Events happen there from time to time, but they aren’t “peak moments” the way something like a theme park is. There’s a few characteristics that set them apart from the way we build all these environments: It strikes me that third places in the real world aren’t flypaper. You hear their plaintive cries - or pokes, or twitters - and stop by to peer in the opening, and maybe toss a few notes in and some stale bread. The difference is that instead of stuffing yourself into the bottle, you stuff all your friends in the bottle, and then you get visitation rights. Oh, don’t get me wrong - they are still like Klein bottles. This makes for an interesting contrast to social networking services, which are premised not on you hanging out there, but on your leaving and then coming back. The endless chiming of casinos wears on you. Grocery stores become obvious in their tapping of hunter-gatherer brain stems, until we learn to control our impulse for that candy bar. “Have we done this one? And this one?” A checklist of places to visit. Theme parks become a bit of a chore after a while. There are no straight lines in theme parks, and instead around every corner, there’s a new zone with new challenges. Once you have managed to entice your customer to set foot in your space, you want to ding them as much as you can before they leave. It’s about retention, it’s about force-feeding the consumer activities and purchases. It is all very “Hotel California” - you can check in, but you can never leave.įrom the designer side, of course, there’s reasons. World of Warcraft places quest hints right in your path to keep you from straying. Grocery stores place tempting impulse buys at eye level right where you are most obliged to move slowly: rounding corners and standing in a queue. Casinos don’t give you line of sight to the doors, even though from the outside, the doors are glaringly large and provide great views of a tantalizing interior. It’s interesting how environments created as consumer spaces are designed to be as close to Klein bottles as we can get. Seems like most virtual worlds are kind of the same way. It struck me because of the possible readings: you can’t leave because it’s so beautiful you want to leave because it’s so horrible you can’t leave because it’s too hard to get out. Salsipuedes means “leave if you can” in Spanish. Somewhere down below, you can catch a glimpse of dusty pickup trucks and maybe a few dwellings. In Baja California, on the way to Ensenada, there is an exit marked “Salsipuedes.” You can’t really see where it leads - the exit turns steeply off the highway, and the area is tall mud cliffs overlooking the Pacific.