Cities, Like Playgrounds
Edinburgh, Hogmanay, years before we would be worried about the press of crowds and coughing in public. I had my first Guinness and saw the best fireworks display of my life. Perhaps my perception of the latter was influenced by my consumption of the former; don’t ask me how many pints followed that first one. An old lover and I chase each other, laughing wildly, through the streets. We duck behind corners, leap out at each other, stealing kisses before racing gleefully away. It’s a cat-and-mouse run to reach our tiny rented apartment and tipsily soak the cold out of our bodies. Nobody does revelry like the Scottish (one word: Fringe), sub-zero temperatures be damned. But while every city has a unique face, what I like the best about cities in general is their potential for personal anonymity. And in that anonymity, play.
“There is no more intimate act than play, even sex.” The internet responded: no one who had had good sex would ever say that.
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Thankfully, I don’t feel that I have to choose between play and good sex (and, might I add, rarely find myself short of either.) Tomorrow follows two friends in the world of video game design. Reading it brought me back to my love for gaming, a precursor to my love for cities: escapism, getting lost in an unfamiliar landscape, ‘choosing your own adventure’. These days I’m having far too much fun in the real world to attend to my poor, neglected Xbox*. As a teenager, though, the virtual world was my oyster and it’s truly a miracle that I achieved the academic success that I did considering how many hours I clocked up on Skyrim. I’m a first person RPG kinda girl, with the exception of Portal (the cake may be a lie, but I’m not when I say that I can sing ‘Still Alive’ from memory.) My avatar affords me total freedom in their game world, where rules are malleable for the skilled and daring, and stakes are low. Fortune favours the bold- this is true in cities as in games.
Brazil, Carnival. We chase blocos around the city, texting friends (“it’s here, come quick!”) and jump on buses, cabs, the subway, to feel sweat trace our spine, surrounded by bodies and the appraisal of strangers. “Can I kiss you?” I look at him, he looks at me. We assess each other, him expectant, bravado pulling him tall. I smile, “maybe later, come find me”. For now there are too many possibilities, too many opportunities. I’ve never been good at choosing. Thank goodness there are so many cities in the world. Everyone is single for Carnival and it’s like a spell has been cast over the city, lifting eventually to find its inhabitants stumbling back to their sweethearts bleary-eyed and glitter-coated.
Alone together, I like to go to Barcelona with lovers. To eat and drink at tables sprawled into labyrinthine streets as the heat of the afternoon melts to dusky languor and endless nights. I like Paris too, and New York, and Tokyo; places that we can be swallowed up and get lost. An adventure we choose together. London has always been an adventure, but it’s also home. I know the shortcuts and my favourite haunts, and memories are stitched into the city’s seams. We nearly got kicked out of there for lying about our membership, we kissed there for the first time, remember, right after that chef winked and sent us a dish so spicy we had to stop for ice cream after? That movie, that exhibition, the bookshop you had to drag me away from? The anonymity of London, though, is as endless as my appetite for misbehaviour (and the London food scene.) It’s a place to hide in plain sight. A city to look out across and find something new each time.
High over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
- Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Funnily enough, Nick serves as the author avatar in Gatsby. We’re all him, sans controller, in the New York Summer Jazz Simulator created by Fitzgerald. While I can’t say that the partying, glamour and outrageous yellow automobiles were without consequence for that particular cast of characters, I can say that some of the scenes in the city were compelling arguments for bad behaviour. To me, cities are about hedonism, subversion and possibility. This place is an opportunity, take it, run with it, play! The choice is yours and you are whoever you want to be, with whoever you want to be with. I’m afraid I’ll never venture into multi-player gaming. But, in the real world, I’ve found that games are best enjoyed with company.
*As a side note, I am holding out for the release of Dragon Age 4 when I’ll be taking a week’s hiatus from life to get obsessively reacquainted.