(1985) has a very particular aesthetic BioShock ’s (2007) underwater city Rapture is frightening and sad, and the upcoming No Man’s Sky promises a gargantuan, mathematically-generated galaxy brimming with impressionistic landscapes. The Mushroom Kingdom in Super Mario Bros. Videogame designers, of course, often choose to focus a great deal on setting. Any boardgame that carries even a shred of narrative either includes lush artwork featuring the locations you visit, or force the creation of a psychic space: take the beautifully detailed stone floors of Mice and Mystics (2012), or the wind-tossed dragons of the minimalist game Tsuro (2004), that hurtle through only the open skies of your imagination. Similarly, sitting down for a rousing game of Dungeons & Dragons, is essentially about plunging into a fantasy world of enchanted forests, sinister dungeons, and caverns that stretch deep into the earth, ripe for exploration. Think about children playing make-believe, overlaying the real world with imaginary landmarks, superimposing an impenetrable citadel onto a jumble of pillows, varnishing a gnarled tree with magic and mystery. The concept of the “magic circle” applies even more to games that try to tell stories: any such game is unavoidably about the ‘where’ that the story takes place in. Taking into account Huizinga’s ideas, you can argue that, fundamentally, the act of playing a game is the act of delineating a boundary that separates the mundane world from a mystical, created one - a world that is governed by rules different from everyday life. the In the 1940s, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga published his ideas about the “magic circle” a “consecrated spot” where play occurs (“the arena, the card-table… the tennis court”). Spatial design is so important to us, that its principles transcend even the physical world of architecture and enter the fictional realm, especially that of games. In other words, we are biologically programmed to be highly sensitive to space, place, and location. They assert that the erection of what Michael Smith describes as “constructions that are much larger than they need to be for utilitarian purposes,” both a) parallels threat displays in the animal kingdom, signifying the might of the builders, and b) exploits our natural sensitivity for “bigness” to instill feelings of awe. In fact, psychologists Yannick Joye and Jan Verpooten do just that, taking a Darwinian approach to analyzing the role of monumental architecture. In fact, if we take into account humankind’s original role as both a predator and a prey species among the vast savannahs of Africa, it isn’t hard to posit that a powerful awareness of space and place is intrinsic to our humanity. Smith argues that empires such as the Aztecs, with their neatly orthogonal capital city of Tenochtitlan, used city planning both to reinforce the cosmological beliefs of the Aztec religion, and to legitimize the political authority of the empire among the people. Humans have been engineering the social and psychological affordances of architecture and urban planning for centuries. They can be made to promote certain pathways, encourage specific behaviours, even elicit emotional reactions. French philosopher Guy Debord talked about the idea of the dérive, a mode of travel where the journey itself is more important than the destination, where travelers “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” But to think of dérive as a kind of random stroll dominated by chance encounters would be to miss Debord’s essential point: spaces, by virtue of being inhabited or shaped by humankind, possess their own “psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.” Spaces can be designed.
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