February 20th, 2012
I’m going to be talking at Lift12 in Geneva this week! I’m in the Thursday slot entitled “The New Face of Gaming”, where I’ll be talking a bit about games as Systemic Media for a Systemic Age.
February 14th, 2012
We’re looking for a Rails developer to work with on a tight, creative client brief to develop a web-based prototype to explore particular interactions.
February 8th, 2012
This is a writeup of a talk I gave at the game design conference Bit of Alright on 3 February. It’s about games in fiction, and why they’re interesting, especially the really stupid ones. There are some pie charts.
I find something perpetually fascinating about fiction and games: any books or movies or TV shows where the characters play something. And that’s what I talked about at Bit of Alright. Games in fiction, what they’re like and how you play and why they’re interesting.
January 31st, 2012
This is a talk that I gave as part of the Southbank Centre‘s festival Death: A Festival for the Living. It’s a short, personal history of dying in videogames: a medium where death is common, and lives are plural but rationed. Why is it that “dying” such a common metaphor in games – even supposedly non-violent ones? Does it have any meaningful significance compared to the process of death in the real world? This essay is a short exploration of that, based on a life in which I’ve died thousands of times.
January 22nd, 2012
I have a large Arts Council literature application to write, so inevitably I’m thinking about trumpets. Specifically, the kinds of trumpet that J.S.Bach had in his orchestra in the mid-eighteenth century, round about the time he was assembling his masterpiece, the B Minor Mass. And this has a lot to do with game design. Bear [...]
January 19th, 2012
Photo by Chris Scott
On 1 January 2011, Hide&Seek and Unique Events ran the New Year Games. Somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 people played. You probably weren’t one of them.
Usually, our live events have a core of people who know us: people who’ve been to a Sandpit or a Weekender before, people who like games, people who know a little about what to expect. Of course they’re often outnumbered by newcomers and passers-by and people who saw the brochure lying around and didn’t have anything else to do, but the familiar core is still there. On 1 January, though, our audience was people who were wandering around Edinburgh: residents out for a walk; visitors who’d come up for Hogmanay and couldn’t leave because the trains weren’t running yet; people with hangovers; wandering families. People who are almost guaranteed not to be reading this blog post. We weren’t really sure how many of them to expect. It turned out there were quite a lot.
It was a silly big game and hundreds of people were involved in making it work, on the day and in the months before: stewards and producers and drummers and actors and guys who put up Helter Skelters and Heads of Games and a samba band and the Lord Provost of Edinburgh and a poet and people on New Year’s Eve stapling sheets of cardboard at 9pm or printing out stickers at 4:30am. I’ve been trying to write it up and it’s just too big, there’s too much of it. But I can at least write down some of the things I want to remember for next time.
January 10th, 2012
On the 28th and 29th of January, we’re going to be running some games as part of Death: Southbank Centre’s Festival for the Living.
January 4th, 2012
We’re excited to announce latest version of Tate Trumps – our iOS game that pits works in the Tate Modern’s permanent collection against one another. The big new feature in this release is Anywhere Mode, which lets you play Tate Trumps wherever you are.
December 3rd, 2011
In Edinburgh? Available some time over the next few days? Fancy having some free fun, and helping us out?
December 1st, 2011
The power of games is the problem of games. As Tom wrote earlier in the week, games gate progress: if you want to feel successful or find out the end of the story or have better stuff or see wilder worlds, you need to complete tasks. This makes them powerful motivators, and people operate – well – dishonestly in their presence.
November 30th, 2011
I have spent a lot of this year thinking about what would happen if I died. I haven’t been doing this in a cafe, staring pensively at my reflection as I drink tepid, tear-tinctured tea. I’ve been doing it at my desk, on company time. I have been doing it in front of white-boards, in brainstorms. I have written Basecamp notes on the conclusions I’ve reached.
Here’s why. In a few days, Carol Morley’s extraordinary documentary, Dreams Of A Life, is released in cinemas. You might have been lucky enough to catch its debut at the London Film Festival or seen the admiring reviews that followed. You may have found your way to Carol’s haunted and haunting piece on the event that it explores in the Guardian. It’s a film which tries to unfold the life that lay behind a single, terrible discovery: the skeletal remains of a 38-year old woman in a flat in Wood Green in 2006. She had been dead for nearly three years, but was found only when the bailiffs broke in to evict her. The television was still on.
November 25th, 2011
Last week I went to see The New World Order, a production by Hydrocracker that adapts several short plays by Harold Pinter into a promenade format. As a designer playing it, I quickly became fascinated by its approach to managing the audience’s progress through space – and how similar it was to games.
November 25th, 2011
We’re proud, delighted and honoured to announce our latest project, for Film4. They commissioned us to create a unique multiplatform experience to support the release of Carol Morley’s feature film Dreams of a Life.
November 11th, 2011
We’ve mentioned before that we’ll be in Edinburgh playing games on 1 January, but we had to be a little bit secretive. Now it’s official!The New Year Games will be running from 2pm to 6pm, with giant totems, fairground stalls, a cathedral, a museum, a minotaur, a hopscotch trail, invisible musicians and more. You can [...]
November 10th, 2011
We’re delighted to announce that we’ve teamed up with the Royal Opera House to create The Show Must Go On, a game for iOS devices (iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®) that puts the player in the shoes of an intrepid stage manager.
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