Hold it in your hands and it is just a big iPod. Neat, flashy. A wonderful gizmo. But just that, a gizmo. The surprising thing happens when you lie the device flat on a table. As a horizontal computing surface, and one that integrates input with output on the same surface, you have the makings of a revolution.

This claim probably doesn't make a lot of sense to anyone who has grown up in a culture dominated by screens. Screens hang on walls, stand on desks, float vertically at every turn. Screens don't lie on tables. Even the Steve Jobs unveil of the iPad had him sitting in a chair, propping the tablet up on his knee, slightly inclined away from his face, but far from horizontal.

But if you look around the built environment, the world is filled with horizontal surfaces--tables, chairs, shelves, stands and cubbies. At home we stack papers on the backs of our couches, on the floor, on top of stacks of books and on top of stacks of stacks.

From an architectural stand point, this is hardly surprising. Our bodies are heavily oriented toward to the horizontal. Our eyes are set in our head making the horizontal primary in our field of vision (thus screens are wider than they are high). Our arms are attached on the sides of our body making us better at dealing with things on a plane projecting out in font of us.

Vertically oriented screens create a viewing experience. Almost literally, these screens become windows through which you watch the world, as a viewer. The vertical screen inspires a meditative passivity.

A piece of paper lying on the desk is the action model, the metaphor for doing. We draw on the horizontal plane, we drop books and magazines on the table to read and flip through pages to research. Like a board game, we place things horizontally on the kitchen table to act on them, to interact with them.

And that's the big surprise for the iPad user. As a screen, it's one more vertical viewing plane in a world of viewing planes. And like so many of Jobs driven innovations, this is a personal media model--my privileged view into the world. But apple's Achilles heel has always been it' baby boomer focus, which is really a 1960's vision of media you watch. Not media that acts.

So, for me the killer iPad app is board games. The table top game--Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, Spades and more-form the referece case for the future of surface media.

Because once you acknowledge how much of our kinesthetic life is organized around the horizontal, then the idea of opening up horizontal surface to computing is nothing short of amazing.

Download a board game on the iPad, I like Small World a lot. Play it with a friend. Horizontal computing changes the interaction model, it changes the social model. It is more comfortable and natural for many tasks. It changes how we think about what we are doing and reintroduces a spatial mode of behavior that we have largely ignored in the history of computing.

Sent from my iPad

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/content/toward-ludic-architecture

Much has been said about the mimetic potential of games to represent reality. The Serious Games movement models an ontological approach that sees games as a mirror creating a reflection of real world phenomenon and constructions. The presence of a game’s sense of reality to a player borrows categorically from real world phenomenon giving it a “half-reality”, to borrow Juul’s conception. Thus, a game object or action has a being tied, to some degree, to a transferable experience between the real and the virtual and allowing for a systematic criticism and exploration of these linkages.  This critical dialog may be considered the heart of what we call, “game studies”

In this view, games can speak about the world because properties of the world are embedded inside game systems and game content. Further, games allow us to generate ideas inside the virtual space of the game system and narrative open to judgement by real world criteria.

Taken together, these perspectives may best be considered games-as-model approaches, where the virtuality of the game is constantly held in strict ontological relationship to the real world.

However, a converse proposition receives less attention—the idea that knowledge about games, rather than knowledge of games provides a framework for talking about things outside of games. The body of knowledge described as game studies has a use beyond talking about games. Following the same ontological bridge that links games to the real world, we can traverse it in the opposite direction using game studies as a method for talking about specific non-game, non-virtual reality.

This paper considers the broad notion of games as epistemic systems capable of generating knowledge and understanding of the world, or at least, cultural views of worldly phenomenon. Game studies, in this mode, turns from its internally focused critical practice, here framed as an ontological practice concerned with the nature of being in a game, into a method for understanding things outside of games. The specific goal of this paper is to illustrate the potential for using games as a system of understanding through the application of the game studies concepts of “ludology versus narratology” and Caillois’ distinction between paidea and  ludus as means for understanding real world places. The first case maps the notions of a strong a ludological notion and a narratological notion to the environment of the children’s playground. This case illustrates how strengths and weaknesses in playground design can be clarified by a discussion of the inherent contestation and productive tension found in the narratology versus ludology debate (or non-debate) inside of game studies.  The second case maps the concepts of ludus and paidea to two natural places, Carlsbad Caverns National Park  and White Sands National Monument, in the United States, arguing that the management of leisure space mirrors the division proposed by Caillois and further elaborated in game studies literature. Using these cases as an initial foray into the method, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of applying game study concepts to the understanding of non-game, real world environments.

Partial Bibliography
1. Ang, S.C. Rules, gameplay, and narratives in video games. Simulation and Gaming, 37. 306-325.
2. Bogost, I. Persuasive games : the expressive power of videogames. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007.
3. Bogost, I. Unit operations : an approach to videogame criticism. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2006.
4. Borries, F.v., Walz, S.P. and Böttger, M. (eds.). Space time play : computer games, architecture and urbanism: the next level. Birkhauser Verlag AG, Boston, MA, 2007.
5. Caillois, R. Man, play, and games. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2001.
6. Frasca, G. Ludologists love stories, too: notes from a debate that never took place Level Up Conference Proceedings, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, 2003.
7. Frasca, G. Ludology Meets Narratology: Similitude and Differences Between (Video)Games and Narrative, 1999.
8. Gee, J.P. What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2003.
9. Newman, J. Videogames. Routledge, London New York, 2004.
10. Nitsche, M. Video game spaces : image, play, and structure in 3D worlds. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008.
11. Pearce, C. Theory Wars: An Argument Against Arguments in the so-called Ludology/Narratology Debate Changing Views: Worlds in Play, University of Vancouver, Vancouver, 2005.

As a part of my, "What makes a place fun?" research, I have postulated the idea of the "fun house" as an actual home anchored in fun as much as much as some homes are designed to be beautiful.

On face value the question rings true. Some places do seem more fun than others and wondering "What makes a place fun?" is equivalent to asking: "Where is a fun place we can go?"

http://home.att.net/~disneysue/characters/wdw/disneyrare.html

• They all anchor specific stories, or story arcs in the Disney world.
  
• Most of the costumes are so elaborate and sculpural that they qualify as a sort of architecture in their own right
  
• The locations and frequencies of the character appearances are tightly managed, or maybe more percisely scripted, So, for example, don't expect to see Captain Jack Sparrow wandering in Tomorrowland (unless as a part of the time-space rupturing parades that allow the entire Disney subconscious to flow, temporarily, throughout all lands).
• All of the characters will sign autographs. So, while most Disney attractions stand mute, providing only pictures, the characters give a script, a symbol of materiality more personal and seemingly more rare than any other Disney souvenir. In this way, the character autograph is the most perfect tourist memento--something intimate but ultimately fake and removed--a pretend signature of a pretend person written by an employ temporarily inhabiting a portable structure.

In terms of videogames, that most environmental form of storytelling, you can see a similar reflection in the use of character, and some opportunities:

• Game characters are as much a part of the gameplay as the game story. Interactive characters that only exist to forward the plot have fallen out of favor in terms of characters that both advance the plot and provide interactive possibility. Fallout 3 stands a perfect example here, where you talk to characters to forward the plot, and the game.
• As a result, the characters in a game work much as the architecture does, limiting action, providing focus and allowing opportunity. In every game that asks the player, "Go find person X" could easily be replaced with "Go find place Y".
• When characters are done well, they are placed and paced as carefully has the locations they inhabit. Finding the hermit on the hill or being sent to look for the princess in another castle.recognizes the inherent spatiality of character in an environmental story.
• Game characters may not sign autographs, but they typically grant players information or items key to a quest.

Where does this lead? Well, Disneyland and videogames both integrate character into place by way of making the narrative ahere to the place. Is this something other narrative environments could model? At the very least, it does seem that it would make architecture more fun if they did!

OK, the tilt-shift technique--the one that makes real photos look like shots of miniature models by way of manipulating the depth of field--may be the fad of the moment. But it also points a finger at just how delicate our grasp of media is in a much more profound way. Without much effort, we can fool the eye that an image of a real place is actually an image of a fake place. The point is, of course, that media can very well be the message. It also happens to support the argument that mediation of any type is a step toward fantasy. Why else do we see the tilt-shift universe as a cute, wonderful and magical doll house world?

Cities are systems, or rather, many systems that interconnect. Like buildings, they can be thought of as having layers, each changing at its own pace. If those layers are loosely coupled, the city — like the building — can adapt.

Recently, new urban layers/systems have started to emerge. They are made up of rapidly proliferating computing power, carried by people and embedded in the environment, used to access vast amounts of data.

At the same time, games have given rise to a new form of literacy —systemic literacy. However, to date, players have mostly inhabited the systems that make up games. They can read them. Writing, on the other hand, is another matter. True systemic literacy means being able tochange the systems you inhabit.

True read/write systemic literacy can be used to craft games, yes. But it can also be used to see that many other problems and challenges in daily life are systemic ones.

Speculative Modeling 

Here the author asks a very good question about our need for authenticity in hobby models. His solution is proposed as a project:

A few things collided in my head a while ago:

* How much I like model railway lay-outs (a lot)

* A wondering about why model railway lay-outs always evoke the past - rarely the future