Blog
May 4th, 2012
This Wednesday, thirty designers and players and interested strangers came to the Hide&Seek office to talk about this year’s Sandpits and Weekender, our playing and playtesting events for new games. Thank you so much to everyone who came – we’re still processing all your suggestions and feedback, and trying to figure out what to keep and what to change and how things will work this year.
We’ll be absorbing all of this and working out what we should change, what can be different in time for the Sandpit on 25 May, and what needs to happen over a longer timespan. For those of you who were interested but couldn’t come, these are the main things we talked about, and our initial notes from discussions… if you have anything to add, or think something below is a great or a terrible idea, then please do comment!
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Tags: games with audiences, sandpits
Posted in Blog by Holly | No Comments »
May 3rd, 2012
Over the next week or so, we’re going to publish a series of short posts about what we mean by Games with Audiences, by calling out some of that games that particularly inspired us when we were deciding on this year’s theme. That list includes:
- Segue by Enterplay
- A Small Town Anywhere by Coney
- Scoop! by, well, us.
- Moveyhouse by Andy Field
So we’ll get to all of those soon! But for now, a game that has had nothing to do with Sandpit (SO FAR), the mighty IGF-nominated global folk game megahit, Johann Sebastian Joust.
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Tags: games with audiences
Posted in Blog by Alex | No Comments »
April 26th, 2012
So, you may have already seen that we’ll be running a series of game events in London this summer – and that we’re calling on YOU YES YOU to be involved: to play things, to make things, to help us improve, to invite other people to come along, to wave flags or plot or hide or run or draw or throw balloons from distant balconies.
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Tags: games with audiences, sandpit, sandpit 2012
Posted in Blog, News by Holly | No Comments »
April 23rd, 2012
Here’s another announcement that we’re bursting with excitement about: Sandpits and the Weekender are back!
The Sandpit is a space where anyone (including YOU) can experiment with new ideas for games that take place in public spaces – a place where players, artists, game designers, makers and thinkers of every stripe can get together, play stuff, and talk. They feel like big parties to us. We love them! They look like this.
The Sandpit series will culminate in the Hide&Seek Weekender at the Southbank Centre on 14-16 September – a weekend-long festival filled with games that were developed through the Sandpit, running alongside playful work around the world.
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Tags: planning, sandpits
Posted in Blog, News by admin | Comments Off
April 18th, 2012
Job spot time!
Producer, full-time role, based in New York. Starts immediately, runs until end of September. Competitive salary
Hide&Seek are a game design agency, making innovative games that change how people play. Our heritage is in real-world gaming, but we work extensively on digital platforms. Our games have attracted international acclaim and passionate reviews. Read more about our work at www.hideandseek.net/projects.
We’re just about to enter an intense phase of development on a very cool new project. It’s a game that will be delivered digitally but played in the physical world, by a huge world-wide audience.
We’re looking for someone to work full-time with our game design team, based in New York. You’ll be running playtests, gathering, interpreting and disseminating player feedback, managing project timetables and keeping documentation up to scratch.
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Posted in Blog, Jobs by Margaret | Comments Off
April 12th, 2012
This summer, Hide&Seek will be playing in Paris.
We’re so excited to be able to announce our involvement with the upcoming exhibition Joue le Jeu at La Gaîté Lyrique, an amazing institution that opened in 2010, devoted to exploring digital culture. Their big summer exhibition this year will fill the building with astonishing games: a stupendous installation from Fred Deakin & Company, a gorgeous social strategy game from Eric Zimmerman and Nathalie Pozzi, a charmingly bewildering construction from Babycastles, and so much more… including our own The Building Is.
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Tags: the building is
Posted in Blog, Events, Events - Play With Us, Events - Work With Us, News by Holly | 1 Comment »
March 9th, 2012
For those of you who are in Austin, Texas enjoying the varied delights of SXSW, we’re pleased to announce that the launch of Would Anyone Miss You is now just 24 hours away! Here’s a photo from our amazing collaborator, Lottie Davies, of a crucial part of the game. All will be explained very soon… [...]
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Posted in Blog by Alex | Comments Off
March 5th, 2012
Hide&Seek are delighted to announce that we’ll be running a new live game at SXSW in Austin this week, from the 10th to the 14th of March.
It’s called Would Anyone Miss You, and it’s inspired by our previous project, Dreams Of Your Life, an interactive piece designed as a response to Carol Morley’s Dreams Of A Life.
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Tags: dreamsofyourlife, wouldanyonemissyou
Posted in Blog, News by Margaret | Comments Off
March 5th, 2012
What’s clear for us is that it would never have come together the way it did without the collaborators we worked with. We’d made some critical decisions about the project on our own: we knew we wanted it to be photographic, because anything drawn or animated might sit oddly next to the film. We knew we wanted text, because it gave us something rich and adaptable and private. And knowing we wanted those, we had a vision of writing on a window. A place you could be but not explore, and a voice you could hear but never meet.
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Tags: dreamsofalife, dreamsofyourlife
Posted in Blog by Margaret | Comments Off
February 29th, 2012
Hello! We’re Hide&Seek. You may know us from such projects as the best ever iOS game about opera (www.theshowmustgo.com), or when we staged a 12,000 player game in the streets of Edinburgh on New Year’s Day (www.thenewyeargames.com). Or that time we fixed Monopoly, Clue, Scrabble and Trivial Pursuits by adding poker and zombies and divorce (www.boardgameremixkit.com). There’s other stuff, too, which you can read about on www.hideandseek.net
We’re currently looking to increase our freelance roster in the US. If you think you might be a good fit, then please get in touch.
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Posted in Blog, Jobs by Margaret | Comments Off
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.
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Tags: lift12, talks, tom
Posted in Blog by Tom | Comments Off
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.
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Posted in Blog by Holly | 4 Comments »
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.
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Tags: death, festivalofdeath, games, southbank centre
Posted in Blog by Tom | 5 Comments »
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 [...]
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Posted in Blog by Alex | 2 Comments »
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.
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Tags: edinburgh, games, newyeargames
Posted in Blog by Holly | 6 Comments »
