Iacovoni on architecture and videogames

"If life is a game whose aim is to discover the rules, a space is created in which play can be activated to try out various moves to change them, operating within that 'zone of uncertainty between brain and environment' which 'is also the zone of uncertainty between subjectivity and objectivity, between the imaginary and reality" (Morin, 74)" (Iacovoni, 2003: 14)

During my journey through Austria and Germany, I finally read a few of the books that I bought in the last few months but did not have the chance to check out. One of the most pleasant surprises was Alberto Iacovoni's "Game Zone: Playgrounds Between Virtual Scenarios and Reality", a literary exploration of the complex interplay between space and games. The book is very slim (less than 100 pages), but dense and replete with references, shortcuts and secret passages. Born in 1966, Alberto Iacovoni one of the founding members of the Studio maO which specializes on architecture and media and a member of the office for urban planning, Stalker. Here he "investigates a fascinating contribution of avant-garde art to the construction of space in the field of electronic games and arcades, beginning with Constant's New Babylon, moving through the radical suggestions of the 1960s and 1970s to the commercial and experimental examples of contemporary amusement arcades". The book is divided into four sections: Play, PlayGrounds, PlayScape and PlayList (the latter being an extended list of references). The section specifically dedicated to videogames starts on page 062 ("Invaders of Space") and ends on page 077. Iacovoni discusses the evolution of virtual playspaces from Night Driver to Origin's Ultima Online, concluding that "we have witnessed a change in videogame space to private to public, from complicated to complex, from delimited to undelimited, in which one can begin, like in real life, not just to construct true relationships, but in which to experiment the violation of the rules and the spaces that form it" (Iacovoni, p. 74). The contribution is very interesting, but it leaves you wanting for more. Recommended!