‘Blog’
Weekender Games: London Poetry Game
Monday, July 5th, 2010
Today’s featured game is the London Poetry Game, and for a very good reason – it’s just gone live and playable! Yes, that’s right – if you’re looking forward to the Weekender and want to play something right now, you can.
A version of the game ran at the very first Hide&Seek Weekender, back in 2007, and Alex has written about it here. The short version, though, is this. The game revolves around an entirely new poem, written by Ross Sutherland. Different lines of the poem have been translated into an awful lot of different languages. And it’s up to the players to retranslate it into English.
If you’re a native speaker of, say, French, or Yoruba, or Welsh, or Swedish, or Gujarti, or any of the languages of the game, you can translate some of yourself… but if not, don’t despair! Nobody will be able to translate all the languages themselves, and that’s pretty much the point of the game. You need to find people who do know these languages, and enlist their help in the translation. There’s a phoneline to call each time you find someone, to record each line, and in the end the many different versions of the many different lines will fir together to create the finished piece.
(And if you find “competition” a better motivator than “art”, there’s also a prize for the player who translates the most lines, or the first player to complete the whole poem…)
The London Poetry Game is running now and will continue until noon on Sunday 11 July. The resulting work will be broadcast at the National Theatre at 3pm that day. The game was designed by Alex Fleetwood and produced by Sarah Ellis; poem by Ross Sutherland, technology by Chris Thorpe, artwork design by Consuelo Yavar Larrain.
Weekender games: Visible Cities
Friday, July 2nd, 2010
Today’s game is Visible Cities, designed by Kevan Davis and, er, me. It’ll be running on the Friday night of the Weekender – and running is the operative word, here; it’s a big game of sneaking, hiding and being chased around the South Bank.
Players start in one of several different Londons: underwater London, say, or desert London. For the rest of the game, they move between these different versions, interacting only with players in their own London. Straightforward enough – but there’s a problem. The locals of these new Londons aren’t always friendly. In fact, sometimes they’re prone to… well… responding poorly to any intruders. By chasing them. A lot.
We played a small version of the game in St James’s Park in June, to the curiosity of an awful lot of passers-by; but it’s going to be very different around the South Bank. Sightlines are shorter, corners are sharper; we’ll have more players, and there are more people around, and fewer trees to hide behind.
Visible Cities will be running on Friday 9 July from 7:30 to 9:30, for around a hundred players – and a pile of checkpoint guards and chasers. If you’re interested in helping out, either by manning a checkpoint or by chasing instead of being chased, email holly@hideandseek.net.
Picture by stevecadman: the South Bank.
Weekender Games: four at once!
Thursday, July 1st, 2010
So we’ve had a break from our Game A Day policy, due to some boring technical problems, but now we’re back, and why not get back into the swing of things by looking at not one, not two, not three, but FOUR GAMES at once?
They’re all running on the Friday night of the Weekender, as part of a group of good old around-the-table bickering-and-bartering games; the type of game that encompasses everything from Victorian parlour games to endless rounds of Werewolf, the Sandpit favourite in which innocent villagers and secret werewolves try to figure out who’s who without getting eliminated.
Getting to Know You: Seated Global Network, from Kai-Oi Jay Yung, is almost a collection of minigames, rather than one game itself. The game leader sets task after task; players take part, and they’re gradually eliminated not by their failure at the games but by the whim consensus of the other players. A version of the game ran in Manchester in May, and for the Weekender it will be running on Friday at 7:00, 8:00 and 9:00.
Aliens Among Us is brought to the Weekender by James Wallis, but it’s based on an idea by the late Erick Wujcik. In many ways it sounds like a game that someone invented in response to Werewolf – a group of players sit around the table; some of them secretly wish to destroy the others; paranoia rules as deductions go awry. But Aliens Among Us is actually an older game; Wujcik started playing it in the early 1980s. There was never a recorded ruleset, so James has constructed something based on play reports, people’s memories, and his own ingenuity. It’ll be running on Friday at 7:00, 8:00 and 9:00.
Spinning Narrative, from Dave Green, is a game for six players and a rotating video camera – the spin of the camera determines who takes the next turn, but the other players determine the constraints on what he or she has to do. It’s a fascinating game because it creates its own documentation, filming as play proceeds; but it’s an incomplete documentation. You see each player take their turn, but you don’t see what the other players are doing as that happens, so there’s plenty of room for undocumented spite and plotting. Spinning Narrative will run pretty much every half-hour from 7:00 on Friday.
Musical!, by Jenifer Toksvig and Andrew Tilling, is a storytelling game based on those old-fashioned musicals where suddenly, all at once, the characters burst into some sort of tangentially relevant song, and then two minutes later get back to the story at hand. It’s extremely straightforward, and it’s fascinating how a really simple ruleset can nevertheless make people feel much more comfortable about starting a song (and joining in on other people’s songs…). Even so, it’s best after people who drink have had the chance to do so just a little, so it’ll run at 8:00, 8:30, 9:00 and 9:30.
And yes, since you ask, Werewolf is scheduled as well, at 7:00, 8:00 and 9:00. Plus all our usual Pick Up & Play parlour-game stuff will be sitting around, some spare Werewolf decks, some equipment from a few of the games we ran during our Beyond Werewolf night last year. And, of course, a couple of very different games… but those will have to wait for another day.
Picture by amuchmoreexotic: playing Werewolf in ICA lobby
Super Political Street Fighter
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
By Greg Foster in collaboration with Contact – Manchester
Join your David Dimbleby on Steroids host and his 2 tamed, professional and political street fighters as they invite members of the audience to voice their political ideas.
Friday: 8:00, 9:30 (duration 35 minutes, drop in any time to watch or get involved)
Weekender Games: The Bloop
Friday, June 25th, 2010
Today I’m going to write about The Bloop, from Nikki Pugh. In a way, it’s quite a difficult game to write about, because even Nikki isn’t quite sure yet how it will work—she’s testing it out at tomorrow’s Warwick Arts Centre Sandpit, and who knows how radically the design may change once real live people have given it a go?
But in another way it’s very easy to write about, because I can just say: come on, it’s a game about whales that uses beeping blacked-out proximity-detecting goggles, surely you want to play?
The game is modelled on the migration of whales, and the movement of krill; Nikki writes about it in more detail on her blog, discussing the story of the game and the construction of the goggles. Players take the role of krill, with their own krilly aims, or whales, who navigate by sound (provided by the goggles) through the ocean around them.
If you’ve been paying attention, you might be thinking: hmm, a game where people navigate by sound alone; wasn’t that Sangre y Patatas? And yep, it is – there are two navigate-by-sound games at the Weekender this year. I’ve played them both in the last fortnight; Sangre y Patatas at the ICA, and an early version of The Bloop at a workshop at the Midlands Arts Centre. And if you get the chance at the Weekender, I strongly recommend that you do try to play both. They’re both great fun in their own right, but the contrast between them is just fascinating: where Sangre is funny and visceral, The Bloop—at least for anyone playing the role of the whale—is a much more detached and alien experience. The outlandish nature of the gear you’re wearing, the slow movement of the krill as they drift around you, and above all the fact that your own sense of hearing has been replaced with the beeep beeep beep of the goggles; it’s a strange and very different way of navigating the world.
Picture by nikki pugh: sonar goggles
Weekender Games: International Golf Proxy
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Today’s pick is International Golf Proxy, from Simon Katan – a game that combines poker-style betting, the old warmer-cooler find-an-object game, and, er, golf. There’s an imaginary golf course, and an imaginary ball, and (non-imaginary!) rewards for players who use the right imaginary club.
Simon’s run games at Hide&Seek events since the very second Sandpit ever, back in early 2008. And almost all of these games have looked really rather odd from the outside. Pervasive games often look a bit peculiar, of course – players sneaking, players running, players trailing a bundle of balloons or trying to carry a rolled-up carpet. But with most games, a diligent spectator can at least guess at what the players are trying to accomplish. Simon’s games, on the other hand, somehow make perfect sense when you’re playing them, and are nevertheless extremely bemusing to watch. The Freemasons, which ran at the 2008 Weekender, had Simon in a flowery apron handing out kazoos, as musicians/players moved around the playspace according to a series of rules that an outsider could never deduce; 2009’s Parse the Parcel set teams frantically exchanging awkward brown-paper-wrapped parcels in a variety of unwieldy shapes, until the members of one team stood up simultaneously and cheered – seemingly at random, to anyone who hadn’t played the game.
International Golf Proxy fits firmly into this distinctive mould, and as such I’m not going to explain it in too much detail. Part of its glory lies in the way non-players will stumble across it, and find a group of serious-faced golf players staring at a blank piece of ground. If you’ve played one of Simon’s games before, rest assured that this is in the classic Katan mould: unfailingly clever and beautifully perplexing. If you haven’t played one of his games, then you really should, and this is a good place to start: a pleasant amble, some deduction, some guesswork, some luck, and a nice 45 minutes of imaginary golf.
International Golf Proxy will be running at the Weekender on Sunday from 1pm.
Picture from striatic: sometimes i golf
Weekender Games: Segue
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
Today I’m going to write about Segue, from EnterPlay. It’s a game about music, and communication, and puzzle-solving, and movement; and about clipping pieces of cardboard to a hat.
The three constituent parts of EnterPlay (Mel Cook, Steve Pretty and Laura Kriefman) come from theatre, composition and choreography backgrounds respectively, and the game exploits all their areas of expertise.
Players are asked guide a dancer around the playing space; but unfortunately the dancers only respond to music. Fortunately, each team is also supplied with a musician, and a collection of musical pieces; and as the game goes on, they use these pieces of music to move the dancer around the playing space.
It’s a lovely game to watch—when it ran at the V&A in March, the entrances to the gallery were crowded with spectators. You only get to see fragments, as different teams come in and out of view—brief passages of music from the different musicians, movements from the dancers that are only seconds long—but the mental exercise of piecing these fragments together can make even spectators feel a bit like they’re playing a game.
Segue will be running from 4pm to 6pm on Saturday 10 July.
Picture from the V&A Lates photographer.
Weekender Games: Sangre y Patatas
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
If you ever find that you’re fleeing a blindfolded monster, trying desperately to keep out of its way, sneaking so that it won’t hear that you’re there; and if in the course of fleeing this blindfolded monster, you find you have a choice between running into a forest of hanging bells, and across a steppe of crunchy corn chips; and if you aren’t sure which way is safer, but you know you need to make your mind up right now… should this ever happen to you, go for the bells. They’re loud and jangly but the monster will be hard-pressed to figure out exactly where the sound’s coming from. If you step on the corn chips, on the other hand, you’re pretty much doomed.
This is the sort of information that won’t, unfortunately, come in handy for players of Sangre y Patatas, portrayed above – because the people fleeing the monsters are blindfolded as well, and they can’t tell the difference between a forest of bells and a mound of chips unless they step into one or the other.
The game, from Tassos Stevens and Pete Law (Coney), is based on an old theatre exercise, and it’s also the live seed for forthcoming iPhone title Papa Sangre. It ran at the ICA Sandpit last Wednesday, and it was brilliant fun. For a start, there’s the whole paranoid-sneaking oncoming-doom thing; plus it triumphantly solved the problem of how to deal with players who are knocked out of the game. Each round was about two minutes long, so anyone who was knocked out of a round, or not taking part, didn’t have long to wait until the next round began; and in any case, watching the game was at least as much fun as playing it.
Sangre y Patatas will be running at the Weekender, and if anything we’ve said so far sounds even a little appealing, you should definitely try to play it – it’s enchanting.
The picture above is from Mark Emery Photography under a cc-by license; there’s some more images on his Flickr stream here.
London Poetry Game – the first time
Monday, June 21st, 2010
In 2007, at the very first Hide&Seek Weekender, I designed and ran something called the London Poetry Game. It was my first go at designing something on a grand scale… Basically, I wanted players to go out into London and find translators of a poem. A poem where each line had been translated into a different language… Translations were phoned in to a hotline, and then cut together to make the poem.
Unsurprisingly, the game had several flaws which were revealed in playtesting. And when I say playtesting, I mean the public running of the game – I didn’t know what playtesting was at the time… I’m running the London Poetry Game again this year, so I thought I’d share a little summary of all the things that went wrong. I hope to correct at least some of them this time around.
- We didn’t distribute the flyer or publish the pdf online, so access to the game was limited to a very small group of players at the BFI. I dropped some flyers off at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden. They were bemused.
- The time available to the very small number of players was too brief to let them play as part of their daily lives, but too extended to capture their attention and interest.
- The challenge to players – figure out what language each line has been translated into, find a stranger who speaks that language, and get them to call a number to leave a translation – is really pretty hard. And there wasn’t a great deal of reward for players.
- The poem selected – W.H.Auden’s September 1, 1939, proved problematic for several reasons. It was full of archaic language that was hard to translate – and the lines themselves made little sense in isolation.
- I did the translations myself, using a mix of Google Translate, international friends, and loitering around the public library in Finsbury Park, asking strangers if they spoke any foreign languages and if so would they mind translating a line of a poem for me, in the name of interactive art. I had no means of checking the translations.
- Producing the translated poem required the graphic designer to install multiple foreign language sets, which introduced some errors into the translations, making them illegible even to foreign language speakers.
- The last two points meant that many players hit a confusing translation, which left them with a bewildered stranger telling them that the line that they were trying to translate made no sense. Most people quite rightly stopped playing at that point. I basically bullied my friends into completing one verse of translations..
- I was responsible for taking the MP3s and editing them together, which, I did, kind of, whilst also, you know, running the whole festival and getting drunk a lot. To think it was only three years ago… Anyway, that was terrifically inefficient.
- The final performance was very pretentious, as I insisted on reading out the whole of the poem, even though the players had only made a translation of one verse. Not as pretentious as going on to make a speech about how Pervasive Games were The New Punk Rock, but hey.
Despite all of these things, I think that the bit of poem that we did manage was rather beautiful, as you can hear for yourself.
Went Out and Played
Monday, June 21st, 2010
One of our eternal complaints at Hide&Seek – along with “we’re out of milk again” and “this game doesn’t have enough balloons” – is that, as designers, we often miss out on playing games ourselves. Which is part of why I was so excited to go to Come Out & Play, New York’s annual festival of street games. The other part of why I was so excited, of course, is that Come Out & Play is really pretty great.
Like our own Hide&Seek Weekender (which it was one of the inspirations for), it provides two and a half days of new games from a pile of different designers. This year there were 39 games, which is, you know, kind-of a lot – too many to write about in any sort of orderly manner, certainly, so I’m just going to concentrate on a few of my personal highlights…
The opening night party: I don’t usually like parties very much! I’m the grumpy one sitting in a corner – or, more often, the not-grumpy one sitting at home saying “I sure am glad I’m not at a party”. But this was a party that made even me happy: hundreds of excited people poring over the programme; loads of games that were fun to watch as well as to play. The laser-reflecting game OMMRPG is several years old now, making it a classic in pervasive gaming terms, and it remains as engaging as ever; Humanoid Asteroid was unfeasibly charming, with joined-arm humans in the roles of asteroids, a guy in a trolley as the spaceship, and white glowing lights outlining the whole scene.
Cross My Heart And Hope To Die: Gosh, this was a gorgeous game. Gorgeous to look at, and gorgeous to play as well. It took place in a maze made of enormous hanging swathes of red fabric (see the photo at the top of the post), which three players chased through – each trying to catch one player, and fleeing from another. To complicate things, each player had two guards armed with ominous staffs, who could block passageways and force chasers or chasees to reroute.
There were a lot of things to like about the game (it won a special jury award for, in essence, general awesomeness), but I think my favourite element was the way the beauty of the physical setting was focused so much on the players rather than the spectators. There are a lot of games that are pretty to watch, but more often than not, the prettiness is most obvious to people outside, looking on; for Cross My Heart, observers saw some pretty fabric and some dark shadows, but the full red-tinted-light chasing-silhouettes flapping-air experience was reserved for the players.
Judging: CO&P gives a number of awards – Best New Sport, Best Family-Friendly, Best Use of Space, and a good few others. I was on the panel, which meant, in essence, that I got to spend two hours sitting around and arguing with ten other people who all cared a lot about games, game design and the festival. I was expecting it to be interesting, and educational – I wasn’t expecting it to be one of my favourite parts of the weekend.
Humans versus Zombies: HvZ is an enormous game. It’s played on hundred of college campuses in the US; it brings its own dedicated player-base, with its own unnervingly huge nerf guns, wherever it goes. It would have been easy for the guys who ran it to turn up, sit in a corner, and do their own thing; but instead they really went out of their way to make sure it worked not just on its own terms but for the festival as a whole (for example, the festival venue and all other games were safe zones, with both zombies and humans immune from attack). Within these constraints, they still managed to make sure their fiercely enthusiastic players had plenty to do, with a pile of CO&P-specific missions. And who doesn’t like seeing a ramshackle arts venue beseiged by idle zombies?
And then there were dozens of other lovely moments across the weekend…
- Trekking many, many blocks in search of a footstool shaped like a banana, for a dramatic food shot in the GOurmet Game (we came fourth, out of five – possibly this wasn’t the best use of our limited time).
- Scrabbling around trying to grab a pile of big felt letters and then slapping them down to read “GIANT REINDEER HEADS INVADE, OH NO”, in BIGTWEET!
- The fact that there was a game with an exclamation mark in its title every single day (Kaboom! on Friday, BIGTWEET! and Shabbat-put! on Saturday, and Square Root! on Sunday)
- Watching two official Guinness World Record staff members, in official Guinness World Record yellow jackets, stand with crossed arms and unimpressed faces as we failed to break the world record for longest line of over-and-under players (there were 32 of us, which in world-record terms is pretty tiny – but on the other hand, at least we were playing with a four-foot bright red ball).
- Being entrusted with the Giant Come Out And Play Bundle Of Balloons, and standing in the middle of a great big meadow while the wind got stronger and stronger…
In a piece of absurdly exciting news, we’re also really, really pleased that three of the games from CO&P will be making an appearance at the Hide&Seek Weekender. We’re not quite ready to announce the details yet, but do look back in a day or two…
Spy Games
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
We play an awful lot of parlour games at Hide&Seek. And we play quite a lot of spy games – it’s a great theme if you want to sneak, decode or use a gratuitous number of walkie-talkies.
But we haven’t, as far as I know, ever managed to play parlour games with spies, which is why I’m so impressed by this passage, from Claud Cockburn’s autobiography Crossing the Line. Here he’s discussing a time during the Second World War in which he – a notorious Communist – was sent to the US as correspondent for the Daily Worker, on the same boat as an assortment of other dignitaries and journalists…
A voyage which might have been otherwise almost intolerably tedious was transformed into a pleasure chiefly by the accomplishments and charm of Sir John Balfour, who had been British Minister in the Embassy at Moscow, and was now being transferred to the same position in the Embassy at Washington.
I reminded him of how, years and years before, when I was a student in Budapest and he was Second Secretary at the Legation there, we used to play a game which might be described as a kind of literary Consequences. I have forgotten just how it was played, except that it involved inventing the title of a book, inventing a suitable name for the author of such a book, and writing a long review of this non-existent work.
This game we now revived, and for hours on end four or five of us sat at a table in the corner of the saloon, scribbling and passing our sheets from hand to hand.
The amusement of the game was enormously enhanced by its effect upon the spies who hung around the table with flapping ears and bulging eyes. The scene, they obviously felt, must mean something, must have some kind of international significance. How could it be otherwise than significant than to have there, huddled round the corner table of that rolling saloon, writing notes to one another, concentrating deeply or bursting into laughter, the new British Minister to Washington; the diplomatic correspondents of The Times and the Daily Mail; a notorious Communist; Mr Cecil King, the effective controller of the Daily Mirror; and Professor Catlin, who was believed by many to be on a secret mission from the Vatican to the State Department.
The spies’ nerves were fraying fast. Day after day they crept nearer and nearer, breathing down our necks.
I’m going to leave it on that cliffhanger – but if anyone can suggest a set of rules for playing the literary Consequences game, maybe I’ll add the story’s denoument…
(Picture from Flickr user ocularinvasion)
Come Out and Play
Sunday, May 23rd, 2010
Come Out and Play, the New York festival of pervasive and street games, looks amazing this year. They’ve been adding more and more games to the line-up, from last year’s favourite Circle Rules Football to dozens of entirely new games. We’ve spotted a couple from London designers:
- Claire Bateman with Sidewalk Wars
- The Coney diaspora with Necropolis Family Tree” and CounterDemo
There’s also:
- Disguise game Smersh
- Alternate-universe assassination game The One
- Cunning public interaction with People Watching Plus
…and obviously an awful lot more, so do take a look.
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