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Dimensions should be at least 760px x 200px. Anything above that will get cropped off of the image. */ #headerimg { background: url('http://buzzcut.com/wp-content/themes/default/images/personalheader.jpg') no-repeat top;} .recentcomments a{display:inline !important;padding: 0 !important;margin: 0 !important;} Home The Ludic Age November 18th, 2008 During this year's Game for Change conference, quick thinker and creative mind Eric Zimmerman dropped a new concept on the audience, "Maybe, ", he suggested, "We are living in the Ludic Age ."His point was well received by a room full of people hoping to change the world through play and games. And his concept made sense on the surface. The industrial age led to the information age and now that we are drowning in all that information and technology, maybe games were helping us figure out how to deal with it all. Whether we had entered the age of games or not, it seemed plausible to at least hope we were.As I work through the question of "What makes a place fun?" I find another reason to give Eric's idea further consideration–the ebb and flow of the romantic and rationalist tendencies in culture.If we think about Romanticism as reading truth in the visible and the human response to that truth, contrasted by the Rationalist tendency to seek natural truth beyond the surface, in the observable matter of the universe, then we set up the dichotomy that sticks with us to this day. Is truth empirical science or human experience? The Romantic movement is most closely associated with the an 19th Century reaction to the Rational efforts of the industrial age. Faced with the ugly truth of people treated like parts in a machine and tied to a ticking clock, the Romantics were concerned with the shape of experience and the power of narrative. The Romantic and Rational have pushed back and forth ever since.Today, the Information Age, the Digital Age, is another Rationalist turn, whereby computers are seen as the basis for encoding all experience as binary quanta. Perhaps no one has voiced an objection to this point-of-view more eloquently than computer pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum when he wrote:""Beginning perhaps with Francis Bacon's misreading of the genuinepromise of science, man has been seduced into wishing and working forthe establishment of an age of rationality, but with his vision ofrationality tragically twisted so as to equate it with logicality. Thushave we very nearly come to the point where almost every genuine humandilemma is seen as a mere paradox, as a merely apparent contradictionthat could be untangled by judicious applications of cold logic derivedfrom a higher standpoint Even murderous wars have come to perceived asmere problems to be solved by hordes of professional problem solvers." (Quote in The New Media Reader, p374)This from the man that programmed ELIZA a piece of software that famously simulated a psychologist. He was deeply concerned that we trusted our rational mode too much, up to and including considering his computer science experiment a viable tool for helping people with their psychological problems. His call for a new humanism stopped short of a Romantic point of view, but its decisive criticism of the Rational opens the door for an alternative.Living in the shadow of Weizenbaum, as it were, perhaps now we see a Romantic turn, a return to the idea that play, imagination, creativity and sublime human experience matter more than the output of a computer. Perhaps, the "Ludic Age" is really a response to the Rationalism of the Information Age.Turning to architecture, it's hard to argue that the super stars of architectural design have not already made the shift back to the Romantic mode. Koolhaas' Dubai projects can stand for the time and speak to a sensibility more Ruskin than van der Rohe, more play than work and more ludic than information. In short, more fun. Posted by email from buzzcut blog (posterous) Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » Get Small — Landscape, Scale and Fun November 17th, 2008 What makes a place fun? Scale seems to have something to do with it.As any SimCity player can tell you, part of what makes that game fun is playing a powerful being that can dink with a giant city. It's fun to feel big, or at least, it's fun to look at tiny things.London-based slinkachu creates tiny urban tableaux from miniature figures placed in satirical and surprising settings. You might find police investigating a drowning victim in a puddle, or thrill-seekers riding a real snail. Pictures of the tiny people close up and then from a pedestrian point of view makes clear the exaggerations in scale and through these contrasts the comedy works.San Francisco-based artist Krista Peel has created a large number of doll house-inspired miniature art projects. Her 2009 calendar project, Public Park provided a 52" x 30" HO scale park and invited fellow artists to create scenes to place in the park. The Candy Land-colored scenes combine miniature whimsy with a landscape that seems real enough that you find yourself wishing that it was.What's the critical place of scale in fun? These projects suggest a few answers–surprising juxtaposition, childlike wonder at toy-sized objects, unexpected collisions of naive and serious content and, well, there's just something magical about tiny pretend people. Posted by email from buzzcut blog (posterous) Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » Public Art WTF? Part 2 November 10th, 2008 Viewed from a distance, the pile of big read beans, or bags, on the east end of the 16th street pedestrian bridge, looks sort of like a pile of frosting or a Dr. Suess Christmas tree. Once you get closer, the color is a deep red that makes you think of blood and the limp elements look like sand bags, or melted candy. It's an image both disturbing and funny.Lacking any other context, at the moment, than police tape, it's not clear whether the piece is a temporary exhibit, still unfinished, or some well-intentioned comment about the war. As I looked at the sculpture a man walking by muttered, "Body bags?".Public art can serve a number of functions from creating beauty and repose in a busy place to asking questions and engaging citizens. And at this point, while I don't care for the piece much on its own, nestled in the looping concrete and steel ramp of the pedestrian bridge, it provides a jarring moment in the otherwise cleanly modern city stroll. It just gives you something to look at (in fact the color and shape demands that you look at it) pulling your eye way from the shops, apartments and city traffic all around you. This is active public art that demands a dialog. Not surprisingly, then, graffiti has already appeared, a sort of aesthetic comment left on the base of the piece like some urban blogger answering the boisterous argument of the original work.I don't know if the bloody beans sculpture is any good. But it is fun!  See and download the full gallery on posterousPosted by email from buzzcut blog (posterous) Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment » Public art WTF? November 8th, 2008 Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of public art. But this piece sprung up over night on my path to downtown and just remind me of….well, the mind sort of boggles doesn’t it? Bloody beans would be a generous description. Really, it just looks like a pile of crap.Who knows, maybe it will grow on me. I ‘ll end up seeeing it about twice a day 5 days a week.    See and download the full gallery on posterousPosted by email from buzzcut blog (posterous) Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments » Hell House / Haunted House November 7th, 2008 A twitter post from an NYC friend reminded me of my long ago visit to a local Denver "Hell House". It was over 10 years ago, and my recollection is a bit fuzzy. But some of the memorable facts are these:I think this was one of the early versions of the original Hell House concept, where a church would stage a reasonably gruesome haunted house desgned to show you what happens when you ally with the devil.Some of the rooms in the house included a patient dying of AIDS, a couple of kids mangled in a drunk driving accident and, the classic abortion scene, where a doctor pulls a bloody, pulstating baby (doll) from a hysterically overacting teenager.The climax of the piece was a decent to hell which I recall smelled sort of annoyingly of rotten eggs (sulpher, maybe?) and populated by a screaming souls writhing about on the church cafeteria floor begging for mercy while the devil, who looked suspiciously like John Lovitz, cackled and invited us to join them.My friend Bruce and I had spent the hour or so waiting in line drinking Jack and Coke out of Arby's cups. So, we politely laughed our way through all the "horror". But the worse was yet to come.Before you could leave, an earnest white haired gentleman huddled our group–which consisted of a bunch of teenagers and us–and asked us to pray. Abortions and dying AIDS patients played played by goofy Christian teenagers was easy to laugh at. But this was uncomfortable. While everyone bowed their head and prayed, Bruce and I looked at each other and wondered what would be more discourteous, just wait it out or bolt. I don't remember what we did because I turned my brain off.These anecdotes seems worth remembering as I spend time researching the idea of the fun house, the haunted house and the house turned into a play house by its occupants. In this case, the house of worship becomes a play house in the sense of hosting a inverted passion play, meant to turn the sinner onto the right road with a bit of camp and some earnest (if badly acted) theater. This is really a lot different than a regular haunted house, which paces its thrills to stimulated waves of excitement and rest for no other purpose that to create a short term drama linked to some pretty tired tropes–guy with chainsaw, vampire on the loose, maniac with a knife, eerie ghost, etc,So, a quick linage goes in reverse from Hell House, to haunted house, to 1950s television and monster movies and carnival fun houses to Victorian Gothic literature to the endless depths of fear that stalk the civilized mind. Sure, this is a certain kind of historiography of horror with its implied rhetorical point. But it does place the Hell House at the right end of an evolving chain of play spaces where dark themes serve different masters and continue to center the concept of the home–the safe place–as the inside-out dangerous place.And maybe that's why the Hollywood Hell House–a later version of the same concept–has managed to attracte so many wry celebs to play everything from the devil to Jesus. The Haunted House is a simulacra of our fears.Posted by email from buzzcut blog (posterous) Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment » Far Cry 2 November 6th, 2008 The increase of computing power in game consoles (and by proxy games on personal computers) has allowed for the both the increase in the graphic detail of game environments as well as the increase in their size and scope. Far Cry 2 pushes the art of level design forward offering 50 square kilometers of game levels featuring a unparalleled level of deail–especially in the foliage. A big part of the fun of this game is feeling like you are in the middle of some mid-continent African bush war. And despite its Soldier of Fortune meets Disney;s Animal Kingdom aethetic, it’s a reasosnable fun game to play. What I find the most interesting is that the included level editor not only allows you to create settings as rich and evokative as those in the game, but that with very little effort, you can make a place that feels real and compelling. Why? Graphic detail is one. But more important–trees and bushes. Plop down a couple of ramshackle buildings on sand and it looks like a game. Pile on a forest of trees and ferns, drooping vines and creeping ground cover and you have an oasis that a National Geographic photographer could love. Posted by email from buzzcut blog (posterous) Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » New York Mystery House June 17th, 2008 What does it take to get your Upper East Side 5th Ave condo in the New York Times? How about an architect who decides to build in a Da Vinci Code mystery right into the design and not tell the client:Mystery on Fifth Avenue - NYTimes.comBut some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough, whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.A couple of notable points about this project and the article:1. The fact that the client couple had children seemed to make the mystery and play acceptable, even though most of the puzzles and the prizes were focused on the grown-ups.2. The design of the mysteries and secrets was such a compelling project that the project architect was able to engage 40-some co-conspirators in the process. Design at play and the design of play is so special that people want to participate, even if for free.3. This article assumes this kind of fun house is unusual. And while not common, it turns out that the design of fun houses remains a consistent thread throughout the evolution of the home.4. Once the mystery was solved, the family moved. Is the home as a game a disposable artifact, something meant to be enjoyed then discarded? Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » Laughing at Goff June 14th, 2008  Anything that Charles Jenks writes is probably worth a look. But when he joyously points to the fun in Bruce Goff’s work, any serious student of play in architecture has to stop and consider what’s going on:Looking, learning and laughing with Bruce Goff It is impossible not to smile and laugh appreciatively when one visits a good Goff house, smile at the bad jokes and chuckle with an inward appreciation that Bruce Alonso Goff (1904-82) often gets the better of those architects who are invoked to justify his work. These paragons used to be Frank Lloyd Wright and Andrea Palladio, but today, in the Age of the Iconic Arms Race (as it is called), the names are Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid.Just as Marcel Duchamp made the art world revalue the readymade and reconsider pop and conceptual art, so has Bruce Goff forced us to reconsider the preoccupations that exercise today’s architecture.The playful house, and the fun in architecture, it seems, can produce important contemplation about design. Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » SimCity: Super Size Me April 18th, 2008  Close to twenty years since the original was released, SimCity remains a peculiar outlier in the videogame landscape. And why not? A game nominally designed around the job of city planner or urban designer and one that tiptoes delicately around the notions of objective, goal or win condition, it’s a wonder that the game ever sat on the shelves next to titles such as Doom and Civilization.But rather than quibble about whether SimCity is, in fact a game, or should, on it’s merits, be considered one, instead we should accept that it has flourished in its evolutionary niche as something fun to do on your computer.Unfortunately, the success of The Sims and glowing promise of Spore has taken more than some of the developer’s attention away from its oldest child. So, it doesn’t really surprise that other developers will rise to the challenge of updating the city-building game for the 21st Century. That’s what fuels the thrill in the following announcement:CITIES XL - HomeMonte Cristo is pleased to announce CITIES XL™ for Windows today. In this next-generation take on the city building genre, realism will be pushed to the limit with cities that are bigger, more realistic and more sophisticated than ever before. CITIES XL™ will expand upon all the features that make city builders fun and interesting, while also letting players take their game online, as they interact with others in a massive online environment.The game is not due until next year. But screenshots and the sheer audacity in scale make this one to watch. Will Cites XL revolutionize the SimCity genre? Is planning education about to go through another wave of enthusiasm for simulation in the classroom beyond the creaky GIS and Google Earth used today?Will it even be any fun to manage the urban densification of an entire planet with friends?One way or the other, playing with cities is going to get more interesting soon. Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments » Millenium Falcon April 15th, 2008  While this certainly does not qualify as an example of fun architecture, this is a great example of people having fun with architecture.Life Without Buildings speculates that, contrary to the claims of the Star Wars designer that cooked up the plans for Han Solo’s starship, The Millennium Falcon wasn’t inspired by random foodstuff.Life Without Buildings: Otto Wagner and the Millenium Falcon: an architecture blog However, I’m more inclined to believe he was flipping through the pages of an Otto Wagner book and came across his 1880 design for the central offices of the Vienna Giro und Kassenverein competition.Raw speculation or brilliant insight? For me, the question is: Are certain forms naturally fun? Maybe more precisely, any form can be imbibed with a cosmic fantasy. Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » « Previous Entries buzzcut home The Ludic Age Get Small — Landscape, Scale and Fun Public Art WTF? Part 2 Public art WTF? Hell House / Haunted House Far Cry 2 New York Mystery House Laughing at Goff SimCity: Super Size Me Millenium Falcon David on Public Art WTF? Part 2David on Public art WTF?brandyradey on Public art WTF?Dennis G. Jerz on Hell House / Haunted HouseDavid on Wacky Dubai -- Summoning the Future buzzcut cares about videogames and architecture. An odd mix, I know.
But it makes sense when you ask the simple question: What makes a place fun?
buzzcut looks into games as environments (or environments as games).
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