IDEA - Interior Design / Interior Architecture Educators Association

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• 2005 IDEA Journal
• Introduction
• Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth
• Absence of Structure
• Rhetoric of Landscape Architecture and Interior Design Discourses: Preparation for Cross-Disciplinary Practice
• Spaces of Architectural Overcoming
• Pacific Space: The Pacific Conception of Building
• Interior Bowers: The Dormant Wilderness of Nineteenth-Century Boudoirs
• The Potential of the Window in ‘Framing’ Landscape Meaning
• AFK – Away From Keyboard, Place in The Sims Online
• Interiors in the Land of the Great Outdoors
• Living Outside with the Sun, A Reflection on Outdoor Living Space Design in New Zealand
• The Aural Eye: Soundscape Practice and Pedagogy in Design Education
• ‘rO:Om’, spatial and material transmissions
• Navigating the Labyrinthine
• From Bus Driver Dreaming to Tjukurpa – the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centra
• Being Nowhere: Distraction, Disintegration and Spatiality
• The Question of the Trip
• Changescapes

AFK – Away From Keyboard, Place in The Sims Online

Kathy Waghorn

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Interior Design, School of Design, Unitec New Zealand, New Zealand

Abstract: The Sims Online computer game engages ideas of place where construction of a place is contingent on the conceptual fusion of space and experience. This paper discusses the ways in which this fusion occurs in this exceptionally popular digital environment. I explore how both the space and the subject (required to mediate, record and name experience) are represented. Two familiar architectural devices are used to construct space in the game; the map and the axonometric, as historical tropes that remain active in digital space. An avatar or Sim operates as the experiencing subject in the game and the oscillating relationship between the body of the Sim and the body of the player is teased out. Finally, the place that results from the fusion of space and experience in this particular environment is described and analysed.