Games, Schools, and Worlds Designed for Violence

sightlines are important that is net they're limited there shouldn't be too long of a space without cover even though walls are built with this in mind hard concrete wings fan out and help provide shelter especially along linear pathways doors are an entirely bulletproof but their impact resistant they're hard enough to get through that backup should be able to get there before anyone gets through these are all features in Fruitport high school a brand new school in Michigan set to open in 2021 and it's not like this is the only place doing this southwestern high school in Indiana has smoke cannons that can fill the hallways officials in Guilford County schools in North Carolina are hoping to invest millions in efficient ways of locking down campus more and more schools are adding metal detectors require and transparent backpacks running active shooter drills it's hard to imagine anyone would design a school in the United States without at least considering the possible violence that might happen there you wouldn't design a school without tables or bathrooms or bookshelves now in 2019 you wouldn't design one without ways for a kid to get away from an active shooter either it certainly won't happen in every school but when it comes to having students safely protected behind layers of reinforced glass and carefully placed concrete well you'd rather just have it to be safe right [Music] cover systems and video games have been around forever but when I hear cover shooter I think of the biggest and beefiest one of them all years of war I mean look at these boys slamming into cover so hard they knocked all the color out of the world running from cover to cover like a vampire trying to get out of the Sun that low cover tattooed on their knuckles Gears of War was perhaps the biggest catalyst for an era of cover shooters that we're still working our way through today whether you were a big beefy space marine boy or a shaved sand the army boy or a wisecrack and handsome adventurer boy and many points and near adventures you are likely to find yourself crouched behind a wall waiting to pop up and shoot some dudes before you continued onward it's easy in the genre to see the combat zones before they happen you'd be walking alone idly chatting with your big beefy bros see a bunch of low stone walls in front of you and suddenly alarm bells would start going off you'd look at those walls and just to know that in a couple minutes you're gonna be crouching behind them waiting for the buzzers to reload even though the whole game was ostensibly a shooter it quickly became apparent which arenas you'd actually be doing the shooting in eventually I stopped consciously noticing the cover I just internalized it even though adding cover fundamentally recontextualizes the space you're in Ames do this all the time if the game gives you a shovel you know you're probably supposed to dig if a game gives you cover you know there are probably some bullets you're gonna have to hide from and a good combat level in a game is never just incidental this is a person's whole job several people's jobs they work for years to make sure that these walls and corners and stairways are in just the right place so Marcus can hide behind them and show the locusts what for [Music] the new Fruitport high school is designed by tower Pinkster a firm that's designed to several schools as well as airports colleges and several prisons the school's design kind of seems like a mix of all of those it's a school of course there are classrooms and cafeterias it well it doesn't actually have lockers yet they promise those will come soon and for a time students won't have lockers but Schmoe niak says in the end the final product will be worth any temporary inconveniences what it does have is always full of cover what it does have is impact resistant glass perhaps most strikingly fruit ports new entryway boasts a retrofitted reception desk that the architect calls an educational entry panopticon the word panopticon is not one typically associated with schools more commonly it's a terrifyingly efficient prison design you've probably seen the depiction of one even if you didn't know it as such a circle of cells each designed to hold just one person each completely cut off from each other the only thing each cell can see is a tower in the middle of the prison but that guard in the tower you can see everything every prisoner every prison staff every movement and the tower is designed so the people and the cells don't know exactly when they're being watched as a result they always feel like they're under scrutiny like they could be the target of the guard in the tower it's a prison that commands discipline by way of paranoia I don't think tower Pinkster meant to raise this mental image when they spoke of their new school's educational entry panopticon I genuinely think they have the best intentions but that's the word they chose to describe the school's design you're not going to raise a good person in prison says J Brotman the architect of the completely remodeled Sandy Hook elementary school Sandy Hook was totally renovated after the shooting in 2012 but takes a different approach to Fruitport J Brotman the architect behind the new Sandy Hook designed with an organic feeling touch the school's front is covered by a lovely wooden facade classrooms and common areas have tons of natural light and there are cool little tree houses at the end of the hallways the building isn't meant to feel like it's built to minimize fatalities but it is also that all of the glass is bulletproof cameras are ubiquitous the building sits significantly farther back from the road and the whimsical design includes a literal moat around the building at the end of the day though hopefully when you walk down Sandy Hook hallways it feels like you know like a school Gears of War communicates that it's a shooter from its very first moments your main dude is roughly the size of a refrigerator your gun has a chainsaw on it and there's not much disguising the fact that the entire world is built around the waist high cover and though Gears of War to its credit does some good world building you still get the impression that every space here fighting through exists for nothing else why does this wall exist hide behind while you shoot dudes what's the purpose of the store the seal often entrance from the dudes you're shooting at everything is capital F functional and that function is violence this isn't the only option though and there are actually games that design for combat much more invisibly Red Dead Redemption - for instance as many of the - doubts happen in forests towns or other relatively natural feeling locales you don't look at this place and immediately think the game is gonna make me kill a bunch of people here it's a true skill that invisible design Rockstar actually has excelled at this for years offices in Max Payne 3 feel like offices nightclubs feel like nightclubs yachts feel like yachts it feels like a genuine world you're playing through importantly though when combat breaks out and it always breaks out you'll find that those needed aspects of game design are still there there's still walls for you to crouch behind flanking routes to get around the baddies all those things we've learned make a fun shooter they're just a little more cloaked in the environment and this design philosophy is enthralling but it's not objectively better than the game or ask gamer worlds of Gears of War or vanquish and those games the purpose of the space is so obvious that blowing bad guys away feels implicit look at all these spots for cover of course you're gonna shoot people here it's like bowling at a bowling alley you're just using the place for the intended goal when you shoot people in Red Dead or Max Payne though and you do shoot many many people it feels transgressive at first the world just feels so legitimate that the gunplay feels almost a gross killing people in a real house rather than a fun house built for gaming but after a while you get used to it this office like that nightclub feels totally genuine but it's not not really you get used to the fact that under the sheen of cubicles and stacks of paper and gray carpeted floor this place too is designed for violence there's a myth that exists on many college campuses one that I often heard and repeated myself it's about the ultimate architectural Chad Brutalism brutalist buildings are big chunky pieces giant slabs of concrete they're bizarre and alien and look on a surface level pendant ugly I don't think I have to further prove my love of brutalist design but especially on first blush the design begs the question why the hell would you make an academic building that looks like a bunker and the answer I heard and I've talked to others who've heard this is that these buildings were actually a response to student protests and activism it was the 70s baby and you had real legit disruptive anti-war protests students would take over buildings groups like the Weathermen would bomb evacuated offices so it just makes sense that universities would build these giant bunkers with complex floor plans and unorthodox entries and exits Brutalism was to control the people man but it wasn't actually most brutalist buildings went up before the majority of student protesting really it probably has much more to do with the fact that concrete is cheap as hell also just as a matter of history brutalist architects were humanist and pretty staunchly anti-authoritarian that's not to say that the style couldn't be used against the designers wishes but I really haven't been able to find anything to corroborate the idea that Brutalism was used to exert university control but that's not to say colleges never built infrastructure specifically to quash student protests in an article for UT Austin's now-defunct the zine polemicist mark Masek laid out how the University's Board of Regents had systematically redesigned campus spaces to make student organization and occupation nearly impossible under the watch of chairman Frank Irwin the board bulldoze trees with student protesters still in the branches dismantled gathering spots for student and non student agitators and implemented student photo IDs and far stricter regulation of movement around campus Masek writes about the new pen Optus ism of the campus observe the minut technologies of control at work in the Union dining areas such as the dim lighting which discourages studying the revolving doors which let people in but not out and the fixed or crowded furniture that can not be rearranged for groups the TV monitors and the halls do more than display the day's events they call attention to themselves as omnipresent signs of the board's vision no one would want to gather in rooms like these and no one does like the panopticon the new layout of the Union is the diagram of a space which surveys and police's itself chairman Erwin said of the Panoptix renovations I don't fund anything I can't control at least I think he was talking about those renovations for him to be directly referencing the student body and be a little too on-the-nose right what I find most striking about May 6 observations is actually in 2019 how mundane they all feel my school was marked by every one of these aspects and I generally just accepted all of them as eternal parts of the experience but they're not to Masek in the early 90s these were glaringly obvious steps towards keeping the student body in check after 30 years they faded into ubiquity but the fact is undeniable student lives are under far more surveillance kept under tighter control with in many cases an omnipresent police force and while it's hard for me to qualify the exact changes that student activism has had to go through to respond it's not surprising to me that protesters feel like they need to cover their faces during an action of course they do they know who stands in the middle of the panopticon virtually nothing is known about the utility or consequence of architectural modifications what are the long-term effects of spending your youth in a classroom with red tape on the floor telling you where to stand when someone opens fire no one knows designing to stop active shooters is not at all the same as designing to hamper student protests and neither of these are the same as building digital shooting arenas in this is not an essay where I am equating the three but I have to wonder about spending so much time and a school designed for violence is it possible to make an elementary school shooter resistant while somehow not communicating to the kids that this may be a place they'll have to survive a hail of bullets and their design be truly that invisible on one hand we have fire escapes and fire drills and I didn't spend my school years constantly worrying about being engulfed by flame but on the other hand fire escapes don't denote a general feel of increased militarism fire drills don't come with a heightened police presence I don't remember a single kid screaming during a fire drill the way I remember it during our lockdown drills when an administrator would come around the school and shake the doorknobs to make sure it was locked on the other hand that there are no studies showing that fire extinguishers increased feelings of fear and insecurity of school even while the fairly blase addition of metal detectors has been shown to do exactly that especially in urban schools let's say nothing of the active shooter and live-fire drills that are proposed and performed with increasing frequency it's not that I don't think we should prepare for these tragedies it seems at the moment that there is no other choice but I think we don't give our architectural sixth sense enough credit I think about my own school experience and how I just can't know how it different from students decades ago before ubiquitous cameras and ID checks how did it subconsciously alter our behavior how did we change ourselves in response to the space we inhabited I don't have the answer I don't think anyone does and because of that I worry I worry that we're all too good at internal izing what a space is built for [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Jacob Geller

Views: 1,335,430

Rating: 4.8919487 out of 5

Keywords: jacob geller, designed for violence, architecture, brutalism, schools, essay, analysis, cover shooters, campus police, protests, modern art, design

Id: usSfgHGEGxQ

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/SmytheOrdo]

This was a good video. But troubling for someone who lives in the shadow of Columbine....