Recently, as part of The Sandpit UK Tour, we were Cardiff with the lovely National Theatre Wales. The BBC were there too and here’s what they got up to: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8241005.stm
Wednesday September 23rd, 2009 by the Sandpit Team in blog | No comments »
Just a quick reminder that this weekend it’s time for Igfest, Bristol’s wonderful interesting games festival. There’s all sorts of stuff happening, and we’ll be playing as much of it as possible - though hopefully we’ll have recovered our energy by Sunday afternoon, when we’ll be running a Sandpit between 1 and 4pm, as part of Igfest and also the fourth stop on the Sandpit Tour. If you’re anywhere in the vicinity, do come along! And if not, check out the other tour dates, because there’s a good chance we’ll be coming to somewhere nearby…
Friday September 11th, 2009 by Holly in blog | No comments »
The 2009 Hide&Seek Weekender is here!
The games start tonight at Royal Festival Hall, with an evening of Beyond Werewolf - social games full of deduction and betrayal, where you can hone your bluffing and backstabbing skills as a stockmarket trader, a bank robber, a supervillain, a revolutionary, an acquaintance of Baron Munchausen, a robot, a werewolf, or something else besides…
Games continue all day Saturday with Mexican thumb wrestling, James Bond Twitter missions, binocular scavenger hunting, paparazzi photographers, wooden cities, cuddly toys, text-message narratives, collaborative playfulness, mystery solving, laser-dodging, one-step-removed movie watching, news-crew filming and a little teleportation.
And on Sunday, games are designed for all ages, with treasure hunting, animal acting, music puzzles, potatoes, balloons and more.
No need to book in advance, just turn up and grab stickers for the games you want to play. For a full, live lowdown of the weekend, you can follow us on Twitter at @hidingseeking.
Friday July 31st, 2009 by the Sandpit Team in Uncategorized, blog | No comments »
Picture from Fiona French
More upcoming games, this time in Greenwich - on 25 July (that’s this very Saturday), head down to the Greenwich Heritage Centre near Woolwich Arsenal for the Big Woolwich TXT game, a text-message-based murder mystery.
The game’s been created by Fiona French, of the excellent GameLab. It was commissioned by Stream, who were behind last year’s In A League Of Our Own, which pitted knitters against bird-watchers against footballers against anyone else who was interested, in a Greenwich Tournament Of Pretty Much Every Existing Hobby. It takes a couple of hours to play, any time between 11 to 5; it’s suitable for all ages; it sends you wandering around picturesque Woolwich; and you get to be a time-travelling forensic detective solving the mystery of three enigmatic deaths. Surely there’s no better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than travelling in time and avenging the wronged.
Wednesday July 22nd, 2009 by Holly in blog | No comments »
Photo by Gwyn Morfey
Well, this is exciting - LaserTrap, one of the hits of the BFI Sandpit, is combining with last year’s Heath adventure for an evening of play from Fire Hazard.
The night, Play Dead, will run from 9pm next Saturday 11 July on Hampstead Heath, featuring a laser maze, a creepy game of Ghost, the return of the highly-successful Night Watch, and a frenetic shootout in Outbreak. Tickets are £5 from the Fire Hazard site - the facebook event is here.
Tuesday July 7th, 2009 by Holly in blog | No comments »
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.
Monday June 22nd, 2009 by Holly in blog | No comments »
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.
Monday June 8th, 2009 by Holly in blog | No comments »
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!
Thursday May 14th, 2009 by Alex in blog | No comments »
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.)
Saturday May 2nd, 2009 by Kevan in blog | No comments »
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.
Friday April 24th, 2009 by Alex in blog | No comments »
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