Urban game space, urban play space
Speaking of parkour and vertical mobility, serial consign reports on a new video game in development:
The narrative revolves around Faith, a nimble traceur in a predictably totalitarian, ultra-sterile futuristic cityscape. Faith, a parkour courier, has been charged with delivering some extremely valuable information - so valuable in fact that she finds herself relentlessly pursued through the city by ruthless government agents. Sweep aside all the plot junk and you are left with the potential for an exciting new simulation of the city as an elaborate playground. What immediately caught my attention about these preliminary screenshots is manner in which architecture elements are demarcated. As per her training in ‘the art of displacement’ Faith possess an innate ability for reading the geometry of her surroundings and this translates into a playing field where the objects, surfaces and assemblies that comprise the city are colour coded according to accessibility. When considered in this manner, the city becomes a giant text and, fittingly, play revolves around spatial problem solving and wayfinding rather than trigger finger virtuosity. (via)
Also: Régine Debatty reviews Ground-up City. Play as a Design Tool, a new book that “maps the continuing history of an urban design strategy for play in the city.”
Following up on a link in that post, near Manchester is a new playground for over-60s that offers the opportunity for playful exercise, and perhaps more importantly, plenty of laughter and chatting.
Still, all this playfulness can get under people’s skin. Momus asks:
What happens when you turn a city into a playground? What happens when fun and games become values you can’t question? And how “pervasive” does Pervasive Urban Gaming have to become? So pervasive that it not only invades the city but penetrates and pervades the shields we all raise in the city to protect ourselves and our different ways of living, our precious, precarious cultural ecosystems which can co-exist only if they — precisely — don’t pervade? What, in other words, does PUG do to multiculturalism and diversity? Because, just as every microculture in the city has its own gender relations, so every microculture in the city has a different sense of personal space, a different way of playing. We won’t all necessarily get on, even after the application of alcohol. Some of us don’t even drink alcohol.
Indeed.
- Anne