Territories of Play - Surveying Architecture Through Gaming (HS)

Abstract

The seminar addresses a way of perceiving reality which has become key: through the lenses of Play and Gaming. Besides offering students steady footing on the makings of an architectural publication, It will provide students with a complementary, yet extremely relevant tool with which to approach architecture and urbanism.

Objective

From Game Theory to Dices, touching Go, Hide-and-seek or Sims, a multitude of games and acts of play will serve as standing points for the perception and re-reading of the functioning of societies and the built environments these give rise to. The seminar will be structured into three distinct and complementary moments: Input - an in-depth introduction to the theoretical frame of the seminar through three lectures; by a game designer, by an architectural historian or architect, and by the seminar's tutor. The theoretical works and authors which make up the core of the seminar - Jesse Schell, Johan Huizinga and Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman - will thus be presented and analysed, hinting at possible bridges to a critical analysis of architecture and the built environment through its decomposition into Mechanics, Aesthetics, Narrative and Technology, the four pillars of game design. Students will be invited to select a game, dissect it according to the theoretical input previously received, and select a key aspect of it. This key aspect will in turn be used as lenses through which students should analyse and question their reality, a milieu of their own choice: from the spaces and urban situations formulating their daily routine in the city, to their hometown or fetish city. From this analysis, an essay presenting and defending their hypothesis of reading of their milieu through gaming should emerge. The writing will be conducted during the seminar's attendance time. Students are to produce a coherent, ludic publication compiling the classes' essays into an accessible survey.

Resources