Toward a Ludic Architecture: The Space of Play and Games

“to show how play, movement, and rhythm inter- relate” ⤴️
“play and architecture share the properties of movement and rhythm at their core.” ⤴️
“notions of movement and rhythm in architecture,” ⤴️
“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” ⤴️
“movement and rhythm” ⤴️
“a pre-condition for spatiality” ⤴️
““Architecture is volume and movement” (Le Corbusier 1962:28). In other words, we wander through architecture, and this modality of movement 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 envir- onment.” ⤴️
“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 inter- linking of events – rhythms, i.e. pauses and tempi of space and light” ⤴️
“pro- gramming rhythm into the relationship between user and architecture” ⤴️
“consider this enacted relationship between a human be- ing and an architecture as more than a rhythmical program of move- ments without social or political connotation that assumed a universal human being void of ideology.” ⤴️
“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 sur- rounding space (1991:26).” ⤴️
“Lefebvre suggests a tripartite constitution of this (fundamentally so- cial) spatiality: the perceived material “spatial practice,” the conceived “representation of space,” and the “lived” spatiality of the representation itself, called “representational space” (1991:38f.).” ⤴️
““rhythm analysis” (1991:205)” ⤴️
“the city is analyzed through, for example, the rhythms created by bodies and their movements, daily sleep cycles, gestures, traffic, exchanges, sounds, sudden events such as accidents, festivities, moods, seasons, weather, light and darkness, colors, smells, the present-absent, tides, and waves.” ⤴️
“To Borden, the interaction enacted by and between skateboarders and their terrain al- lows us to think of architecture “not as a thing but a flow” (Borden 2001:9).” ⤴️
“the physical concepts of movement and rhythm relate to the psychological concept of “flow” (Csíkszentmihályi 1975), which many consider to be at the core of gameplay situations cap- able of absorbing players (Chen 2007).” ⤴️
“Flow-inducing activities such as ritual, play, dance, or art facilitate concentration and involve- ment by way of controllable rules, skill learning, attached goals, and feedback (Csíkszentmihályi 1991:72) – the type of flow that results, we see, is more related to formalized, game-like activities than to playful activities.” ⤴️
“architectural flow is based on the assumption that a certain type of architecture can cause a rhythmic to- and-fro flow, which need not necessarily result in a psychological flow state. T” ⤴️
“urban planning theorist Kevin Lynch (1960) con- cerns 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 ele- ments can heighten the city’s legibility and facilitate, for example, orient- ation.” ⤴️
“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 reflects Lynch’s belief that fundamentally, “a city is sensed in motion” (Lynch 1960:107).” ⤴️
“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 artificial city rhythms i” ⤴️
“the rhythm of change must be celebrated and carefully planned – in prototyping environments” ⤴️
“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 film stock that documents change (1972:248ff.).” ⤴️
“Rem Koolhaas” ⤴️
“glorifies 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-specific, unique architectural characteristic. Rather, Koolhaas sees tempo and movement as expres- sions of globalization that assure constant change and the promise of (or excuse for) generic architectures without predefined programs (Koolhaas 2003).” ⤴️
“For Koolhaas and his concept of the Generic City, it is not only the rhythm of spatial impressions that defines architecture, but also the rap- id rhythm of change that dictates how an urbanity should be designed so that it can accommodate both that change itself and the movements caus- ing it.” ⤴️
“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, artificially 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.” ⤴️
”” (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, in- consistent playground, always on the move.” ⤴️
“mobilizing archi- tectural construction” ⤴️
“voice-controlled levels that self-rotate 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 movement of the user in relation to the built environment, the movement of chance, or the habitual movement of structural play.” ⤴️
“the consequences of the mobile age have rubbed off on architectural vocabulary – just think of airports, rail- ways, the Autobahn, motels, car-friendly city planning and zoning, mod- ular furniture, etc. Today, movement – or, metaphorically speaking, li- quefaction – also impacts the architectural design process and building service and maintenance. T” ⤴️
“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.” ⤴️
“although these philosophies are distinguishable as design rhetorics, we are proposing that all are im- plicitly 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.” ⤴️
“Huizinga (1987) argues that dance is a particular and particularly perfect form of play: both phenom- ena are identical in nature.” ⤴️
“a proper understanding of dance would certainly shed light onto the nature of play” ⤴️
“dan- cing 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).” ⤴️
“Kinetography Laban or Labanotation, a movement nota- tion system similar to music notation that “indicate[s] the accurate rhythm of movement” (Hutchinson 1977:3). It is particularly intended for the field of dance and generally aims to analyze and “record objectively the changes in the angles of the limbs, the paths in space, and the flow of energy [as well as] movement motivation and the subtle expression and quality” (1977:4).” ⤴️
“Labanotation holds that movement is the result of the release of energy through a mus- cular 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.” ⤴️
“language of expressive gestures.” ⤴️
“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).” ⤴️
“we can think of gameplay as a kind of dance (2002:34).” ⤴️
“a more general and more dia- lectical 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 re- sponse to this stimulus, the player enacts a movement. This movement (or rhythm) places the player in a novel relation to another player, an ob- ject, or a space, possibly triggering a response.” ⤴️
“a visual notation system as an alternative analysis and information visualization method for a rhetorically oriented film analysis, intended to serve both as a tool and a language that transcends the composition of an opus.” ⤴️
“all human actions, including cognitive acts, rep- resent embodied action and that the bodily experience of movement is a way to access the world and objects in the world (2007:692).” ⤴️
“extended the Struc- tural Form to include interface aspects, differentiating body parts” ⤴️
“This extension makes it possible to transcribe gameplay per- formance in reference to what Labanotation classifies as a “Dab” effort – a movement light in weight, direct in space, and sudden in time.” ⤴️
“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.” ⤴️
“our human ability to move and to both react to and create rhythm,” ⤴️
does everyone have the cognitive ability to respond to rhythm? and is there a brain impulse measurable when someone paralysed intends to dance?
“Dialectic thinking embodies a speculative Denkbewegung – in English, a thinking movement. This movement be- gins when one thinks about something that exists. Then, from the start- ing 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).” ⤴️
“perfectly designed thinking in terms of move- ment and, conversely, moving in terms of thinking;” ⤴️
“dialectical moving describes a kind of play” ⤴️
“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).” ⤴️
“a philosophical investigation of play-movement could be criti- cized as either too esoteric or too speculative” ⤴️
“Buytendijk analyzes how both play and games dialectically transcend the opposition between player and play-other” ⤴️
“Huizinga criticizes Buytendijk for explaining play as a second- ing vehicle that serves a biological purpose, arguing that this kind of the- ory fails to investigate the holistic nature of play and games, what and how they are, and what they mean to the player (1971:12).” ⤴️
“Huizinga proposes that play and games interrelate with human culture, that they are, fundamentally, the base and factor of culture, finding their expres- sion in myths and rituals, law and order, traffic, handicraft and art, po- etry, scholarship, and science (1971:13).” ⤴️
“it attempts to explicate the general lineaments of play and games.” ⤴️
“play and games can be interpreted psychologically and anthropologically as expressions of life drives in both humans and anim- als” ⤴️
“Buytendijk understands “man as player” from childhood to adulthood, always seeking to understand play as passively expecting or actively seeking luck in life” ⤴️
“for Buytendijk, the “primitive” play and the rule- based game both pursue fictional, “as-if” purposes (Buytendijk 1933:159).” ⤴️
“the stimulative nature of objects and environments in relation to a subject.” ⤴️
“Principles of Topological Psychology (Lewin 1936), the first in a series of works dedicated to ex- plaining the situational behavior of a person in terms of the forces (or vectors) acting on him or her.” ⤴️
“Lewin’s Formula, a highly influential 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.” ⤴️
“explaining the attractive- ness of spaces or objects for motivating behavior in an individual” ⤴️
“any given situation models a “force field” 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.” ⤴️
““stimulative nature,” usu- ally referred to simply as “valence.”” ⤴️
“properties of objects or envir- onments are either positively or negatively motivating actions and that thereby, objects – including toys” ⤴️
“and environments trigger movement and determine the direction of be- havior in any individual (Lewin 1931/1982:177).” ⤴️
“de- termining situational movement – for example, reaching for a toy or climbing onto something” ⤴️
“valence also causes lo- comotion from region to region within a field” ⤴️
“valence adheres to an individual’s wants and condition” ⤴️
“To describe the sum of force fields in a person’s life, Lewin later intro- duced the term “hodological space.” This space can be expressed in the form of a psychologically defined topology in which paths and vectors between fields represent not the shortest paths, but the paths of least res- istance (Lewin 1982:66f.).” ⤴️
“the inspiration for Gibson’s “theory of affordances” (Gibson 1977)” ⤴️
“physical ob- jects 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.” ⤴️
“an object or an en- vironment 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” ⤴️
“an affordance need not be visible” ⤴️
“Norman (1990), in a designerly publication, limits action possibilities to an affordance that is easily dis- coverable by an individual.” ⤴️
“discoverable affordance has, in other words, become commonplace and well-loved for the way it stresses un- derstanding the participant’s goals, plans, values, beliefs, prior experi- ences, and embeddedness as a kind of ecology that can assist in motivat- ing an agent to interact with an object or an environment (Gibson 1979).” ⤴️
“Bollnow extends Lewin’s hodological space, which focuses on paths, with the concept of an activity space experienced by the individu- al 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.).” ⤴️
“Lewin’s legacy can be traced not only in psychological disciplines, but also in the context of mediated interactions and in architectural theory.” ⤴️
“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).” ⤴️
“Bartle (2004), defined 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.” ⤴️
“In order for play and/or a game to take place, there must be move- ment. 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).” ⤴️
“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 alterna- tion 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).” ⤴️
“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 com- prises ordered measurable movements between player and plaything.” ⤴️
“intensity, pace, proportion, and pattern, taking place during the amplitude between tension and termination (1933:particularly pages 62ff. and 114ff.).” ⤴️
“dance, like swinging and oscillating, is far more rhythmically explicit in the way that its tension and termination are organized (1933:120).” ⤴️
“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 envir- onmental and object attachment (1933:146) explains why play takes place in the first place. Rule-based play consolidates play- movements so that games become more ordered – become, so to speak, “adulted” play (1933:151f.).” ⤴️
“The playing field defines the outer borders of the dynamic to-and- fro of play and constrains the movements spatio-temporally (1933:118f.).” ⤴️
“Play rules are the virtual inner borders of the to-and-fro that define what cannot happen during play (as opposed to defining what has to happen) (Buytendijk 1933:119).” ⤴️
“following the communicative strategy of a “progress rhetoric” (Sutton-Smith1997:42), the qualities of play he lists” ⤴️
“we can think of play as an activity tied to movement in which we react to rhythm and strive to act rhythmically” ⤴️
““Once we see a pattern, we de- light in tracing it and in seeing it reoccur” (Koster 2005:27).” ⤴️
““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)” ⤴️
“reconsider the widely cited definition that “play is free move- ment within a more rigid structure” (Salen and Zimmerman 2004:304)” ⤴️
“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.” ⤴️
“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 relation- ship. At its core, kinesis is a spatial activity because all play-movements imply space.” ⤴️
“verbal movements such as trading, bidding, bluffing, negotiating, and, always, imagining.” ⤴️
“Unlike creative media such as books or films, digital environments represent space that we can move through: “The computer’s spatial qual- ity is created by the interactive process of navigation” (Murray 1997:80).” ⤴️
“Play rhythm can come into existence via kinetic interactions between player and play-other. In certain cases, the player adjusts to an outer rhythm.” ⤴️
“Play rhythmic types, then, indicate how the play rhythm comes about form- ally, not motivationally.” ⤴️
”• 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, finger 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).” ⤴️
if you’re playing with nothing, you’re playing with yourself over time and space
“Extrinsic rhythms in particular can be either pro- posed (the player volunteers to adjust movements to a sequence of meas- ured 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 con- sole, controller, and display.” ⤴️
bundled play-object
“g predetermined gameplay (so called “hard rails”)” ⤴️
“non- linear gameplay.” ⤴️
“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 spa- tial exploration.” ⤴️
“In the case of imposed play rhythms, the tension and ter- mination amplitude will tend to match the waveform of the play rhythm.” ⤴️
“Play rhythm in games can also emerge from interactions between space and space” ⤴️
““the gameworld is synched to the console calendar and clock so that events in the game oc- cur simultaneously with events in the real world, including major holi- days, 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 en- virons in that, for example, it perfectly navigates alongside house walls, never walking into them.” ⤴️
is this play? watching something do something - is it a toy? is it only a toy when interacted with? is a doll alone in a room still a toy is that definition in the interaction? this relates to the discomfort i felt as a kid at calling teddies/plushes/etc toys as i felt them a distinct category of object to other toys, due to the ‘life’ instilled in them rather than just play-interaction. but i still understood that this ‘life’ went away when i wasn’t interacting with them - this wasn’t a misunderstanding but a philosophical statement about objects
“In this case, the external play rhythm matches the tension and termination amplitude between the buttons, the tension and termination amplitude defined by the song length, and, fi- nally, the smaller (amplitudinal) portions of the song, such as verse, chorus, and bridge parts.” ⤴️
guitar hero
“-rhythmically firing bullets,” ⤴️
“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.” ⤴️
““Interactive technologies can operate in three basic ways: as tools, as media, and as social actors” (Fogg 2003:22).” ⤴️
“people treat com- puters like real people, real places, and real objects (Reeves and Nass 1996).” ⤴️
“tool, media, and social actor are the fundamental categories into which we can classify play rhythm.” ⤴️
”, understands spec- tatorship as a play pleasure.” ⤴️
“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).” ⤴️
“interactivity in play as the potential for a play rhythm.” ⤴️
“in order to interact with an object, anoth- er object may be needed” ⤴️
“a second-order play rhythm (which we can then also use to represent any n-order play rhythm) s” ⤴️
“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 specification and project docu- mentation purposes.” ⤴️
“The nature of play is kinetic.” ⤴️
“dialectical to-and-fro creates and/or adjusts to a play rhythm, which relates to alternations between tension and termin- ation: From both, a play dynamic emerges.” ⤴️
“helps us to understand how that with which the player plays has properties that make it more attractive or less attractive to play with;” ⤴️
“play and games in relation to an architectural design understanding.” ⤴️
“In our definition, kinesis defines the real or virtual movement that is embodied and co-located with play. Based on this definition 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 first and fundamental conceptual di- mension of playspace.” ⤴️
“displayed in a long exposure shot; this image, of course, only visualizes the prox- imate kinesis of the golf player and golf club, leaving out the golf course and the golf ball’s trajectory.” ⤴️
“to show how play, movement, and rhythm inter- relate” ⤴️
“play and architecture share the properties of movement and rhythm at their core.” ⤴️
“notions of movement and rhythm in architecture,” ⤴️
“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” ⤴️
“movement and rhythm” ⤴️
“a pre-condition for spatiality” ⤴️
““Architecture is volume and movement” (Le Corbusier 1962:28). In other words, we wander through architecture, and this modality of movement 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 envir- onment.” ⤴️
“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 inter- linking of events – rhythms, i.e. pauses and tempi of space and light” ⤴️
“pro- gramming rhythm into the relationship between user and architecture” ⤴️
“consider this enacted relationship between a human be- ing and an architecture as more than a rhythmical program of move- ments without social or political connotation that assumed a universal human being void of ideology.” ⤴️
“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 sur- rounding space (1991:26).” ⤴️
“Lefebvre suggests a tripartite constitution of this (fundamentally so- cial) spatiality: the perceived material “spatial practice,” the conceived “representation of space,” and the “lived” spatiality of the representation itself, called “representational space” (1991:38f.).” ⤴️
““rhythm analysis” (1991:205)” ⤴️
“the city is analyzed through, for example, the rhythms created by bodies and their movements, daily sleep cycles, gestures, traffic, exchanges, sounds, sudden events such as accidents, festivities, moods, seasons, weather, light and darkness, colors, smells, the present-absent, tides, and waves.” ⤴️
“To Borden, the interaction enacted by and between skateboarders and their terrain al- lows us to think of architecture “not as a thing but a flow” (Borden 2001:9).” ⤴️
“the physical concepts of movement and rhythm relate to the psychological concept of “flow” (Csíkszentmihályi 1975), which many consider to be at the core of gameplay situations cap- able of absorbing players (Chen 2007).” ⤴️
“Flow-inducing activities such as ritual, play, dance, or art facilitate concentration and involve- ment by way of controllable rules, skill learning, attached goals, and feedback (Csíkszentmihályi 1991:72) – the type of flow that results, we see, is more related to formalized, game-like activities than to playful activities.” ⤴️
“architectural flow is based on the assumption that a certain type of architecture can cause a rhythmic to- and-fro flow, which need not necessarily result in a psychological flow state. T” ⤴️
“urban planning theorist Kevin Lynch (1960) con- cerns 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 ele- ments can heighten the city’s legibility and facilitate, for example, orient- ation.” ⤴️
“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 reflects Lynch’s belief that fundamentally, “a city is sensed in motion” (Lynch 1960:107).” ⤴️
“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 artificial city rhythms i” ⤴️
“the rhythm of change must be celebrated and carefully planned – in prototyping environments” ⤴️
“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 film stock that documents change (1972:248ff.).” ⤴️
“Rem Koolhaas” ⤴️
“glorifies 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-specific, unique architectural characteristic. Rather, Koolhaas sees tempo and movement as expres- sions of globalization that assure constant change and the promise of (or excuse for) generic architectures without predefined programs (Koolhaas 2003).” ⤴️
“For Koolhaas and his concept of the Generic City, it is not only the rhythm of spatial impressions that defines architecture, but also the rap- id rhythm of change that dictates how an urbanity should be designed so that it can accommodate both that change itself and the movements caus- ing it.” ⤴️
“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, artificially 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.” ⤴️
”” (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, in- consistent playground, always on the move.” ⤴️
“mobilizing archi- tectural construction” ⤴️
“voice-controlled levels that self-rotate 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 movement of the user in relation to the built environment, the movement of chance, or the habitual movement of structural play.” ⤴️
“the consequences of the mobile age have rubbed off on architectural vocabulary – just think of airports, rail- ways, the Autobahn, motels, car-friendly city planning and zoning, mod- ular furniture, etc. Today, movement – or, metaphorically speaking, li- quefaction – also impacts the architectural design process and building service and maintenance. T” ⤴️
“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.” ⤴️
“although these philosophies are distinguishable as design rhetorics, we are proposing that all are im- plicitly 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.” ⤴️
“Huizinga (1987) argues that dance is a particular and particularly perfect form of play: both phenom- ena are identical in nature.” ⤴️
“a proper understanding of dance would certainly shed light onto the nature of play” ⤴️
“dan- cing 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).” ⤴️
“Kinetography Laban or Labanotation, a movement nota- tion system similar to music notation that “indicate[s] the accurate rhythm of movement” (Hutchinson 1977:3). It is particularly intended for the field of dance and generally aims to analyze and “record objectively the changes in the angles of the limbs, the paths in space, and the flow of energy [as well as] movement motivation and the subtle expression and quality” (1977:4).” ⤴️
“Labanotation holds that movement is the result of the release of energy through a mus- cular 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.” ⤴️
“language of expressive gestures.” ⤴️
“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).” ⤴️
“we can think of gameplay as a kind of dance (2002:34).” ⤴️
“a more general and more dia- lectical 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 re- sponse to this stimulus, the player enacts a movement. This movement (or rhythm) places the player in a novel relation to another player, an ob- ject, or a space, possibly triggering a response.” ⤴️
“a visual notation system as an alternative analysis and information visualization method for a rhetorically oriented film analysis, intended to serve both as a tool and a language that transcends the composition of an opus.” ⤴️
“all human actions, including cognitive acts, rep- resent embodied action and that the bodily experience of movement is a way to access the world and objects in the world (2007:692).” ⤴️
“extended the Struc- tural Form to include interface aspects, differentiating body parts” ⤴️
“This extension makes it possible to transcribe gameplay per- formance in reference to what Labanotation classifies as a “Dab” effort – a movement light in weight, direct in space, and sudden in time.” ⤴️
“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.” ⤴️
“our human ability to move and to both react to and create rhythm,” ⤴️
does everyone have the cognitive ability to respond to rhythm? and is there a brain impulse measurable when someone paralysed intends to dance?
“Dialectic thinking embodies a speculative Denkbewegung – in English, a thinking movement. This movement be- gins when one thinks about something that exists. Then, from the start- ing 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).” ⤴️
“perfectly designed thinking in terms of move- ment and, conversely, moving in terms of thinking;” ⤴️
“dialectical moving describes a kind of play” ⤴️
“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).” ⤴️
“a philosophical investigation of play-movement could be criti- cized as either too esoteric or too speculative” ⤴️
“Buytendijk analyzes how both play and games dialectically transcend the opposition between player and play-other” ⤴️
“Huizinga criticizes Buytendijk for explaining play as a second- ing vehicle that serves a biological purpose, arguing that this kind of the- ory fails to investigate the holistic nature of play and games, what and how they are, and what they mean to the player (1971:12).” ⤴️
“Huizinga proposes that play and games interrelate with human culture, that they are, fundamentally, the base and factor of culture, finding their expres- sion in myths and rituals, law and order, traffic, handicraft and art, po- etry, scholarship, and science (1971:13).” ⤴️
“it attempts to explicate the general lineaments of play and games.” ⤴️
“play and games can be interpreted psychologically and anthropologically as expressions of life drives in both humans and anim- als” ⤴️
“Buytendijk understands “man as player” from childhood to adulthood, always seeking to understand play as passively expecting or actively seeking luck in life” ⤴️
“for Buytendijk, the “primitive” play and the rule- based game both pursue fictional, “as-if” purposes (Buytendijk 1933:159).” ⤴️
“the stimulative nature of objects and environments in relation to a subject.” ⤴️
“Principles of Topological Psychology (Lewin 1936), the first in a series of works dedicated to ex- plaining the situational behavior of a person in terms of the forces (or vectors) acting on him or her.” ⤴️
“Lewin’s Formula, a highly influential 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.” ⤴️
“explaining the attractive- ness of spaces or objects for motivating behavior in an individual” ⤴️
“any given situation models a “force field” 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.” ⤴️
““stimulative nature,” usu- ally referred to simply as “valence.”” ⤴️
“properties of objects or envir- onments are either positively or negatively motivating actions and that thereby, objects – including toys” ⤴️
“and environments trigger movement and determine the direction of be- havior in any individual (Lewin 1931/1982:177).” ⤴️
“de- termining situational movement – for example, reaching for a toy or climbing onto something” ⤴️
“valence also causes lo- comotion from region to region within a field” ⤴️
“valence adheres to an individual’s wants and condition” ⤴️
“To describe the sum of force fields in a person’s life, Lewin later intro- duced the term “hodological space.” This space can be expressed in the form of a psychologically defined topology in which paths and vectors between fields represent not the shortest paths, but the paths of least res- istance (Lewin 1982:66f.).” ⤴️
“the inspiration for Gibson’s “theory of affordances” (Gibson 1977)” ⤴️
“physical ob- jects 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.” ⤴️
“an object or an en- vironment 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” ⤴️
“an affordance need not be visible” ⤴️
“Norman (1990), in a designerly publication, limits action possibilities to an affordance that is easily dis- coverable by an individual.” ⤴️
“discoverable affordance has, in other words, become commonplace and well-loved for the way it stresses un- derstanding the participant’s goals, plans, values, beliefs, prior experi- ences, and embeddedness as a kind of ecology that can assist in motivat- ing an agent to interact with an object or an environment (Gibson 1979).” ⤴️
“Bollnow extends Lewin’s hodological space, which focuses on paths, with the concept of an activity space experienced by the individu- al 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.).” ⤴️
“Lewin’s legacy can be traced not only in psychological disciplines, but also in the context of mediated interactions and in architectural theory.” ⤴️
“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).” ⤴️
“Bartle (2004), defined 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.” ⤴️
“In order for play and/or a game to take place, there must be move- ment. 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).” ⤴️
“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 alterna- tion 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).” ⤴️
“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 com- prises ordered measurable movements between player and plaything.” ⤴️
“intensity, pace, proportion, and pattern, taking place during the amplitude between tension and termination (1933:particularly pages 62ff. and 114ff.).” ⤴️
“dance, like swinging and oscillating, is far more rhythmically explicit in the way that its tension and termination are organized (1933:120).” ⤴️
“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 envir- onmental and object attachment (1933:146) explains why play takes place in the first place. Rule-based play consolidates play- movements so that games become more ordered – become, so to speak, “adulted” play (1933:151f.).” ⤴️
“The playing field defines the outer borders of the dynamic to-and- fro of play and constrains the movements spatio-temporally (1933:118f.).” ⤴️
“Play rules are the virtual inner borders of the to-and-fro that define what cannot happen during play (as opposed to defining what has to happen) (Buytendijk 1933:119).” ⤴️
“following the communicative strategy of a “progress rhetoric” (Sutton-Smith1997:42), the qualities of play he lists” ⤴️
“we can think of play as an activity tied to movement in which we react to rhythm and strive to act rhythmically” ⤴️
““Once we see a pattern, we de- light in tracing it and in seeing it reoccur” (Koster 2005:27).” ⤴️
““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)” ⤴️
“reconsider the widely cited definition that “play is free move- ment within a more rigid structure” (Salen and Zimmerman 2004:304)” ⤴️
“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.” ⤴️
“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 relation- ship. At its core, kinesis is a spatial activity because all play-movements imply space.” ⤴️
“verbal movements such as trading, bidding, bluffing, negotiating, and, always, imagining.” ⤴️
“Unlike creative media such as books or films, digital environments represent space that we can move through: “The computer’s spatial qual- ity is created by the interactive process of navigation” (Murray 1997:80).” ⤴️
“Play rhythm can come into existence via kinetic interactions between player and play-other. In certain cases, the player adjusts to an outer rhythm.” ⤴️
“Play rhythmic types, then, indicate how the play rhythm comes about form- ally, not motivationally.” ⤴️
”• 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, finger 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).” ⤴️
if you’re playing with nothing, you’re playing with yourself over time and space
“Extrinsic rhythms in particular can be either pro- posed (the player volunteers to adjust movements to a sequence of meas- ured 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 con- sole, controller, and display.” ⤴️
bundled play-object
“g predetermined gameplay (so called “hard rails”)” ⤴️
“non- linear gameplay.” ⤴️
“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 spa- tial exploration.” ⤴️
“In the case of imposed play rhythms, the tension and ter- mination amplitude will tend to match the waveform of the play rhythm.” ⤴️
“Play rhythm in games can also emerge from interactions between space and space” ⤴️
““the gameworld is synched to the console calendar and clock so that events in the game oc- cur simultaneously with events in the real world, including major holi- days, 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 en- virons in that, for example, it perfectly navigates alongside house walls, never walking into them.” ⤴️
is this play? watching something do something - is it a toy? is it only a toy when interacted with? is a doll alone in a room still a toy is that definition in the interaction? this relates to the discomfort i felt as a kid at calling teddies/plushes/etc toys as i felt them a distinct category of object to other toys, due to the ‘life’ instilled in them rather than just play-interaction. but i still understood that this ‘life’ went away when i wasn’t interacting with them - this wasn’t a misunderstanding but a philosophical statement about objects
“In this case, the external play rhythm matches the tension and termination amplitude between the buttons, the tension and termination amplitude defined by the song length, and, fi- nally, the smaller (amplitudinal) portions of the song, such as verse, chorus, and bridge parts.” ⤴️
guitar hero
“-rhythmically firing bullets,” ⤴️
“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.” ⤴️
““Interactive technologies can operate in three basic ways: as tools, as media, and as social actors” (Fogg 2003:22).” ⤴️
“people treat com- puters like real people, real places, and real objects (Reeves and Nass 1996).” ⤴️
“tool, media, and social actor are the fundamental categories into which we can classify play rhythm.” ⤴️
”, understands spec- tatorship as a play pleasure.” ⤴️
“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).” ⤴️
“interactivity in play as the potential for a play rhythm.” ⤴️
“in order to interact with an object, anoth- er object may be needed” ⤴️
“a second-order play rhythm (which we can then also use to represent any n-order play rhythm) s” ⤴️
“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 specification and project docu- mentation purposes.” ⤴️
“The nature of play is kinetic.” ⤴️
“dialectical to-and-fro creates and/or adjusts to a play rhythm, which relates to alternations between tension and termin- ation: From both, a play dynamic emerges.” ⤴️
“helps us to understand how that with which the player plays has properties that make it more attractive or less attractive to play with;” ⤴️
“play and games in relation to an architectural design understanding.” ⤴️
“In our definition, kinesis defines the real or virtual movement that is embodied and co-located with play. Based on this definition 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 first and fundamental conceptual di- mension of playspace.” ⤴️
“displayed in a long exposure shot; this image, of course, only visualizes the prox- imate kinesis of the golf player and golf club, leaving out the golf course and the golf ball’s trajectory.” ⤴️

Resources

misc notes

Toward a Ludic Architecture: The Space of Play and Games