Games at Urban Scale
December 15th, 2006
Founded by two New York-based designers in 2005, area/code wants people to get out and interact with their cities in a completely different way: by playing the world’s largest boardgames. In Minneapolis, three teams raced to move 25-foot inflatable pieces through a series of checkpoints scattered across the city over a series of days. And in New York, area/code used the grid of Manhattan to stage a life-size version of Pac-Man, complete with ghost costumes.
Cities can be incomprehensible, scary, anonymous places; area/code breaks the city down into something understandable, something that we can imagine follows rules printed on the inside of the box. What could be better than urban space re-energized through playful art and social interaction? After all, some of the greatest games (Monopoly, Candyland, Risk, and go) rely on representational physical space, why not the other way around?
A short side note: From the mid-50s until 1982, Yale University had its own urban game called Bladderball, where teams of students tried to roll a giant inflatable ball – by any means necessary or possible – from Old Campus to the President’s House. I’m not sure it inspired students’ use of urban space, though it did lead to much drinking, bizarre pranks, and minor property damage.
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