By Holly
One of the big London games stories of recent weeks is We Tell Stories, a sequence of playful stories with a promised ARG element to follow.
It’s new ARG company Six to Start’s first public project, and it involves Hide and Seek stalwart the partly-fictional Mink Ette, but even apart from that I find it very interesting. However, my reasons for finding it interesting are almost directly opposed to those of many of its other enthusiasts, including to some extent its creators.
See this, from the press release, for example: “These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago.” This is not literally true; the first, Google-maps-based, story would have been trickier a couple of years ago, but the second, Toby Litt’s “Slice”, is basically a story told in parallel blogs of the type we’ve seen since 1995, with The Spot (parallel fictional blogs before the word “blog”; a daily audience of 100,000 in 1995, when the online audience was a couple percent of what it is today).
So if statements like this are not literally true, what do they mean? Perhaps that Six to Start or many of the readers of its stories see novelty as one of the important characteristics of the project. See comments like “the sad thing is that there’s generally a real disdain for ‘linear’ storytelling, despite its huge popularity and history, and I think this has caused most people to ignore the possibilities of what could be done with presenting ‘normal’ stories in new ways.” Again this is not literally true (except perhaps in video games, where attitudes to linear storytelling are ambivalent), but it points to the idea that the exploration of new forms undertaken by “We Tell Stories” is something innovative.
This is odd for me because my reaction to the project is predicated not on perceived novelty but rather on how firmly it fits into what seems to me to be a long-running tradition of experimental text-based online fiction that verges on the gimmicky but doesn’t suffer because of it, a tradition that has Geoff Ryman’s 1996 253 as its first prominent “literary fiction” success (or, arguably, Douglas Cooper’s 1994 Delirium—but Cooper hasn’t kept the work online, so only the archaeologists care). By “gimmicky” I mean that the stories feel like they have been constructed medium-first; somebody’s seen a possible technological form for a work of fiction and then consciously created a fiction (or commissioned a writer to create a fiction) that fits that form. Regardless of their success as fiction, these works are most obviously about seeing what can be done; trying to find out what experiments will hold up in a relatively new medium (well, fifteen years old now, or you could start counting from academic darling Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story and make it twenty-one; we’re not as new as we insist on thinking). Not “how best can I tell my story?”, but “what happens if I try to tell it like this?”
(more…)
Wednesday March 26th, 2008 by Holly in essays | No comments »
By Alex
In response to an invitation to come and play with Hide and Seek made earlier this week, the blogger, pop star, artist & intellectual hero known as Momus has essayed a significant blog post about the pros and cons of Pervasive Urban Gaming.
Momus has a number of interesting points to make about Hide and Seek. How much hide is allowed? Do we make games for introverts? How pervasive are we? Do we respect the multiple fragile cultural ecosystems that co-exist in any city? Or are we creating, to quote a particularly memorable line from the post, “… a Butlins redcoat holiday organised by Nathan Barley and his huge team of kidult assistants?”
Two memories from last year’s festival. Cruel 2 B Kind is a beautiful game. It encourages acts of kindness, moments of lovely awkwardness, hilarity. It’s a very smart piece of pervasive gaming. And yet… as the game progressed, and the units of 2 started to coalesce and become herds of 30 players, the compliment that had been sensitive, in-context, and okay, became a bit oppressive. Non-players started to have to get out of the way of the stampeding herd as it traversed the playspace. A huge yell of ‘I love your shoes!’ startled someone quietly browsing the books under Waterloo Bridge.
I designed something called the London Poetry Game. It was intended to be a quiet, sensitive, aesthetically rich, yada yada game. The poem that the players were supposed to translate was by WH Auden - a beautiful meditation on how alienation leads to fascism. Now, there were some design flaws - the poem was stupidly hard to understand, let alone translate, and I got the transliteration wrong for quite a few of the languages, which would have put even the hardiest aesthete off the game, but also… there was a disconnect between the guiding idea of the game and the guiding ideas of last year’s festival. People were having a lot of fun, running around, rediscovering the joy of play, and they didn’t want to tramp around doing some hard-to-accomplish poetry game. No real reward in it. No jeopardy. No prizes even. Just the risk of approaching strangers to ask them a favour. Players didn’t really want to come down from the joy of playing something like Manila to get on with a bit of poetry-work. Thanks to a lot of begging and the kind support of friends, we managed to get just one verse of the poem translated - it was beautiful - but I made another mistake in the performance, by explaining everything that had happened, and insisting on reading out the whole poem in its original form. The memory of the looks of polite patience on the audience (waiting for the next game) is very clear…
Bill Savage’s comment on the Trafalgar Square Freeze post is very, very important in this context - 1000 people showed up for that event because the ask was straightforward and the outcome was amazing. So that’s another lead for the LPG. Make the task less onerous and the payoff much greater. Maybe players can access a version of the translation online as they collaboratively build it up. Maybe we’ll ask Momus to write a poem for translation and to reward the players with a guerilla pop concert on the top of the Festival Hall. Maybe all it needs is its own audience - one who loves poetry and is curious about games, instead of vice versa.
I find Momus’s essay provocative - it reminds me that unthinking evangelism is always around the corner when you’re making something new - it’s too easy to go hurtling down the path of the exciting thing that you’re embarking on without stopping to absorb the lessons of what didn’t work or the comments of those who aren’t engaged by your big new idea.
As well as a desire to respond to Momus’s blog, I’m writing this now because we’re about to announce the details of Hide and Seek 2008. It’s going to happen at the South Bank Centre (and be in their brochure and everything), and the Jerwood Foundation have increased their support. So we’ve got an amazing opportunity to do some great things, and even a bit of money to make it happen. We need to use everything we know about what works to get there. We don’t have long to figure out what’s in the programme so there is urgency and jeopardy about this discussion.
What works? What should we show to London in June? How do we get a more diverse audience to our games? At the moment we’re pretty much theatre and games design - what about other art forms? How do we design in order to be more sensitive to those around us? How can players transition from one game to another on the spur of the moment? How can we get families and kids to play? What about the communities on the doorstep of the South Bank? What about old people? What about people who don’t like shouting and running around? What about people who are disenfranchised by technology?
I hope that if you’ve read this far, you’ve got thoughts on that. In which case, the Sandpit is waiting to hear. It’s not just for playing in. It’s a bloody arena of ideas, littered with the twitching corpses of Pervasive Games That Didn’t Work So Well… and your opinion counts, in a wholly undemocratic and untransparent way.
Friday February 22nd, 2008 by Alex in essays | No comments »
By Holly
If it wasn’t for the death at the end, duelling would have been a pretty fantastic street game.
You could be challenged at any time, for almost any reason. You couldn’t refuse, unless you wanted to risk losing the respect of society (”being disqualified”, perhaps, in game terms?) The legality was questionable; there were completely absurd rules (see, for example, John Lyde Wilson’s The Code of Honor, or this 1777 Irish ruleset); there were winners, and losers, and cheaters, and people who criticised the whole endeavour as frivolous and wasteful. So far, so good: pervasive games have managed all that.
The main difference — again, apart from the death thing — is that pervasive games just aren’t as popular as duels were. I’ve put a dozen of the most famous London duels, sword and pistol, on a map:
View Larger Map
but they were everywhere: parks, pubs, city streets, other people’s houses. If word of a duel got out, people would gather to watch it; and if it was about something ridiculous (one gentleman issued a challenge because another had accidentally collided with him during a waltz) then so much the better. The fashionable went to Hyde Park, the considerate to Putney Heath, and they shot and died and shot and died. Estimates suggest that one in fourteen duels ended in a death; and that in France, where dueling was perhaps most popular, there were 40,000 deaths during the pastime’s 180-year peak.
(more…)
Sunday January 20th, 2008 by Holly in essays | No comments »
Join our Facebook group
