Videogames open a new domain for persuasion: procedural rhetoric, “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions”.
“When we create videogames, we are making claims about processes in the human experience, which ones we celebrate, which ones we ignore, which ones we want to question.”
“Videogame players develop procedural literacy though interacting with the abstract models of specific real or imagined processes presented in the games they play. Videogames teach biased perspectives about how things work. And the way they teach such perspectives is through procedural rhetorics, which players ‘read’ though direct engagement and criticism.”
“Serious games are videogames created to support the existing and established interests of political, corporate, and social institutions. Seriousness helps create an opposition to triviality, positioning the goals of government, business, and educational institutions against those of entertainment. ”
In this paper, I will analyse some of the videos that were made at the occasion of the Welcome to My Place project, a collective video resource that started in February 2010 and where people can share the places that matter to them. In view of the videos and after some researches, I would like to propose a slightly different approach to the concept of non-place introduced by Marc Augé, and to the way places are appropriated. This paper is also intended to provide a short introduction to the philosophical notion of place and its main themes.
Spaces, places and non-places
A place is a meaningful location. According to John Agnew, it has a location (e.g. longitude and latitude), a locale (the material setting for social relations – e.g. walls, ground) and a ‘sense of place’. By sense of place, he means that the place is a space invested with meaning. In a slightly different formulation, Robert D. Sack defines a place as a “phenomenon that brings social and spatial together and in part produces them” (Source: “Place, a short introduction”, Tim Cresswell).
The sense of place is an elusive notion. We can however roughly describe it using the three following attributes:
- The place’s identity, e.g. possibility to name the place
- The social practices taking place, e.g. praying in a temple, selling in a market, eating in a restaurant
- Traces of memory, e.g. literature, pictures about the place
As an illustration, the following video introduces the history of the Westminster Reference Library in London. It shows that the building exists as a place thanks in part to the people who transmit its history. They participate in the preservation of the sense of place.
Marc Augé describes a non-place as a space that cannot be defined as relational, historical or concerned with identity. Highways and airports are examples of non-places. He goes further and describes how the sense of place is on the other hand simulated in historic towns, making places and non-places distinct and opposite (as a remark, binary oppositions form the basis of classificatory systems within cultures according to Claude Lévi-Strauss). It is a similar process to those described by postmodern writers such as Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. As Marc Augé puts it:
“Our towns have been turning into museums (e.g. restored, exposed and floodlit monuments, listed areas, pedestrian precincts) while at the same time bypasses, motorways, high-speed trains and one-way systems have made it unnecessary for us to linger in them.”
“A person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does and experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver [...] he obeys the same code as others, receives the same messages, and responds to the same entreaties.”
My argument is that non-places are much more frequent and rooted in human nature than Marc Augé suggests. This has direct consequences on how space is negotiated on a day to day basis. Transmission of identity, history and social practices is fragile. A sense of place relies either on a group of people assuring its continuity or on authoritative power, and is not necessary desired.
Places between sedentism and nomadism
Humans are incredibly adaptive and can accommodate very well either sedentism or nomadism. These two lifestyles are profoundly in us and even though we mostly have a sedentary life, our approach to space remains nomadic in many occasions.
Renting a house is a profoundly nomadic situation, either by choice or for pecuniary reasons. The rent is very often concluded without any knowledge of the history and identity of the house or flat. The sense of place is rarely transmitted from the landlord to the tenant, assuming the landlord has any sense of place for his property. Blocks of Victorian houses in London for example have surely a history, but unheard of by most of its inhabitants. They are furthermore easy to commoditise because of their very similar configuration. Only their material structure influences the social practices of their inhabitants. One might argue that this material structure is informed by British tradition and in that sense transmits a persistent sense of place; because it forces inhabitants to manage their space in a certain way. I would however not give a disproportionate importance to this transmission and consider that these houses are mostly non-places, as functional and anonymous as an airport. In many cases, houses are not bequeathed anymore from one generation of a family to the other, and its sense of place is lost.
A difference between these places and non-places though is that inhabitants need to make them their home, and rapidly reinvent a brand new sense of place. The need to feel at home is described in details in La poétique de l’Espace by Gaston Bachelard. As he points out, this feeling could be reduced to the image of the hermit’s hut, the simplest expression of what being at home means. I think that we are all nomads. We all have this image of the hut in our imagination. We can make nearly every place our home, and move the next day. The sense of space is disposable. It is not an anomaly of modernity, but in human nature. Here is an example; few objects and a soundtrack are enough to generate a mobile and disposable sense of place.
For a nomad to appropriate a space, it might be faster to deal with a non-place in the first place. It avoids any complicated negotiations with a pre-existing identity. It is not always the best option however and I’m not advocating systematically anonymity. Dealing with a place and its pre-existing identity can also be helpful to invent or reinforce a narrative that the inhabitant can use to give meaning to his life. The place in this context is often the symbol of some support, like the house from the parents, or the car from the company.
I talked so far about houses, but the same process is observable in many other types of places: working places, places of celebrations, entire neighbourhoods. In the following video, I wonder if the ‘cosmopolitan world’ mentioned by the owner of the café is not in fact a non-place. His strategy to provide an identity to his business is to rephrase cosmopolitanism with an Arabic sensitivity and décor. Place is maybe here a meeting place, as proposed by Doreen Massey: “each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations, an understanding that its character can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond” (Source: “Place, a short introduction”, Tim Cresswell).
In this video of the New Year celebration by the Kurdish community in Finsbury Park, the park is treated as a non-place so that the celebration of that other place, the Kurdistan can be fully experienced (read here an in-depth analysis of the park and its surrounding area).
An easy way to create a sense of place from a non-place is by using media. As you can see in the video below, film effects and a soundtrack instantly provide an identity to the parkland walk: an old-fashioned place to enjoy with friends.
In all these videos, the sense of place is created nearly from scratch by the occupiers, who prefer to treat the space as a non-place. That sense of place might be ephemeral or persistent depending on the intentions of the occupiers; it is their freedom to choose between nomadism and sedentism.
It remains that the overall and much contested trend is towards nomadism. It can be attributed to the phenomenon of ‘time-space compression’, “a term used to describe processes that seem to accelerate the experience of time and reduce the significance of distance” (Wikipedia). It is the direct consequence of trains, cars, airlines, television, and the internet. Information is instantaneous; the world is reduced to the in-flight map that indicates the position of the plane. Commuting is the norm and anyone who wants to ‘succeed’ in life has to move constantly.
Narrative architects
As explained in the previous chapter, people need non-places that are easy to appropriate. They need them because they might change of location in a couple of years, because they are already too busy managing their identity on the web or get a sense of authorship on their career. Places imposing a strong narrative are for most of us more appropriate for travels or visits, like the centre of Florence protected by the UNESCO. We are the product of freedom and the free market; legacy is a constraint, tradition is a reduction of choice. However, non-places are not as blank as they look. Architects, urbanists, artists, politics, health and safety agencies, cultural agencies, all participate in the design of urban non-places and are what I call narrative architects, a term borrowed from Henry Jenkins (Source: Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche).
Childhood is fun and colourful; It is nice to go to work every day by bicycle; Streets are not to sleep in; I live in a place full of history. These statements portray an idyllic city. They form together a narrative of the ideal urban life. Narrative architects design elements in non-places that will evoke this story. The citizens will use these elements to reconstitute and internalize it. The evocative elements are even expected a-priori in an all inclusive package of the modern city lifestyle. Non-places that include these elements tend to work better. Let me start with the example of the playground.
The designers of the playground didn’t write any story addressed to the children. But they knew that the concrete objects they designed for the playground will be associated with tales of mountains, castles and exotic adventures. They provided evocative elements that children can use to appropriate a very dry non-place, and transform it into a heterotopia. The concrete elements also provide a substitute for an unfenced environment perceived as not appropriate for children (and adults?) or requiring an unreasonable amount of surveillance.
Using the same logic, one juts need to put lines on a concrete ground to associate that space with football, and significantly alter its use. These evocative elements produce generic senses of place that are quick to internalize and convenient to use.
The American kitchen, British bathroom, Western or why not Japanese style living room are evocative elements that architect narrators uses to sequence the everyday storyline of their occupiers. Of course, you could imagine a house where you would take a shower in the living room, but most people prefer to stick with more common storyboards.
With these evocative elements in place, it is more difficult to divert from the prescribed user scenarios, to use a marketing term from mass production. But it is possible and people find unusual ways to appropriate their space. “People are able to resist the construction of expectations about practice through place by using places and their established meanings in subversive ways” (Source: Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche). Here is for example how wi-fi signals can be used to form an unexpected representation of the neighbourhood.
Politics of space
A sense of place reflects the values that are constantly negotiated and contested within a group. It might look intangible, especially in an urban environment where the landscape is a given for the nomad. In their willingness to pacify the space, local authorities take its control and by doing so erase the need for local communities to dialogue, which prevents any contestation and negotiation of public space, and de-facto its appropriation (see this study of the London N4 area I did in collaboration with the Transition Finsbury Park association).
The best way to put in evidence the relation between places, values and power is to imagine the destruction of places, or their disappearance from the map. Such an imaginary threat will help you list the people who would protest, their arguments, as well as the people who would agree with the destruction, and their counter-arguments. These two groups of people are the actors in the relation of power that maintain the existence of a place.
The place becomes a symbol of that balance of power and reinforces it. An evocative example is when the churches were higher than the town halls. In a period of time-space compression, the churches have not only to compete with the town halls, but with everything in every media. Spaces do not only compete between one another to capture the attention of people, and the sense they can give to them. They also need to compete with mobility. If they lose, they become non-places.
“Place is a form of fixed capital which exists in tension with other forms of capital. Political struggle over place often provide opportunities for resistance to the mobile forces at the origin of the time-space compression” (Source: “Place, a short introduction” by Tim Cresswell). The green movements such as transition towns want to valorise the local for its more sustainable qualities. Local communities want to preserve their neighbourhood and way of living. Fashionable slow food restaurants want to promote time and distinction at the opposite of ubiquitous fast-food chains. They are all part of a ‘militant particularism’ movement that fights a time-space compression often associated with capitalistic interests. It is in that sense a progressive movement. Another example is libraries. Here is a talk illustrating the values and relations of power at play.
On the other hand, militant particularism could be seen as a reactionary strategy to exclude outsiders. “Sentimentalized recovering of sanitized heritage sites” can marginalize people who are not part of that heritage. It can justify segregation by the “construction of a unproblematic identity” (Doreen Massey). This is what happens in gentrification that ‘restores’ old districts, houses, ‘historic’ canals and churches. It ‘rehabilitates’ a neighbourhood and its identity that former, poorer inhabitants didn’t appreciate enough. It is a justification for their necessary exile.
“Accompanying this production of sense of history and authenticity is a process of exclusion based on the identification of a threatening other beyond the walls of the town” (Source: “Place, a short introduction” by Tim Cresswell).
Conclusion
I have shown how much non-places are useful for the nomads we are and how easily we can produce a disposable sense of place for them. Non-places are not totally blank however and feature evocative elements designed by narrative architects. These evocative elements mediate the appropriation of space and our daily life. Whether or not places are more desirable than non-places is a question of values between nomadism and sedentism. The superiority of places over non-places is advocated for opposite reasons in progressive and reactionary rhetoric. For this reason, I don’t think it is wise to draw a conclusion using this dichotomy. I would for the time being just note how much the status of the place is controversial in contemporary culture.
Here is a series of three artistic videos around the theme of verticality. I made them while I was in Hong Kong in May 2010 to complement the Welcome to My Place video collection and my researches on the philosophical concept of place. While I visited many cities in my life, Hong Kong is a particularly striking vertical experience, because of its density and uncompromising modernisation.
I have been inspired to work on the subject of verticality while reading the book ‘La poétique de l’Espace’ (The poetics of Space) by Gaston Bachelard, and more specifically this translated quotation:
“In addition to the lack of vertical intimate values, one needs to add the lack of cosmology in the houses of big cities. Houses are not there in nature anymore. Relations between home and space become tacit. Everything thereby becomes machine and private life leaks from everywhere.”
Houses and their phenomenology have been studied for a long time. Apartments and vertical buildings are more recent. They still have this image of being the second option, not the ‘real’ home. Reality from Hong Kong looks quite different. What is the imaginary of verticality?
My intuition was to start from the lift: a key component that differentiates vertical buildings from horizontal ones. The small room mediates verticality for its guests and is where its negotiation occurs. I could also have chosen the escalator, another important mediator of verticality in contemporary buildings. But its affiliation with stairs makes it somehow a less original feature, even though many things could be said about its cultural function. The lift has no precedent and reigns in spaces of verticality.
The lift is typically a small room in which guests cannot do anything else than to press on numbered buttons. It never has any seats and is thus not a place to stay; relaxing background music is sometimes played though. The lift might celebrate its own movement, and by extension the verticality of its building, by having large windows giving to its outside. But it denies most often its mobility and doesn’t feature any window. Which doesn’t prevent the image of the long and dark vertically corridor to appear mentally in the passenger’s mind (see the imaginary of the Disney’s Tower of Terror ride for example). The lift feels at the same time a private place, having mirrors that guests can use to check their appearance, and public, with surveillance cameras and the knowledge that everyone on the outside can check the lift’s movement. The ambiguity leads to well known sexual fantasies, breaking also the predictive and functional role of the room.
Through evolution of technology, the lift reduced to the maximum freedom of its passengers. They need to accept its rules if they don’t want to use the stairs. The lift decides who is next, when to open and close the doors, to go either up or down. This generates a lot of frustration and contempt, along with angry insults when the lift is slow to act on passengers requests. They generally accept the rules though because they believe that the lift has been programmed for the best of their interests. Even if they might sometimes doubt that it is intelligent enough to achieve the task.
The lift, and vertical buildings, can be perceived in three different ways closely related to social practices.
Lift as a teletransporter – verticality is a multi-dimensional space
The lift is a teletransporter. It connects a particular location on the ground to a space where people live in the same habitation at the same time, but without knowing the existence of one another. This is what I tried to convey in the following video that was made at my apartment building in Mong Kok, the area with the highest population density in the world (see here a map of teletransporters around the Olympic station, not far from Mong Kok).
This imaginary can only remain if habitants of the building have no significant contacts between one another. If they had, vertical distances between one another’s floor would break the multidimensional representation of space. They are living in the building because they greatly value the location of its entrance, not their neighbours. It might be justified and I don’t necessary make of neighbouring a virtue.
Another interesting aspect of this subjective representation is the emphasis on the ground location and not the verticality of the building, as illustrated in the “Concentration” video. What is the most fascinating in a skyscraper? Is it its height? Or is it the importance given to its location? Why thousands of people would want to be teleported everyday at the entrance door of a single building? While there are so many other geographical coordinates to choose from on earth? The massive appearance of a skyscraper is the material expression of the importance of its location. My video suggests that such a disproportionate interest in specific locations is due to a phenomenon of concentration, a door becomes highly desirable because of the importance given to doors next door. This remains true even when the original singularity becomes anecdotic, and when concentration in itself becomes the significance. The harbour of Hong Kong brought in financial institutions, employees, consumers and finally advertisers.
Lift as a carriage – verticality works just like horizontality
In this representation, the lift is a vertical carriage that goes from one door to another in a long vertical corridor. It doesn’t differ substantially from a horizontal corridor. The vertical building is one that is turned 90 degrees. A sense of proximity with neighbours is possible in this configuration, and all being in one single corridor provides a feeling of equality. But maybe vertically is not the best configuration then. The lift becomes an inconvenient means compared to simply walking to see a neighbour for example. Other considerations are at play: the ones explained in the previous and next chapters, and maybe additional benefits that verticality can bring to the community, such as wider park area (see the Unité d’habitation from Le Corbusier in Marseilles, a ‘vertical village’).
Escalators offer a compromise in a vertical place that doesn’t want to be. Take the huge Langham Place vertical shopping mall in Hong Kong. Its extensive use of escalators, some of the longest around, smoothes the visit that doesn’t need to be interrupted by lifts. The escalators make the place feel more like a horizontal one, more adapted to wandering and temptations.
Lift as a cable car – power in verticality
The lift is a cable car that makes it easy to climb distances sometimes higher than of mounts. Vertical buildings are inspired by human verticality. They allow an overview of a territory and its control. The higher you can see the more power you can exercise on the territory and its people. I’m not a big supporter of analogies between skyscrapers and the phallus; I think sexuality is the mirror of life and not the inverse. Human verticality and the desire of power are in my opinion better justification for vertical buildings.
At the difference of the mounts altitude that has been set once for all by nature, there are no limits for skyscrapers and engineering. You might think you are at the top, but you soon realise that it was only the top of one social group or class, and then new heights are being built every day. Higher standards for wealth and social status are being set, which paradoxically don’t increase the number of people who can see the uninterrupted horizon. In a funny argumentative twist, horizontal space becomes more valuable than vertical space: only matters the uninterrupted horizon you can see from your eyes, not what is below and above you.
I had the idea to incorporate video game elements in the next video after reading Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark, and more specifically this quotation:
“A higher level is essentially more than a lower level. And so there’s nowhere to go but to more, and more, until there is no more, and the gamer, like the character, is left with nothing.”
The video narrative also strangely reminds me the 80s animated series Cocoshaker by Jean-Charles Meunier, except that the next coconut palm is always higher!
“Work becomes a gamespace, but no games are freely chosen anymore. Play becomes everything to which it was opposed. It is work, serious, morality, necessity”.
“The utopian dream of liberating play from the game, of a pure play beyond the game, merely opened the way for the extension of gamespace into every aspect of everyday life”.
Algorithms:
“What is distinctive about games is that they produce for the gamer an intuitive relation to the algorithm”.
“The game is true in that its algorithm is consistent, but this very consistency negates a world that is not”.
“Gamespace turns descriptions into a database and storyline into navigation”.
Boredom:
“Boredom is something a body does when space will not let the body enter it in a way that transforms the body into something else, so that the body can forget itself”.
“The time and space of the topological world [gamespace] is organized around the maintenance of boredom, nurturing it yet distracting it just enough to prevent its implosion, from which alone might arise the counter power to the game”.
Read more in the book: Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark
Five conceptual planes for the analysis of game spaces:
Rule-based (algorithm, hardware)
Mediated (what appears on the screen)
Fictional (what is in the head of the player)
Play (where the player is)
Social (other players).
On narratives:
“A fundamental function of narrative is that of providing a way of comprehending space, time, and causality”.
“Narrative can be thought as systems of verbal or visual cues prompting their readers to spatialize storyworlds into evolving configurations of participants, objects and places”.
“Games position their evocative elements to make sure that a location is not only a visual cue or a point in coordinate system, but also can be a feared obstacle, a safe home base, or a crowning achievement”.
Examples of spatial structures:
Tracks: capture, intensify, and lengthen key racing moments.
Labyrinths: monotonous repetition without significant differentiation.
Arenas: open structures with one dominating demarcation line, the surrounding enclosement. In contrast to the labyrinth, they feature few visual clues that draw attention to the place as such; they provide the canvas for a performance. They are more social than labyrinths (the labyrinth is usually the one to fight against).
“The mass media do not transit ideologies, they are themselves an ideology. It doesn’t matter what you say when the recipient is surrounded by a series of communications. The nature of the all disparate information is of scant insignificance.”
“The world exhibitions glorify the exchange value of commodities. They create a framework in which commodities’ intrinsic value is eclipsed. The objects are not desired in themselves, every wish is gone and what remains is pure amusement and excitement. In a contemporary exposition, a country no longer says ‘Look what I produce’ but ‘Look how I am presenting what I produce’.”
Animal animatronics in Disneyland: “It is not so much difficult to have the real equivalent but public is meant to admire the perfective of the fake.”
An article summarising the Heterotopia of Walt Disney World presentation that I gave in October 2009 is now published in the February edition of the Philosophy Now magazine. The article is part of a series of papers about ‘continental tales’ and the concept of narrative in Continental philosophy.
