Archive for June, 2010
Time*Trails
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
By Michael Dales and Sophie Sampson
Explore the South Bank’s past by picking up the stories people have left behind. Drop in and play any time.
Requires one iPhone per individual or group.
All weekend, drop-in (duration 10 minutes to an hour)
Werewolf
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
By Dimma Davidoff
An old favourite featuring villagers and werewolves, each group trying to weed out the other, with one problem: nobody’s quite sure who the werewolves are…
Friday: 7:00, 8:00, 9:00 (duration 60 minutes)
Walking Smiles
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
By Present Attempt
A walking game in the city. Build a map of London as you wander through the city, collecting smiles from strangers as you go.
All weekend, drop-in
Visible Cities
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
By Kevan Davis & Holly Gramazio
Travel between different Londons and then make your way home, but watch out – in some versions of the city, the locals aren’t exactly friendly…
Friday: 7:30 (duration 2 hours)
The London Poetry Game
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
By Alex Fleetwood
A new poem has been written in the languages of London
Turn the page, play the game
So that it can be heard…
All weekend, or watch the performance of the finished piece at 3:00-3:30 on Sunday
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.
Weekender – first look!
Monday, June 21st, 2010
As the Weekender races towards us – three weeks to go! – we thought we’d give you a sneak preview of some of the games that we’re going to be playing. We’ll be updating these regularly and blogging about them in more detail, but here’s an initial flavour…
Silent Relay, from Berlin Invisible Playground, sends its players around the Southbank area to a carefully-designed MP3 soundtrack, exchanging codephrases with players in London and Berlin- EnterPlay’s Segue tasks you with guiding dancers from one checkpoint to the next – with the slight difficulty that they only respond to movement
- Coney’s Hutong is a rectangular walking game played with a team in Delhi
- The London Poetry Game, from Alex Fleetwood, will set you translating from all sorts of languages to recover a poem commissioned specially for the Weekender
- Pass the Impossibly Large Parcel, from 815Agency, will hide untold wonders within the papery layers of a really big parcel
- Plus there’ll be migrating whales and electronic hats; taunts exchanged in Anglo-Saxon and Norman French; an international competition of imaginary golf; and an awful lot more!
Photo by Flickr user digitaldust.
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…
New website live!
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
You know this, because you’re looking at it, but we’re very pleased to have moved our website from its ramshackle last home to the shiny new environs created for us by the fine folk over at Line Industries. They did all the design as well, including the new logo. It’s still a bit under construction so bear with us – and if you have any suggestions for how to make it better, let us know.
Hide&Seek to partner with Royal Opera House on R&D project
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
We’re thrilled to announce our latest partnership with the cultural sector – we’re going to the opera! Hide&Seek and the Royal Opera House are collaborating on a period of R&D to investigate how game mechanics and digital technologies could integrate with ROH’s brand and digital resources to create new kinds of cultural product. This project is intended as the first stage of a partnership to create, produce and distribute ROH-branded games and interactive content.
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