Playmakers - The Story so Far Part 3

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.

The Barbican Sandpit playtest in March was a pretty great start. We just wanted to try out the basic premise of - is running around with a video camera, trying to film things and other people, while evading capture, fun? Here’s one of the videos that the teams created in the course of their play:

Barbican Playmakers #1, Red Team from Hide and Seek on Vimeo.

The other two are on our vimeo channel if you’re curious!

20 minutes of video is a lot to watch so here are a couple of highlights. 00:00 - 1:30: looks like a lot of fun - breathless excitement, the need to get away fast from the other teams, a rapid working out of what to do and how. 3:49 - confusion reigns! Disagreement over the rules between the team and the Camera Monitor. Hmm… looks a bit like some people are starting to get a bit left out. 12:00 - spying through the window! cool! 13:20 a STAND-OFF! Cue much excitement and hilarity… 19:00 Team shot! Team Shot! aren’t they all cute.

So, what did we learn from this first try? The basic mechanic seemed to be pretty robust - it allowed for a certain amount of improvisation, jeopardy, and thrilling encounters. A key piece of feedback was that some people felt left out, as folk took charge of the camera and the map, and left them without much to do. Holly & Alex took all that feedback, plus a detailed watching of all three videos , into the next design session…

This is the last post for the story so far - we’ll be documenting the rest of the playtesting we did (and are yet to do) at playmakers.org.uk. See you there!