” (Koolhaas 1978/1994:293), let us look, with Sloterdijk’s words in the back of

our heads, at the Colosseum as an addictive machine. From this machine, there was, 

in a defi nitive sense, no escape for at least one of the gladiatorial opponents who met in 

the arena. That the ancient Roman idea of (cruel) theatrical entertainment – optimized 

by Technological apparati and constructions – prevails today over the ancient Greek 

idea of perfect athletic competitions agreeable to the gods, can be traced in a recent 

essay by stadium architect Volkwin Marg. 

Marg, who has built numerous soccer stadia in Europe, suggests that in the media 

age, soccer stadia are the stage for “commercialized gladiator games” (Marg 2008). In 

Marg’s reading, stadia host and manage mass events, and their purpose is to stimulate 

vertigo not only through the overwhelming scale of the competitions they host, but also 

by means of the masses they can hold. In order to be successful, Marg continues, 

recently built soccer stadia must be cramped and steep and feature a sonic lid, 

creating a resonance body that amplifi es the synchronous, collective, primal scream. 

Marg appropriately names these new incarnations of ancient Roman arenas, “hysteria 

bowls” (ibid.). 

Other factors also help choreograph the mass experience. The arrival landscape sets 

a certain mood; security elements steer the stream of visitors and defi ne how the 

play-ground is perceived; the areal inscenates orientation and, eventually, illuminates 

the scenery. Yet though the masses may appear homogenous, the logic of sports 

marketing dictates the programming of segregation between Super VIPs, VIPs, 

business customers, regular visitors, and fans in the building of professional soccer 

stadia for the purpose of commercialized entertainment. Taken together, this divided 

stadium audience then effectively plays the claqueur for the audience in front of home 

television sets, which demands an authentic atmosphere (ibid.). But Marg misses one 

important factor, the main factor for those viewers more interested in the ludic activity 

than anything else: Not only are different audience “ranks” segregated in the stadium, 

but the audience as a whole is segregated - indeed, sealed off – from the players in 

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244 

a segregation that resembles the demarcation between audience and actors in the 

proscenium Theater. That means that the audience can gaze and hear, but not play, 

while the players can play as well as gaze upon and hear the mass and scale of 

the stadium. 

As in the proscenium theater, the intended hindrance between players and spectators 

infl uences audience affects. But there are other factors, too, that work on the spectator. 

Not only for the players, but also for the audience, the soccer contest arrogates 

partisanship, which is amplifi ed by league, cup, or championship games. Furthermore, 

the play-ground of the stadium emotionalizes and reconditions the relationship between 

players, fans, and club. In combination with spectator mass and scale, the acting out of 

aggression can be better comprehended: In a fi lled arena, it is socially acceptable to 

at least verbally release aggression (by, for example, screaming, scolding the referee, 

etc.). But when we are in a stadium, we realize that this catalyst function is normalized, 

too – that it is part of the ritual in the stadium to behave according to the stadium code, 

which includes singing or collective playing (as in the La Ola-wave movement). 

Whether it’s a contest stadium52 _ or spectacle arena, the heart of the soccer stadium 

remains, architecturally and ludically speaking, the soccer game. The literal basis of the 

soccer game is rules, players, ball, goals, and perhaps most fundamental, a fl at green 

lawn – a fi eld, really. This soccer green enables players to run and kick around a ball53 . 

It can be understood as a life-size Board, demarcated into smaller spaces in order 

to visualize and support some rules of the game that takes place on it. The better the 

game, the better the impression of the stadium – and for the players, playing against 

the background of 80,000 cheering spectators is an impression not easy to forget. 

52 Of course, the stadium can be inscenated as a spectacle, too. Watching the opening of the Olympic Games 

in Beijing, the author had the distinct impression that he was looking at a red-glowing, almost skeletal Bird’s Nest 

stadium wearing a giant Olympic torch, reminiscent of scenes from The Lord of the Rings movies. 

53 Of course, a fi eld can be used for throwing discs too, as it is in Frisbee and fl ying disc, cf. Morrison and Kennedy 

(2006).

17. Kindergarten 

In the 1830s, a pedagogist and crystallographer by the name of Friedrich Fröbel (1782- 

1852) developed the idea of the kindergarten as a teaching system for younger children, 

opening the fi rst installation of his revolutionary preschool educational framework in 

Blankenburg, Germany in 1837. 

Fröbel, a highly spiritual and idealistic man, conceived kindergarten as a set of 

abstract design activities intended to reveal God’s universal language of geometric 

perfection and natural harmony and thereby cultivate children’s innate observational, 

reasoning, expressive, and creative abilities: “Its ultimate aim was to instill in children 

an understanding of what an earlier generation would have called “the music of the 

spheres” – the mathematically generated logic underlying the ebb and fl ow of creation” 

(Brosterman 1997:12). Many activities were incorporated into the kindergarten concept, 

such as gymnastics games, gardening, storytelling, singing, and group sociability 

training. To support these activities, Fröbel invented kindergarten materials, which he 

called gifts, intended to serve as play things for the children to and program them 

according to the kindergarten concept. 

Gifts 1-6, including ball, sphere, cylinder, cube, and block, were intended to teach the 

kindergarten children about simple, solid bodies and their kinetic and Tessellation 

properties. Children were meant to “contemplate” the surface of Gift 7, parquetry. 

The following gifts, e.g. sticks; and drawing with a slate pencil – were dedicated to 

exploration of linearity, while Gift 11, punching dotted patterns into paper, was dedicated 

to exploration of visible points (von Mahrenholtz-Bülow 1891:269f.). The 12th Gift – an 

occupation, really – was sewing, often on gridded paper, and Gifts 13, 14, and 18 

entailed cutting, weaving, and folding (which often included making animals and people 

by folding a single piece of paper, an activity recommended mostly for older children). 

PLAY-GROUNDS 

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Gifts 15-17 programmed the laying of lines or linear forms by way of slats, jointed slats, 

and paper strips. Gift 19, peas work, featured softened peas that served as connectors 

for toothpicks or small sticks that were used to create constructions. And fi nally, Gift 20 

provides children with modeling clay, which, in a way, encompasses all previous gifts 

(Brosterman 1997:64-88). Figure 42 shows exercises that Fröbel suggests for Gift 1, 

fi rst published in his Sonntagsblatt newspaper. To us, these exercises have the appeal 

of simple play kinesis, of basic to-and-fro.

Figure 42 

Gift 1 play exercises as suggested by Fröbel. Reproduced from Goldammer (1872). Illustration 

is public domain. 

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248 

The twenty gifts progress from volume to plane to line to point to line to plane and back 

to the beginning: solids (Gifts 19 and 20). Children could not play freely with these 

gifts; their use was regulated by Fröbel’s Unitarianist philosophy: “In short sessions 

of directed play, the gifts were used to create pictures or structures that fi t loosely 

into three fundamental categories – forms of nature (or life); forms of knowledge (or 

science); and forms of beauty (or art)” (Brosterman 1997:37). The dimensional waveform 

drawn by the twenty gifts and the realms can all be traced in two of Fröbel’s major 

inspirations. 

On the one hand, Fröbel’s design gifts were inspired by pedagogy revolutionary Johann 

Heinrich Pestalozzi, who, driven by a belief that the world consists of combinations 

of basic particles, attempted to break down nature into a language of gridded and 

geometric elements. He then used this ABC der Anschauung (Pestalozzi and Buss 

1803) – in English, object observation lessons – to teach orphans and peasants at his 

school in Yverdon, Switzerland. On the other hand, Fröbel’s gifts were inspired by his 

obsession with crystals and the four-year tenure he spent under Professor Christian 

Samuel Weiss, the father of modern crystallography, at the Mineralogical Museum of 

the University of Berlin between 1811 and 1815. At the museum, Fröbel was responsible 

for researching and categorizing the museum’s vast collection, which eventually helped 

Weiss formulate his groundbreaking, mathematically precise systematics of crystalline 

geometry, wherein the forms of crystals are external manifestations of regularly 

arranged particles in three-dimensional grids. 

Brosterman, in what can be called an archaeology of modernity and design 

functionalism, argues that many infl uential architects and form-givers of modernity 

have been “indoctrinated, in effect, programmed, by the spiritual geometry of the early 

kindergarten” (1997:13): Le Corbusier in Switzerland and later France; Walter Gropius 

and Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus in Germany; Theo van Doesburg, co-founder 

of De Stijl, in the Netherlands; Frank Lloyd Wright in the US; and, in a turn-of-the-

century Milton, Massachusetts kindergarten, R. Buckminster Fuller, who remembers 

how the 19th Gift led him to the invention of triangular structures from semi-dried 

peas and toothpicks and, ultimately, the geodesic dome (see Brosterman (1997:84) 

and World). 

Fröbel conceived all kindergarten activities, including the gifts, as play activities. This 

was the novelty of the educational kindergarten: It defi ned a space for play to teach 

about life and nature, thereby framing play as essential to childhood development. 

If we accept only a portion of Brosterman’s argument – that modernity and modern 

design and modern art have their roots in Fröbel’s formal language as expressed in the 

kindergarten gifts – then we can further contend that major components of modernity 

have their roots in the play of geometrically perfected shapes. 

Architecture, then, not only sets the stage for or functionally defers to gameplay; rather, 

architecture is fundamentally and inherently the result of calculated play with primary 

forms: a jeux de volume et de lumière stretching from Mass Production Housing (Le 

Corbusier 1928/2008:253-290) to architectural and urban planning rule sets such 

as those put forth in A Pattern Language (Alexander/Ishikawa/Silverstein 1977) and 

eventually to games such as Will Wright’s SimCity (1989) or Spore (2008) or the 

Patterns in Game Design publication (Björk and Holopainen 2005). To borrow a phrase 

from game designer Jesse Schell, these are all tools “to play with patterns” (Schell 

2007:402). 

From this perspective, and in the words of a gamer, we can read the kindergarten as a 

conceptual play-ground of creation – a God-view of interlinked (cf. Topology) creation 

where children re-create life forms using a God view for tools and where gift exercises 

trigger play-stimuli and each exercise creates an allegory of the perfection of God’s 

creation, a creation of playful movement. 

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250 

18. Amusement Park 

The amusement park condenses the City (or any other theme) and the pleasures 

of Technology into one play-ground. In its attempt to make accessible maximum 

entertainment on minimal ground, the amusement park always miniaturizes another 

space, even if that space does not yet exist. The amusement park is like a Dollhouse 

without macroscopic reference – it must entertain with novelty or variation, not with 

commonplaces. An amusement park can be a play-ground for amusing because like 

other public sites intended for gazing, adventuring, and contemplating, it is not only 

a social destination that we seldom, if ever visit by ourselves, it is also a total playground. 

As Caillois notes, 

the amusement park seem[s] to be the proper domain of vertigo-inducing 

contraptions – machines for rotation, oscillation, suspension, and falling, 

constructed for the purpose of provoking visceral panic. However, all the 

categories of play are concurrently and seductively involved. Shooting 

guns or arrows are competitive games of skill in the most classic form. 

(...) Lotteries are everywhere. (...) Mimicry is also present. Jesters, 

clowns, ballerinas, and mummers parade and cavort in order to lure the 

public” (2001:133f.). 

Amusement parks are built and attract people all over the world; people – like the 

author - enjoy ”collecting” visits. Existing examples include the Tivoli Gardens in 

Copenhagen, Denmark, reportedly the world’s oldest amusement park; the Prater in 

Vienna, Austria, with its Riesenrad Ferris wheel familiar from the movie The Third Man; 

Disneyland in Anaheim, CA in the USA, the park with the most franchises; Europapark 

in Germany, the largest park on mainland Europe; Gorky Park in Moscow, Russia; 

Jaya Ancol Dreamland in Jakarta, Indonesia; Blackpool Pleasure Beach in Blackpool, 

England; Tivoli Park in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Durban Miniature Railway Park in

Natal, South Africa. In Dubai, developers are currently constructing the three billion 

square foot Dubailand54 , a City-size urban entertainment center expected to become 

the world’s largest tourist and entertainment destination, combining theme and 

water parks, gigantic shopping malls, and residential skyscrapers. Upon completion, 

Dubailand will integrate urbanity with the form of the amusement park, becoming the 

Arabian spectacle of a New Babylon that the Situationist concept of the future ludic city 

of New Babylon never wanted to be (see the Society entry). 

At least in the USA, where amusement parks are highly commercialized, the park as an 

architectural form has its roots in several other historical forms, which Judith A. Adams 

traces in her study The American Amusement Park Industry. A History of Technology 

and Thrills (Adams 1991:1-40). Adams’ study serves to highlight how the amusement 

park, that play-ground and precursor to pervasive games, emerged and was shaped: 

● Medieval church-sponsored fairs and trade fairs all across Europe. 

● So-called “pleasure gardens” in Europe, which emerged in the late 17th 

century; unlike the often chaotic and brief fairs, the gardens were available 

for outdoor activities throughout the warm seasons. 

● Parks such as the Prater in Vienna, which opened in 1766 as a naturalized 

and egalitarianizing respite from urban life. 

● Mechanized enjoyment machines such as the carousel and the roller 

coaster, which constitute the essential and most enduring appeal of 

amusement parks as distinct from gardens and retreats. 

● World Expos, most notably the World’s Columbian Exposition held in 

Chicago in 1893; this expo introduced the essential design elements of 

54 Cf. http://www.dubailand.ae. 

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Figure 43 

The Midway Plaisance at 

the 1883 World’s Columbian 

Exposition in Chicago. 

Photo is public domain. 

amusement parks – unity, magnitude, and illusion – as well as inaugurating 

many defi ning fi rsts: electricity in buildings, artifi cial illumination, 

hamburgers, picture postcards, and organizational elements such as the 

Midway Plaisance, alongside which amusement attractions were erected, 

like, for example, the newly invented Ferris Wheel, which rose 264 feet 

above the Midway. Figure 43 shows an image of the Midway Plaisance. 

Adams’ archaeology, however, lacks a few important precursors: 

● Masquerade balls and the carnival custom, which take on myriad forms 

and in which masked and costumed fi gures play an integral role, asdoes 

the “cast” for amusement parks. For example, during the Swabian- 

Allemanic carnival pageants in southwestern Germany, in which the author

has participated for more than ten years 55 , the “fools” (i.e. reappearing 

characters such as the orange-clad Hansel) jump rhythmically to a 

marching band, slowly moving through town streets wearing wooden 

masks and traditional costumes with leather straps onto which cupric 

bells have been sewn. 

● Public festivals such as the largest of them all, the Wiesn, or Munich 

Oktoberfest, which has taken place annually on the Theresienwiese 

since 1812, conceived as a Catholically sanctioned “time out from order, 

class, hierarchies, and respectability” (Herwig and Holzherr 2006:68). 

The Oktoberfest is fl avored with extra-strong beer and orchestrated by 

booths, amusement attractions, and the architecture of giant beer tents 

wherein people are seated and equalized on wooden benches. 

Based on these examples, we can infer that the precursors to amusement parks 

are, fundamentally, about compaction, and that amusement parks generate a kind of 

synthetic, if not virtual urbanity catering to those audiences that, in their everyday lives, 

experience suburbanization and urban sprawl programming as opposed to European 

models of high density and multiple-use zoning. 

In his infl uential book Delirious New York (1978/1994), subtitled a “retroactive manifesto 

for Manhattan,” architect Rem Koolhaas describes how Coney Island, a former resort 

location and site of legendary amusement parks, grew into a “theater of architectural 

invention” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (1978/1994:78) and, as such, 

into a vis à vis laboratory for modern Manhattan. Koolhaas’ term “Manhattanism” – 

anticipated on Coney Island – outlines an architecture that is theatrical, synthetic, 

ever-in-progress, ever-illuminated, ambitious, utilitarian, polemic, megalomaniac, 

55 Cf. the German language Wikipedia entry on the Narrenzunft Oberndorf at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrenzunft_Oberndorf. 

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vertical, hyper-dense, and subject to gridiron rasterization. It is a “delirious” – we could 

say, vertiginous – spectacle and testing ground that, urbanistically speaking, has its 

roots in the competing technologies of pleasures brought forth by an “urbanism of the 

fantastic” (1978/1994:63) – roots, that is, in the multiple synthetic realities and pleasure 

zones of Coney Island, including, among others, Steeplechase Park, Dreamland, and 

Luna Park. In a seconding account of their impact, we read that “the air crackled with 

electricity. The masses (...) went to amusement parks to try out modern track-systems 

and novel constructions; the latest in amusement became a test bed for modernity” 

(Herwig and Holzherr 2006:62). In the guise of entertainment rides and pleasures, the 

Coney Island pleasure zones and zone visitors together conducted mass experiments 

in, for example, velocity, automation, horizontal and vertical (elevator) transportation, 

electrifi cation, and vertical building and experiencing. Experimentation also included 

simulation – a trip to the moon was offered (see also the Castle entry) and a vast 

indoor model of the canals of Venice was set up (see the City entry) – as well as 

miniaturization – a “midget city” was erected (see the Dollhouse entry). In the Dr. 

Couney’s Infant Incubator building, premature babies were publicly saved (Koolhaas 

1978/1994:46ff.). 

Coney Island, we learn, was, at fi rst, a US play-ground. In the beginning, it attracted 

tens of thousands; then, in the 1920s, one million or more per weekend. This success 

eventually led to the spawning of Luna Parks all over Europe as well. These parks lost 

their audiences only in the 1940s due to the advent of Television programming and 

mass tourism (Blume 2001:44). Still, pleasure and architectural concepts from Coney 

Island live on even today in the Casino town of Las Vegas and in Folly and symbolizing 

architecture, which Venturi/Scott Brown/Izenour described so vehemently in their 

criticism of the symbolistic and zoomorphic building gestalt of the “Duck” (1977:17). 

While Koolhaas (1978/1994) encourages us to think of amusement parks as miniature 

cities, Gingold (2003) encourages us to think of digital games as miniature garden

spaces – an analogy derived from Shigeru Miyamoto, Japanese game designer/ 

producer of milestone videogames such as Super Mario Bros. (1985), and an analogy 

that points out the affi nity between amusement parks (as pleasure gardens) and games: 

A garden has an inner life of its own; it is a world in fl ux which grows 

and changes. A garden’s internal behaviors, and how we understand 

those rules, help us to wrap our heads and hands around the garden. 

The intricate spaces and living systems of a garden surprise, delight, and 

invite participation. Gardens, like games, are compact, self-sustained 

worlds we can immerse ourselves in. Japanese gardens often contain a 

multiplicity of environments and places, such as mountains, oceans, or 

forests that we can look at, walk around, or interact with. Gardens are a 

way to think about the aesthetic, cognitive, and representational aspects 

of game space (Gingold 2003:7). 

Celia Pearce (2007) merges both models, arguing that digital games resemble theme 

parks, yet neither references Koolhaas nor points at the garden analogy suggested by 

Gingold. In Pearce’s view, Disneyland in Anaheim, CA came into existence to fi ll an 

ahistorical, i.e. narrative and folkloristic vacuum that pervades southern California in 

contrast to Europe, where inhabitants are immersed in the three-dimensional narrative 

structures of the European City, made up historically of castles and cathedrals 

(2007:201). In particular, Pearce parallels theme parks and graphically based 

massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs): both types of locales, she argues, are 

public places that simultaneously offer entertainment and attract thousands of people. 

Both are themed, with the vast majority of major MMOGs based, more or less, on the 

sword and sorcery role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (1974) and motifs from 

J.R.R. Tolkien’s secondary fantasy worlds. Similar to amusement park precursors such 

as Renaissance fairs, and dissimilar from the Disneyland scheme, MMOGs demand 

that players role-play and thus fully break the “fourth wall” (see the Theater entry for 

further elaboration). 

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Whether zoned garden or spatial narrative, the play-ground of the amusement park can 

be analyzed from a game design perspective as an agglomeration of play pleasures 

similar to the game design fi gure of a tournament. In such a space, visitors usually deal 

with a succession of railed entertainment: “In environments based on the amusement 

park model, the story and the visit can be tightly meshed” (Murray 1997:109). From an 

architectural perspective, at least the American amusement park can be taken as an 

attempt to produce a congested storytelling fantasy by way of Technology: “Americans, 

after all, never had real castles (...)” (Dunlop 1996:104) to program “a place of warmth 

and nostalgia, of illusion and color and delight” (1994:25). Or so, at least, thought Walt 

Disney in a romanticized reading of history and present. The amusement park, then, is 

a sandbox play-ground of imposed, hard-railed confi guration - a true spaceplay. 

19. Panopti con 

Panopticon is a Greek word that means all-seeing and is the name that British philosopher 

and utilitarian theorist Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) chose for a completely new, ideal 

prison meant to be erected in an urban context. Bentham presented this vision to the 

public in numerous drafts, offering a perfected architectural model in 1791 with his 

General Idea of a Penitentiary Panopticon (Kaschat 2002:114f.). Figure 44 visualizes 

this late Panopticon structure with six stories, designed to hold circa 460 prisoners, 

with each windowed cell in the outer circle (A) confi ning several inmates. (D,O,F) show 

connecting corridors and wells, followed by a chapel on the inner circle (M,G) and the 

director’s watchtower in the middle (N). As Foucault explains, “The Panopticon is a 

machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheral ring, one is totally 

seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being 

seen” (Foucault 1997:362).

Figure 44 

Plan and text for the Panopticon, 

or Inspection House 

1791. Bentham Papers, Special 

Collections, University College 

London Library Services. 

This power of the gaze is institutionalized in the Panopticon. Thanks to the architecture, 

a single party can conduct absolute surveillance of everything taking place within the 

building. The Panopticon is an architectural machine that creates and sustains power: 

prisoners always see the tall and central tower from which they are intermittently 

observed, but don’t know when they are being watched, so must assume that it is 

always. The result, Foucault explains, is “To induce in the inmate a state of conscious 

and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 

1997:361). Bentham’s Panopticon has inspired designs for buildings varying from 

asylum to hospital to, of course, prison, but has never proved sustainable. And yet, 

the concept itself has sustained thanks to Foucault’s in-depth analysis of disciplinary 

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control (Foucault 1997) as a synonym for a society of surveillance that impacts both 

public and private life. 

The entertainment industry, Peter Weibel briefl y notes, does not consider the panoptic 

principle a threat or a punishment, “but, rather, as amusement, liberation and pleasure” 

(Weibel 2002:215). And in a mediatized world governed by images, reality Television 

shows such as Big Brother (Endemol Entertainment 1999), in which a group of people 

live together in a “container” TV studio apartment and are recorded 24/7 by cameras, 

provide “the pleasure of power, the pleasures of sadism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, 

scopophilia [the love of looking], and narcissism” (ibid.). 

The London neighborhood Shoreditch has created a mechanism that caters to those 

very pleasures. There, residents can tune into a TV channel to watch content from 

cameras installed in Shoreditch public spaces. The service allows residents “to 

see what’s happening, check out the traffi c and keep an eye out for crime” (Digital 

Bridge 2006). The latter is of particular interest when considering the “crime channel 

Shoreditch TV” and Shoreditch itself as a play-ground in the form of a panopticon. 

Shoreditch TV is a public closed circuit television program (CCTV) intended, implicitly, 

to convince neighborhood inhabitants that public CCTV can assure social control. At 

its core, however, Shoreditch TV inscenates the power of gaze as entertainment in a 

true-life version of the movie The Truman Show, in which the protagonist eventually 

escapes the OmniCam Ecosphere, where the reality TV show that he unknowingly 

inhabits takes place (Paramount Pictures 1998). 

Rolf Nohr (2007) considers the movie as though it were a game: “The Truman Show 

anticipates the computer game The Sims (2000) and thematizes the closed and fully 

controlled space of life-simulation on the basis of a normative canon of values and 

consumerist strategies for success. Like The Sims, The Truman Show represents the 

declension of a neoliberal urbanistic space” (Nohr 2007:470).

Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau 1984), proposes 

countering such totalizing tele-views – i.e. perspectives from above and afar that 

seek to control space – with individual everyday spatial design practices from below 

intended to break conformity. De Certeau offers some examples of such practices: 

tactical activities such as the altering of maps or city street objects, the inventing of lost 

and legendary spaces, and the encouraging of conscious choice and customization of 

goods so that the consumer becomes a producer. Indeed, in a mediatized age, there 

are many interesting forms of playful counter-surveillance available: 

● New York City based performance activists and Situationist pranksters, 

The Surveillance Camera Players perform Theater plays in front of public 

surveillance cameras. 

● Mann (2003), criticizing an over-surveilled Society, describes methods 

of sousveillance, i.e. inverting surveillance, by bringing the power of 

gaze down below, to a human level – somewhat in the tradition of the 

Situationist détournement performances. An example can be seen on 

Figure 45, which shows a variety of everyday sousveillance infrared and 

video camera objects. 

The panoptic play-ground caters to those who fi nd pleasure in exhibiting and those who 

desire to show. Those who seek to protect their privacy can overcome surveiltainment 

by creating sousveiltainment, thereby ironically (re-)creating consumer-created 

surveiltainment. 

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Figure 45 

Seriously ironic: “Conspicuously Concealed Cameras as a deterrence against crime” – University 

of Toronto EXISTech’s sousveillance line of products. Reproduced by permission from Steve 

Mann (www.wearcam.org/domewear). 

20. Trompe l’œil 

During the Baroque period, which originated in Italy in the early 17th century, artistic 

methods to deceive the eye were developed with the goal of establishing an aesthetic 

of the virtual that tended to invade space in every direction (Bal 2001). Combining 

multiple, shifting points of view and narrative perspectives, the Baroque was different 

from classical systems in its “refusal to respect the limits of the frame” (Ndalianis 

2000). Because of this refusal, the viewer is situated into a spatial relationship to the 

representation. Consequently, Gilles Deleuze proposes the term “architecture of vision”

(Deleuze 1993:21) as the best way to paraphrase the Baroque approach to building. 

Similarly, Lewis Mumford describes how the city planners of the Baroque – Servandoni, 

Inigo, Jones, Bernini – were primarily scenic designers who created theatrical backdrops 

for the inscenenation of power using designerly means like overscaling, ornamenting, 

and disguising, and, fi rst and foremost, created a City culture of pleasure for the masses 

by way of monumental façades on grandiose palaces, pleasure gardens with swings 

and roundabouts, the Bal masqué, and anatomy dissections as public performances 

conducted in public “theaters” (Mumford 1961:378f.). Here, too, we can identify certain 

play types: pursuing vertigo, role-playing, savoring, and gazing. 

The trompe l’œil – French for “trick the eye” – is one artistic technique particularly 

representative of this Baroque urban pleasure culture based on the architecture 

of vision. The trompe l’œil was perfected in probably its most immersive form, the 

quadratura, which virtually extended the existing physical architecture ad infi nitum. 

One good example of a masterpiece of quadratura – and of High Roman Baroque 

technique in general – is Father Andrea Pozzo’s breathtaking nave ceiling of the church 

Sant’Ignazio in Rome. Painted between 1691 and 1694, the fresco depicts an allegory 

of the apotheosis of St. Ignatius and the missionary work of the Jesuit order stretched 

across a circle with a 17 meter diameter. The ceiling is fl at, but thanks to Pozzo’s use 

of perspectival projection, a trompe l’œil effect is achieved whereby a viewer, standing 

at an ideal spot marked by a yellow marble disc in the fl oor, experiences an illusion of 

infi nite depth. Looking up at the Theatrical, lofty cupola [Figure 46], he sees angels 

fl oating upward towards the open and bright sky, orchestrating St. Ignatius’ entrance 

into paradise so that “It is almost impossible to tell where the real architecture ends 

and the faux begins. Here, the subtle techniques of perspective make possible the 

illusion of a virtual reality which seems to blend seamlessly into the physical space of 

the church – one has the feeling of really “being there” beneath that angel-fi lled sky” 

(Wertheim 2000:111). Also see Impossible Worlds. 

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Figure 46 

Fra Andrea Pozzo’s trompe l’œil ceiling of Sant’Ignazio di Loyola a Campo Marzi in Rome. Reproduced 

from Wikipedia. 

Not only trompe l’œil frescoes, but the trompe l’œil in general as a Technology of 

visual representation challenge the Albertian fi xed-point perspective construction, 

named after Renaissance architect, humanist, and writer Leon Battista Alberti. 

Alberti’s 1435/36 work Della Pittura can be considered the fi rst modern treatise on the 

theory of painting. In Della Pittura56 , Alberti proposes the mathematical construction 

and framing of painted space as a way “to control the space which man is to inhabit 

both as an actor and observer” (Spencer 1970). In contrast, the illusion of infi nite spatial 

56 An English language version of the text can be found online at http://www.noteaccess.com/Texts/Alberti/.

extension into impossible realms as exemplifi ed by Pozzo’s piece of art manifests the 

allegory as the central designerly and spatial trope of the Baroque. It is the allegory as 

a central spatial feature that ties trompe l’œil to computer games, the latter of which we 

can analyze as playable illusions (Aarseth 2007). 

In fact, it has been argued that like the allegorical spatiality evoked by trompes l’œil, 

21st century entertainment forms such as Amusement Park attractions are also 

intended to break down the spatial barriers between the space of the representation 

and the space of the audience: “One space extends into another, one medium into the 

next, the spectator into the spectacle, and the spectacle into the spectator. Extending 

the Baroque spatial dimension of sight, this Baroque attraction employs multi-media 

technologies to produce virtual trompe l’œil effects that call into play all the senses. 

Introducing motion, sound, and other sensorial encounters to visual spectacle, the 

contemporary Baroque articulates the perceptual collapse of the frame more powerfully, 

and in ways not witnessed before” (Ndalianis 2000). The same holds true of pervasive 

games such as REXplorer. 

When we walk, take the subway, or drive through the streets, undergrounds, and 

squares of Zurich, Berlin, London, New York, Seoul, Beijing, or Tokyo’s Ginza, urban 

trompes l’œil meet our eyes in the form of billboards, large public LCD displays and 

interactive façades. Many of the interaction possibilities between these new urban 

forms and the passers-by who see them have not yet been researched. Outstanding 

projects that redefi ne this relationship include the Chaos Computer Club’s Blinkenlights 

installation in Berlin in 2001. Using 144 building emitters, Blinkenlights morphed the 

windows of the “House of Teachers” high-rise at Alexanderplatz into “pixels,” which 

were then used to display messages and animations on the building with the help of 

PC software. In addition, Blinkenlights enabled observers to play a gigantic version of 

PONG (1972) by using the keypad on their cell phones to control a virtual ball (Willhardt 

2007:396f.). 

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It is not only the entertainment or game spectacle that seeks “to obliterate the frame 

that demarcates a distance between reality and representation” (Ndalianis 2000). In 

the future, that will increasingly become the goal of our media-enabled architectures 

as well of our hunger for illusion. The illusionistic stance of the trompe l’œil and its 

conceptual successors goes well beyond Le Corbusier’s ludically inclined, but 

nevertheless narrowing assumption that “paintings are made for meditation” (Le 

Corbusier 1928/2008:170). 

21. Television 

In 1977, Thomas Gottschalk, today one of Germany’s most famous TV hosts, began 

moderating the new TV show Telespiele, which made him famous nationwide. (Note 

that Telespiele is a German term for early console games, translating quite literally to 

“tele games.”) The show ran for a total of almost 30 episodes until 1981, turning into 

one of the most popular evening programs. In fact, Telespiele was both the defi ning TV 

experience and one of the defi ning game experiences of the early game generation – a 

fi rst glimpse into the possibility of mediated Panopticon games. 

Telespiele was a truly unique and groundbreaking TV program not only for its time 

but also in general. The show consisted of contestants playing videogames against 

one another in the TV studio, using a large public display and idiosyncratic controllers 

such as punching balls. The highlight of the show, however, was an entirely different 

gameplay experience: a call-in candidate would play a game clone of PONG against 

Gottschalk or against a studio candidate, with the players using their voices to control 

and change the bat’s y-axis position by making sounds or remaining silent (which 

returned the bat to (0,0)). Hence the somewhat confusing, yet amusing game claim: 

“Eine Telefondiskothek mit Thomas Gottschalk,” in English, “A telephone discotheque

with Thomas Gottschalk.” The call-in contestant would use her TV set as a display and 

had the chance of winning a videogame or choosing between a pre-recorded sketch 

or a live band performance. Although questionable from a design standpoint – players 

often failed to hit the ball at all, and very few to-and-fros, i.e. ball cycles, took place 

– the PONG-like game in Telespiele marked the dawn of pervasive games. Through 

an interactive game and diverse media, a relational network between a set of rather 

diverse spaces and actions was established, thereby creating a coherent gamespace 

that comprised: 

● the players (phone-in contestant and show host); 

● the other TV studio contestants (now viewing the action) as well as the 

TV studio audience; 

● the physical location of the TV studio; 

● the physical location of the call-in candidate; 

● the physical and mediated objects used by the players to engage with the 

game (phone, TV display, interface, controllers, etc.); 

● the physical locations of all viewers (including my parent’s living room); 

● the objects used by all viewers (including my parents and me) to 

experience the show (TV and, potentially, phone); 

● the object-bound mediation of players, candidates, audience, their 

locations, their objects-in-use and their interactions via the TV. 

Quite a complex setup in which the physical and the virtual interrelate, and spaces and 

objects take on several roles, both virtual and physical, to enable the player as well as 

the audience experience. The key role in this setup, however, is that of the architecture 

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of the game, where architecture describes the processes, uses, and performances 

– in short, the production of space, time, and sociability – that took place during a 

Telespiele show. 

In classical tele-games, savoring still is a major mode of experience, in no small part 

because real-time audience interaction is not easily produced in TV shows. And yet 

if we assume classical TV delivery (TV set at home with a cable box placed on top), 

we can think of many interesting models for novel interactive TV games designed 

according to the following lines of exemplary continua (note that some modes may be 

mutually exclusive): 

● Participants: Cast – TV audience. 

● Participation: Savoring – Active participation. 

● Commentary: Program created – Audience created (and judged). 

● Programming: Live – Preshot. 

● Input channel: Remote control – Multiple devices (phone or other). 

● Input transmission (i.e. how many players does it take to effect an output): 

Single player – Accumulated Players. 

● Game opponent: Game system – Other player(s). 

● Game feedback: Continuous (i.e. real-time) – Discrete (i.e. asynchronous). 

● Player location: Televised (TV studio or alternate location) – TV audience. 

● Output location: Televised – Personalized (e-mail, IRQ, phone). 

● Game progress: Intra-Show – Inter-Show. 

● Content fabric: TV show – Cross-media experience.

Television can also extend its reach and interaction possibility when coupled with other 

media through Technology, thereby creating new play-grounds. 

22. Folly 

The architectural, physiognomic, or zoomorphic – in any case: hyper-real – folly is the 

play-ground of symbolic savoring and, sometimes, inhabitation. Venturi/Scott Brown/ 

Izenour reject it as brutal: “It is all right to decorate construction but never construct 

decoration” (1977:163). Figure 47 shows an example of such decorative symbolistic 

space, a sketch of Charles-François Ribart’s L’Elephant Triomphal, Grande Kiosque à 

la Gloire du Roi from 1758. 

Ribart suggested the construction of this three-level piece of zoomorphic architecture 

as an addition to the Champs-Elysée in Paris, where the Arc de Triomphe stands today. 

The French government turned down the proposal. Over 120 years later, however, on 

the other side of the Atlantic, the U.S. Patent Offi ce granted James V. Lafferty a patent 

for the design of animal-shaped buildings in 1882. That same year, Lafferty constructed 

the Elephant Bazaar, later dubbed “Lucy the Elephant,” a six-story elephant that 

eventually became a National Historic Landmark in the 1970s, after it had already been 

moved from its original site in Atlantic City. Both Ribart’s and Lafferty’s elephants are 

architectural “follies.” We can fi nd these often neglected buildings in English parks, at 

World Expos, or in an Amusement Park, usually as (tourist) attractors, landmarks and/ 

or orientation and navigation “pins.” 

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Figure 47 

A sketch of Charles-François 

Ribart’s L’Elephant Triomphal, 

Grande Kiosque à la Gloire 

du Roi. Reproduced from 

Architecture Singulière (1758). 

Paris: P. Patte. Public domain. 

In the strictest sense, though, Lucy the Elephant cannot be called a folly; since its 

erection, the building has served as a restaurant, a business offi ce, a cottage, and a 

tavern. The building, in other words, has various practical uses. Even though follies 

have no building purpose other than pure spatial entertainment, they nonetheless 

serve spatial functions for the area where they have been erected. As such, follies fall 

under the category of attractor architecture. 

In the landmark study Learning from Las Vegas. The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural 

Form, Venturi/Brown/Izenour harshly reject the idea of the “sculptural duck” (Venturi/

Brown/Izenour 1977:130) as a self-aggrandizing monument, inappropriate for the scale 

of environments subject to (auto)mobility, speed, and traveling: “The iconography and 

mixed media of roadside commercial architecture will point the way, if we will look” 

(1977:131). In their time, Venturi/Brown/Izenour identifi ed the decorated shed and the 

“ugly and ordinary” as ways to overcome what they believed were Modern architecture’s 

great mistake – namely, the promotion of space and articulation over symbolism and 

ornament. The result, Venturi/Brown/Izenour believed, was the “designing [of] dead 

ducks” (1977:162). 

Entertainment Castles can feature stylistic tradition or at least raise historical 

awareness and still clearly serve an aesthetic function. In the spirit of Walt Disney’s 

attempt to create a miniature replica of the world in the form of a park where landmarks 

from other places could be wondered at, Mickey’s Magic Castle clearly resembles 

the Neuschwanstein folly castle in southern Bavaria, commissioned by Bavarian king 

Ludwig II in 1868 and still today one of the most popular tourist attractions in Germany. 

Yet there is a difference between the two castles: namely, tourists can wander the 

halls of Neuschwanstein. Visiting a non-navigable folly architecture like Mickey’s Magic 

Castle, on the other hand, only serves the savoring play stimulus. And in order for a 

building environment to become more involved in the play activity it hosts, the building 

should feature traversability, thereby allowing for player Mobility. 

Follies are curious, expressive architectures that can add fl avor to a game’s mise-enscène. 

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23. Dollhouse 

The dollhouse is an abstracted miniature Cave affording directing; it turns domesticity 

into a spatial toy, and a spatial toy into a home. Long before the invention of the 

computer generated god view perspective or the digital god game genre, the “director” 

of the original dollhouse took on a god view of his physical Sims-like dolls, which he 

role-played in order to storytell. Claus Hansmann and Leonie von Wilckens (1959) state 

– and we agree – that dollhouses are, beyond being play stimuli, scaled down mirrors 

of the everyday. So if dollhouses became widespread ludic devices during the early 

19th century Biedermeier era in Europa, because they were intended to program girls 

for their later role as a housewife, what does today’s ludic device, The Sims, program? 

Will Wright, main creator of The Sims, has called the game “a computerized dollhouse” 

(Hattori 2000) “for understanding not only our personalities, but also our personal spaces” 

(Thompson 2003). See also the Technology entry. Wright’s statement implies, among 

other things, that The Sims allows for simulated and interactable growth of characters 

and of living situations. The computerized play-ground of the dollhouse allows for the 

simulation of space and time, but the trade-off for the player is micromanagement 

under pressure. 

Jenkins (2001) praises the game for “the logical culmination of the Girls Game 

movement and the beginning of the process of developing a more “gender neutral” 

playspace.” Jenkins also mentions that focus group participants told game developer 

Maxis that they disliked the proposed game title Dollhouse. If Jenkins’ praise is wellfounded, 

then the play-ground of The Sims dollhouse is a positive example of literally 

downsizing stereotypes in digital games.

Schell (2007:402) considers The Sims a form of pattern-playing (see also the 

Kindergarten entry). This designerly view conforms with that of Celia Pearce (2004), 

who has dubbed The Sims “the IKEA game,” fi nding that there is a subtext of anti- 

consumerist satire in the game that exists alongside humorously described household 

items and living enhancements. Pearce also sees a latent Big Brother element (which 

we would dub a savoring play stimulus; see the Panopticon entry). 

Paulk (2006) convincingly argues that the game has sped up a sociology of interior 

design, serving as a testing ground for lifestyle strategies by allowing users to try 

out different ways of furnishing and organizing a household. In contrast to Pearce, 

Flanagan (2007) argues that players in The Sims “maintain a consumer-driven suburban 

household” that not only reinforces the logic of the American urban sprawl (bulldoze or 

develop open space), but also validates and prepares users for a suburban way of life. 

Rolf F. Nohr calls this the “declension of a neoliberal urbanistic space” (Nohr 2007:470). 

The satire that Pearce describes likely got lost in the closed and fully controlled space 

wherein consumerism leads to a Society of success. 

On the one hand, dollhouses refl ect and miniaturize the world outside the play-ground; 

on the other hand, “miniature scale, clear boundaries, and inner life help players to 

wrap their heads, hands, and hearts around a world” (Gingold 2003:8). And it is the 

interplay between macro and micro scale that invites participation and that allows for 

safe tinkering and world-learning (2003:24f.). The play-ground of the dollhouse lets us 

oversee a World that we experience at close range. 

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24. War 

Television does not really show it, but the space of war is still fi lled with blood, screams, 

and tears; and wherever people go, war goes sooner or later as well. Based partly 

on the war descriptions of Walter Benjamin, we have come to think of war as an alldimensional 

spatial permeation – the play-ground of death. 

Mumford (1961:42f.) illustrates how war was fundamental to the constituting and cyclic 

dynamics of the ancient City, which thrived and grew by preying on other cities’ wealth 

and thereby itself became a target. Mumford further argues that war shaped the city until 

the 18th century, as visible European artifacts such as fortifi cation walls, towers, and 

ditches make clear. Mumford also contends that this shaping brought forth institutional 

organization in the form of weapon-equipped leadership as well as the superiority of a 

quasi-standing army within the walls of a given city. 

War produces a set of functional Technologies. These include technologies of 

protection (such as the walls cited by Mumford) and technologies of attack (such as 

the catapult, mobile siege cannon, or Leonardo da Vinci’s fascinating war machine 

drawings), conceived as problem-solving mechanisms designed to conquer and/or 

kill. This is not to say that war is a game, although war is confl ictive and typically 

has a quantifi able outcome. Rather, games are practicable devices by which to stage 

and, through rules, discipline war while avoiding its bitter consequences. The origin 

of games and the origin of the city, you see, are connected by the human practice of 

war-making. 

Wargaming, then, is a mechanism for training people for warfare by simulating it. 

Between 1780 and 1820, a number of games were invented in Prussia that transformed 

and redefi ned chess into a “tactical game based on chess,” called War Chess, which 

eventually became the Kriegsspiel, or War Game (Pias 2002:207).

The original game of that name, fi rst demoed by Georg Leopold Baron of Reißwitz in 

1811 to Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, used a sandbox within which a Terrain was modeled 

based on the “irrational” scale of 1:2373. Reißwitz, and later his son, Georg Heinrich, 

continued to iterate the rules and make-up of the game by, for example, adjusting the 

scale to a more reasonable 1:8000 and table-topping the game using topographical, 

modular terrain pieces instead of baking sand to puzzle war landscapes and lightweight 

metal fi gurines to represent troops (see Tessellation and Board). The rules of the 

Kriegsspiel board were known as “supplements,” and these supplements were fairly 

complex, detailing movement and battling, and even allowing for the creation of new 

rules via a random generator device in those “exceptional” game situations in which 

even the Kriegsspiel’s referee could not reach a decision (2002:204ff.). 

Coincidentally, this miniaturization of war-making occurred at a time when other devices 

of miniaturization became tools to train by play (see the Dollhouse entry). Peter Perla 

(1990:4f.) describes how the Kriegsspiel eventually became quite popular within the 

Prussian offi cer corps and how, in due course, it was introduced to the military in other 

countries such as the US, the UK, and France. Thenceforth, it shaped the development 

of wargaming as a tool for planning, strategizing, and de-briefi ng military action. Traces 

of the Kriegsspiel can be found not only in the US Naval War College’s tile-based 

wargaming room or America’s Pacifi c campaign in World War II, but also in the US 

Army recruiting videogame America’s Army (2002) and in the US Army videogame 

Future Force Company Commander (2006), used to familiarize soldiers with the army’s 

Future Combat Systems, in itself an extensive program featuring a game-like “warrior 

machine interface” (Korris 2007:426). 

Claus Pias (2004:219ff.), in his archaeology of major computer game genres, points 

out how Kriegsspiel game elements such as the random generator and numerically 

intricate supplement can be considered a form of mechanical computation Technology 

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(2002:204ff.). Pias also demonstrates how the Kriegsspiel has signifi cantly contributed 

to what much later became the strategy computer game genre. 

The Kriegsspiel and all war games that came after it attempt to abstract the kinetic 

extreme of player-player collision. In truth, wargames are allegorical play-grounds 

for an abstracted contest that will never actually take place precisely the way is has 

been played. Kriegsspiel is the only way to wage war peacefully; and because of that, 

pretending to play a game while, in fact, being at war is such a tempting deceptive 

strategy. This abstracting of war into gaming accompanies the abstracting of war 

into information-technology processes, including game-like interfaces, computerized 

weapons, or surveillance systems (De Landa 1991). This evolution leads not only to 

the synthesis of physical and virtual warfare, but also to the synthesis of warfare and 

gaming. In an interview conducted by the author in his capacity as co-editor of Space 

Time Play, James H. Korris, founding director of the Institute for Creative Technologies 

at the University of Southern California, which is mainly funded by the US Department 

of Defense, points out that “using this kind of synthetic view of the world, people get 

used to the idea of looking at the world as if it were a videogame” (Korris 2007:429). 

25. Casino 

When we think of casinos – in fact, when we think of logistically perfected entertainment 

– we fi rst think of Las Vegas. For some, the city remains a blooming, alluring, everchanging 

desert fl ower, an urban play-ground accommodating illusions, show, and 

chance, always moving one step closer to becoming the Situationist city of spectacle 

(Graft 1999). For others, Las Vegas is the manifestation of vice – a Darwinist playground 

of evil. Las Vegas and Venice (see the City entry) share more than just this 

quality of being perceived vastly differently by different people; both are desirable cities

uilt as islands – one in the desert, the other off-shore – and in Venice, the fi rst legal and 

public casino ever, a ridotto, was opened in 1638 in San Moise Place to be operated 

during Carnival. This 17th century ridotto is the original casino blueprint (Schwartz 

2006:92ff.). 

In comparison to the architectural manifesto of Venice, however, Las Vegas is a young 

city, and its story can be told in major milestones: 

● 1905: The city starts out as a speculative land purchase – an empty stage 

on which the fi rst purely service city in the world would soon be built 

(Häntzschel 2001:297). 

● 1931: The state of Nevada legalizes gambling. 

● 1941: El Rancho, Las Vegas’ fi rst casino hotel, opens. 

● 1970s: Downtown Las Vegas is enthusiastically celebrated as the urban 

solution for the age of automobile motorization: “The big sign and the little 

building is the rule” (Venturi/Scott Brown/Izenour 1977:13). 

Today: The urban situation has changed signifi cantly. Downtown Las Vegas, then the 

heart of the city – and, as Hunter S. Thompson wrote, the heart of the American Dream 

– has become a rundown quarter full of prostitutes, homeless people, and wrecked 

buildings. The Strip, which used to belong to the Las Vegas suburbs, dominates and 

illustrates a form of new urbanism, populated as it is with block-sized hotel casinos, huge 

mock-up architecture such as the Venetian Campanile, and the Eiffel Tower, and a still 

spectacularly big mini Manhattan, entertainment rides slung around high-rise buildings, 

staged pirate battles, and a frequently erupting volcano. The city here is a monstrous, 

well-working amusement complex – a city-sized allegory of allegories. Las Vegas is, if 

we believe Hal Rothman, the fi rst city of the 21st century; it anticipates the future of a 

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society defi ned by consumption and entertainment as opposed to industry and farming 

(Rothman 2002). From a residential perspective, the most popular tourist destination 

in the USA (Henderson 2003:9) is also a rapidly growing agglomeration of uniformly 

looking McMansion virtual worlds – endlessly stretching suburban communities with 

fantasy names such as “Inspirada,” “Solista,” and “Civita.” 

In these communities, the buildings all too often have been cheaply put together with 

wood and polystyrol foam and will last maybe twenty years. Gated communities turn 

public space into a jail yard; there are no playgrounds and not enough schools, and 

environmental abuse prevails. In a continuation of its double-edged tradition, the city of 

the 21st century may well be the “supernova of American Cities” (Davis 2003). 

Las Vegas’ sole play-ground function is to create maximum profi t from entertainment 

stimuli. Though shopping and wedding tourism have become utterly important, the 

spatial embodiment of this function is still the casino, which accommodates and enables 

Las Vegas’ major play pleasure: chance gaming. 

The Mirage Resort casino opened on The Strip in 1989 and marks the merger of 

themed gambling and mega-scale accommodation. The Mirage ushered in a new era 

of entertainment spectacles that aim to fantasize chance; the term to fantasize is used 

both because in the offi cial language of casino designers, themes are called “fantasy 

concepts” (Henderson 2003:10), and also because it has been convincingly argued 

that in Las Vegas, “form follows fantasy” (Hess 1993). 

As the fi rst casino fantasy to establish itself as a tourist destination, The Mirage 

Resort uses spectacular elements such as waterfalls, a lobby rainforest, an erupting 

volcano, captive animals such as tigers, tropically themed furnishing and fi nishes, 

ceilings, carpets, and elements such as an aquarium to set the stage for pre-play, 

play, and post-play. The casino itself resembles a Polynesian village with canopied

gaming areas (2003:15f.). Robert L. Ward, Senior Vice President of Universal Studios 

Recreation Group, discussing the Portofi no Bay Hotel at Universal Studios Escape in 

Orlando, FL, explains, “When you experience a hotel as a destination, you don’t think, 

“Oh, a great building – I have to stay there.” People don’t say that. What they say is, 

“Let’s go somewhere special, perhaps Europe...How about the Italian Riviera? Let’s 

go to Portofi no!” It’s a more accessible story that refl ects how we make our vacation 

decisions” (Ward 2001:5). Ward points out that entertainment placemaking differs from 

architectural placemaking in that the former allows for the incorporation of explicit 

storytelling elements into the built environment such as a premise, location, or cast of 

characters that enable visitors to make believe. 

Figure 48 

The silhouette of new urbanism: 

New York – New York Hotel & 

Casino in Las Vegas. Photo © 

2009 MGM Mirage. Reproduced 


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More recent casino resort destinations that refl ect Ward’s insight include the eighthectare 

make-believe-Manhattan New York – New York Hotel and Casino. Located at 

the corner of Tropicana Boulevard and The Strip, the faux architecture, which cost half a 

billion dollars to erect, boasts twelve downsized copies of Big Apple high-rise buildings, 

the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and everything else needed to create the fantasy of 

New York City in the Nevada desert. A rollercoaster ride alongside the buildings adds 

even more vertical and horizontal excitement to this new urbanism experience. Figure 

48 shows (and dramatizes) the silhouette of New York – New York. 

Other types of interesting spaces that accommodate gambling also exist. Off-shore 

riverboat casinos such as Harrah’s Shreve Star in Shreveport, Louisiana, combine 

gambling with the symbolic power of the heterotopian epitome, the ship, thereby 

creating an über-heterotopian play-ground. The Shreve Star, built in Missouri and 

later towed to Louisiana, is not an authentic riverboat; rather, it has been designed to 

resemble one, and thereby adhere to the requirements of a certain Missouri gambling 

law (2003:82ff.). The Shreve Star is home to three gaming fl oors that feature expanded 

heights to accommodate bulky casino equipment. On all fl oors, a basic, overwhelming, 

bright, attention-grabbing casino theme prevails. On the Palace of Fun fl oor, this is 

accompanied by circus-like colors, forms, and fi nishes; on the Crystal Palace fl oor, by 

a 19th century, botanical glass conservatory look and feel. And yet when playing on the 

Shreve Star, the author felt that the theming destroys the atmosphere that could have 

been created by the ship situation itself; or rather, that nautical elements would have 

amplifi ed the heterotopian situation, which would have been preferable to adding yet 

another heterotopia. 

The way that casinos are designed and fantasized as spaces reveals a generalizable 

pre-assumption: that the fantasy of narrative architectural illusionism in alliance with 

other spectacles such as live concerts contributes positively to visitor experience. For 

example, an empirical investigation of visitor satisfaction at atrium-type casino resort

hotels in Las Vegas revealed that these types of quasi-interior public open spaces 

create a positive feeling of urbanity as long as the atria are humanized, e.g. by use 

of human scale zoning, inclusion of shopping stores and seating areas, effective 

connectivity between atria, or promotion of pedestrian circulation, i.e. walkability (Sun 

1997). Atria, then, could become the new public plazas of Las Vegas-style urbanism, 

which would represent a signifi cant departure from the automobile focus of Las Vegas 

in the 1960s and 1970s (Venturi/Scott Brown/Izenour 1977). 

Still, gambling remains the center of attention of all connected plazas in Las Vegas. 

Whereas on a ship casino, the casino takes up all space on all the fl oors (i.e. the 

ship is, spatially speaking, the casino), in resort casinos, the casino is the central 

area of the property and thereby expresses the fact that gambling is at the heart of all 

resort activity. 

When zooming in on the casino games in the fantasized space, we see women and 

men gamble casino chips on possible random (combinations of) outcomes, with a 

quantifi able luck factor involved. There are table games, gaming machines, and random 

number games such as Bingo. All create certain types of game systems, which we can 

investigate in terms of, for example, the magic circle, spatial representation, type, or 

kinesis. Ultimately, though, the goal is to beat chance. In the early 1960s, Edward 

Thorpe and Claude Shannon carefully studied the anatomy of American Roulette. Over 

the course of several months, Thorp and Shannon analyzed the motion of the ball in 

relation to the space of the roulette wheel by, for example, operationalizing how the ball 

is launched, how it orbits from stator to rotor, how it is affected by the spinning rotor of the 

roulette wheel, and how their measurements were affected by timing errors. Based on 

the data gleaned in their experiments, Thorp and Shannon designed the fi rst wearable 

computer. The size of a pack of cigarettes, the computer was controlled by its wearer’s 

big toe and in the lab, yielded an expected gain of +44% when the wearer bet on the 

most favored numbers. When secretly testing the device with their spouses on site in 

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Las Vegas in the summer of 1961, the researchers saw their predictions consistently 

realized when they played with the 38 numbered and colored roulette pockets. Their 

device, which combines innovation in both the realm of Mobility and Technology, was 

made public many years later, but was eventually banned by the courts in the state of 

Nevada along with all other outcome prediction devices (Thorp 1998). 

When it opened in 1989, The Mirage Resort was not only the fi rst casino to exploit the 

idea of mass-scale fantasizing, but it was also the fi rst casino to use a closed-circuit 

television system with cameras on all tables, at all times (Knightly 2007). It is safe to 

assume that this CCTV system was installed mainly to prevent the illegal use of prediction 

machines such as the one Thorp and Shannon created. Based on the three elements 

discussed in this section – i.e. Panopticon-like surveillance, themed entertainment, 

and computing – we derive an impression of Las Vegas as the urbanistic play-ground 

of pervasive surveiltainment. Is this form of entertainment at least innovative? Quite 

to the contrary, most of the themed fantasies are either borrowed from successful 

Hollywood blockbusters or recycle “the arcade, the state fair, the world exposition, and 

the ambiance of the cosmopolitan, pedestrian City [bolding and underlining mine]” 

(Gottdiener 1997:151). So, is the loss of privacy and the lack of innovation worth the 

gain in spectacle? Or is the recent foreclosure of the Cosmopolitan Resort & Casino 

building project a sign that the policy of unlimited entertainment has come to an end in 

the western world? 

As Ian Bogost notes, 

The casino, tavern, arcade, and pizza theater (e.g. Chuck E. Cheese’s) 

all share similar properties. They are enclosed spaces without windows 

in which participants can easily lose track of time. They are dark and 

constricted, with limited space for free movement. The games therein are 

provided not for their own sake, but as a means to an end, as a way of 

drawing players into spaces, keeping them there and taking their money

(whether as payment for the games themselves or for other services) 

(Bogost 2007:305). 

The casino, then, is not only a panoptic play-ground for a kind of adult pinball; it is a 

play-ground that continuously perfects persuasion. 

26. Mall 

The Monroeville Mall in Monroeville, PA is a roughly 100,000 square meter indoor 

shopping complex constructed between 1967 and 1969. Figure 49 shows one of the 

mall’s entrances as well as the corridor that leads from that entrance into the mall. 

Figure 49 

Impressions of Monroeville Mall in Monroeville, PA, setting for the Zombie movie Dawn of the 

Dead: (Left) A mall entrance. (Right) Corridor leading from the entrance into the mall. 

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Once the United States’ biggest mall, the Monroeville Mall served as the main location 

for George A. Romero’s highly infl uential 1978 horror fi lm, Dawn of the Dead. The 

production of the movie was partially fi nanced by the owners of Oxford Development 

Company, the fi rm that had built the mall and was managing it at the time of shooting. 

The zombie movie, then, served not just to entertain movie-goers, but also to market 

the mall. This is somewhat surprising considering that both the mall setting and the 

plot itself made Dawn of the Dead a harsh critique of American consumerism. While 

insatiable zombies hungry for human fl esh are barred from entering the mall, the 

supposed sanctuary character of that mall together with its heterotopian inscenation of 

supplies soon wears thin on the main protagonists once they realize that their safeguard 

is, in fact, their prison. In Dawn of the Dead, the mega-mall is not only “a substitute City 

[bolding and underlining mine] center and rendezvous point, but even an amusement 

or theme park” (Borries 2004:43) (see the Amusement Park entry), but also a site 

where players seek to solve the problem how to survive as long as possible in an effort 

to outsmart their enemies, the zombies, who just as passionately seek to devour them. 

In homage to both the Monroeville Mall and Dawn of the Dead, the designers of 

Capcom’s Xbox 360 action-adventure game Dead Rising set their game at the 

“Williamette Parkview Mall,” for which they designed an environmental Map clearly 

inspired by the fi lm. See Figure 50. 

The play-ground of the mall is fi lled with consumerist collectibles meant to both still and 

instill hunger, the most profound desire.

Figure 50 

Dead Rising: An Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii based video gamespace filled with zombies and 

inspired by the Monroeville Mall space and the George A. Romero movie series. In-game screenshot 

© 2006 2009 Capcom. Reproduced by permission. 

27. Castle 

The castle as a play-ground has different faces, but it is always an expression of 

fortifi cation and enclosure and is thus a form of military architecture. When games 

implicitly or explicitly involve the castle trope (which, in the western world, usually 

appears in the form of motte and bailey, fortress, citadel, or, more representatively, 

palace), it can be assumed that some type of contest between competing powers or 

metaphor for defense or attack pervades the activity. War and castle are common, if 

not cliché, ludic architectural tropes. 

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The castle awes and expresses power by virtue of its scale, not only to intruders, 

but also to the populations who live near it, which it overshadows and commands. It 

defi nes a kind of artifi cial island in the wild. Note that this island-like nature of castles 

also explains why we are particularly fascinated by urban islands such as Venice, New 

York, Las Vegas (in the midst of the desert), and, formerly, West Berlin (in the midst of 

socialism). 

This is all the more interesting when one considers the fact that “the proto-city had (...) 

the beginnings of its institutional life in the fortifi ed camp and the shrine, not necessarily 

occupying a common site” (Mumford 1961:64). In German, the term Burg – which 

has always meant “fortifi cation” and today, also means “castle” – was long used to 

describe the spatial form of the City, as evidenced by the names of many cities, like, for 

example, Hamburg or Regensburg. Likewise, the German term Bürger means “citizen”, 

or, more literally, “townsman.” Similarly, in colloquial English, “burg” still connotes a city. 

Neither city nor citadel can be thought of without thinking of the other; and in Europe, 

neither can be thought of without thinking of the heritage of antiquity and the many 

Roman fortresses out of which modern cities grew. The play-ground of the castle is an 

ur-symbol of urbanity. 

Functionally, castle gameplay can be achieved in many ways. Castles can be strongholds 

to be placed or obstacles to be overcome. They can feature a palisade made up of 

pointed pales, a ditch surrounding a steep motte, a sleek scarp of rampart to climb, 

with soldiers hiding behind parapets, terreplein that must be hit, scorchers behind 

loopholes, a postern to seek and secretly enter, a wooden horse body to smuggle men 

into the polity, and, ultimately, a keep that must be penetrated (see Ching 1995:98f. for 

castle terminology). Inversely, castles can also be fortifi cations that must be defended. 

Inside the castle keep, other functions are possible. Often, booby traps, secret 

passageways, and other Labyrinth (and Maze) structures are contained in this

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Symbolically, in a game of power, a castle can be a Folly, and as a folly, a political 

“stamp.” For example, the Hohkönigsburg castle in Alsace in France lay in ruins for 

over two hundred years before being refurbished as a “fairytale castle” of the reigning 

Hohenzollern house by Berlin architect Bodo Ebhardt, commissioned by German 

emperor Wilhelm II. The refurbished castle combined political and attractor functions 

(Willaume and Richez 1991), but also sounded a warning, and thus militaristic signal to 

the French. Today, the castle is one of the most popular tourist destinations in France, 

serving to remind visitors of the former German presence in the Alsace. Entertainment 

and military, we see, were co-evolving even before the invention of the computer. 

Whereas “the digital emerges as military, but achieves acceptance as entertainment” 

(Wark 2007:95), the analogue Hohkönigsburg emerges as military warning, but 

achieves acceptance as entertainment. 

Finally, let us look at the castle trope when used both as backdrop and interactive 

playground. The PS2 action-adventure game ICO (Sony Computer Entertainment 

2001) is designed, explicitly, iconographically and beautifully based on the trope of 

castle architecture, and it represents “a huge spatial puzzle from which you, the player, 

must escape” (Davidson 2007:54). In ICO, the constructive trope is well-supported 

and achieved by the way the game camera follows the player context-sensitively 

(Adams and Rollings 2006:247). The camera, using different positions and angles, 

intelligently inscenates not only the action, which is, of course, most important for an 

action-based game, but also the immense architecture and landscape. Through these 

shifting camera positions, the game both mentally and pictorially maps and almost 

draws the gamespace panorama for the player. In addition, in ICO, the gamespace 

itself is the puzzle from which the player must escape, “by climbing, jumping, pulling 

levers, pushing crates and running around” (Davidson 2007:54).

Through kinesis, the player “learns” the embedded game architecture of ICO. But this 

is not where the cleverness of the design with regards to the architectural experience 

stops. In ICO, the player controls a boy, but in order to end the game successfully 

and traverse gamespace, the boy must take care of a mysterious girl, protect her, and 

help her overcome numerous spatial challenges. To do so, the player-boy holds the 

girl’s hand throughout the course of the game. This hand-holding is an essential part 

of the gameplay and is underlined by controller force feedback, affecting the player’s 

Body. “This creates an intimacy between the two characters lost in the castle; the 

virtual/physical act of holding hands is the means by which they work together to get 

through the ruins” (Davidson 2007:55). In this way, the gamespace in ICO is integrated 

emotionally through a deeply human bond, perceptually with the help of a contextsensitive 

landscaping camera, and cognitively by virtue of the fact that challenges are 

created for the boy and on behalf of the girl. 

In ICO, the castle is the game system, and the game system is the castle. This conversion 

of a castle into a game system reminds us of the Fun Palace, an improvisational 

architecture conceptualized by architect Cedric Price in 1964 together with avant-garde 

theater director/producer Joan Littlewood, who, in 1955, premiered Bertolt Brecht’s 

play Mother Courage and Her Children in London, thereby bringing the concept of 

Brecht’s Epic Theater to the UK. (See Theater, where Brecht’s vision of breaking the 

fourth wall between actors and audience is discussed.) 

The Fun Palace - cf. Figure 52 - is not a conventional building, but rather an ad-hoc 

construction of leisurely learning and discovery, where a scaffolded structure for pivoting 

stairs and escalators, moveable (and prefabricated) wall, fl oor, ceiling, platform, and 

stair modules, and overhead cranes affords constant constructing, dismantling, and 

reassembling. The Fun Palace, in other words, is a life-size kit-of-parts Playground 

of performativity and kinesis between players, objects, and the environment, which, 

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theoretically, aims to eliminate contest and encourage creation and adventuring. 

Littlewood “envisioned an ideal realization of Brechtian theater as a place of cultural 

bricolage where people could experience the transcendence and transformation of the 

theatre, not as audience, but as players and active participants in a drama of selfdiscovery” 

(Mathews 2005:76). In the original Fun Palace concept, we can see not 

only an affi nity to Brechtian theater, but also to the Situationist urban ideal of New 

Babylon (see the Society entry), in which the symbol of the palace was supposed to 

be democratized. 

Figure 52 

An early pervasive playground: Cedric Price. Interior perspective of Fun Palace. ca. 1960 - 1964. 

Reproduced by permission from Fonds Cedric Price, Collection Centre Canadien 

d’Architecture / Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.

Price, designing based on Littlewood’s theatrical brief, began to plan for the construction 

to learn, with the help of artifi cial intelligence and computation, behavioral patterns, and 

not only adapt to the player’s current program, but also to anticipate future activities, 

thereby gradually shifting the focus from Brechtian theater to cybernetics, control 

systems, and social engineering. In fact, the inclusion of cybernetics scientists in the 

conceptual planning of the Fun Palace quickly led to the treatment of Palace players 

as data whose interests and activities would be monitored by sensors and computers. 

The Palace system would thereby have helped “modify people” with the help of 

virtual reality-like simulations such as “a trip around the moon in a space capsule,” 

an “underwater restaurant,” a “maze of silence,” or a “fantasy generator.” “Today, the 

idea of “unmodifi ed” and “modifi ed” people makes us recoil in horror. Yet, in the 1960s, 

the prevailing and naïve faith in the endless benefi ts of science and technology was 

so strong that the Orwellian implications of “modifi ed people” went largely unnoticed. 

At the time, the “social control” aspect of the Fun Palace was seen as a constructive 

contribution to society” (2005:85f.). 

Conceptually speaking, the Fun Palace anticipated the virtual realities of digital games 

as well as the privacy issues of surveilled entertainment and, more generally, pervasive 

computing (see Panopticon). Indeed, the Fun Palace truly would be an interesting role 

model for a building-based pervasive playhouse. Formally and aesthetically speaking, 

the unrealized Fun Palace certainly impacted architectural design and the construction 

of many realized buildings. For example, referencing the design of the Centre Pompidou 

in Paris, Reyner Banham writes that that “the concept of a stack of clear fl oors that 

can be adapted to a variety of cultural and recreational functions seems to recall the 

(...) Fun Palace of Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, even if the project was never as 

radical as the fl oorless Fun Palace, or as casually innovatory as Price’s Inter-Action 

Centre,” a realized, but much smaller Fun Palace-like hands-on leisure center in the 

UK, demolished in 2003 (Banham 1977:275). 

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The lesson is: a castle designed for fun can break the symbolic power of the playground, 

but will exert control over any player who chooses to experience it. 

28. City 

For the oncoming tourist sitting on one of the ferry boats speeding through the saltwater 

lagoon, Venice’s centro storico is highly evocative. The cityscape and overall composition 

of the city center are incredibly moving, featuring, as they do, the Campanile, the 

combined colors of canals, palaces, and water, buildings that sharply carve an island 

of islands, and that special Venetian summer smell. All these make the city memorable. 

Camillo Sitte writes romantically of Venice: “So much beauty is concentrated on this 

single patch, no painter has ever conceived more beautiful architectural backdrops, no 

theatre has ever seen anything so sensually captivating than what has been capable 

of arising here in actuality.” 57 

Venice’s aesthetic qualities are a fact; wayfi nding in Venice, however, is a challenge. 

No wonder that Venice, the most touristed city in Europe (see Casino for the most 

touristed city in the US) and, claro, the most beautiful city in the world, is the epitome 

of the urban game: a citywide Labyrinth (and Maze). 

In The Image of the City, Lynch (1960) empirically explores how city dwellers perceive 

and envision spatial information while navigating through urban space. Although the 

study was conducted using only US cities as examples, Lynch identifi es a number of 

systems that render the example cities more legible for the study subjects and allow for 

what he coined “wayfi nding,” i.e. “a consistent use and organization of defi nite sensory 

57 Translated from the German original by the author: “So viel Schönheit ist auf diesem einen Fleckchen Welt 

vereinigt, dass kein Maler noch je Schöneres ersonnen hat an architektonischen Hintergründen, kein Theater 

noch je Sinneberückenderes gesehen hat, als es hier in Wirklichkeit zu erstehen vermochte.”

cues from the external environment.” (1960:24) Wayfi nding devices assist people in 

constructing a predictable mental map, an environmental image. Lynch organizes the 

elements of this mental map into fi ve categories, in turn creating a design vocabulary for 

urban wayfi nding that has since served as inspiration to urban planners and architects 

as well as information and interaction designers. Lynch’s elements follow: 

● Paths: The streets, walkways, transit lines, canals, railroads, and other 

urban channels through which people travel. 

● Edges: The walls, shores, fences, barriers, shorelines, and other perceived 

boundaries that exist in relatively straight lines, thereby demarcating as 

well as relating distinct areas. 

● Districts: Larger sections of a city that are distinguished by their unique 

identities or urban characters (Financial Districts, for example). 

● Nodes: Focal points such as intersections, enclosed squares, subway 

stations, and other transportation hubs. 

● Landmarks: Readily identifi able points of reference (in Europe, for 

example, the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Fernsehturm (TV Tower) in 

Berlin). 

Lynch derives two concepts from his study. The fi rst is the imageability of a city: “a 

quality which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer” 

(Lynch 1960:9). The second is a city’s legibility, that is, “the ease with which [a city’s] 

parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern…a legible city 

would be one whose districts or landmarks or pathways are easily identifi able and are 

easily grouped into an overall pattern” (Lynch 1960:10). 

For the oncomer on the boat, Venice at fi rst appears highly imageable and legible. 

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But for those traversing the city on foot, the sheer combinatorial possibility of canals, 

bridges, pieces of art (statues, roundels, coats of arms, crosses, reliefs, logos, plaques, 

and fragments), Squares (campi), small squares (campielli), and lanes – alternately 

called alli, salizzade, rughe, liste, rami, sottoporteghi, rii terrà, and fondamenta – is the 

underlying truth of the Venetian game. 

Venice, navigationally speaking, is simply disorienting. Fabio Carrera (1997) has 

shown that at least on the level of the Campo Santa Maria Formosa square, for 

example, Venice can be imageable thanks to the free-standing church landmark. 

As a navigational network, however, the city remains an exciting maze. No wonder, 

then, that the annual Orientamento a Venezia – abbreviated as just Orivenezia – is 

the toughest city orienteering competition in the world. 58 (See also the “Nature” entry, 

which discusses the sport of orienteering). Yet, arguing only in terms of navigation 

would not do Venice justice. Like so many other European cities, as well as New York 

and Boston in the USA, Venice immerses pedestrians in a three-dimensional narrative 

(see Pearce (2007:201)). 

As a city experience, the Venetian maze is acceptable (and made possible) to us 

because, with every other turn and break of visual angle and perspective, there is 

always some new thing to adore, a compelling urban story to discover, a dead-end to 

realize. Venice, in short, is a perfect archipelago adventure for disorienting pleasure. 

Venice, we daresay, is the perfect physical urban play-ground because it combines the 

kinetic participatory delights of pursuing vertigo, contemplating, savoring, adventuring, 

amusing (tourists usually visit in groups of two or more), problem-solving, and wayfi nding 

achievement with a unparalleled pedestrian experience of Mobility. It is, in short, a 

play-ground in and of itself. 59 _ We can only hope that the game generation will still 

58 Cf. http://www.orivenezia.it. 

59 An entertaining gameplay strategy for the maze that is Venice 

can be found at http://www.initaly.com/regions/veneto/ovensty.htm.

have the chance to play Venice, which is in constant danger of being fl ooded by rising 

waters. Should that happen, gamers may instead decide to see the replica Campanile 

at the Venetian Resort Casino in Las Vegas, proclaimed Entertainment Capital of the 

World and Venice’s New World counterpart. Similar to the perfect, but sadly and slowly 

sinking play-ground for making one’s own urban adventure, the urban archipelago of 

Casinos within the Clark County desert vegetation offers a gamble on one’s future, too. 

In the game REXplorer, the city of Regensburg is not only used as a backdrop, but as 

a functional platform and raison d’être for the game. The game design understands 

the city as a rhetorical landscape that persuades the player to move between urban 

sites. Players are presented with audio drama based cliffhanger puzzles spoken by 

site-specifi c characters. By way of these audio cliffhangers, characters offer quests 

to the players, which can only be resolved at other sites. Players, then, must keep 

moving in order to play the game. Through this core mechanic, the audio augmented 

city becomes a physical game Board on which player mobility is infl uenced with the 

help of reward structures (players who successfully resolve their quests receive points, 

and walking itself is credited as well). For a more detailed discussion of this aspect of 

pervasive gaming, see Walz (2007) as well as Walz and Ballagas (2007). 

The cityscape of Venice and the REXplorer game teach us important lessons as to how 

to design exciting mazes and how to think of them architecturally and in terms of urbanlike 

relationships. We can also turn this around and think of the World Wide Web as an 

urbanistic maze; the pervasively computed city towards which we are heading today 

is another such maze. See Figure 53, which sets both maze metaphors into relation. 

When one considers the urban maze of Beijing, where a labyrinthine, disorienting 

structure is achieved by demolishing whole city quarters, one may be inclined to think 

that Venice will spearhead the heterotopian model of the European city-as-museum. 

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Figure 53 

Two mazy city metaphors: (Left) Artist collective eBoy depict the WWW as a city in their FooBar 

poster (www.eboy.com). (Right) In 2004, the architectural office hybrid space lab envisioned a 

SubCity - a pervasively computed urban game (www.hybridspacelab.net). Images reproduced 


But, although the Asian model may try to abandon the European Labyrinth (and Maze) 

topos, it inadvertently re-establishes that exact model through constant changes in the 

cityscape and in building usages.

29. Society 

On the evening of December 20, 1960, in a militant presentation at the Stedelijk 

Museum in Amsterdam, Constant Nieuwenhuys – a Dutch architect whose name is 

commonly shortened to Constant – accused the modern City of being an exploitative, 

utilitarian machine that demands productivity from its population, that pacifi es with 

pseudo-“Nature”, and that destroys life. Constant suggested a solution called New 

Babylon, which he later revised again and again, but which, at its core, constitutes “a 

vision of a ludic society” (Nieuwenhuys 1974). In this “counter-design to Modernism’s 

functionalization and realization mechanisms for architecture and town planning” 

(Feireiss 2007:218), inhabitants play a creation game of movable walls, fl oors, partitions, 

ramps, stairs, bridges, and infi nitely variable qualities of light, color, ventilation, texture, 

temperature, and moisture, designing their own environment for adventuring against 

their designed backdrop. Architectural historian Mark Wigley evocatively recounts 

Constant’s concept: 

Technology has long been the new nature that must now be creatively 

transformed to support a new culture. The increasingly traumatised 

inhabitants have to take over the shaping of their own spaces to recover 

the pleasure of living. This reshaping will soon become their dominant 

activity when automation handles all forms of production. Leisure time 

will be only time. Work gives way to an endless collective play in which 

all fantasies are acted out. The static constructions of architects and town 

planners are thrown away. Everybody becomes an architect, practising a 

never-ending, all-embracing “unitary urbanism.”” (2001:9). 

New Babylon represents an activist’s and activist play-ground, an elevated, jungle 

gym-like (see the Playground entry in this inventory) fl uxus labyrinth, covered on a 

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planetary scale, programming an “unfunctional and fantasy way of living (...); people 

would constantly be travelling” (Nieuwenhuys 1964/2001:14). At Constant’s fi rst 

presentation at the Stedelijk, however, the debaters raised a fundamental question: 

would New Babylon liberate humanity by affording the pleasures of fl uidity and of 

creative and adventurous play? Or would it be a prison? (Wigley 2001:11) 

Constant’s vision of an all-consuming hyper-urbanism overwriting the city (Sloterdijk 

2006:98) accommodated the revolutionary goal of the Situationist International (SI), 

of which Constant was a member when he fi rst presented New Babylon. This SI goal 

was to overcome not only modernist architecture, but to conquer consumerism and, 

ultimately, capitalist society through ludism. A 1957 fusion between radical avant-garde 

artists and groups (mainly, the Lettrist International centered on the artist-theorist 

Guy Debord and the Mouvement international pour un Bauhaus imaginiste, founded 

by the painter Asger Jorn), the SI experimented with a number of ludic techniques 

and provocations, among them New Babylon, under the umbrella of the concept of 

psychogéographie (Stahlhut et al. 2006). Basically, psychogeography can be described 

as the playful becoming aware of, reimagining, and exploration of the city; in other 

words, the affective realization of the city. In the following list, a number of exemplary 

psychogeographical techniques are presented: 

● In the fi rst issue of its magazine Potlatch, the Lettrist International 

published “The Psychogeographical Game of the Week”: 

In accordance with what you are seeking, choose a country, a 

more or less populated city, a more or less busy street. Build a 

house. Furnish it. Use decorations and surroundings to the best 

advantage. Choose the season and the time of day. Bring together 

the most suitable people, with appropriate records and drinks. The 

lighting and the conversation should obviously be suited to the 

occasion, as should be the weather or your memories. If there has

een no error in your calculations, the result should satisfy you 

(Debord 1955/2004). 

● In our terms, we can think of this game as consisting of adventuring and 

creation play pleasures, with some risk-taking and performing-socializing. 

● The Situationist practice of dérive, a term coined by Russian LI member 

Ivan Chtcheglov meaning, literally, “drifting.” The dérive is similar to 

Constant’s ever-traveling Homo Ludens, in that it refers to constantly 

and rapidly vagabond and adventure through different areas in the city 

(Stahlhut 2006:10). Game rules and gamespace were defi ned for a 

dérive; this included starting and possible rendezvous points, duration, 

number of participants, size and kind of urban playground, objective, and 

activity fi lters such as, ”Look for all taverns serving white rum,” or ”Take a 

cab and drive 20 minutes westwards before starting the dérive” (Debord 

1958). The Universal Psychogeographic Computer (Hou Je Bek 2007) 

introduced earlier in this section in the discussion of utopian play-grounds 

can be considered a dérive device, while Debord’s and Jorn’s The Naked 

City map of Paris bears witness to ample, vertiginous adventuring – a 

nomadic kinesis, leading to a joyful re-discovery of a city by the way of a 

design that “simultaneously mourned the loss of old Paris, prepared for 

the city of the future, explored the city’s structures and uses, criticized 

traditional mapping, and investigated the relationship between language, 

narrative, and cognition” (Sadler 1998:60). See Figure 54. 

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Figure 54 

Guy Debord: The Naked City. Illustration de L’Hypothése Des Plaques Tournantes 

En Psychogéographique (1957), screenprint. Reproduced by permission 

from RKD, The Hague. 

● The Situationist practice of détournement is a creative play pleasure 

meant to misappropriate, reorganize, pocket, and de-contextualize 

existing structures such as signs, façades, objects on the streets, etc. 

(Debord and Wolman 1956). It is a combination of adventure-creation 

with components of risk-taking. 

Borries (2004) traces how Nike applies subversive practices as marketing tactics in 

urban areas in an effort to penetrate sub and counter cultures and thereby establish 

a branded city that transcends the logic of everyday. Just do it, so to speak, like 

André Agassi and Pete Sampras did in a Nike TV spot in which they played tennis

on New York City’s 5th Avenue as an act of liberating the regimenting of the city: the 

street becomes the tennis court, the sidewalk the bleachers. But whereas the New York 

City TV spot was merely symbolic, the Nike basketball court surface made of recycled 

sneaker soles (bearing the Swoosh logo, naturally) located at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, 

the heart of the city’s public sphere, is very real: “The Situationist strategy of fake 

and détournement can be discovered as an instrument of communication in nearly 

all of Nike’s urban interventions. They serve here the same function they do with the 

Situationists and media guerillas, namely to gain access to new spaces of interpretation 

and opportunities for refl ection” (Borries 2004:72). 

When reading these lines and thinking about recuperating marketing, let us not forget 

where the Situationist games came from; in its heyday, dérive promised a new urbanism 

with “rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help 

but love” (Chtcheglov 1958). Building authentic pantopian dreams, then, can be a tactic 

stronger than the tactics of those who succeeded in misappropriating by misappropriating 

their greatest enemies. In a society in which life presents itself as an immense accumulation 

of commodifi ed spectacles, a fallback Walden tactic is still by far more truthful than 

radical opportunism. 

In our context, street and guerilla artists show us an alternative to life in the woods 

(which can be seen as an early example of a self-governd alternative to the society of 

the spectacle). With guerilla art, people express themselves, often playfully, in a public 

space, in order to affect as well as to reclaim the space, to make a political statement, 

to decontextualize or to intervene, often with the goal of letting people interact with this 

environment in a novel, though-provoking way. Basically, this can mean that someone 

presents someone else with something elsewise than what they might suppose: “Like a 

random act of kindness, guerilla art has the potential to create a ripple effect. Imagine the 

postal worker running through his day, stopping for a moment to read a quote you have 

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chalked onto the sidewalk.” (Smith 2007:15) writes Keri Smith in her inspiring book The 

Guerilla Art Kit. This tactic of anonymous artists entering into people’s daily routines, 

then, overlaps with Situationism, but may be more about beautifying, questioning and 

interacting with space impermanently than about altering space forever. 

30. Topology 

A topological play-ground maps how nodes in a social network are acquainted, just as 

in the following example: 

To prove that nowadays the population of the Earth is in every aspect much 

more closely interconnected than it has ever been, one member of our 

gathering proposed a test. “Let us pick at will any given existing person 

from among the one and one half billion inhabitants of the Earth, at any 

location.“ Then our friend bet that he could establish via direct personal 

links a connection to that person through at most fi ve other persons, one 

of them being his personal acquaintance. “As people would say, look, 

you know X.Y., please tell him to tell Z.V., who is his acquaintance....so 

and so.” ”OK,” said a listener, “then take for example Zelma Lagerlöff” 

[literature Nobelist, born 1909]. Our friend placing the bet remarked 

that nothing is easier. He thought only for two seconds. “Right,” he said, 

”so Zelma Lagerlöff, as a Nobelist, obviously knew the Swedish king 

Gustav, since the king handed her the prize, as required by the ceremony. 

Gustav, as a passionate tennis player, who also participated at large 

international contests, evidently played with Kehrling [Béla Kehrling, 

Hungarian tennis champion and winner at the Göteborg Olympics 1924, 

1891-1937], whom he knew well and respected.” ”Myself,” our friend 

(he was also a strong tennis player) said, “I know Kehrling directly.” 

Here was the chain, and only two links were needed out of the stated 

maximum of fi ve (Braun 2004:1745).

Chemist Tibor Braun, in a letter to Science magazine, translated the aforementioned 

portion of a humorous short story composed by Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy 

in 1929, originally called Láncszemek – in English, Chain-Link. As you will note, the 

activity described – i.e. the test – is really a game, with the objective to prove that 

the bettor knows, by a maximum of fi ve linking chainmen, any other given person on 

the planet. The play pleasures implicitly include contesting, problem-solving, (social) 

storytelling, and the kinetic pleasure of jumping from node to node, and thus, from 

friend to friend-of-a-friend. Karinthy’s short story also anticipates, by many decades, 

the scientifi c discourse surrounding the structure of social networks and particularly, 

their connectedness. The fi ctional story marks the appearance of a spatial concept we 

know today as “six degrees of separation.” 

One of the fi rst quantitative studies concerning the structure of social networks was 

conducted by controversial social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the late 1960s. 

Milgram (1967), then at Harvard University, sent letters to random subjects in Wichita, KS 

and Omaha, NE, whom he asked to participate in a scientifi c experiment by forwarding 

the letter to a target address through a personal acquaintance who is more likely than 

the subject to know the target person, either a stock broker in Boston or the wife of a 

divinity graduate student in Massachusetts. Milgram’s goal was to fi nd the “distance” 

between any two people in the US. Based on the letters that arrived at their destination 

and the log fi ling postcards that chain-persons were asked to mail to Harvard, Milgram 

conjectured that 5.5 was the average number of acquaintances separating – and thus, 

connecting – any two randomly chosen human beings in the United States. 

Milgram’s experiment has been harshly criticized for lack of scientifi c rigor, for little 

evidence of successfully completed chains 60 , and for not refl ecting the implications of 

mail forwarding factors (and hindrances) such as race or class (Kleinfeld 2002). Yet, 

60 Kleinfeld found, upon re-visiting Milgram’s original research notes stored at Yale University, that the claim 

was not supported by Milgram’s experimental results: 95% of the letters sent out had failed to reach their targets. 

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the concept of a world of socially linked “small-worlds” prevailed, and eventually lead to 

playwright and screenwriter John Guare’s play and movie, Six Degrees of Separation 

(1993), which introduced the idea of a worldwide linkage system. J. J. Abrams, who 

starred in the movie as the character Doug61 , later became the executive producer for 

the TV series Lost (2004-2010) and Six Degrees (2006-2007), both of which implicitly 

and explicitly use the six degrees of separation concept as a storytelling and character 

puzzling device. Figure 55 shows a Lost character connection map excerpt featuring 

exemplary characters and series locations. 

In Lost in particular, but also in general, the concept of six degrees of separation makes 

us comfortable, because it creates the illusion (and mystery) of intimacy, and it has an 

utmost alluring explorative play character that spans all of social space. The online 

social networking sites Friendster and Facebook play on the concept, too. But is the 

concept scientifi cally valid? Or maybe the more appropriate question is: In which 

play-like contexts do we fi nd small-worlds? 

61 Cf. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0009190/.

Aaron Littleton 

Mother 

Claire Littleton 

James "Sawyer" 

Ford 

sleeps with 

Mary Jo 

(Lotto Girl) 

pulls lottery numbers on TV 

Hugo "Hurley" 

Reyes 

Figure 55 

A socio-narrative topology among 

exemplary characters and locations 

in the TV show Lost (ABC). 

Uncle 

Father 

met in bar 

patient 

Half sister 

invests in 

Jack Shephard 

Father 

Christian 

Shephard 

Nurse 

blames for parents' death 

knows 

John Locke 

works at 

Box Company 

Santa Rosa 

Mental 

Institution 

works with 

father 

mother 

sometimes patient of 

Anthony Cooper 

Emily Locke 

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Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz (1998) show that many natural as well as designed 

networks exhibit the small-world property, achieved by adding a small number of 

random links to a network, which reduce its diameter – i.e. the longest measured direct 

path between any two vertices in a network – from very long to very short. This fi nding 

suggests that infectious diseases spread more easily in small-world networks than in 

regular networks. The small-world architecture developed by Watts and Strogatz also 

supports the observations made by sociologist Mark Granovetter (1973) in his milestone 

paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, in which he asserts that our acquaintances – i.e. 

our weak ties – are less likely to be involved socially with one another than are our 

strong ties – i.e. close friends. Any individual, therefore, forms a low-density network 

with weak ties, whereas in comparison, a set consisting of that same individual and 

her close friends forms a high-density network enabled by the presence of many of 

possible lines. See also Granovetter’s critical recapitulation of his own argument in 

Granovetter (1983). Both fi ndings let us think of playspaces as sites where something 

is passed on (or back) in space, allowing for contesting, risk-taking (“Will this prove to 

be a strong tie?”), chance, collecting, adventuring, or storytelling; think of a Telephonestyle62 

information corruption activity or an activity in which a story (an image, a video, 

a song) grows from node to node. 

In an effort to reveal the mathematical features of a sexual-contact network using a 

random sample of individuals, Liljeros et al. (2001) found that the connectivity of an 

objectively defi ned non-professional social network linked in the most intimate way 

possible is scale-free. That means that there is no core group that is separated from 

other individuals. Scale-free describes the fact that in sexual-contact networks, one can 

observe connectivities much larger than the sample’s mean, in contrast, for example, 

to a single-scale network. In a single-scale network, each agent would have had the 

62 Known as Chinese Whispers in the UK and Stille Post in German-speaking countries.

same amount of sexual contacts, creating an exponential and homogenous network, 

as opposed to a non-homogenous scale-free network. 

Using citational and co-authoring data from scientifi c papers in physics, biomedical 

research, and computer science, Mark Newman (2001) investigated the “Who is the 

best connected scientist?” game and came up with the following summary: 

In all cases, scientifi c communities seem to constitute a ‘‘small 

world’’ in which the average distance between scientists via a line of 

intermediate collaborators varies logarithmically with the size of the 

relevant community. Typically, we fi nd that only about fi ve or six steps 

are necessary to get from one randomly chosen scientist in a community 

to another. It is conjectured that this smallness is a crucial feature of a 

functional scientifi c community. 

We also fi nd that the networks are highly clustered, meaning that two 

scientists are much more likely to have collaborated if they have a third 

common collaborator than are two scientists chosen at random from the 

community. This may indicate that the process of scientists introducing 

their collaborators to one another is an important one in the development 

of scientifi c communities (Newman 2001:408). 

The results from the sexual-contacts research as well as the citation game are 

consistent with fi ndings suggested by Barabási and Albert (1999) as well as by Albert/ 

Jeong/Barabási (2000) and a categorization popularized in Barabási (2003). Barabási 

counts small-world networks as exponential networks, in contrast to Technologybased 

networks, which are scale-free and feature self-organizing properties. 

These properties are governed by two straightforward rules: (a) expansion (nodes are 

added one node at a time for a given period of time), and (b) preferential-attachment 

(new nodes connect to existing nodes and are more likely to connect to the more 

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connected nodes). More than a fi xed six degrees of separation, these principles 

are likely responsible for the scale-invariant architecture of the World Wide Web, 

where Website’s nodes seek to link themselves to hubs, i.e. Websites with the most 

connections. Figure 56 visualizes the difference between these two types of networks. 

Figure 56 

Two types of networks visualized: (left) A homogenous exponential and (right) an inhomogenous 

scale-free network. Most nodes in the exponential network have about the same number 

of links, whereas in the scale-free network, most nodes have one or two links and only a few 

nodes have a large number of links, so that the system becomes interconnected. The five 

nodes with the highest number of links are colored dark-gray; their first neighbors are colored 

gray. Figure reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd.: NATURE Albert/Jeong/ 

Barabási (2003). 

Barabási’s principle of preferential-attachment is interesting when viewed from a game 

design and play pleasure perspective, beyond storytelling and character topologies

such as those found in the TV series Lost. The principle indicates that scale-free play 

architectures can emerge when play-others – players, objects, and spaces – have been 

found more attractive by previous players than other play-others. When implemented, 

this could play a role in orienteering-like games (see “Nature”) and scavenger hunt 

situations, as well as in exploration and adventuring play and game types in general. 

The similarity of this hypothesis to the principle of social navigation, which holds that 

participants’ activities in a (physical or virtual) space are infl uenced by observing and 

following other participants’ activities (Dourish 1999), is striking. 

In the hybrid network space of REXplorer, another type of topology has been established, 

in which physical sites are connected through the fi ction and rules of a game (as opposed 

to, say, a physical topology in which wires or cables connect nodes). In designing the 

game, which is intended as a playful yet educational touristic offering that goes beyond 

the classical guided tour, we reviewed the city of Regensburg’s overview list of over 

1,400 protected historical buildings, which describes each site’s erection, make up, 

and usage over time. We then cross compared a number of city sightseeing guides 

including the city’s tourism Website, fi nally fi ltering 29 sites of interest out of the mass 

of information; these represent typical sights that tourists would want to see during a 

day-long visit. 

In the fi rst design draft, we decided that each building or a building’s main function over 

time should be represented by a site-specifi c character. To prototype these characters 

and give them personality depth, we used a character sheet format. This consisted 

of a one-page description of the different characters that provided an at-a-glance 

overview to simplify the review process. These character sheets were important in 

communicating our more detailed content ideas with the local tour guides for content 

supervision as well as for guiding the voice actors. The character sheets provided a 

compact and highly browsable format that supported an effective review process. The 

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tour guides were able to suggest improvements or changes in character selection very 

easily using this format. The changes at this stage of the design process were easy to 

incorporate and they prevented signifi cant rewriting of the full script later on. 

The main challenge of narrative production, then, lay in bridging the characters (and 

City sites) so that they would be connected meaningfully, as well as emotionally, 

through quests. In the design document, we created guidelines as to which general 

emotional dimensions could bond the characters so that players would want to travel 

from site A to B to fulfi ll a quest in order to hear the resolution of a cliffhanger. In 

the game dialogue script, we applied emotional bridges such as romance, greed, and 

fear to the Non Playable Characters’ (NPCs) quest stories, while planting clues in the 

NPC’s sentences as to which element gesture the players need to cast. For example, 

at the site of the historical character Barbara Blomberg, we embedded the clue for the 

expected gesture element “water” by having Barbara, crying, ask the player to take her 

“tears of her love” to emperor Karl V., who she has only seen once, but with whom she 

has a son 

Once we had created example quests between characters, the script draft was reviewed 

by stakeholders. Based on the feedback, we eventually created 59 quests with the help 

of a travel journalist, who acted as a co-writer. The fi nal script was iteratively fi ne-tuned 

and was recorded at a professional recording facility. Figure 57 shows REXplorer’s 

narrative topology as well as the game’s kinesis topology in the relation to the physical 

site on top of a city core map. As can be seen from this Figure, REXplorer provides a 

connectivist perspective of the city of Regensburg.

20 

2 

1 

14 

26 

25 

8 

9 

13 

12 

10 

27 

6 

24 

23 

25 

22 

18 

21 

17 

3 

16 

5 

19 

15 

28 11 

7 

4 

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Figure 57 

Topologies in REXplorer. 

Game topology in relation to 

the physical site on top of a 

city core map as well quest 

associations between character-sites 

no. 1 to 27.

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Many pervasive games fail to reach the masses because they are depending 

on specifi c sites (as REXplorer is), social situations or times; or because they are 

event- or campaign driven and irreproducible; or because they are enforcing socially 

inappropriate behavior onto players in public space, such as running, costuming (see 

Body) or role-playing. 

In comparison, interweaving pre-existing social, spatial and temporal topologies and 

everyday behavior with pervasive gameplay may serve as a key to commercial success 

or game attractiveness. A game can pepper, amplify or enhance a given situation or 

procedure with the help game mechanics, yet without aiming to break given everyday 

circumstances. For example, REXplorer takes advantage of the tourist situation, during 

which, typically, groups of leisurely-oriented people attempt to visit and learn about a 

defi ned set of sites during a limited amount of time. Another example, the locationbased 

social networking game foursquare (2008), rewards city exploration and 

activities as well as meeting new people with points and badges. Thereby, the game 

capitalizes on present urban networking patterns such as friend fi nding, going clubbing 

and discovering as well as sharing places and activities. In fact, both REXplorer and 

foursquare quasi “ludify” pre-existing patterns, fl avoring them with uncontroversial and 

playful, but alike behavioral patterns. I call this type of game design technique the 

simile principle, cf. the chemical rule similia similibus solventur, or the homeopathic rule 

similia similibus curentur.

31. Mobility 

In 2005, on the side of a heavily traffi cked federal highway just outside of Regensburg, 

a man-sized poster courtesy of the Bavarian road safety association warned the Homo 

(Ludens) Digitalis that though driving fast may feel fun and quite game-like, it may have 

an irrevocable consequence: – “Game Over”, see Figure 58. The road sign refers to the 

meme of a computer-like interface; it concerns an actual automobile, but acknowledges 

the illusory similarity of driving 

that automobile and playing a 

racing game, a game of contest 

and risk-taking, where in real 

life, losers pay the highest price 

– death. 

Figure 58 

A man sized poster, courtesy of the 

Bavarian road safety association, 

applies a race game look and feel 

to warn of speeding. 

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Whereas the game that lures behind the street sign promises vertigo from high-stakes 

play, in these times of rising petrol prices, a different car-related activity, hypermiling, 

has become a game-like achieving and contesting activity in which car drivers strive to 

squeeze as many miles as possible from a tank of gasoline63 . 

Mobility, in fact, mobilizes the magic circle, and it can be abstract and concrete. Mobility 

enables contests, signifi es the way a plot progresses, and can have a visual gestalt 

or an auditive one. Without mobility, perspective would not have a before or an after. 

Mobility creates play functions related to movement. Mobility is the concrete expression 

of kinesis on a play-ground: through mobility, we perambulate space and time. 

Mobility plays a major role in the way we, playfully, learn the World. Jean Piaget (1951) 

illustrates how the development of motor skills and the development of cognition 

in children interrelate and cannot be separated from one another; sensomotorical 

intelligence, and also more general traits of intelligence, fundamentally result from 

motor function and experiencing the world through movement. Piaget explains that 

it is during the “sensorimotor stage” (Piaget 1992:49), which spans from birth to the 

age of two, that this type of intelligence is acquired, when the child rehearses refl exes, 

develops habits such as thumb-sucking, grabs with the hands, and begins combining 

prior motor skills to actively experiment and play. Ultimately, the child leaves behind 

this trial and error phase, once he has become capable of playing games with more 

complex rules. From an adult’s perspective, children’s movements are, as mentioned 

earlier, often unjustifi ed, undue, and repetitive (Buytendijk 1956:294ff.). But from the 

perspective of a child, it is precisely these factors that make mobility highly enjoyable 

because through movement, children experience the world. 

More rigorously, then, and in agreement with mobility researchers Zoche/Kimpeler/ 

Joepgen (2002:7), we defi ne “mobility” here as follows: 

63 Cf. http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2008/06/hypermilers09.

Mobility 

The potential for movement and the execution of movement. 

The fi rst aspect of the defi nition underlines the fact that mobility implies that a person’s 

Body, an object, or, alternatively, a space are mobile (and in reverse, that this mobility 

is the condition of being mobile). The second aspect describes the actual concrete 

movement of people, objects, or spaces, i.e. the process of change of an entity from 

one unit of a described system to another unit. The two defi ning aspects are reciprocal: 

without the condition of mobility, actual mobility cannot take place, and without actual 

mobility, the condition of mobility is worthless. Together, the two aspects create what 

we can call a mobility-space. For a defi ned system with a set of actors and a set of 

elements, such a space embodies all possible movements and all actual movements. 

But what are the dimensions of mobility? What kinds of mobility can we identify? Below, 

we’ve grouped the major kinds: 

● Anthropological: Michael Gleich (1998) traces mobility as an 

anthropological constant, claiming a Homo Mobilis for whom mobility 

is an exigency, a capability, and a desideratum (1998:13). This way of 

looking at mobility certainly resembles Piaget’s constructivist stance, and 

it remains the core of all mobile play-grounds. 

● Physical-geographical: In geographical space, physical mobility can be 

a property of people or things, and people’s mobility can be caused by 

migrational, vacational, or leisurely everyday activities (Zängler 2000:20f.). 

This kind of mobility implies a positional change between spatial units, of 

which games can take advantage. Physical movement of people, then, 

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can be interesting particularly for health game purposes – for example, to 

resolve obesity64 . Another starting point for designers can be reoccurring 

route patterns, for example commuting between home and work. 

● Social: Individual or societal changes between groups, strata, or classes, 

which take place over time (i.e. intra- or intergenerationally). 

● Formative: John Urry (2000), somewhat combining several of the 

approaches cited above, argues that as spatial metaphors and processes, 

mobilities are at the heart of contemporary social life and should therefore 

be at the center of 21st century sociological analysis. Travelings are thus 

constitutive elements of the structures of western Society and cultural 

identity. They can be corporeal, object-related, imaginative, or dematerialized, 

i.e. virtual. Nigel Thrift (2004) even envisions that continuous 

and ubiquitous numerical calculating alters our understanding of how we 

relate, so that “the nomadologic of movement becomes the natural order 

of thought” (Thrift 2004:590), which Thrift calls the “qualculative sense” 

(ibid.). In an earlier study of spatial formation, Thrift shows, for example, 

how the railway has been exceptionally important in the shaping of modern 

mobility, remodeling our existing relationships to landscape, space, and 

time. The railway has familiarized the masses with machinery outside 

of the workplace, it has democratized longer-range travel, propelling 

passengers through space, and it has, as a Technology of power and 

quite like a projectile, pierced, bridged, framed, bypassed, amplifi ed, and 

degraded physical space – in other words, disciplined and dominated it 

(Thrift 1996:266ff.). Urry, transposing Thrift’s railway observations onto 

64 Martin Knöll, an architect and doctoral student at the University of Stuttgart co-supervised by the author, and 

the author are currently preparing the production of YourParkour, a mobile and pervasive game to fi ght obesity, 

targeting 12-13 year olds.

the notion of the fl exible and wholly coercive car, which “reconfi gures civil 

society involving distinct ways of dwelling, travelling and socialising in, 

and through, an automobilised time-space. Civil societies of the west are 

societies of automobility” (Urry 2000:59). When we were kids sitting in 

the back seats of cars, we played games like “I spy with my little eye,” but 

tomorrow, our backseat kids will investigate crime mysteries designed to 

span vast areas along the road network, while they travel at automobile 

speed and look out of car window. Even today, just such a mystery exists 

in prototype form: the game prototype The Journey, which links a GIS 

module to a narrative engine (Gustafsson et al. 2006). 

In all the ways that we play while driving, riding the train, or talking to others on our 

mobile phones, mobility is the play-ground of delightful discovery. Maybe it is because 

of this that Urry realizes, without explicitly mentioning Foucault, that the ship is the 

most remarkable mechanism (and metaphor) for mobility, travel, and possibly, travel 

encounters: “Mobilities that pass over the edges of society, through and into the “other”” 

(2000:48). The nature of mobility, we see, is heterotopian; whereas in the Baroque 

era, architecture, theater, dance, and music deceived eye and ears by “moving” the 

senses with the help of illusions (Oechslin 2007) (see the Trompe l’œil entry in this 

inventory), the fl uids of the 21st century are made up of “the remarkably uneven and 

fragmented fl ows of people, information, objects, money, images, and risks across 

regions in strikingly faster and unpredictable shapes” (ibid.). 

These fl ows, then, allow for the creation of fl ow games – games that take advantage of 

existing fl ows or create new ones. In a time when physical mobility based on vehicles is 

becoming more expensive due to rising energy prices (or, seen another way, reduced 

resources), other mobility vehicles will have to enable intellectual, mental, emotional, 

communicative, and, naturally, ludic mobility. 

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32. World 

In the 1960s, architect R. Buckminster Fuller proposed the World Game (WG), a 

conceptual design-scientifi c approach to creating an Integrative Resource Utilization 

Planning Tool on a grand scale. With it, Fuller eventually hoped to “fi nd the specifi c 

means of making fi ve billion humans a total economic and physical success at the 

earliest possible moment without anyone being advantaged at the expense of another” 

(Fuller 1971:2). Fuller called his vision a game in order to underline the fact that it would 

be accessible to everyone because it would be unburdened by the political ideology 

and economic interests of an elite class. His ultimate goal was to achieve world peace 

by providing the highest standard of living to everyone on the planet, continually and 

sustainably (1971:89). 

Fuller suggested that the WG be the focus of the US pavilion at the EXPO 1967 fair, 

where it would be housed in a Fuller-typical geodesic dome with a diameter of almost 80 

meters. As in many military gaming systems, which Fuller had experienced personally 

(1971:4), a giant Map of the world located inside the dome would be connected to a 

computing system with a comprehensive database storing and processing knowledge 

about abundant and scarce world resources, needs, and problems gathered from 

satellites and other sources. Possible WG objectives included: 

● Communication: “Availability to all mankind of means to communicate 

with anyone wishing to be communicated with at the highest rate of 

economy and effi ciency” (1971:112). 

● Education: “Make available the best comprehensive education in 

all spheres of life for all mankind; and to anyone who wishes to learn 

anything, everything pertaining to his special interest” (1971:113).

● Energy: “Make available enough energy for the healthful internal and 

external metabolic functionings and satisfaction of Spaceship Earth and 

all mankind living and to be living at the highest rate of economy and 

effi ciency” (1971:113f.). 

Neither the EXPO version of the WG nor any other facility-related version of the WG 

was ever realized, but many World Game workshops have been conducted ever since 

to help set Fuller’s Spaceship Earth metaphor on course. Indeed, Fuller never intended 

the WG to be just a temporarily employed problem-solving tool in the style of planning 

or strategy games. Rather, he envisioned realizing a permanent real-time computing 

system based on noble and, in his time, not-yet-feasible goals. To some extent, the 

Internet today has grown into what Fuller envisioned many decades ago: a worldwide, 

real-time Technology network that “makes the world work, making mankind a success, 

in the most effi cient and expeditious ways possible” (1971:95). Fuller’s WG may have 

inspired cybernetics experts Stafford Beer and Fernando Flores, who in 1972 in 

Santiago, Chile, designed a computer-rich control room to assist president Salvador 

Allende in determining and steering the socialist economy of his country (Himmelsbach 

2007:412). 

The ludic space of the WG, we see, is not just Spaceship Earth (the title of a book 

Fuller authored) or its computer simulation. It is both. Therefore, it is legitimate to 

think of the WG as the ultimate, largest possible play-ground in the age of pervasive 

computing – a play-ground of Possible Worlds where all play types are legitimate, 

even if subordinated to the great systemic goal, and where the pleasure consists of 

collective and constant problem-solving and achieving. 

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33. Outer Space 

In Spacewar!, one of the fi rst digital games, developed in 1961 by MIT students on 

a DEC PDP-1 computer, a circular, dark Type 30 Precision cathode ray tube with a 

dotted, yet accurately modeled night sky serves as the setting for an outer space battle 

and as a major inspiration for many digital games to follow. 

Outer space is the play-ground of many infi nites: 

● It is the location of infi nity and its allegory (in itself allegorized when 

compressed into a game); outer space programs six degrees of freedom. 

● Typologically, this space does not need many visual elements to be 

universally understood. 

● Potentially, zero gravity and the sheer size of outer space allow for infi nite 

Mobility. 

● The core function of outer space in games is to provide an open space 

with some hindrances that must be overcome, such as meteoroids and 

an infi nity of potential enemy or benign species – an infi nite dystopia. 

● The movement enabled by the heterotopian space ship that goes to 

places where no one has ever been before. 

The play-ground of outer space embraces and embodies all other play-grounds, 

possible and impossible worlds that we are not yet capable of comprehending. It also 

implies an inner space and as a result, is implicitly connected to all other Play-grounds.

34. Technology 

We know that there is a particular affi nity between games and computing technology 

that has led us to state that all gamespaces represent, at least conceptually, rule-bound 

digital spaces in which confl ictive, goal-oriented player interaction takes place. We have 

briefl y discussed the enjoyable qualities of technology, fi nding that play interrelates with 

the technology through which it is expressed, and we have regarded game technology 

as a vehicle of architectural experimentation. The latter view is obviously accompanied 

by the fi nding that “entertainment is a key driver for development of technology“ (Cheok 

et al. 2007:128). But what is the play-ground of technology? How is technology ludically 

spatialized? Let us look at three exemplary perspectives, which also help to clarify 

notions of technology and how they affect the way a ludic architecture unfolds. 

In the previously mentioned tourist game prototype Spirits of Split (SoS), supervised 

by the author and co-developed during a 2004 game design summer school class 

conducted on site in Split, Croatia (cf. Walz 2006a), “low” technology was used to create 

a gamespace for the player. In the game, the tourist player only stays an average of 

two hours in Split’s ancient city center, a former Roman palace. Because temperatures 

easily reach 40°C during the high season, the site is crowded and narrow. In SoS, 

actors wearing historical dresses are therefore distributed in the play area at easy-toreach 

plazas, where they hand out cubes that represent their historical eras. Tourists 

can collect six different cubes, which they then place in a box that they can keep as a 

souvenir. City center, cubes, and costumed actors (singing or performing historically 

accurate songs) all provide lightweight and technologically unobtrusive entertainment 

appropriate for a laid-back Mediterranean environment. 

The “high” technology – i.e. technology-centered – perspective represented by 

Benford/Magerkurth/Ljungstrand (2007:248) cites pervasive games such as Can You 

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See Me Now? (2001) as examples of hybrid environments built upon a blend of recent 

technologies, combining the location-based and, typically, public nature of gameplay. 

In the example game, CYSMN?, up to 20 online players are chased through a virtual 

3D city by up to four players who move on the actual streets of that city, running to 

capture the online players in the virtual representation of the city. The physical runners 

are equipped with GPS and GPRS enabled handheld computers that show all player 

positions on a digital map application. Online players (who move at a fi xed maximum 

speed) can send text messages to other online players as well as to the runners; runners 

communicate with each other over a walkie-talkie channel, verbally and contextually 

transmitting their current urban status, which is then broadcast online. This audio stream 

“defi nes the game; because they are privy to the runners’ talk, online players are quite 

adept at avoiding their pursuers, effortlessly leading them up and down hills or through 

crowded public spaces“ (Benford 2007:258). The gameplace – i.e. the area where the 

game is physically played, where it takes place – of CYSMN? is both the actual city 

and the places where online players play; in other words, it is distributed across a 

network. The gamespace of the game – i.e. the space wherein the game takes place – 

is primarily virtual for the online players and physical for the runners. Yet each group is 

provided with information from the other realm, making the experience for the chasers 

physical-virtual and that of the online players virtual-physical. Together, the game group 

experience – and the gamespace it creates – is hybrid, and only made possible because 

of technology. Similarly, noted game designer and theorist Jane McGonigal, argues that 

CYSMN?’s gameplay renders the role of games in society as a form of “colonization“ 

(McGonigal 2007:233) of players, objects, and environments in the name of ubiquitous 

computing. 

An appropriative, game-centric perspective on the spatialization of technology can be 

traced with the help of game designer Gregory Trefry, who asserts that the core challenge 

for ubiquitous game designers is “to fi nd the right technology to fi t the game“ (Trefry

2007). Trefry leads us to understand that it is not necessarily a certain technology that 

makes a good, i.e. well-designed and playable game, but that a certain type of game 

affords an appropriate technological solution. 

We can call the aforementioned technology affordance the technological decorum of the 

technological play-ground. In the case of pervasive games, this affordance shifts away 

from the application domain of pervasive games looking to superimpose physicality with 

aforementioned “computing functionality“ (Magerkurth and Röcker 2007:6). Instead, 

this affordance implicitly considers all technology – old, new, or experimental – as a 

means to create a certain kind of gameplay experience: “Many games fi nd interesting 

ways to repurpose existing technology and infrastructure“ (Trefry 2007). 

In Payphone Warriors for example (a game co-designed by Trefry in 2006 for the 

New York City based Come Out and Play Festival of ubiquitous games – cf. www. 

comeoutandplay.org/blog), the initial design goal of the game was to create an onsite 

experience during which teams of players could try to claim territory in a physical 

city. Trefry and his co-designers ended up settling for an interesting and appropriate 

technological solution that catered to the game’s high concept: because GPS receivers 

proved to be too costly and too imprecise in the urban canyon of Manhattan, payphones, 

which feature a unique caller ID and have a fi xed location, were chosen instead to 

serve as checkpoints in the game. Players in teams of four claimed a checkpoint by 

dialing the game server from the payphone and punching in their team’s number. The 

goal of the game was to control as many payphones as possible during the 30 minutes 

of the gameplay session by making calls, listening to the pre-programmed audio 

feedbacks, and moving around in the game area outlined by the layout and position 

of the payphones (see http://payphonewarriors.com and Trefry (2007)). Figure 59 

shows the map of the game played during the Come Out and Play Festival along with 

its rules. 

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Figure 59 

A game demonstrating technological 

decorum: Payphone Warrior. 

Reproduced by permission from 

Gregory Trefry. 

HQ 

1 

6 7 8 

20 

2 3 

4 

5 

Whereas in CYSMN? and other games that take advantage of ubiquitous computing 

research, technologies are often used to demo technological novelty, Payphone 

Warriors takes a somewhat different approach. The game not only takes advantage 

of a somewhat outdated, yet pre-existing technology and, more importantly, a 

functioning hard- and software infrastructure that caters to the game’s design task 

and thereby reminds the player of the existence of a seemingly outdated means of 

telecommunication. The game also makes a case for low-technology being capable of 

solving a typical ubiquitous game problem – that of exact positioning, territorial control, 

and atmospheric orchestration. In Payphone Warriors, the core technology of the game 

fulfi lls several functions: 

● A spatio-contextual function: Plotted onto a top down map of midtown 

Manhattan, the payphones serve as vertices of the gamespace. At the 

same time, the payphones are part of a seemingly antiquated, yet ever 

present networked and urban system that is brought back into the player’s 

spatial perception via the game. 

9 

10 

11 12 13 

14 15 

18 

16 

17 

25 

19 

21 22 23 

24 

Payphone Warriors 

Control the payphones & control the city. 

A game of territory control using the 

forgotten payphones of New York City. 

Simply make a call from a payphone & enter your 

team number to capture a phone. For each minute 

your team controls that phone the team scores 1 

point. Grab more phones for more points. 

Call 212-812-XXXX 

1. Payphones produce points. Every minute a payphone produces one 

point; if a team controls a payphone, then the point goes into the team's 

point pool. 

2. A player captures a payphone by calling HQ & entering her team #. 

3. After capturing a phone a player may guard the payphone so rival 

players cannot call from it. However, guarding players can be chased 

away away if a greater number of rival team members arrive. 

4. If two players arrive at a phone at the same time, the player to touch the 

phone bank first wins the right to make the first call. 

5. Quarters are a scarce resource. Each player is alotted only 10 quarters. 

Quarters can be distributed amongst players however the team likes. 

6. The team with the most points at the end of the game wins. 

Payphone Warriors For more info visit www.payphonewarriors.com

● An enabling function: The payphones, without even being a novel 

ubiquitous technology, create a hybrid gamespace by combining physical 

location and virtual phone network in one ubiquitous gaming experience. 

The example of Payphone Warriors demonstrates that there is no need to 

use ubiquitous or cutting edge technology to create a ubiquitous, accurate 

location tracking game system. 

● A task function: In Payphone Warriors, the goal of the game is to 

claim (and control) payphones by making a call from a payphone booth. 

Ultimately, without the payphone, the game would lack a goal. 

● A procedural function: The game includes a number of sub-procedures 

centered around the central Capture the Flag-like procedure of controlling 

the payphones. The payphones, then, not only act as positioning entities 

and gamespace outliners, but also as tasks and resources. 

● A social interaction programming function: Payphone Warriors has 

players compete over payphones in real time. This builds physical sportslike 

action and a high competition model of confl ict into the game because 

players are trying to literally hold on to their payphone banks. 

Payphone Warriors demonstrates more than just how ubiquitous games set up, control, 

and infl uence a (collaborative) ludic architecture mainly by technological means. The 

game also shows how a wisely chosen technology makes a game on almost every 

level, leading to a high degree of technology decorum and letting players re-discover 

abandoned urban space. SoS, on the other hand, suggests that technology should only 

be considered in light of the given circumstances, and that technology does not always 

imply computerization. 

In REXplorer, the technology most visible to the player is the game controller. The 

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form and functionality of the detector and keypad – i.e. game controller – went through 

many iterations before reaching its fi nal design so that technology decorum was 

guaranteed. Figure 60 shows a number of detector prototypes. In a design studio class 

supervised by the author, a small group of students co-created the detector, seeking 

input from industrial design professionals as well as from a manufacturer specializing in 

lightweight metal bending and laser cutting. In addition to decorum aspects, there were 

many considerations that needed to be addressed in the design itself. For example, the 

design needed to: 

● house the phone and GPS receiver together in a tamper-proof, protective 

shell; 

● support the atmosphere of the game by providing a look that fi t the story 

description of a scientifi c detector and a feel that mimicked a technomagic 

wand ready for spell-casting; 

● provide a skin for the phone keypad to provide a customized game 

interface; 

● amplify the phone’s default audio volume to compensate for the outdoor 

situation65 ; 

● allow for quick recharging of devices. 

65 Note: For security reasons, we opted against headphones. A mono headphone was also excluded because of 

the additional cables that the tourist information staff would have had to look after.

Figure 60 

Prototype stages of the REXplorer game controller. 

During the prototyping phases, different materials were tested. Plastic was the fi rst 

choice, but it proved not to be robust enough. A thin aluminum skeleton was used in the 

fi nal design, wrapped with a soft and stretchable textile into which the keypad layout 

was laser-printed in a series of 30 pieces. Professional production of this small series, 

as seen in the Figure, proved to be feasible, yet costly. The fi nal design result fulfi lled 

the requirements and was warmly received by players in the playtesting. 

The use of technology (or a technological interface) as a play-ground or in service 

of another play-ground implies that design documentation should be written with the 

technology in mind. For example, in REXplorer, formal player interface state charts 

were important for defi ning exactly what text needed to be written for each character 

that the player could encounter. By formally fl ushing out the design, we were able 

to ensure that we had accounted for every possible game state and error condition 

before the narrative script was written and recorded. Most importantly, the state charts 

also served as design documents for the software implementation of the game engine. 

Figure 61 depicts an exemplary fi nite state machine showing the reaction to a spell cast 

by the player. 

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In cell 

Recognizing 

gesture 

Is incoming quest 

accepted? 

no 

Is there a 

possiblity to close 

a quest? 

no 

Are all outgoing 

quests completed? 

no 

Is outgoing quest 

accepted? 

no 

Leave 

hotzone 

Is quest list full? 

yes 

yes 

yes 

no 

yes 

no 

Walking 

around 

Invalid Gesture 

Quest completed 

Is there a possiblity 

to close a quest? 

Is outgoing quest 

completed? 

yes 

no 

Quest offer 

Non-Quest 

Gesture 

yes 

Please try again 

Character not 

responding 

Request for more 

uncompleted 

quests 

Request for 

uncompleted 

quests 

Quest already 

completed 

Quest incomplete 

List full 

Quest 

offered 

In cell 

(repeated 

from top) 

Figure 61 

Finite state machine showing the reaction to a gesture in the REXplorer game. Other state charts 

were created, for example for in-cell states and other game states. The colors determine whether 

the spoken text stems from the character or the detector.

Technology, when permeating our lives, can affect and ultimately control all other playgrounds 

in order to create forms of ludic architecture. For example, technology simplifi es 

the generation of Possible Worlds and Impossible Worlds, equips the Body for novel 

types of play, and lets us control natural space for ludic activity. Technology automates 

Tessellation and organizes a game Board. Technology shapes and enhances Caves 

as well as Labyrinths (and mazes). It enables us to design and map playful Terrains 

as well as enhancing our Playgrounds. It turns our Campuses into exciting adolescent 

play-grounds, and much, much more. Technology is not only a tool or a medium of play, 

games, and their space today; it is, increasingly, a conditio sine qua non that must exert 

control to empower the pleasure-seeking player. 

35. Ambiguity 

What if it is unclear where, when, how, or with whom to play if the locative and possibly 

other dimensions of ludic space are ambiguous66 – if, in other words, we cannot make 

out a play-ground? How can such a play-un-ground be, which spatially links nowhere 

and is not linked to from anywhere else? In our pool of possible architectural formats 

that embody ludic qualities, this last entry addresses what can be called the “disclosure 

problem.” 

In fact, game design researcher Markus Montola argues that pervasive games such 

as REXplorer exhibit an “ambiguity of expanding beyond the basic boundaries of the 

contractual magic circle” (Montola 2005:1). Montola further argues that games that have 

been grouped under the concept of pervasive games “do not have a single common 

denominator making them pervasive, though each of them has salient design features 

66 As a side note, it is amusing to consider how in this context, the term “utopia” – as in, “a non-place” – takes 

on a new meaning. 

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systematically working their way out of the magic circle of play” (2005:1). Montola holds 

that pervasive games consciously take advantage of the expansion mentioned above, 

and that it is the resulting “uncertainty” (ibid.) that is the defi ning signature trademark 

of the pervasive game. According to Montola, a pervasive game can thus be defi ned 

as “a game that has salient features that expand the contractual magic circle of play 

socially, spatially or temporally” (Montola 2005:3). Montola also underlines that none 

of the mentioned expansions necessarily affords technology, but that they can appear 

in mixed form to produce genuine experiences. As we have seen in the preceding 

section, technology can appear in many forms ranging from low to high. 

Staffan Björk, one of the designers/researchers behind the pioneering pervasive game 

Pirates! 67 (Björk and Ljungstrand 2007:256f.), supports Montola’s view and suggests 

expanding his three-layered ambiguity-based defi nition. According to Björk, the 

pervasiveness of a game can manifest itself not only through spatial, temporal, and 

social ambiguity, but also in the form of interface-related interaction ambiguity (Björk 

2007:277f.). 

However plausible the argument is, note that Montola does not differentiate between the 

terms “uncertainty” and “ambiguity,” but rather uses them interchangeably (in contrast 

to Montola, Björk uses the term “ambiguity” only, but remains unspecifi c as to what 

it exactly means). In our context, the meaning of (and difference between) the terms 

ambiguity and uncertainty seems to be rather ambiguous or uncertain itself. Therefore, 

67 Pirates! was developed in 2000 at the PLAYstudio of the Interactive Institute together with researchers from 

Nokia Research Center Tampere. In Pirates!, players roleplay ship captains in physical space who “sail” (virtual) 

seas by moving about in physical space with a handheld computer (their “ship”), seeking (virtual) islands, collecting 

resources, fi ghting monsters, and completing game quests and quest tasks. The gameplace of Pirates! must 

be equipped with WLAN, which the ship client uses to communicate with the game server, and a short range 

radio system. Stand-alone radio beacons in the gameplace represent the islands to which the players are sailing 

as well as serving to detect player proximity. Senders attached to the handheld computers allow the system to 

detect players in range of one another. Thus “what makes Pirates! different from ordinary computer games is that 

the movement within the game is prompted by the player’s movement in the real world” (Björk and Ljungstrand 

2007:256).

let us seek to make the ambiguity play-ground more precise in order to frame the ludic 

architecture that it engenders. 

Strictly and economically speaking, game(spaces) of uncertainty are situations in 

which a player is unable to securely forecast future states of a game she’s playing, i.e. 

the player must make incalculable decisions: kinesis under uncertainty. As opposed 

to a risky game such as a state lottery, in which at least the odds are calculable, in a 

game of uncertainty, the player – who acts as the decision-maker – only knows the 

relevant states that depend on her choice(s) in the game and may potentially occur. 

Still, the player cannot judge the likelihood that these states become reality. In a state 

lottery game, by contrast, the player knows or, with a little effort, can easily calculate 

the probability distributions. This somewhat rational perspective on gameplay has been 

further mathematized by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (1944), whose 

monumental treatise propelled the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior into the 

mainstream of economic thought and well beyond. Von Neumann and Morgenstern 

also helped to establish the theory of games as a sub-discipline of decision theory, 

which incorporates “theories of preference, utility and value, subjective probability and 

ambiguity, decision under risk or uncertainty, Bayesian decision analysis, probabilistic 

choice, social choice, and elections” (Fishburn 1991:27). As the quote shows, decision 

theory is of particular interest to those aiming to refi ne Montola’s interchanging of 

ambiguity and uncertainty. 

Decision theory distinguishes three key decision-making situations that help us to 

explain, analyze, and model decision-making: 

1. Risk situations: Situations in which the decision-maker knows potential 

outcomes as well as their odds, i.e. their probability distributions (Knight 

1921). Example: A player participates in a state lottery game, which has 

calculable odds. 

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330 

2. Uncertainty situations: Situations in which the decision-maker knows 

potential outcomes, but there are no odds available (Tversky and 

Wakker 1995:1270). In uncertainty, according to Knight (1921), the 

player has imprecise information. 

3. Ambiguity situations: A class of choice-situations where outcomes 

are ambiguous because the odds are ambiguous (Ellsberg 1961). 

Daniel Ellsberg had shown experimentally that when gambling, many 

people sometimes prefer to bet on known rather than unknown or 

vague probabilities, thereby violating the expected utility prediction put 

forth by Savage (1954) and serving as proof of the phenomenon of 

ambiguity aversion. Much later, C.R. Fox and Amos Tversky (1995) 

showed that ambiguity aversion occurs only when the choice set allows 

the actor to compare the ambiguous proposition with another, less 

vague proposition. In other words, ambiguity aversion depends both 

on the source of uncertainty and on the degree of uncertainty (Tversky 

and Wakker 1995:1255). In addition, it has been shown that a subject’s 

measured ambiguity aversion is related to his or her psychological 

tolerance for ambiguity, i.e. the less tolerant a player is of ambiguity, 

the more the player prefers to know the odds (Sherman 1974:169). As 

opposed to uncertainty, which is not necessarily avoidable, ambiguity – 

a synonym for vagueness – is always avoidable. 

The preceding list implies that at least the fi rst two decision-making situations can 

be derived from the relationship between decision and outcome / odds. By creating 

a matrix (see Table 10), we can, however, derive even more decision-making protosituations. 

These are listed below and tentatively named for the sake of completeness, 

but are not further discussed:

4. Possibility situations: Situations in which the decision-maker does 

not know the exact nature of potential outcomes, but knows the odds 

of those outcomes. 

5. Zero feedback situations: Situations in which the decision-maker knows 

neither the outcomes nor the odds of those outcomes materializing. 

Ignoring, for a moment, situation number three (i.e. ambiguity situation), we can think 

of another outcome–probability relationship that is not subject to degrees of insecurity: 

DECISION 

EXPECTED 

OUTCOMES 

6. Certainty situations: Situations in which outcomes and associated 

odds are completely predetermined (Fishburn 1991). 

3. Ambiguity 

PROBABILITIES ASSOCIATED 

WITH OUTCOMES 

Known Unknown 

Known 1. Risk 2. Uncertainty 

Unknown 4. Possibility 5. Zero feedback 

Table 10 

An overview of relationships between decision and outcome / odds. 

As can be seen, in each of the categories 1 to 5, probability plays a defi ning and 

standard role in insecure decision-making processes and has thus been chosen for the 

sake of argumentative clarity. Still, the question remains of whether or not probability 

could be replaced by an alternative in decision theory. 

In the fi eld of game studies, uncertainty is an agreed-on term used to express a feature 

designed into games in which chance is central to play. Caillois, for example, classifi es 

chance-based play alea as one fundamental category of ludic activity – i.e. “all games 

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332 

that are based on a decision independent of the player, an outcome over which he 

has no control, and in which winning is the result of fate rather than triumphing over 

an adversary” (Caillois 1962:17). From Callois’ category, it generally follows that 

uncertainty is the result of chance, and that chance can be a game’s main feature – 

a feature that some games have in common and that allows for these games to be 

grouped and categorized. 

Notice how in the quotation cited above, Caillois considers chance to be a gameplay 

progression factor that is entirely player-independent, ascribing a passive, control-less 

role to the player, who needs no further resources or skills in order to play. Salen and 

Zimmerman disagree with this depiction of games of pure chance, pointing out that 

Caillois may accurately describe the emotions of some players while playing a game 

of chance, but that “even in a game of pure chance, a well-designed game continually 

offers players moments of choice. Meaningful play requires that at some level a player 

(...) is making choices with meaningful outcomes“ (Salen and Zimmerman 2004:179). 

Merely casting dice and waiting, trembling, to see the result, as Caillois has observed, 

does not result in meaningful play. If the outcome of a game has been predefi ned, no 

meaningful play will arise for the player. 

Salen and Zimmerman hence argue that games of pure uncertainty – that is, games 

whose outcomes are completely unknown to the player and in which no player choice 

exists at all – are neither widespread nor much fun to play. 

In our second example of how the word uncertainty is used in game studies, Salen and 

Zimmerman, although rejecting games of pure chance as quasi unplayable, argue that 

“uncertainty is a central feature of every game” (2004:174), thereby claiming that there 

is an intrinsic bond between uncertainty and the authors’ concept of meaningful play. In 

their schema, which highlights games as systems of uncertainty, Salen and Zimmerman 

break down the relationship between a game decision and a game outcome into three

degrees of uncertainty, i.e. types of mathematical probability. This model differs slightly 

from the decision theory-based model that was introduced earlier: 

● a certain outcome is entirely predetermined; 

● a risk is an outcome with a known probability of taking place; 

● an uncertain outcome is entirely unknown to the player (2004:189). 

Salen and Zimmerman argue that in all games, even games of skill, the overall outcome 

of a well-designed game is uncertain for the player; on a macro-level, all games possess 

uncertainty (2004:174). 

How the player ultimately experiences uncertainty, however, may not necessarily 

correspond to the amount of mathematical chance designed into the game: “Uncertainty 

is in the eye of the beholder, or perhaps, in the play of the player“ (2004:187). For 

example, assume a single standard six-sided die, with each side of the die showing 

one number from one to six. When cast, the chance for each side to appear is 1/6, or 

16.67%. When all chances are added up – 6*16.67% – they total 1, or 100%. In Das 

grosse Buch der Würfelspiel (Knizia 2000), game designer (and mathematician) Reiner 

Knizia calls the numbers one to six the elementary outcomes, which are, as can be 

seen, not only equally likely to appear, but which also represent the possible set of 

basic outcomes that a player’s cast can produce (2000:51). 

Let us imagine a simple dice game that requires a single die, in which the player wins 

when he throws a six. The probability of throwing a six is always, for every cast, 1/6. The 

player can calculate this risk and thus choose to play a risk game when, for example, 

she bets on the next throw. The chance to succeed and thus win the bet is 1/6, while 

the risk of losing the bet is 5/6. However, psychologically, this kind of game can quickly 

take on a higher degree of felt uncertainty if, for example, the player hasn’t cast a six 

in many throws, or if other players are gambling for the accumulated bet, or against the 

PLAY-GROUNDS 

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PLAY-GROUNDS 

334 

bank, or both. In games that feature probability elements, the player interacts with the 

game system, while the system – although quite formal and somewhat predictable – 

together with the player forms a unique and highly situational gameplay loop that grows 

in complexity the more players or the more dice are involved. 

As has been demonstrated using examples from both decision theory and chance 

gaming, the play-ground of ambiguity can be made more precise and further broken 

down. Pervasive games may blur the locative dimension of gamespace, thereby 

introducing player uncertainty concerning the site of gameplay. Yet because of its 

game-nature, the play-ground of that game will be, naturally, subject to uncertainty in 

terms of outcome quantifi cation. 

In conclusion, the play-ground of ambiguity is realized whenever a game is at play; 

and whenever players play freely, they cannot be certain of where play may take them. 

In the end, and considering the described differentiation of uncertainty, ambiguity and 

risk, we have come full circle back to Brian Sutton-Smith’s ambiguity of play (1997), 

and fi nd that play is not only subject to contextual and rhetorical uses all across the 

sciences, but also that play and games are spatially framed.

GAME OVER! INSERT COIN. 

“The real key to the architecture of gamespace, 

like any other architecture, is the entrance and the exit” (Wigley 2007:486). 

1. Summary 

In this book, we have set out to architecturally frame play and games, both analytically 

and, where appropriate, designerly. We have structured the treatise according to three 

main sections, all of which contribute to our task of introducing the notion of a ludic 

architecture. 

In the fi rst section, we investigated the conceptual dimensions of the space of play, 

differentiating between an ambiguity dimension, a player dimension, a modality 

dimension, a kinetic dimension, an enjoyment dimension, and, fi nally, a culture and 

context dimension. The major fi nding and contribution of this section consists in a novel 

approach towards play that couples play with architectural thinking and practice. A 

second contribution is the introduction of F. J. J. Buytendijk’s work to the game studies 

and the architectural community. 

In the second section, we reviewed and updated existing notions of space and 

spatiality in digital games based on recent game and game design research, as well 

as on architectural research, with the goal of mapping a conceptual gamespace. In 

the concluding sub-section, we sketched out an analysis framework for investigating 

the spatiality of games. In this framework, we related dimensions of playspace to 

dimensions of gamespace; the resulting matrix can be considered the main fi nding of 

this section. 

GAME OVER! 

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In the third section, we applied our framework where appropriate in our critical and 

essayistic discussion of “play-grounds,” i.e. prototypical and historically persistent 

spatial topoi of play and gameplay. The major contribution of this section consists of 

the enumeration of these play-grounds and their conceptual linking. 

2. Final Remarks 

Games and play are here to stay. With technological developments, games and play 

will further evolve, and so will the gamespaces they produce and augment. Ultimately, 

some of us will live fully immersed in ludic machines – hybrid environments made 

to be played in, similar to Le Corbusier’s vision of houses as machines to live in (Le 

Corbusier 1928/2008:170). The question is: Will we play to dream or play to work? 

Alexander/Ishikawa/Silverstein (1977:Pattern 58), writing on entertainment, suggest 

that in a world where rites of passage have diminished and where circuses and carnivals 

have died out, there is an even stronger desire to live out dreams. Architects and city 

planners, then, are supposed to accommodate this desire and build dreams straight 

into the city in the form, for example, of an amusement park, where competitions, 

dance, music, tombolas, street theater, and one’s own non-everydayness can take 

place. In many ways, digital games in all modalities are a realization of these dreams. 

The crazy games that Alexander et al. want to see … well, put simply, they are already 

here. 

But as dream worlds, games have a societal function. “Dream worlds are a refl ection of 

our society, its desires and fantasies. As such they are not utopias, but play their part 

in the search for meaning” (Herwig and Holzherr 2006:17). What makes off-the-shelf 

sandbox games such as Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) so appealing for the masses?

Commercial digital games seek to sell optimized dreams, which, to borrow from another 

context, “represent an ideal order. Reality is spontaneous, chaotic, and parallel; dream 

worlds are, by contrast, controlled and sequential, a precisely planned route without 

detours or shortcuts, so the visitors can be sure of replicating that same experience 

as often as they like, in the spirit of the notion that happiness is nothing other than the 

desire for repetition. Satisfaction guaranteed” (Herwig and Holzherr 2006:17). In the 

case of GTA IV, this optimized dream takes place in Liberty City, the fully traversable 

re-design of New York City – an Amusement Park-like shadow of the urbanity and an 

ironic and quite delirious interpretation at once. 

If we assume that games as dream worlds have the potential to stabilize society 

because, as Crawford has put it, they frame “a safe way to experience reality” (whether 

or not reality is seen as too chaotic or too controlled), what will be the stabilizing factor 

if games become 100% pervasive? What will happen if we meet Super Mario in real 

life? How will we dream within an everlasting dream? Or if the political goal of pervasive 

games is to destabilize or at least transform, then what kind of society do we want? 

What are our options? The “complete environment” of a New Babylon, as Constant 

would have described it? The ones who criticize control, but propose control as a 

solution will either govern a post-revolutionary world or maybe be the fi rst ones eaten 

by their own revolution. 

Just as utopias always tell their own story as well as the story of a counter-concept 

of the space and times during which they were created, the fantasies that play out in 

games tell us something about the world in which we play our game fantasies. 

Back when digital gaming fi rst hit the mass market in the 1970s, movies such as Star 

Wars, the Star Trek TV series and movies as well as games such as Space Invaders, 

Defender, or Asteroids fi red our imagination with “the infi niteness of space” (Schütte 

2000:9) – and every since, games from independent as well as from commercial 

developers continue to do so. The impact of games onto culture has also led to games 

GAME OVER! 

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inspiring physical architecture. For example, London-based architectural practice FAT 

has conceived a community building and landscape for an economically underprivileged 

town on the outskirts of Rotterdam, Netherlands. Employing participatory as well as 

interventionist design tactics toward a suburban regeneration effort, FAT’s Heerlijkheid 

project in Hoogvliet displays bubbly, colorful and videogame-like elements such as a 

golden portico. The design not only explicitly resembles the Super Mario Bros. (1985) 

gameworld; it also refl ects the residents’ stories and dreams, thereby manufacturing a 

place in a double sense. Surely, Heerlijkheid is “an archetypal decorated shed, using 

sign-like popular imagery to communicate to its audience” (Long 2008). At the same 

time, attacking Modernist masterplan architecture, both the building and the landscape 

are emblematic of participative design as well as of videogame culture at least on the 

façade, the material and the topological level. 

What of the structural level? With Marcos Novak’s transArchitecture theory and related 

projects, we came to think of cyberspace and physical space as merging to create an 

architecture beyond architecture: “The signifi cance of this transition into, then through 

and eventually out of the looking-glass is the exploration of ideas and phenomena 

such as the fourth dimension will not remain limited to computer screens and headmounted 

displays but will occupy the actual spaces we inhabit” (Novak 1996). Now that 

pantopian games such as REXplorer exist, what will feed our fantasies when the fantasy 

can be anywhere? How technological will these fantasies be, and how technologized 

do they have to be, really? See Figure 62, which displays the low technology example 

of the bronze “Glockenhopse”, a popular nine-tone glockenspiel lowered into Berlin- 

Spandau’s market square. Will we use games to jazz architecture, as Ludger Hovestadt 

(2007) suggests? Will we construct greater Liberty Cities to spice up games – or reconstruct 

as well as augment the everyday with ephemeral, yet sustainable game rules 

and fi ctions to turn our networked, sensor- and actuator-rich urban environments into, 

potentially, neverending games or game-like experiences?

While “we are struggling to fully comprehend the possibilities of cross media experiences” 

(Davidson 2008:163), on the next level, where Game Design and Architectural Design 

truly merge, the questions become: who will be the architects of ubiquitous dreams, 

and what kind of ludic architectures will they build, for us to play? 

Figure 62 

Ludic architecture: Ground glockenspiel in Berlin-Spandau. 

GAME OVER! 

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Bioplay5000 (2005), developed by Steffen P. Walz and CAAD MAS students, published by the ETH Zurich. 

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Carcassonne (2000), developed by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, published by Hans im Glück. 

Civilization (1991), developed by MicroPose, published by MicroPose, Koei. 

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Cruel 2 Be Kind (2006), developed and published by Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost. 

Frogger (1981), developed by Konami, published by Sega. 

Das Spiel (1979), developed by Reinhold Wittig, published by Edition Perlhuhn. Published in English as The Game. 

Dead Rising (2006), developed and published by Capcom. 

Donkey Kong (1981), developed and published by Nintendo. 

Doom (1993), developed by id Software, published by id Software and GT Interactive. 

Dungeons & Dragons (1974), developed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, published by Tactical Studies Rules. 

Echochrome (2008), developed by SCE Japan Studio, published by Sony Computer Entertainment. 

Grand Theft Auto IV (2008), developed by Rockstar North, published by Rockstar Games. 

ETHGame (2005), developed by the ETHGame design class, Steffen P. Walz and Odilo Schoch, published by the ETH 

Zurich. 

foursquare (2008), developed and published by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. 

Free Running (2007), developed by Reef Entertainment, published by Rebellion.

Future Force Company Commander (2006), developed by Zombie, produced by Science Applications International 

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God of War (2005), developed by SCE Studios Santa Monica, published by Computer Entertainment. 

Guitar Hero (2005), developed by Harmonix Music Systems, Inc., published by RedOctane in partnership with Activision. 

ICO (2001), developed by Team Ico, published by Sony Computer Entertainment. 

Katamari Damacy (2004), developed and published by Namco. 

Killer (1981), developed and published by Steve Jackson Games. 

Kriegsspiel (1811), developed and published by Georg Leopold Baron of Reißwitz. 

M.A.D. Countdown (2002), developed by Steffen P. Walz, Thomas Seibert, Tim Ruetz and Mobile Application Design 

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Majestic (2001), developed by Anim-X, published by Electronic Arts. 

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Ole Million Face (1920s), developed by Carey Orr, Chicago and published by Face Corporation. Also known as Changeable 

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Pac-Man (1980), developed by Namco, published by Namco and Midway. 

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PainStation (2001), developed by Tilman Reiff and Volker Morawe, published by the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. 

Payphone Warriors (2006), developed by Abe Burmeister, Gregory Trefry, Cory Forsyth et al., published by Come Out 

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Second Life (2003), developed and published by Linden Research, formerly Linden Labs. 

Settlers of Catan (1995), developed by Klaus Teuber, published by Kosmos. 

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SimCity (1989), developed by Will Wright, published by Maxis Software et al. 

Space Invaders (1978), developed by Taito Corporation, published by Midway. 

Spacewar! (1962), developed by Steve Russell and other students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Spirits of Split (2004), developed by Convivio student team and Steffen P. Walz, published by Convivio Summer School 

/ Arts Academy of Split. 

Spore (2008), developed by Maxis, published by Electronic Arts. 

Super Mario Bros. (1985), developed by Nintendo EAD, published by Nintendo. 

Telespiele (1977-1981), developed by Holm Dressler, Wolfgang Penk, Thomas Gottschalk et al., broadcast by S3, ZDF 

& ARD, and produced by SWF. 

Tempest (1981), developed and published by Atari. 

Tetris (1985), developed by Alexey Pajitnov and Vadim Gerasimov, published by Various. 

THE aMAZEing LABYRINTH (board game) (1986), developed by Max Kobbert, published by Ravensburger. 

The Journey to Wild Divine (2003) published by the Journey to Wild Divine. 

The Sims (2000), developed by Maxis, published by Electronic Arts. 

Tombstone Hold ’Em (2005), developed and published by 42 Entertainment. 

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (1999), developed by Neversoft, published by Activision. 

Wii Sports (2006), developed by Nintendo, published by Nintendo. 

World of Warcraft (2004), developed by Blizzard Entertainment, published by Vivendi Universal. 

Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates (2003), developed by Three Rings Design, published by Three Rings Design and Ubisoft. 

Zork (1980), originally developed by MIT students 1977-1979, then Infocom; published by Personal Software.

3. Films and Television Shows 

Dawn of the Dead (1978), directed and written by George A. Romero, distributed by United Film Distribution Company 

et al., USA. 

Lost (TV series) (2004 - 2010), created by Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, broadcast on ABC, USA. 

Metropolis (1927), directed by Fritz Lang, written by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang, distributed by UFA / Paramount 

Pictures, Germany. 

Six Degrees (2006 - 2007), created by Raven Metzner and Stuart Zicherman, broadcast on ABC, USA. 

Six Degrees of Separation (1993), directed by Fred Schepisi, written by John Guare, distributed by MGM/UA, USA. 

Star Trek (TV series) (1966 - 2005), originally created by Gene Roddenberry, USA. 

Star Trek (fi lm series) (1979 - present), directed by multiple directors and distributed by Paramount Pictures. Based on 

the Star Trek television series originally created by Gene Roddenberry in 1966, USA. 

Star Wars (fi lm series) (1977 - 2005), initially created by George Lucas, distributed by 20th Century Fox, USA. 

Telespiele (1977 - 1981), created by Holm Dressler, Wolfgang Penk, Thomas Gottschalk et al., broadcast by S3, ZDF 

& ARD, produced by SWF, Germany. 

The Promise of Play (2000), directed and written by David Kennard and Stuart Brown, produced by The Institute for Play 

and Independent Communications Associates Productions, Canada. 

The Third Man (1949), directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene, distributed by British Lion Films, United 

Kingdom. 

The Truman Show (1998), directed by Peter Weir, written by Andrew Nicol, distributed by Paramount Pictures, USA. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

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