‘Blog’
Transmedia Training Days
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
Hide&Seek have formed a new partnership with The Script Factory, Europe’s premier script development organisation, to launch two brand new workshops this Autumn.
If you read about the amazing Wonderlab and thought it sounded interesting, or if you’re beginning to work in transmedia and want to kick-start your career, then these events are for you. The day-long workshops are devised and run by our very own Alex Fleetwood and Margaret Robertson, and they’re going to be brilliant.
On Wednesday 27 October, there’s an Introduction to Transmedia: a day for directors, producers and other film industry pros looking to understand the increasing opportunities for screen storytelling in a networked world.
And then on Thursday 28 October, it’s time for Stories Without Borders, a practical workshop for writers focusing on how stories can be successfully seeded across different media. The workshop will give writers tools to tackle these arenas and a chance to test them out in an exploratory and supportive environment. If you’re experienced at writing, but new to writing across platforms, this is the workshop for you.
The workshops cost £120 + VAT, or £210 for both. Places can be booked via The Script Factory.
Photograph by ktylerconk: Quill and ink.
Some games you should definitely go to
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
We here at Hide&Seek remember the distant days of yore (“yore” means “around 2007 or so”, right?), when big pervasive game events were so rare that each one was accompanied by comets that flared through the sky. In these newfangled times, however, the fun pretty much never stops. The next few weeks see groups in Birmingham, Bristol and Pittsburgh all running a pile of different games…
BARG, in Birmingham, recently ran Taste the Game, a clearly amazing afternoon of games at the Midlands Arts Centre. They’re back there this Sunday 29 August for Enter the Arena. It’s free, and there’ll be secret aliens, cardboard swords, and pretty much all the fun you could possibly want on a Sunday afternoon.
Also coming up this weekend, the Steel City Games Fest is running in Pittsburgh. It’s from Obscure Games, who won Best New Sport this year at Come Out & Play with their pinball-themed football-baseball hybrid Silverball, and the festival has a really interesting focus on new sports.
And then, on the 17th and 18th of September, it’s Igfest time in Bristol! There’s a folk game theme, and you can expect the full schedule soon, but in the mean time you can grab a ticket to 2.8 Hours Later, their zombie-themed through-the-city chase game. It’s £10, and is pretty much bound to be amazing.
Picture by Kevan Davis, of Igfest 2009.
The Generosity Game
Thursday, August 19th, 2010
I’ve been taking part in a two-day symposium on talent development in Edinburgh. Today I chaired a panel featuring David Jubb (BAC), Nick Sweeting (Improbable), Anthony Roberts (Colchester Arts Centre) and Andy Field (Forest Fringe). The Generosity Game was designed in response to a provocation from Tassos Stevens (I believe he triple dog dared me). I was thinking about ways in which we could get away from the panel format (in itself a cultural institution) to something which addressed the themes of the panel – organisational generosity, strategic altruism and the messy business of developing artists – in a playful, open & constructive way. I’d really like to play it some time, and maybe see it as something that could develop and grow.
THE GENEROSITY GAME
SETTING UP
This is a game for:
- 20 – 40 people who have a vested interest of some kind in good art being made, shown and enjoyed (artists, producers, directors, makers, funders, civil servants, interested parties, philanthropists)
- an artist or group of artists
- a critic
The people are divided loosely along categorical lines, depending on what it is that they most regularly do. These groups are combined into four teams of 5-10 so that there are representatives from each category in each group.
The artist then gives a short presentation to the group about themselves, their work, and their needs.
Each group has to combine the resources at their disposal to make the most generous offer to the artist that they can. They have ten minutes to do so.
RULES
- Resources must be actual resources that each indvidual could deploy in real life – an artist’s time & creative support, a venue’s audience, space or technical team, a philanthropist’s money.
- There must be one resource given by each member of a team, and only one.
- The resources will be deployed to the artist over a year which will play out month by month. All the resources can be given in January, or spread out however the group sees fit.
The group is encouraged to think collaboratively and ingeniously about what combination of resources might best serve the artist over the course of that year.
HOW THE GAME WORKS
The groups take it in turns to present their offer to the artist.
A group presents it’s offer month-by-month through a year of work. The artist is free to ask questions about the resources, and to imagine themselves using them as the year progresses. At the end of the year, the artist has to present a piece of work to the whole group (created along the lines of the Imaginary Theatre workshop run by Tassos Stevens and Andy Field) utilising the resources at their disposal.
The critic then reviews the piece. Stars may be awards if so wished.
The next group then takes its turn and process repeats until all four groups have offered up their generosity, four pieces of imaginary work have been made, and four reviews composed.
There aren’t any winners or losers, it’s not that kind of game.
New Hide&Seek Game: The Normans
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010
Have you ever wanted to teach 7- to 11-year-olds about the Battle of Hastings? Or keep a group of children occupied for an hour? How about both at the same time? Well, now’s your chance…
Hide&Seek’s been working on a game for the BBC’s Normans season, as part of their Hands On History series of activity packs. It’s an active playground game for 7 to 11-year-olds, based on the Battle of Hastings. We’ve done an awful lot of running around, playtesting, rules-tweaking, beanbag-throwing, flag-making and rule-writing over the last couple of months, and the game’s now gone live on the BBC website.
If you’re a teacher or a playleader – or know someone who is – do have a look! The pdf gives curriculum suggestions, setup instructions, and all those useful things, and the game itself is really simple and straightforward to run. But even if you’re not a playleader or a teacher – well, in confidence, lots of running around daftly careful playtesting has determined that the game can be awfully good fun for adults as well.
Pocketgame voting live
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010
If you made it to the 2010 Weekender, you might have seen the Pocketgame display – dozens of designs for easy-to-play games you can keep in your pocket, entered for the Cadbury pocketgame competition.
A couple of weeks ago, a collection of judges (including me) narrowed the entries down to ten – and these ten are now open for a public vote, here.
For the next stage, two of the ten games are going to be turned into proper physical prototype versions, sent out to thousands of players – and it’s up to YOU YES YOU (well, and any other voters) to choose which two those will be.
The games are up for voting here, and they’re well worth a look. There’s…
- The chalk racetrack fun of Flick Racer – it’s a bit hard to read, but there’s a bigger version here (disclaimer: this one’s from James Wallis, who shares an office with Hide&Seek, and whose chocolate digestives we ate while he was on holiday)
- The straightforward and brightly pretty Choc-a-Block
- The charming balancing game Stackits, where the box is part of the play
- A selection of cunning papercraft-lite penny-flicking sports
- And six more, so do poke around and pick a favourite!
A couple of weeks left to play
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
Earlier in the summer, a couple of charming (and free!) participatory-y game-y interactive-y all-around-London-y projects began: the Conspiracy for Good, an ongoing story with four great big pervasive game events, and Tate Britain’s Grand Experiment, a series of sound walks focused on different Henry Moore sculptures.
Well, summer is long, right? Plenty of time to play everything. Except now both projects are drawing to a close, and if you – by which I mean me – have been sitting around assuming that you’d get around to playing any time now, you’re going to need to get a move on.
There are two events left in the Conspiracy for Good’s run, happening this Saturday (the 31st) and next, during the day. Players from previous events report hours of running around, hunting down clues, solving puzzles, boats, buskers and ice-cream vans (see the video above). It’s free, but you’ll need to give them your contact details and book in advance at the website (there are some spaces left at time of writing…).
And the Henry Moore exhibition at the Tate runs until 8 August, so find a statue near you and download its mp3 while you’ve still got the chance, and then visit whenever suits you.
The Pixel Pitch deadline is approaching
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
There’s a lovely opportunity coming up for anyone with (a) a production company, and (b) an exciting cross-media idea that they want to develop further: the Pixel Market, a two-day event happening in London in October.
The Pixel Market is run by Power to the Pixel, who are looking for “international projects with stories that can span a combination of film, TV, online, mobile, interactive, publishing, live events and gaming”. Twenty of the teams who submit an idea will be invited to attend the Market itself, where they’ll get a chance to meet up with potential international finance and creative partners; and following pitches from half of these shortlisted teams, an international jury will choose one team of applicants to receive a £6000 prize.
The deadline is 6 August, so be quick!
Couple Up, unpacked
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Following on from the previous post, I wanted to explain a bit more of thinking – conscious and subconscious – that went in to Couple Up.
To recap, Couple Up was the card game designed and deployed by the participants of the WonderLab at the end of the event. Intended as a way of creating a concrete expression of the issues raised during three days of talking, playing and experimenting, it also had to work as an enjoyable game for an unwitting invited audience. Nothing like raising the stakes to concentrate the mind.
We’d closed the first day of the lab by writing giant post-its with big, open questions on them, and sticking them to the walls – you can see some of them in the great summary video on the Lab’s YouTube channel (along with all the talks from the event). It wasn’t the intention to try to cover everything in the final game, but it was interesting how many we did. So, in no particular order (and with a bit of paraphrasing), here’s how I saw the things we’d talked about flowing into the game. I’m sure other participants would have different takes. Pat Kane has already written some cracking stuff about his sense of how well it worked, and I’m sure there’ll be more blog posts coming.
You might want to nip back to the earlier post to remind yourself of the ruleset. Broadly speaking, players are trying to gain access to the booze-laden Upper Club by gaining the approval of a bouncer who will only admit perfect couples. Players use the two cards they’ve been given to find their perfect partner amid the crowd, but then discover that the bouncer has a secret rule he won’t disclose, which can only be guessed at by inspecting the appearance of the other players. But why was that the game we made, and what were we trying to explore?
The interesting ways in which games can be broken
Momus mentioned early on that one of the things that intruiged him about games was the fact that they could be broken. Art, he suggested, could be good or bad, or all kinds of other things, but not broken. Was it always a bad things for games to be broken? Might more interesting things happen in a broken game than a working game?
And so, partly out of necessity (3 hours isn’t a very long dev cycle), and partly out of curiousity, Couple Up is fundamentally a bit broken. The number cards (the first part of finding your perfect match) are worked out fairly carefully, and will mostly allow all players to find a partner, but for the fortune cards that just isn’t true. It’s easy to end up with your last two players being a born-and-bred Londoner looking for pet owner and an animal-phobic allergy sufferer looking for a foreigner. There’s no way they can form a match, and no way they can finish the game. Broken.
Interesting, though. It’s increasingly painful for those individuals left at the end – what was once a busy, anonymous roomful of people has thinned out, and they’re now alone and exposed in a big empty space, being watched from the comfort of the Upper Club by a crowd of smug players already tucking into their second drink. They’re forced towards a choice. One option is to lie – we’re in no position to check birthplaces and pet ownership, so we’ll have to take them at their word. Or they could appeal for help, either from the gamerunners or the bouncer. Can’t you just make an exception and let us through? Another option is to simply disengage from the game, to say it’s boring and broken and stupid and simply step over the laughably flimsy rope barrier. It’s acutally the most interesting choice in the whole game, and one I think I’d struggle to build a game which could support it overtly. It’s a genuinely revelatory moment, watching the choices that people make.
In the end, our players did the first two but not the third – they lied, and threw themselves on the clemancy of the bouncer. During the post-mortem it turned out that about a third to a half of our players overall had lied. Some immediately, some in desperation. It seemed a bit more prevalent between players who already new each other, which isn’t surprising. More surprising was that we didn’t have any active mutinies, not least because another thing we’d wanted to explore was…
Power
As we start to make games for more and more purposes – whether you’re Zynga trying to enforce daily playing and paying behaviour, or Channel 4 trying to teach teens how to be happy – there are more questions arising about how much power game-makers have, and how ethically they’re deploying that power. Brands, governments, protest groups are all starting to make games, and we know how deep a good game can get its hooks into its players. So – as Pat Kane vocalised – are game makers on their way to becoming the new ruling class? Are they, literally and figuratively, going to be the people making the rules that will determine how our culture and societies evolve? And if so, will the players of those games have the literacy and the confidence to challenge those rule-makers?
Couple Up tackled this head on, with the decision to include the hidden, arbitary secret rule. In some respects, this is really bad game design – forcing players to obey a rule without telling them what it is. Here, though, the bouncer becomes an embodiment of the game-makers within the game. He’s the guy pulling the strings and making the rules and he’s right here in front of you. Are you going to accept his arbitary decisions? Are you willing to lie to him? Will you try to cheat? To reason with him? Bribe him? To threaten him? It was interesting to watch how willing people were to be dominated by a man in a bow-tie made of post-it notes who claimed to make the rules. Once you’re in the game it became very hard to question the game, which was a sobering observation – especially since we’d also setout to try to generate some….
Ethical gameplay
A core inspiration for Couple Up was Momus’ desire to make a game that had a happy ending for everyone. The meaning of success and failure came up a lot over the lab. In the long and increasingly ridiculous game of Nomic we’d run the day before, Phil Nichol had worked long and hard to impose rules that undermined the notion of winning – that changed winning into losing and losers into heroes (we won’t talk here about the rules that ultimately required Pat Kane to hide under a table with Kati London while she did her uncanny De Niro impression…). Momus was similarly interested to explore if we could make a satisfying game where everybody wins.
And so, although Couple Up has elements which are rather cruel, and are about exclusion and power imblanaces, the other side to that coin is that this is a game about finding a new friend. Once those last, self-conscious players have made their choice and lied, bullied or begged their way into the Upper Club, everyone who plays has won, and everyone who plays has found a new partner. There’s lots of scope for flirting in Couple Up, for making new friends and finding out new things about old ones. The atmosphere, both times we played, was happy and silly. It wasn’t a resounding design solution to the Momus’ challenge, but it did take us some way down a road to one.
Enabling Performance
And that atmosphere was important, because another element of the Lab which Couple Up explored. Melanie Wilson talked about The Boursier-Mougenot installation at the Barbican, where zebra finches fitted amonst the live, miked strings of musical instruments. She’d been struck by the way that the birds, in responding to the movements of the visitors as they walked around, amplified and interpreteted this very simple form of participation. Aleks Krotoski and Malcolm Sutherland had both shared interesting stories about their experiencs of Before I Sleep, the participatory theatrical production by dreamthinkspeak inspired by The Cherry Orchard. It sounded an amazing event, but – like many such events – people’s experience of it seems to have varied wildly depending on what they managed to find or how brave they were about actively participating. That is, of course, much of the joy of that kind of experience, but it raised the question of how much literacy the public now need in interacting with these evolving art-forms. Coming in cold, it’s often very difficult to have an optimal experience. Games, of course, have a long track record in teaching new players how to play. What did that look like, we wondered, for these kind of performances?
Couple Up, then was partly designed to be a game with a structured curve leading players from participation into performance. When the game opens, the stakes – and the pressure – are very low. There is a safety in numbers, and a deliberately non-threatening initial task: finding someone with the right number card. You can even just show your card if you’re nervous making the first move or striking up conversations. Then, the requirements step up a little as you play the little Fortunes conversation game. We were struck by how much people got into the spirit of this, and how well it worked to enabled interesting conversations. The game structure also changed the dynamic of approaching the bouncer. He was, fundamentally, a performer, and often in participatory theatre pieces its only the bravest attendees who will actually initiate an interaction with a performer. But here, the game gave you a structure, supplied you with at least a couple of opening lines. And this, of course, is when the balance starts to tip beween private play and public performance: the bouncer attracts everyone’s attention and the game encourages everyone else to inspect you. By the end game, when most of the players have moved through to the Upper Club, the dynamic has completely switched: the remaining players are now staged in a big empty space, with a seated audience looking back at them, having been gradually converted from players to performances as the game went on. It wasn’t by any means a wholly successful experiment, but one which did reflect some interesting thinking on how play and perfomance inter-relate.
Technology driving content
Game-makers sometimes bemoan working in a world where the production landscape changes unrecognisably very five years. Theatre-makers, too, have on occasion been heard to vent their frustration at funding application requirements which insist on technological additions to pieces which would have been better without them, purely in an attempt to be ‘modern’. To what extent, we asked ourselves, does technology drive content? To what extent should it? Of course, we then entirely side-stepped the issue by committing to making a card game – a totally untechnologised experience.
Our biggest surprise, however, was that it was only once the game was underway that we noticed that every ounce of our content had been defined by one big bit of technology we’d become oblivous to: the room. The lab took place in the upper galleries in the ICA – two large rooms, linked by a very short, very wider corridor. If we hadn’t been in that space, it’s highly unlikey the game would have taken the shape it did. Couple Up was creatively, as well as functionally, shaped by the hardware that surrounded it. We just hadn’t noticed because we’re so used to thinking of technology as things with screens and USB ports.
Games that leak
Another element that had played into the lab was the idea of games – and indeed performances – where things leak into the real world, or back from the real world. Conversations with Aleks Krotoski and Tassos Stevens had brought up interesting questions about how we respond differently to the real and the virtual. Can the virtual give us goosebumps and raise our heart-rate the way roller coasters can? Or is Tassos’ definition of ‘live’ more useful: that as long as an experience is responsive and reactive, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the same room, or indeed the same time-zone – virtual space interactions can be just as live as meat space ones. Kati London, too, had spoken very convincingly about the value of games that know how to manage their relationship with the real world, and we’d had some experiences playing Set which demonstrated how porous the game/reality barrier was.
In a very simply way, Couple Up was intended to reflect a little of this. It was deliberate that one of the critera for finding a partner was endogenous to the game – a randomly assigned number, and the other was exogenous – a real-world piece of information triggered by someone else’s Fortune card. To play the game successfully you had to find someone who was both a game-world match and a real-world match. Of course, the Fortune card was endogenously assigned, which rather undermined the idea, but the principle was there, and proved Kati’s point right: it’s a definitely strength of the game.
There’s much more than that, of course, but those elements seemed to me the clearest in the design. When I set the task at the beginning of the lab, it was with some trepidation. Simply designing and delivering a new game in an afternoon – particularly with a group who had never worked together, of whom many had never designed a game before – seemed a pretty high wire proposition on its own. Hoping that that game would somehow embody or represent the agenda the lab wanted to set seemed extremely over-amitious. I shouldn’t have worried: it was hard not to feel that that roomful of people could have turned their hands to almost anything and who – with flair and good-humour and disciplined enthusiasm – pretty much did.
Couple Up
Monday, July 19th, 2010
The WonderLab was a three day exploration of what happens when performance meets play. As befits a lab, we did a lot of theorising, experimenting and inventing, and decided to use the medium of a card game to express the conclusions we’d drawn about the big issues facing designing these experiences. We didn’t want to produce just another document of vague polemic or unresolved theory, but rather make something concrete and specific, which we hoped would enable other people to respond in concrete and specific ways. Using a game in such a way was a very untested idea, which felt just like what a lab should be doing. It was conceived and produced in a single afternoon, and was launched on the public after only one very brief playtest. There’s lots that’s wrong with it – some things deliberately, some not – but I think we were all heartened by how well it performed.
So, for now, I’ll run through how the game works, and tomorrow I’ll talk through what the thinking was behind it. It will be interesting to see whether or not anyone picks up the threads from the ruleset alone.
Couple Up! It’s a game about finding your match and making the grade. Or, more brutally, it’s about finding a partner and getting a drink. Here’s how we played it:
You arrive into a large empty room, which is gradually filling with other guests. You can see another room beyond, full of drinks and nibbles and comfortable looking chairs, but access to this room is barred by a velvet rope and a maitre d’ in a snazzy bowtie.
It’s explained that the room beyond is the Upper Club. To gain access to its delights, you must persuade the maitre d’ to let you in. The maitre d’ however, is very picky. He won’t consider granting entrance to anyone who hasn’t found their perfect match. But how do you know if you have?
Easy. As the game begins, you’re given two cards. On the first is a number – something between 1 and 4. This is public and you can show it to anyone. On the second is your fortune. This is secret and you can’t show it to anyone – it’s so secret, you can’t even say out loud any of the words that are underlined on your card. To find your perfect match, you must first find someone with whom your number cards add up to 5. So if you have a card with a 4, you’re looking for someone with a 1. If you have a 2, you’re looking for a 3, and so on.
Then you have to discover if this person fulfils your fortune, and if you fulfill theirs. This is particularly tricky when you remember that you must keep your cards secret, and can’t say any of the underlined words (So if your fortune says ‘Your match is wearing blue underwear’ – forgive me for not knowing how to do underlines – then you need to find a way to ask the question without either of those words). Once you’ve found someone with the right number and a compatible fortune, and checked you match their fortune, then you may approach the maitre d’. He will check your number cards add up, and ask you each to pledge that you fulfill each other’s fortunes and then…
And then, something unpredictable happens. Some couples he lets in. Some he looks up and down and announces solemnly ‘There’s something not quite right about you’ and sends them back into the foyer. You soon realise that you won’t make it into the Upper Club until you figure out what the maitre d’ is being so fussy about, and he’s not giving you any clues.
As the players seperate into the two rooms, you scan them anxiously to try to see what makes them different from you. Some couples who failed the first time have succeeded the second. What did they change? Something they said? Something they did? Something they wore? Some new members have even filtered back into the foyer, sipping their wine and looking smug. You try asking them how they got in, but all they do is shake their heads and show you their Upper Club membership card, which simply says ‘Sorry, I’m taken’. It’s up to you to figure out what it takes to ascend.
And that’s it – the game ends when all the players have found their match and made the grade. Or, of course, when the maitre d’ takes pity on any remaining lost souls. It aroused some strong feelings and interesting debate when we ran it, and we’re looking forward to running it again in different ways, with different audiences, to explore those issues further.
You can download a gamerunners ruleset for Couple Up here, in case anyone wants to give it a whirl themselves. We’d love to hear feedback – although I can’t help but remind anyone who spots any of the obvious holes that this was a game made from scratch in an afternoon. It was designed to entertain, but also to embody and explore some of the biggest issues WonderLab participants felt were facing the gaming and performances spaces. Next post, I’ll run through them explicitly.
Hide&Seek Weekender roundup
Monday, July 19th, 2010
In the week since the Hide&Seek Weekender, we’ve come across photos on Flickr and Facebook, comments on Twitter, and blog posts from players – and between them, they end up giving a much better view of the Weekend than anything we could write up.
To see a few of our favourite pictures from the Weekender, take a look at this Flickr gallery. And to get an overview of what was going on, try these blog posts:
- David Hayward’s brilliant write-up of the games he played
- Chris Unitt’s consideration of Pass the Impossibly Large Parcel
- Sophie Sampson’s designer-eye-view of running Time Trails
- AceDiscovery’s experience of Flag It Up
- Average Gamer’s play of Segue
- And Ark Lab’s write-up of their experience
Have we missed any? Let us know if so!
Picture of Segue by Ludo des Cognets, courtesy Watch This Space festival.
The Beach – National Theatre Wales
Monday, July 19th, 2010
Want to be one of the participants in the first mass-participation playable documentary theatre piece? Then you need to head to the fine sands of Prestatyn beach in the last week of July.
National Theatre Wales, in partnership with Hide&Seek, have developed a new kind of performance which will explore Prestatyn’s missing generation. The event itself – called The Beach – will be playful, dramatic and spectacular, and the story has already started unfolding online. Check out The Beach community site to start following, and head over to book your tickets – and do it right now, they’re selling out fast!
Saturday 17th: it’s a bewilderingly busy games frenzy!
Thursday, July 15th, 2010
While we’ve been running around with Weekenders and Wonderlabs, the rest of the world has been hurrying about too, setting up all sorts of playful things over the next couple of weeks. And specifically, over the next couple of days. And even more specifically, on Saturday 17 July, when a ridiculous four different pervasive-game-y events are happening across the UK, entirely unrelated to each other.
In Manchester, there’s Hazard a day-long city-centre microfestival of sited performance including games from the Larkin’ About crew. There will be deely-boppers.
And still in Manchester, there’s a zombie-themed game at Eccles shopping centre, from Let’s Go Global.
In London, this weekend sees the start of the Conspiracy for Good’s live events, which promise to be amazing – the Conspiracy is also looking for volunteers to help out over the next few weeks, so if you’re interested, email Jo Dagless at nasher2@hotmail.co.uk.
And in Bristol, there are a few places left in Iglab’s design workshop at the Milk Bar.
Four events! One single day! Surely this can only end in an epic pitched battle/game between the four at some central point, desperately confusing the inhabitants of a tiny mid-England village.
WonderLab: Make Believe
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
Those of us lucky enough to be at the WonderLab yesterday were treated to a visit by Jimmy Stewart – no, not that Jimmy Stewart – who some of you will know from Tassos Stevens‘ and Nick Ryan’s performance at BAC earlier this year.
Jimmy was kind enough to prepare some thoughts for us, which Tassos was able to deliver, and which have proved to be both a distillation of and a bedrock for the work that’s been going on Lab over the last three days.
Check in tomorrow for news of what the Lab finally invents, but for now, enjoy Jimmy’s thoughts – or, better still, watch them performed.
“Hello, I’m Tassos Stevens. I’m a co-director and runner of Coney, an agency making play where it’s all about you, founded on principles of adventure, loveliness and reciprocity, amongst others.
But I am not here to talk about that. Actually I’ve brought along something to read by somebody else. There’s this writer I know called Jimmy Stewart – yep, just like but obviously not the Jimmy Stewart – and there’s a short essay of his that I’ve brought along. It does read a bit like an incomplete manifesto, but if he were here, he wouldn’t apologise for that. He’s at least half-Martian which makes his perspective somewhat alien and his language occasionally rather dense. But that’s probably why I like it.
So this is…
Make Believe by Jimmy Stewart
Play is make believe at the double. I look at something and I first see what it is, or at least what I believe it is, be it Simon Russell Beale, a banana, February 14th. But then I make believe what if that what is were something else: Hamlet, a revolver, the feast of St Valentine. What if. What is. We’re playful when we hold two spheres of belief in our brains overlapping. Humans are really good at it. There’s facility especially when it’s conventional, meaning we are practiced at it, or if we are in a collection of other human-people simultaneously doing that same juggle of spheres. But it’s most inspirational when we discover it ourselves together.
The distance between these two spheres of what if and what is, it’s a dynamic space, sparking like the electrical storm of Van der Graaf. Sometimes so close the spheres are almost touching, sometimes miles apart, but the meaning of play is found across that distance. Still what if is only charged if it is grounded and connected to what is. There’s no chance of transformation otherwise.
Play is a live, fluxing reinvention, ever negotiated, always In Play. You can’t make me believe anything unless I want to believe. I don’t want to play by your rules, says the stubborn kid who is sometimes the very best of us. And it matters then in this negotiation whose rules, who is telling that stubborn kid what if, and even who is paying them to do so.
But the best play doesn’t tell you how to act, play invites you to imagine what if and – if then – what do you want to do about it. It’s a principled belief that creates an action-space, where the agent of play is you.
Peter Brook was a theatre director and once asked what it is for an actor to exit pursued by a bear. I see a bear, I feel fear, I run. I see a bear, I run, I feel fear. Two pursuits. Brook argues that they are equivalent, and it only depends on the actor and the director together which suits them best. Too true. But if you want an actor with agency, better to be governed by a principle than ordered into action.
Game arises from play. A ruleset crystallises a set of actions distilled from an experience of play. That crystal can be popped in your pocket to be played with again and again, any time, any place, with anyone entranced by its sparkle. It gets chipped and scratched, then rubbed and polished. It becomes a lens that focuses action in time and space and for one brief encounter let’s us act as if we lived in a simpler world, the kind of world that can be described in a ruleset. But the very best thing about it is that if we want to, we can smash it up and grind it into paste to make believe anew. Even if let alone, its inherent ephemerality will let it pass; like a playful version of the second law of thermodynamics, people stop playing attention and soon the game dissolves into flux. It’s the playful spirit of the game that’s more important than the letter of the rules.
Which is as it should be. Jane McGonigal says reality is broken and let’s fix it with game, a whiff of formalin in the air. Her lens on the world is rather monocular, fundamentalist in the proper sense of the word. It rarely admits failure and dreams of a superhumanity. But I think I can do no better than make play with people, and forcing them into one game they don’t want to play is like trying to choreograph butterflies.
Try to be a theatre director of any scene of people in play and you discover many games tumbling out at once – games of status, of desire, of curiosity, of connection, and of greed, of all the sins and of all the virtues – plus hope – and as an actor here you can’t stop still, moment by moment a different game crackles into life. And in reality, these games are all being played all at once: by different people at different times in different places, interrupting and overlapping. If you look at the crystalline complexity of reality through a monocle, no wonder it looks broken.
Reality is broken. To which the only true playful response is: Yes And. A cascade of Yes Ands, with the odd Yes But, an occasional No Thank You, one step at a time.
Actually it’s where reality breaks that matters. Where one game breaks down and you choose to start playing another. Or simply because someone else asks you to play nicer for them. Augusto Boal was another theatre director who never stopped playing what if with reality, again and again, until it broke and then he asked the audience if they had a better idea and if they wanted to get up and do it.
As a society, as individuals, it’s how we respond to fail more than to epic win that matters. It’s in fail that we find the dimensions of our capacity for resilience: connectedness, the ability to be stretched, our very own agency, powered by accurate reflection of what is with still space to dream what if.
————————–
That’s as far as Jimmy got. Slight hyperbole there at the end, sorry about that.
And, by uncanny coincidence, that’s all I’ve got too. Thanks.”
The WonderLab begins
Sunday, July 11th, 2010
As the Weekender draws to a close, we wanted to remind you to keep an eye out for the WonderLab, which starts on Monday. Thanks to support for the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Hide&Seek and LIFT are bringing together some of the smartest creatives from the digital, gaming, theatre and performance fields, to spend three days exploring where digital tools and the ethos of play will take us next.
Attending, we have brilliant people like Paul Bennun, head of digital at Somethin Else; Pat Kane, writer of the Play Ethic; Kati London, vice president at Area Code; Nick Currie, known to some of you as Momus and to others as the author of The Book of Scotlands; Malcolm Sutherland, theatre producer and digital guru, Melanie Wilson, performer and sound artist; Tom Armitage, creative technologist at BERG; and Jo Twist, commissioning editor at Channel 4.
And, if that wasn’t enough, coming in to visit, we’ll have Tassos Stevens, of Coney and other fame; Syndey Padua, creator of Babbage and Lovelace; Mark Earls, author of Herd; Richard Lemarchand, game designer for the Uncharted series; Nick Ryan, composer and audio designer; Aleks Krotoski, writer and presenter of the Virtual Revolution series, alongside a couple of other mystery guests.
Even better, all of these people will also be talking to you, via a series of short videos we’ll be releasing over the next few days. Everyone is coming to the lab armed to talk about something which blows their mind – something amazing or extraordinary they’ve found in the course of their work or life, and we’ll be posting footage as they reveal what they’ve chosen and why. Do watch this space and we’ll keep the links coming.
Weekender Games: The Party!
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
Today’s featured game isn’t actually a game! It’s a party, and not just any party: it’s a Hide&Seek party, with all the usual party stuff plus an awful lot of fun and games as well.
Those of you who remember the 2008 party, with its Hat Scrabble, its Knob Karaoke, its impromptu games of HipSync and Animal Mayhem, and its general amazingness, will of course already be clamouring to hear more… and we wouldn’t want you to clamour in vain. So: come along on Saturday night and you’ll find all manner of fun and games provided by veteran frolickers Lost and Found (who brought us the 2008 party) and the amazing Stoke Newington International Airport.
There’ll be party games with an international twist, the Ping Pong Quiz Show, the Globe-o-vision Karaoke Contest, and a host of of surprises yet to be announced (well, they wouldn’t be surprises if we announced them).
Tickets are £8, but reduced to a bargain six pounds if you book in advance through the ICA website.
The party will take place on 10 June from 8:30pm, at the ICA.
Image by Pink Sherbert photography.
« Older Entries