Playmakers - The Story So Far Part 2

NESTA (that’s the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) have commissioned Playmakers, a ground-breaking project exploring the future of games through film and playful experiences. The project will officially launch at the ICA Sandpit on April 22. Ahead of that date, we’re going to blog a little about the project, how it came about, and what we’re hoping to do with it.

So, Holly and I sat down with a blank sheet of paper to generate some ideas for the new game. Except one never really sits down with a blank sheet of paper - especially not when the Sandpit is involved, and we have umpteen half-finished, recently played or downright peculiar game ideas circling our brains, waiting to land. (Sorry, I am trying to get good at Flight Control and it’s clearly affecting my use of metaphor).

Holly had devised a game called Hunt The Scavenger - part of the game mechanic of which revolves around trying to snap digital photos of your opponents. I had two bees in my bonnet that day - one was about trying to come up with a game format that allowed for a proper ending, and the other was about the new generation of digital video cameras that allowed for cheap and easy shooting (& uploading) of video.

The problem, as Holly explained it, with HTS was that the digital photos came out blurry, and that there was no convenient way of grabbing the photos at the end of the game for speedy sharing and scoring. Why not use video cameras instead? In fact, why not have three teams, each with its own video camera?

This seemed to lend itself to: a) solving the blurry photos problem - it’s easier to identify even a blurry target in moving footage, because you have so many more frames in which to do so; b) making use of this interesting piece of technology, and c) it gave us a framework for a game with an ending. If the teams all shot video synchronously for the duration of the running around part of the game, then we could play it back and get an interesting multi-screen recording of the game afterwards, enabling all the players to score the game together and watch themselves being silly/clever/successful/awful/whatever.

A hat tip here has to go to The Go Game, who pioneered the first ‘run around & have fun then watch yourself back in a social environment’ game, back in 2005. We felt our mechanic was sufficiently different to theirs to make it interesting and worth trying out.

Our first playtest was at The Barbican on March 7th. We recce’d the space and got very excited - the Barbican, with its multitude of levels and perspectives, seemed to be an excellent location to try out the first draft of our game.

We decided to buy three video cameras and have a go.