It’s a busy week for pervasive games in London… there’s the Sandpit on Wednesday 24 June at the Southbank Centre, of course for a whole evening of new pervasive games, as we frantically test things out in preparation for the Weekender… but in non-Hide&Seek game news:
Ben Henley’s Ponzi!, a game of deception, finance and brightly-coloured beads, will be running at Soho Theatre from Tuesday 23 June. It’s part of Everything Must Go, a night of short plays and other work based around economic collapse. The game will be played in the bar from around 9:30 - it’s free to play, but there are limited places and first dibs go to Everything Must Go ticket-holders. (The night also features a new soundwalk from Duncan Speakman - people who tried out the mscapes at last year’s Hide&Seek might remember his wonderful always something somewhere else).
And then on Sunday 29 June at 7:30pm it’s time for the Cable Street Conundrum, a “modern fable on three floors”. It looks to be an enigmatic game-adventure played over a three-floor building, featuring bears, blocks, rabbits, narrative, strategy and mystery — but to find out for sure, you’ll have to go. Email Mr Rabbit to book your free place.
Summer is peak pervasive gaming season - it’s now less than a week to Come Out and Play in New York, for example. If that’s a bit far for you to go, though, how about Spitalfields?
Composer, game designer, and Sandpit stalwart Simon Katan will be running musical games as part of the Spitalfields festival, this Friday 12 June, in Bishops Square Spitalfields E1. There’ll be live performance by Kate Ryder, Jean McGowan, Dan Shilladay, Richard Thomas and Dominic Lash; and it all sounds like pretty much the best possible way to spend a Friday lunch break.
They games up for playing are Rubik Music, a puzzle built from contemporary musicians, and Congestion Zone, a noisy maze for frustrated motorists.
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:
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!
Don’t forget to sneak along to London’s South Bank tonight for an evening of spy-themed pervasive gaming, at Sandpit #11. It’s running part of the BFI’s James Bond Weekender, and we’ve prepared a suitable range of espionage, subterfuge and high-tech gadgetry.
Games start at 6:30pm and run until 10pm, with a tiny casino and, later in the night, music from Jason Singh, Stephen Coates and Johnny Trunk. There’s a full schedule on our events page.
(Agents wishing to play the Twitter-based QNTMFSLC this evening may wish to prepare themselves by digesting this briefing document in advance.)
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.
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.
Back in September 2008, I had the pleasure of running through Igfest’s Journey To The Middle Of the Night with Rohan Gunatillake. Rohan, as well as being fleet of foot, sharp of eye, and strong of stamina, was interested in pervasive gaming, and what it all might mean for collaborative innovation.
Rohan, mid-Journey
He blogged extensively about the weekend here. We were very delighted indeed when, a few months later, Rohan got in touch suggesting that NESTA commission a piece of learning around Hide&Seek this summer. He had refined his thoughts about pervasive gaming around the term ‘ungeeking’, the definition of which is:
“Ungeeking is what happens when behaviours developed online make their way into areas of our lives independent of the technology through which we learnt them.”
Hide&Seek seemed to be ungeeking in two ways. The first was that we were taking ideas and design concepts from video games and online experiences and translating them into live, social spaces. The second was that the community that had developed around Sandpit was collaborating and sharing ideas, both in real life and on the web, using a variety of digital tools in the process.
So, we came up with a commission that would explore both these elements. The project comes in three parts:
1. A NEW PERVASIVE GAME. Holly and I are working to create a new pervasive game - one that builds on the knowledge we’ve accumulated as makers, curators and players.
2. A COLLABORATIVE PROCESS. In order to make that game as good as it can be, we’re going to ask for the support of our community. We’re going to playtest the game at every Sandpit between now and the end of July, and we’re going to launch a dedicated website (www.playmakers.org.uk) which will make community involvement in the creative process as easy as possible.
3. A FILM. Ivo Gormley, director of the brilliant Us Now is going to document the whole thing, Sandpits, playtests, brainstorms, disagreements and all. The footage will form the main thread of a film looking at the whole of the pervasive gaming scene, featuring interviews with a host of great minds from the pervasive gaming community to boot. Ivo is going to blog about the progress of the film at playmakers.org.uk, and the community will have their chance to participate in this part of the project too.
In Part 2 I’ll blog about the game itself, the basic mechanic which we tried out in March, and where we’re hoping to take the project creatively over the next few months.
It’s nearly Sandpit time again! For Sandpit #10 we’re at the ICA, with a night of games themed around the end of the world. (There’s a list of games live on the Events page now). Come along and pick through the rubble of a fallen civilisation, invoke angelic prophecies, make as much money as you can while the economy collapses around you, fight off infectious diseases, and more!
After harvesting some feedback about whether or not to charge (and thank you to all those who wrote with a view), we’ve decided to go ahead and put a charge of £4 to this event, which will let us keep on running the Sandpit regularly and with its full complement of hats, brightly coloured flags, beads, rulesets, tripods, balloons, monsters, paranoia, camaraderie and fun. The main point that you all made was “charging is fine, but I want some guarantee of being able to play in return”, which is very fair, so: your ticket buys you a place on three of the scheduled games, plus all the usual ambient and pick-up-and-play fun that goes with it.
Tickets are strictly limited, so do book soon if you’re coming!
A few weeks ago, Jane McGonigal declared that she was going to game-ify writing her book — using techniques from game design to persuade herself to write more, for example writing the easiest chapters (”level one”) first and making a record of her progress publicly available.
There’s plenty of this trick-yourself-into-writing stuff about, of course, but it’s really interesting to explicitly formulate it as a game, and probably worth looking at similar tricks that writers have used without necessarily seeing them as playful. There are the people who have, like Jane, written their chapters out of order — Margaret Mitchell wrote the last chapter of “Gone With the Wind” first and then gave the book to a publisher without getting around to Chapter 1; Vladimir Nabokov wrote on index cards so he could shuffle them around at will; Warren Ellis is “known to start with a scene somewhere in the middle with no characters or setting and build in both directions”. But there’s also stuff like:
P.G. Wodehouse used to stick all the pages of a manuscript around the room, high on the wall if he thought they were really good, low if they weren’t:
A first draft for Wodehouse was a question of getting the essential ingredients of a story organised—its plot structure, its characters and their comings and goings, the mountains they climb and the cliffs they fall off. It is the next stage of writing—the relentless revising, refining, and polishing—that turned his works into the marvels of language we know and love. When he was writing a book, he used to pin the pages in undulating waves around the wall of his workroom. Pages he felt were working well would be pinned up high, and those that still needed work would be lower down the wall. His aim was to get the entire manuscript up to the picture rail before he handed it in. (Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt)
I think it’s Malcolm Bradbury (in Unsent Letters, perhaps?) who writes about working on two different projects at a time, both of them collaborations with a friend. He and the friend would sit opposite each other at the kitchen table, one typewriter each; and whenever either of them got stuck they’d call out or ring a bell, and the two of them would move around the table to swap typewriters and stories. (This one might have been fictional — the Unsent Letters are not particularly reliable — but it’s a fun idea.)
Sven Lindqvist has written in numbered pieces for a long time, and was further “inspired by the manuals of the role-playing games”.
National Novel Writing Month is maybe the most successful writing game ever — and it is almost explicitly a game. People sign up every November, over 100,000 of them, and they all try to write a 50,000 word novel within a month (success rate for 2007 was around 15%). There are wordcount widgets so that writers can show people how many words they’ve written; there’s a Word Count Scoreboard, showing which regions and genres have amassed the greatest bulk of novel. People who reach the 50,000 word mark are even declared “winners”, with a web badge and pdf certificate marking the fact.
Write or Die is particularly interesting, and was pretty widely used last National Novel Writing Month. You set a time limit or a wordcount aim, and it gives you a text box to write in. If you hesitate for too long first the background starts shading from white through pink to red; then horrible music starts to play; and then finally — if you have it on “kamikaze” setting - the most recent words you’ve typed begin to disappear from the screen. I find this extremely useful when I can bring myself to use it (I would have missed at least a couple of Minor Delays deadlines without it), but I’m always reluctant, because it shuts out the possibility of distraction (wonderful distraction!) so completely.
As a nice contrast: Kent Haruf writes his first draft sitting in a cellar with a woollen cap pulled over his eyes, touch-typing, unable to see his surroundings, unable to see what he’s written for that matter. (He writes about it here). Difficult to argue that it’s a game-like technique, but it’s the same intent: concentrating attention, shifting the relationship between the external world and writing, convincing yourself to do something you wouldn’t have done otherwise.
Following on from yesterday’s thoughts, and the stimulating comments, I thought of something - not a game, exactly, but a playful, immersive experience - that embodies some of the snow-like magic that I was talking about. The company who made this are called seeper - H&S collaborated with them at the end of last year on a different project, which I’ll be blogging about soon.
Isn’t that great. So. Ways in which Pi is a bit like snow…
1. There is no barrier to getting started. Well, hardly any. You have to make it past the glamorous flight attendants…
2. It puts the player in touch with a childlike, uninhibited creativity, releasing them from an overactive sense of right and wrong. There is no goal, except to understand, play, and create. You can be as extreme as you like.
3. The technology is accessible to anyone, it’s multipurpose, it’s communal, and it can be combined in unexpected and delightful ways.
4. It generates a sense of community and shared purpose. The way those energy balls get passed around the room, it’s just like snow, because they can be shaped, passed on, returned with interest.
A big shout out to Evan and the seeper team for this magnificent piece of work; it’s truly inspiring, and goes some way to proving that the bold ambition of making a game that is just like snow is, if not achievable, then certainly a fun way to think about good experience design.
This article eloquently captures what we all felt yesterday. A return to innocence, a rare moment when talking to strangers, play, urban creativity are all allowed. A suspension of the usual rules of engagement… And this video shows how, in a tiny space of time, a crowd can generate a huge amount of joy and an epic theatrical event. All themes close to Hide&Seek’s heart, so I thought I’d reflect briefly on what snow might mean in terms of games design.
1. Snow is pervasive. Well, that’s certainly true… It’s a unifying social event - more than football, Strictly Come Dancing or Brad Pitt, snow affects every single person underneath its blanket.
2. Snow is transformative. It changes everything. Speed of travel, acoustics, the way the world looks. It’s an incredibly powerful game-rule. Incidentally, when in a game has it snowed? And has the impact of snow ever been truly brought off in a game?
3. Snow is an enabler of play and creativity. Like sand, but even better. It’s affordances are numerous - you can slide on it, build things with it, throw snowballs. All complementary activities, especially building snowmen and throwing snowballs - bored of building? Start a snowball fight. Bored of fighting? Finish your snowman. Furthermore, this technology is non-digital, and free.
4. Snow reminds us of childhood, family, and fun. I was out at 7am yesterday, and the giddy sense of joy I felt recalled each REALLY BIG snowfall, all joined together in my memory, a Proustian rush of sledging, waking in the middle of the night and seeing the flakes under the sodium streetlamp, yells of ‘It’s Sticking’. Snow is the opposite of work - it’s ingrained in our minds that Snow=No School=Play.
5. Snow is a little bit extreme. It’s really really cold. It hurts your hands. You might fall on your bum. A snowball in the gob or a sledge crash can be a bit harsh. But all of these threats are relatively mild (compared to, say, a rugby tackle, or a F1 racecar crash.
6. Snow is temporary. It’s perfect when it lands, and you know, you just know, it’s all going to turn to slush and ice in no time at all. So you have to play while you can.
7. Snow only happens outdoors. Snow increases in quality, the further you are from traffic. Parks beat side streets beat main roads.
Anyone got any ideas for a pervasive game that might reflect some of the qualities of snow?
(and one final thought - was this the first twittered snowfall? It was the only thing in people’s updates all day. See also this - which was a lovely bit of collaborative snow-mapping, even if the end result was necessarily rather incomplete.
The Sandpit is a monthly pervasive gaming night - a chance to play interesting games in the urban environment. We're based in London, with occasional events in other cities.
The Sandpit is a project of Hide&Seek, and has been running since February 2008.
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