Aperio: Games and Spaces

The Hidden Playground

Researcher Sara Grimes discusses the intersection of games and outdoor play. On the one hand, games can provide environments of exploration unavailable to urban youth and the children of suburban sprawl. On the other, games can encourage kids to look at their own environments in a new way. As Grimes writes, “digital games can perform a similar function to seeing stones by subverting the mundane character of things like streetlamps and trash bins.” As a kid, I lamented not having the ultimate backyard of adventure as pictured in Bill Watterson’s comic Calvin and Hobbes. However, I do remember running around my house in endless circles, swinging a plastic sword while combating imaginary enemies and collecting power-ups. Taking what I had learned from games about the escalating difficulty and intricacy of level design, my first lap around the house would be only on the ground, while subsequent laps required climbing on my swing set or backtracking counter-clockwise around the house. Video games fundamentally shaped the way I saw and still see the world around me, so I highly support Grimes’ call for discovering new places of play.

Theme Park Maps

I’ve always been fascinated by the maps of theme parks. Not only do they help people find their way around, but they tell a story of the park. The theme park maps archive, which I just discovered via Lifehacker, offers a historical perspective of the United States’ most popular amusement parks. Choosing any single park, you can look how it has changed in time. It’s interesting to watch the parks undergo changes as rides get renamed, new sections are built, and stage shows are replaced by more thrill rides. It’s also neat to see those things that have not changed—the timeless elements of a park that give it its distinct character. So, I implore you to browse the archives for your favorite park and reminisce as you watch it change through history.

Real World Turned Virtual: Avatar Machine

GameSetWatch introduced a cool latecomer to today’s round-up: the Avatar Machine. A project by artist Marc Owen, the Avatar Machine projects a third-person perspective of the individual wearing Owen’s suit onto a VR head-mounted display, so they see themselves in the environment. Owen states that “the system potentially allows for
a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.” A better technical explanation of an earlier implementation can be found on We Make Money Not Art.

Avatar Machine [LONDON] 2008 from MARC OWENS on Vimeo.

This blog entry is a bite-sized portion of my Master’s thesis on Representations of the City in Video Games.

Maps provided in-game are an integral part of how the player makes sense of a space. Maps help players understand space by establishing physical geographic relationships between places, by revealing possibilities of navigation, and by explicitly showing some of Kevin Lynch’s city elements (districts, paths, landmarks, nodes). There are different forms the map can take. The pause-menu map, as seen in Grand Theft Auto IV, Spider-Man 2, Ultimate Spider-Man, and True Crime: New York City, can be browsed and zoomed while the game is paused. Pause-menu maps usually detail locations of interest, destinations, and the player position, but what does this information say about each of these city spaces?

Both GTA IV and True Crime: NYC treat the district/neighborhood as their smallest level of granularity. While the GTA IV map can be zoomed, the True Crime: NYC map remains at the same scale. Though both games show the neighborhoods or districts on their map, the utility of doing so is more obvious in True Crime. Manhattan in True Crime is divided into police precincts that correspond to the actual precincts of the real New York City.

One of the uses of the map is to check the level of crime in each district. Successfully completing dispatch missions reduces the crime-rate, which is shown on the map on a green-to-red scale. And while it might be a goal of the game to turn all precincts to green, the rigid divisions of the precinct reveals the relatively tenuous connection between crime and geographic location. Does arresting a perpetrator on one street really improve the relative crime-rate of somewhere ten streets away? If the game’s modeling of this system seems flawed, it perhaps reveals the flaws of the actual practice of systematically dividing geographic regions and judging their overall level of crime.

When might a player refer to the GTA IV pause map? Liberty City is an expansive place and destinations, whether in some sort of mission or player-defined, are often on another island. This means that player cannot just aim their trajectory toward a destination marker on their radar map, as they might need to get on a freeway on-ramp to take one of Liberty City’s many bridges. The map reveals the intricacies of the road system and the complexity of the transportation infrastructure. True Crime: New York City does not face the same difficulties because it is limited to the island of Manhattan, which is relatively well gridded.

To help players move between locations, Grand Theft Auto IV features a bright yellow line of navigation on its maps. This line will appear during a mission when a target location is marked or can be applied by the player if they manually set a waypoint on their map. The line finds the shortest possible distance between the player’s location and destination and will update itself if the player finds themselves off-course. Some cars in the game also have audible turn-by-turn directions based on a diagetic GPS system to go along with the highlighted route.

The pause-menu maps of Ultimate Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 are very similar, as Ultimate Spider-Man came out of the same production studio a year after the film tie-in game. Buildings are the most important feature of the map. While the view of the map is top-down, the buildings are rendered in 3D to show their height. As buildings are the method of travel for Spider-Man, this mapping makes sense. The only time the player needs to be on the ground is when fighting enemies or rescuing citizens in distress. At all other times it is more convenient for Spider-Man to be between or on top of buildings. This is also shown on the map by its coloration of ground-level surfaces; the illustration makes no delineation between grass, sidewalk, or road.

What do the map icons and legends reveal about the place? I would like to divide the types of markers on the maps of these games into two categories: missions/goals and landmarks. Though these are closely related (often one in the same), the distinction is useful because of their utility. The maps of Ultimate Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 allow the player to turn on and off the map icons. This is crucial because of the sheer number of destinations available to the player at any given time.

When viewing these maps, the high density of available missions has the propensity to turn into clutter. There is little that distinguishes one “race” mission from the next, and the maps do not provide any insight into these differences. This meant that only used the map to find unique locations like story-missions or shops. In contrast, Grand Theft Auto IV usually has a few missions running concurrently, so the map is the best way to see what options are available.

What can we take away form these observations on how the inclusion or exclusion of an overview map contributes to the understanding of space and the making of place? Maps can be useful means by which the geography of space can be comprehended at once and are useful when the relationship between spaces are an important part of gameplay. They are also good tools for marking relevant geographic locations: missions, destinations, the locations of objects, etc.

However, it is easy to abuse a map when designing a game. In the case of Spider-Man 2, the map contained a flood of information that was less meaningful because of its abundance. Cosgrove criticized modern maps as merely images of locations of travel removed from place, and too often this happens in video games.^[1] Maps should serve as a reference, not a crutch. If a player is constantly referring to the map to remember locations, the game has done a poor job at establishing the player’s orientation and memory of physical locations in the game.

Gamer on the Roof

Georgia Tech’s own friend of the blog Ben Medler wrote about rooftop spaces in games. He not only frames them within a DeCerteau power-structure, but he ties it into Sun Tzu’s tactical strategies of terrain: traversability, openness, and endangerment. Each of these has a mechanical effect on the game—strategy, movement choices, vulnerability—but it’s Ben’s observations about restricted space that I find most fascinating. I think back to my playthrough of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which featured helicopters the player can highjack and fly above the city. This opened up a new area of space unavailable in the original Grand Theft Auto III. I found myself “bringing a helicopter to a knife fight” in many missions; my enemies were helpless as I stood high atop a roof and fired down on them. In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, using air transportation to ascend a building took on new meaning, as the game provided a parachute to use while base jumping (the new Ballad of Gay Tony also incorporates this). Of course, there’s neither a parachute in Vice City nor GTA IV, which means the fun of exploring rooftops via helicopter can quickly end if said helicopter crashes and falls off the building. At that point, the ground is just a quick jump and file-reload away.

Den of Daydreams: 8 Fantastical Make-Believe Makeovers

Who says houses can only have Housey qualities of Houseness? Here are eight examples of rooms that have been redone to fantasy specifications. As cool as they may be, I wonder what it is like to go about your daily experience in some of these spaces. The treehouse and princess rooms lend themselves to the imaginations of children, while the steampunk and Star Trek: TNG rooms are themed media theaters. Imagine the day-to-day in the Star Trek: Voyager room, however. While it may be an astonishing feat of interior decoration, you might imagine you’d feel a disconnect doing non-Trekkie things like ironing or the crossword puzzle on the deck of the Enterprise.

Ferrari World Abu Dhabi

Continuing its trend of building ridiculous structures in the desert, Abu Dhabi will soon be home to the world’s largest indoor theme park (because it’s much too hot to put outside). Centered around exotic car manufacturer Ferrari, this massive park will have a host of thrill rides, dark rides where vistitors can experience of the inside of an engine or the history of Ferrari, a mini F1 racing track for driving school, a giant Ferrari arcade, a theater, galleries, and showrooms. Given that a Ferrari itself is a mix of luxury and thrill-ride, the theme of this new park makes perfect sense. World of Coke, eat you heart out.

Stonesense: Isometric Dwarf Fortress Visualizer

Developed by Jonas Ask and Solifuge, Stonesense is a “retro isometric visualizer” for the ASCII graphics game Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress. This skinning builds on the underlying structure of the game, which originally represented the map and objects with colored ASCII characters. Comparing the two side-by-side, it’s amazing to see how a graphical shift dramatically changes the feel of the game. Want another perspective? Watch this video of a 3D visualizer of the same game. The underlying mechanics remain the same, so the question becomes how do graphics affect the player’s perception of the space.

When I met with Celia Pearce today I brought up the subject of airports. As I mentioned last week, I have recently finished reading Alastair Gordon’s telling of the history of the airport in Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure. This sudden interest in airports was spurred by a recent trip from Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson, my current airport, to Dulles International Airport, which was only fifteen minutes down the road from me growing up in Virginia. On seeing the newly renovated sections of Dulles, which have a heavy sci-fi port vibe, I realized that airports actually had a lot in common with experience spaces like theme parks. I, of course, am not the first person to recognize this. But it got me thinking.

So, today in our meeting Celia raised the question, “why aren’t there more airports in games?” I racked my brain for airport levels and confirmed how few there are by searching through the Giant Bomb database. We wanted to address what it is players do in these airports to understand why they’re so limited.

What are the notable airport game scenes, levels, or locations? The Grand Theft Auto series features airports, though in only San Andreas can you hijack a jet plane for transportation. It’s also the only GTA game in which you get on an airplane to go somewhere outside of the game’s map (CJ travels back to Liberty City to perform a hit for Salvatore Leone). Most “airport” missions involve picking up someone/something or killing someone.

Left 4 Dead features an airport level which, predictably, tasks the player to get from one side to the other while surviving the zombie onslaught. Perfect Dark (Nintendo 64) uses an air base as a means of getting aboard Air Force One. Players grind and do tricks on airport architecture in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. The Conduit (Wii) features an airport, which appears to be the standard fare of run and gun.

Sure there are others I haven’t listed here (and I’ve totally ignored simulation-type games), but the airport is generally used as another place for action-sequences to play out, having little to do with the airport itself. Contrast the use of the airport in (non Action) film, where the airport is often a place of transitions and passage (people greeting loved ones as they arrive, escaping to another place, watching someone leave).

Of course, just as many films feature explosions and chases, but it seems games have not gotten beyond this point. Perhaps the close thing to airports are spaceports in games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Players encounter new peoples/creatures, are introduced to a new world, and experience culture through the port. But this is an overly romanticized notion of the airport.

If you ask someone about their experience of the aiport, you’ll probably hear about waiting in ticketing and security lines, sitting around for hours eating overpriced fast food, or visiting the airport bar to calm their nerves. Persuasive Games’ Airport Security, Jetset, and Airport Insecurity are more accurate to the experience of the airport, in which we think about isolated obstacles rather than movement flow through space. They are rhetorical pieces that focus on the processes people encounter in the airport.

When I think about games, I think about actions in a space. What verbs come to mind for the airport? Waiting, standing, queueing, frisking, walking, riding, more waiting, buying… not a particularly exciting list. When it comes down to it, our contemporary notion of the airport is mundane. Traveling to an exotic location is prosaic; the adventure only begins once you arrive.

This shouldn’t be the case. It still amazes me that we’ve built these amazing machines to take us around the world and we’ve organized a massive infrastructure to support it. If we can’t look forward to the flight itself (a whole other problem), we could at least look forward to spending time in a marvel of modern technology. As airports evolve and architects, designers, and planners become more interested in experience design, we need not be subjected to dingy terminals where we’re herded about.

Game and theme park design can inform the design of destination spaces like the airport. Already they are doing this in newer airports, but places like Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson need significant overhaul. Of course, part “fixing the airport” would be to improves the processes (ticketing, security, finding departure gates), and it remains to be seen whether a futuristic skinning of the airport can really evoke a sense of wonder to overcomes the knowledge that under the surface it is still the same experience. It certainly wouldn’t hurt.

From the opposite approach, translating the airport into games could help identify how airports function and are experienced. Doing so will expand the game design vocabulary so that we may identify actions beyond standing in security lines, picking up illegal packages, and diving behind ticketing counters to shield ourselves from a rain of bullets. As fun as these may be, we would do well to find other nuanced dynamics, social relationships, and spatial experiences of the airport.

The Aperio Link Round-Up is a weekly feature that gathers articles and blog entires members of the group have found interesting, providing summaries and commentary. These links are not original writings by Aperio members.

Game Lobbies / Green Rooms

Greg J. Smith provides us with his first example of a tentative space—temporary, informational enclosures that a gamer inhabits and modulates while immersed in play or setting the parameters for it. A multiplayer videogame lobby is an official structure designed to host meetings of people so that they may organize their play. Designated and ad-hoc spaces of play preparation are by no means unique to digital media (think: setting up a board game, picking teams on the kickball field, going over the rules of a LARP), but they do entail specifically designed networked software structures that determine the possible combinations of players and rules. While making these decisions, hosts and players begin to adopt their playing personalities, preparing in a place much like the “green room” of performance media. In a theater performance it might be used as a rehearsal space, in a radio station a place to prepare for an interview. Others might use it simultaneously for recreation and to socialize. These same use-types exist multiplayer game lobbies.

Cut Out Maps

Illusion 360 posted a handful of cut-out maps by artist Shannon Rankin. These maps are reminscient of the Situationists’ practice of constructing maps from dérive, like Guy Debord’s Guide psychogeographique de Paris. While the cut-out maps, created foremost as visual design pieces, do not represent a specific instance of understanding, Rankin writes in her artist statement, “The ephemeral nature of maps speaks to the fragile and transitory state of our lives and our surroundings. While bearing traces of the original form, I deconstruct maps to create new geographies, suggesting the potential for a broader landscape.” In addition to the Uncharted Series linked above, make sure to look at her Circle Series, Anatomy Series, and the archives.

Adventureland Drawings 1954

Stuff From the Park has been uploading vintage promotional drawings from Disneyland. These renderings of the park’s attractions and spaces strongly illustrate the detailed effect Walt Disney and the Disneyland designers were trying to achieve. They even encoded the emotions they wanted to evoke in the park’s guests; the woman riding at the front of the Congo Queen is surprised by something in the distance while others gaze in awe. Make sure to check out some of the other renderings while you’re at it.

‘Bookworm’ for iPhone, or against mobile gaming

In a short piece on playing games on her iPhone, writer Bonnie Ruberg muses on an aspect of play spaces similar to those Michael Nistche presented on in Aperio’s first meeting. She laments the loss of special places of play when mobile devices make games like Popcap’s Bookworm available anytime, anywhere. The player’s behavior outside of the game is constrained by the situation, which means other riders on your bus, for example, will find it odd if you celebrate a high-scoring word with full outward vigor.

IKEA, and the logic of videogame design

Lastly, Dan Golding delves into the IKEA maze, writing about the videogame qualities of shopping. Like a good videogame or well designed theme park, IKEA is concerned with creating a navigable path of activity flow using wayfinding devices (signs, clearly delineated paths), area theming (bedroom, livingroom, kitchen), and maps which show only top-level information. Golding shows how the movement flow of IKEA is like a videogame: you begin with a goal (find X items), are forced to navigate through different levels and overcome obstacles, collect clues (stockroom locations) to where these items are, find shortcuts to help abbreviate the trip, are refreshed quite literally with the restaurant area, and then must face the “final boss” of the warehouse to retrieve the items corresponding to the clues gathered. Need more proof? In 2004 Matthew Baldwin wrote a walkthrough of IKEA as if it were listed on GameFAQs, ASCII art and all.

Of all the many reasons I enjoy studying the space of videogames, the translation of real physical spaces into game levels, environments, and worlds perhaps fascinates me the most. The choices made during the construction of these spaces reveals much about our assumptions and understanding of the world we live in. Whether imbued with romanticized notions or reduced to their most functional properties, we codify our world into mechanics, geometry, textures, and tasks.

One type of space from our world that interests me is transportation space. I’ve recently finished reading Alastair Gordon’s telling of the history of the airport in Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure. Expect some airport related writing soon. I am also currently reading Marc Augé’s In the Metro (translated from French by Tom Conley). I wrote about the Washington, D.C. Metro last year in relation to Fallout 3, and included observations on the New York City subway in my thesis on “Representations of the City in Videogames.”

At the time I had not read Augé, so these topics are worth revisiting in light of this new critical lens. I want to specifically return to my discussion of Fallout 3, in which I highlight the multitude of uses for the Metro. It serves a similar role to the typical videogame dungeon—a hostile space full of monsters that you enter to find items, loot, and gain battle experience. Dungeons expand the space of the game by creating non– world-map or overworld environments. In a 3D game like Fallout 3, however, there still needs to be a x- and y- plane mapping of the dungeon to the world above because the player uses it to traverse distances. It is impossible travel overland to all points in the Wasteland because obstacles block the way. The Metro, then, guides the player’s movement from one place to the next.

This subverts our expectations of the subway. When I ride the subway, Metro, MARTA train, tube, of whatever you want to call it, I have an expectation that I will follow a designated path which can only get from point A to point D by passing through B and C. On the more complicated rail systems, the subway gives options for transferring trains, but even though I may construct multiple paths to the same destination, I have no way of traveling on anything but the rail.

This means that any pedestrian movement inside the tunnels of the subway produces surprising results. A map of the DC Metro would be of no help to a Fallout 3 player, because the designated routes of the tracks have been destroyed and altered. Traveling on foot down a new tunnel in the Metro, I have no idea where I might end up. Fallout 3 uses this to complicate overworld travel, while providing more space for the player to explore and more enemies for the player to encounter.

But I want to add something from Marc Augé I find particularly relevant. The setting of Fallout 3 is post-apocalyptic Washington, DC—an uninhabitable world poisoned by radiation and overrun by monsters. Many humans have taken refuge in underground bunkers called Vaults, while others live on the surface in camps formed in the ruins of old buildings. The closer into the center of the city, the more identifiable the referents. This is no doubt because it is easier to recreate monuments and landmarks than the characterless suburbs of Maryland and Virginia (in which I lived for 21 years). Representing these areas, then, becomes as easy as naming them.

As Augé notes, subway stations are named in a handful of different ways. A name might refer to a street or intersection, a neighborhood, a landmark, or even a person. These tell the riders a story. A subway station named for a landmark tells us something about the destination of those who disembark at that point. A station named for only a street or intersection seems to indicate there are no points of interest above. When named for a person, the station not only asks questions about that person’s importance to the metropolitan area, but also why that station in particular was commemorated.

The Metro stations in Fallout 3 commemorate something else. They’re the memorials of an infrastructure, a way of moving, and a way of organizing a world that no longer exists. Many stations retained their pre-war names of actual Metro stops: Falls Church, Dupont Circle, Farragut, L’Enfant Plaza, etc. These are the names of places that once had meaning, though now are little more than geographic referents. Some stations, to help the player better navigate the world, are named for landmarks both important to our world and the game’s world: The Mall, The White House, Our Lady of Hope Hospital.

Because they are not the only usable points of transportation, it is not only the actual stations that get names in the Fallout 3 wasteland. Some Metro tunnels dump out into sewer systems or service corridors. These places only became used after the war. Irradiated Metro, Flooded Metro, Collapsed Car Tunnel, and the Tepid Sewer are equally as important as their officially sanctioned counterparts.

In Augé’s Metro, the structure of the subway is an abstraction of the world above. The Louvre station in France is decorated like a little museum, names commemorate the people and places that live above the ground, and the people waiting on the platform form population microcosms.

Yet, in Fallout 3 the Metro is an abstraction of a world that doesn’t exists. Actually, two worlds that don’t exist. On the one hand there is the simulacrum of the Washington, DC that exists in our world. With a handful of exceptions, naming serves as little more than a nod to real places to give Fallout 3 a sense of place. On the other hand, the real world of D.C. is parallel to the pre-war world of Fallout 3′s D.C. Neither exist in any way the game can interact with beyond the representation of something that once was and is no longer. They exist only as memorials to how we organize and move through our world.

The Aperio Link Round-Up is a weekly feature that gathers articles and blog entires members of the group have found interesting, providing summaries and commentary. These links are not original writings by Aperio members.

The Architectural Remnants of Cold War Yugoslavia

BLDGBLOG pointed us to this piece authored by Christoph Hinterreiter with photos by Wolfgang Thaler which shows an underground nuclear bunker in Bosnia. It details a moment captured in time—the Cold War frozen and shrink wrapped. The arrangement of the space is just as interesting as the contents of the building. BLDGBLOG author Geoff Manaugh was struck by the labyrinthine structure:

I mention this because the urge to build labyrinths—in stone or in tufa or against the detonations of nuclear war—often seems to transcend those labyrinths’ purported use-value. As Hinterreiter himself might say, constructing a labyrinth of any kind “exceeds purely functional considerations,” sliding off into mythology before too long and adding an oddly sinister veneer to any civilization that pursues it.

Both the original and Manaugh’s commentary are worth reading.

Does Looking at Nature Make People Nicer?

I chose this article because it raises a point of digital translation. If people presented with natural environments have a more amenable disposition than those confronted with man-made objects, then what happens in digital environments that are man-made representations of nature? As a role-playing game genre trope, forests, fields, and other similar spaces are considered “wild” and overrun with enemies. This is in direct contrast to the safety of the town gates or city walls. If the results of this survey are true, perhaps this trope does not accurately map to our emotions. There are, of course, plenty of games that uphold the study’s findings, but it’s worth considering how well the dynamic of safety and threat apply to the constructed and pristine.

Parkour and Gender

A part of the link round-up is finding interesting articles that have been published in the past. Writer Regina Buenaobra considers the spectacularized masculine body in Parkour in relation to the 2008 Parkour inspired game Mirror’s Edge. The game features a female lead (and numerous female supporting characters) and is set in a first-person perspective. This means that the player has little chance to engage in the spectacle of their actions because there is no body to observe. The cut-scenes in the game are rendered in cartoon graphics, which reinforces the game’s denial of scopic pleasure. One comment I need to add is that the space of the game—the sterile white city—is also less masculine compared to the common depictions of Parkour through concrete and steel. It’s not perfect, of course, but it is a great example of a game that tackles issues of gender through mechanics and space.

An Expedition into the Lost World of Exploration: ToeJam & Earl

Lastly, Chris Lepine provides a tour of Earth as presented in the Sega Genesis game ToeJame & Earl. Based on the ideas of the Rogue PC game, the game’s levels are procedurally generated. Procedural generation does not always produce the most coherent products, which actually works for the weird world of ToeJam & Earl, which is supposed to be a mish-mash of American popular culture. Lepine’s piece and another blog entry by Jason Moses provide amusing anecdotes of how the author’s played the games and explored the world when they were kids.

A theme or amusement park’s layout greatly influences the experience of a space. Determining where rides, attractions, food and beverage, retail, and restrooms will dictate where people will walk and what they will see along the way. This is, of course, no secret.

Some amusement parks seem to have little structure at all. I have gotten lost at Six Flags Over Georgia because paths wind in every-which direction, disorienting me from any point of reference. King’s Dominion in Virginia has four distinct spokes: the Congo, the Waterworks water park, the area formerly known Wayne’s World, and Old Virginia. Yet these four areas do not branch out from a single hub. Instead, the center of the park is a mass of three areas: Kidzville, Nickelodeon Central, and the carnival game midway Grove. As the park has added more attractions over the year and swapped parent companies (it was once a Paramount park), the view from any location in the park is relatively cluttered. Traveling through the park is a winding mess (though the inconsistencies are what I find charming).

The “hub and spoke” design of Disneyland and Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom allows visitors to quickly move from one land to the next with relative ease. They might travel in a clockwise or counterclockwise pattern from one area to the next, but they also have the option of cutting through the central hub to skip to a place of interest. This design obscures the view of each area. And while standing in the middle of the park the player might be able to see the tops of Space, Splash or Big Thunder Mountains, there’s no overview of what the park has to offer. This is by design, of course. The Magic Kingdom calls for the isolation of each land to produce a coherent theme and unbroken image.

But not all parks deny their denizens a total view. Epcot’s World Showcase and Universal’s Islands of Adventure are two examples of parks that use a central water feature to create not only a circular path, but a vista by which the whole park can be seen. Water features provide something rare in a theme park: an unobstructed view. This design is a descendent of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which included lakes, lagoons, and ponds around which buildings were organized.

I refer to the World Showcase individually here because Future World at Epcot is a more traditional hub-spoke design. One side of this wheel empties out into the World Showcase. Around the 1.2 mile World Showcase Lagoon sits the eleven countries that comprise the back half of the park. Visitors can either head to the left for Mexico or right for Canada, and work their way “around the world”. But unlike the Magic Kingdom, the different countries are all visible from each other from across the lagoon. This is thematically important as Disney is trying to attempt a “global view”. When looking across the water, the parkgoer sees a place that is relatively near, yet still out of reach. This arrangement creates a sense of drama, too: anticipation of the new, accomplishment of the experienced, surprise at that which was not visible from afar.

Universal Studio’s Islands of Adventure takes a similar approach, but to a different end. The park’s entrance opens onto the lagoon with Marvel Super Hero Island on the left, marked by the formidable Hulk coaster, and the zany colorful Suess Landing on the right. This vantage point provides a view of the rest of the park, though the vista merely teases the experience to come. The eye-catching “weenies”, from this view, appear to be the Jurassic World Discovery Pavilion, the Mythos restaruant in The Lost Continent, and the marooned tugboat from Popeye and Bluto’s Bilge-Rat Barge. It is worth pointing out the two functions they do not serve. They’re not traditional “weenies” that stand tall so as to attract eyes and movement. They are also not entranceways–signs, gates, archways, or corridors that designate the separation of themed areas. Rather than show off the best and most exciting attractions, these landmarks are symbolic of each section of the park, a preview of the park’s offerings.

Unlike the World Showcase, Islands of Adventure is not laid out as concentric circles with water on the inside, attractions on the outside, and a walking path in the middle. The park does not support a consistent view across the lake because it still wants to keep each area separate to sustain the ullusion. Beyond Marvel Super Hero Island and Suess Landing, finding a spot to look across the central lake means exploring each of the individual lands. The Jurassic Park area requires that visitors travel through or around the Discovery Center to make their way to the water. The Lost Continent is primarily self-contained (which will become even more important as Universal converts the area to its new Harry Potter theme for Spring 2010).

Of course, what good is a water feature if it’s not used for something besides decoration? Both World Showcase and Islands of Adventure lagoons are the site of daily shows. Epcot puts on its nightly IllumiNations fireworks show over the water, while Universal turns to its movie stunts heritage and features the HydroAction Ski Show starring water and jet skiers. IllumiNations punctuates the end of the night at Epcot, building on an evening spent touring the countries of the World Showcase. The HydroAction show, however, feels tacked on because it has little to do with the park itself. It is closer in kin to the speedboat stunt show in Universal Studios or Lights, Motors, Action! at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. And while it is a nice distraction in the middle of the day (and certain vantage points are splash spots, great for when it’s hot out), it seems out of place.

These two lagoons serve as unifying structures in each of the parks. They create a natural layout for the park that is easy to navigate, allows glimpses of things to come, and provide the sense of a natural time-distance pacing by imitating the face of a clock. Plan on spending a four hours in the evening at the World Showcase? Then you better be at Japan two hours in if you want to keep your schedule. This, of course, does have its downsides. Revealing a visitor’s progress is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if they’re paying attention to the clock they may not get lost in the world of illusion (the same reasons casinos are windowless). But a visible meter of their progress might be reassuring, allowing them to take a second turn on a ride or spend a little extra time at the gift shop.

World Showcase and Islands of Adventure are not the only parks to feature this kind of central water feature, but they provide us with two examples of how the same idea can be executed toward different effects.

The Aperio Link Round-Up is a weekly feature that gathers articles and blog entires members of the group have found interesting, providing summaries and commentary. These links are not original writings by Aperio members.

Arkham Asylum and the space of traumatic-memory

Daniel Golding discusses the spatial design of Batman: Arkham Asylum as a manifestation of the mechanics of memory. Psychological issues are reflected in gameplay tasks and rules. Not only is the game’s titular mental asylum a place of the game characters’ trauamas, it also reflects on the game player’s experience of the current generation of console hardware.

Rural Spaces

Anne Galloway posts snippets of Justin Partyka’s The East Anglians, which focuses on the culture of rural England. Partyka’s work portrays “the forgotten people of the flatlands who continue to work the land because the need to is in their blood.” In eastern England, land is culture, culture is tradition, and tradition is land. Partyka’s photoessay is not only comprised of striking visuals, but a vibrant introductory narrative.

Bad Show

EPCOT Central, a blog dedicated to Disney’s most experimental park, explores spaces that break the illusion. Poor signage, visible wires, and disused areas all detract from the park’s magic and expose its confused identity.

12 Cities From Scratch

WebUrbanist details twelve cities that may or may not realize their dreams of forgoing centuries of development in favor of being entirely built from scratch. While the architecture and design may inspire awe, we can’t help but think they lack a soul.