City planners and urban boosters find the question of how to create a vibrant and attractive downtown an ongoing puzzle. Sports and shopping and the occasional festival fill out a fairly standard set of tools used to try focus attention in the regional middle.
Leave it to a bunch of zombies to create a spectacle that really brought the city to life. Sure, buskerfests and art fairs and all manner of outdoor concerts and meat on a stick carnival events bring in the crowds. But I watched with delight as at least 7000 participants showed up in downtown Denver dressed in all their undead regalia for 5th Annual Zombie Crawl. From the most basic footdragging outfits to jaw dropping costume constructions, the zombies and various other end-of-the-world characters ambled up and down Denver’s pedestrian mall.
The city seems to have a sort of perplexed stance on what to do with the independently organized event. Last year, officials slapped a huge bill on the Crawl organizers to clean up left over blood and guts. This year, things seemed to be a little more in control. Holding the even during the day slacked the playful bloodlust. And the city had the sense to cease mall buss service during the event to prevent the zombie hordes from attacking the vehicles as startled tourists drove by.
To my mind, as city governments look to increase civic engagement and get people taking advantage of their downtown cores, things like the Zombie Crawl should be encouraged, and not just tolerated. Citizens cutting loose, enjoying doing something with a wide diversity of ages and races, in a non-violent and festive environment is, well, fun. I don’t think that fun can save the city. But finding ways for people to participate in their public environmental in ways other than buying stuff or watching sports, seems like the next big thing.
What’s the difference, how can you tell and why does it matter? The connection seems to lie right below the surface, but remains as quick as a fish and twice as slippery when you try to grab it.
In one of those unscripted moments in life where things comes together in such a perfect way that it seems improbable because it all feels conveniently coincidental, I gave a speech last August at TEDx Boulder on “What makes a place fun?” while Colorado University Boulder professor Dr. Peter McGraw gave a speech titled “What makes things funny?”
Anyone following the narrative will figure that the TED event organizers just matched Pete and I up to provide some poetic symmetry and maybe stimulate some debate. But I don’t think that is the case. I was invited to speak because I research videogames and architecture. So, there really wasn’t any specific guidance on my topic. I might have ended up talking about “What do games have to do with architecture?” During a last minute deadline, I opted for the topic, “What makes a place fun?”
For me, the coincidence has more to do with the zeitgeist. Fun and funny are in the air and the TEDx Boulder organizers have a good nose for popular culture news.
So what?
On face value, there is a particular question that deserves to be answered—what is the relationship between fun and funny? Is this another coincidence, one of language? Is it just luck of the linguistic bounce that two words that seem to have a relationship clearly have a structural connection? Or is it something else? Do the words grow from a common root in meaning? Do fun and funny share more than several letters in common?
Since Peter and I gave two speeches almost side-by side, it seems worthwhile to compare the two ideas and look for a connection and to search for meaningful discrepancies. I can see both.
Peter’s theory revolves around the notion of “benign violation.” Basically, the theory holds that we think things are funny when they violate some social or psychological convention, but do it in a non-threatening way. So, we laugh when a waiter drops a tray full of plates, but not if that was our dinner he was carrying. Tickling seems the case example. We react as if we are being attacked, but we know we are not so we laugh.
My notion of fun, distilled from Brian Sutton-Smith in “The Ambiguity of Play” and D.W. Winnicott’s “Playing and Reality” assumes that what we call “fun” are things that both are and are not at the same time. So, Cinderella’s Castle in the middle of Disneyland is certainly there and it’s shaped like a castle. But it’s not really a castle in any meaningful sense of the word. And since it is both a castle and not-a –castle at the same time, it seems wondrous, fantastic and fun.
Clearly Benign Violation Theory (BVT) and fun as the is/is not share a similar structure. Both rely on things that are both there and not there. Someone mocking an ethnic group at a comedy club is funny, because we both get the violation (you should not make fun of a minority group) along with the benign nature of the mockery (I’m only kidding!”). This matches the fun theory which would hold this is fun because the person IS mocking a minority group but IS NOT (“I’m only kidding”). If for a moment we think that the person is deadly serious, well then, we have left the comedy club and entered the no-fun world of political hate.
Where I see the big difference is this:
I propose that everything that is funny is fun. But not everything that is fun is funny. Laughing is always fun. But taking a nap may be fun, but it’s not funny.
The reason for this I think is a fundamental distinction between funny as a specific psychological effect and fun as a broader philosophical phenomenon. In a simple sense, fun subsumes funny, and by implication, is/is not consumes BVT.
This observation is not meant to collapse funny into fun. But to recognize that funny is a specific form of is/is not. The benign (the is) and its contracting violation (the is not), creates an explosive collision that results in laughter. In the process, the benign consumes the violation, otherwise the laughing stops. But fun is a more contingent and ongoing state, where the categories do not collapse, but stay present, neither consuming nor being consumed by the other.
Of course, this is a cocktail napkin sketch of the relationship, As such, this is a conversation started. And be sure to check out Pete’s thoughts on the same idea on his blog.
Prior to my TEDx Boulder talk on “What makes a place fun?” CU Boulder profession, and scholar of the concept of “funny” asked me for a a quick answer to the question I posed in my talk title.
There is an ongoing interest in the idea of games and architecture. Usually this means videogames. And usually this means how buildings are designed in games.
When you want to think more about the concept of games and the concept of architecture, I think it helps to look at board games. I have taught an urban planning class using games, and I found that board and card games were generally better at peeling back the principles of planning that I wanted to talk about. SimCity is a lot of fun. But you have to spend a lot of time pulling back the curtains on the software to get to the heart of the matter.
I have not tried teaching architecture with games. But the idea intrigues me. So, I was happy to find this list of board games that feature, or other, relate to architecture in some way or another.
Keep on tricky thing in mind. Games are very spatial things. They tend to happen on a board or a court or a screen. Their spatiality tends to be one of their primary attributes. So, when looking for games about architecture, there may be some wonderful games that don’t directly deal with architecture, per se, but may actually speak more to the subject that games that send you around building little buildings
