‘Blog’
Designing Games for Telephones
Monday, October 24th, 2011
Hinterland – a poem that you play – ran for two weeks at the Edinburgh festival. Over four cantos, players would seek out strangers meeting particular criteria (which varied per canto), and get them to help answer a questionnaire. Then, players would phone the Operator, and hand over their answers. The Operator wasn’t a human being, though: it was a piece of software.
I wanted to write a little about the technical design behind the game: how we wrote a game for telephones, and the design considerations that went into it.
Hinterland began in a “scratch” week of prototyping at Battersea Arts Centre in early summer. As well as exploring the concept of the game, the nature of its poetry, and the experience we wanted players to have, we also took a first run at the technology behind it, to see what was possible. This was where I got to understand the material we were working with – in this case, telephony: what was possible, what felt natural, and how we could convey the experience we wanted through it. I wrote code while the rest of the team wrote poetry and design the game.
We quickly came to a simple technical brief for the game: it had to be playable on a simple mobile phone, with nothing more than voice calls and SMS. “Designing for a Nokia 3210” became a mantra. By the end of the week, we had a working prototype: a single Canto, playable beginning to end, with a working Operator and working telephone lines.
Basic Telephony
We’re lucky to exist in a climate where writing smart answerphones for telephone-based games is remarkably easy. Hinterland is made possible by Twilio: an API for “building Voice and SMS applications”. Twilio connects a phoneline to an endpoint on a webserver. When you sign up, you get a number in the US or Canada; you specify a URL on your webserver for Twilio to post data to. And then, every time you receive a call, Twilio POSTs data to that endpoint. If you return an XML file that accords to the TwiML spec, Twilio will follow the instructions contained in that file: speaking text, playing an MP3, asking for voice or numeric input.
That’s enough to make our Operator with.
When a player calls the Operator, the software works out which Canto that player is on, and what question to ask them next. It asks them that question, waits for the answer, and repeats this process until they’ve answered all the questions in the canto.
Hinterland identifies players by their mobile phone numbers, which Twilio passes to us (making maintaining state easy). Initially, we created a new player the moment they dialed our number, but this led to people starting missions when they perhaps hadn’t planned to – if, for instance, they rang the number they saw on the website.
As with so much of the project, we fixed this with human intervention. Because starting the game required visiting Forest Fringe, we’d ask players for their mobile numbers at the venue. When they called the phone number, we’d already determined that they were playing the game. Similarly, they couldn’t proceed to the next canto until they returned to Forest Fringe, where they’d receive a new canto booklet, advance their avatar to the next part of the Hinterland, and finally, be moved onto the next canto in our system by a volunteer. This ensured that the phoneline always behaved in the manner players expected.
Twilio’s phone numbers are all based in the US or Canada – not much good for a primarily British audience. The first version of the game we tried used an 0800 Freephone number forwarding to Twilio. That sounds good on paper, but turns out to very expensive when you’re on a mobile – most mobile contracts don’t include Freephone numbers. For the Edinburgh run, we acquired an Edinburgh phone number from Soho66, which cost next-to-nothing. We had to pay a small VOIP fee for the forwarding to the US, but it meant that players would call a British landline, which made the cost of the call to most of them minimal.
Dealing with responses.
Once we’d got a player’s answers, we had to make a custom canto from them. A few of the answers were multiple choice – specified via pushing a button on the keypad. Most, however, were spoken responses.
When Twilio records speech, it includes the URL for an audio file in the data it POSTs to your server. In the Hinterland admin interface, it was possible to listen to the audio of the player’s answer, and enter a transcription of it. That text transcription appears in a version of the poem that’d appear on the website for the player (and whoever they chose to share the private URL of their page with) to see.
The text transcription enabled us to produce an audio version of the poem. The cantos are designed as performances to be listened to, first and foremost. We’d experimented with various forms of delivery at BAC, and settled on the use of a speech synthesiser for most of the cantos. It wasn’t enough to just put the whole canto into a speech synthesiser, though; that tended to sound disappointing. So Ross provided audio templates of the poem: large multitrack Garageband files, cleverly designed to allow new words to be dropped in, and branching segments to be appropriately muted. We’d synthesise the player’s dialogue, assemble their poem as an MP3, and upload it to our server.
This was a little intensive, and involved a behind-the-scenes team in London working on the audio whilst Edinburgh worked on transcription. The trade-off for using people was nuance: the poems sounded good, and there’s nothing like the good old human ear for tweaking audio until it sounds good. Still, I’m going to keep looking for ways to streamline the audio production process in future runs: the balance of “sounding good” and “returning a file to a player in a good time” was often hard to strike.
Early feedback before Edinburgh from the production team was that a clearer “inbox” of what needed doing would help them a lot, so I created a view of incoming responses grouped by player, indicating exactly how many players were waiting for transcription or upload. It meant the production team only had to watch one page to stay on top of things.
This became the heart of our workflow. Indeed, most of the fine-tuning in the weeks running up to Edinburgh came from understanding the workflow of a distributed production team – split between Edinburgh and London – and what processes would help players understand the game best, whilst ensuring everyone on the production team was clear about what had to happen next for each player, and who was doing what.
Delivering the poem
Finally, we returned the canto to the player via SMS and email. The latter told them their poem was online, and gave them a URL where they could see it as text and listen to it. However, email was a luxury, for players with smartphones: the main purpose of the email was so that players could revisit the experience when they returned home to a computer.
SMS became our primary messaging system: a short text to tell players that their canto was ready, and that they could return to Forest Fringe for the next one. The text gave them a number to call, which would play them their latest canto (again using Twilio). It meant they could get their latest poem as soon as it was ready – ideally, not too long after they’d submitted their answers – and listen to it wherever they were. We used Clickatell for our SMS gateway, which cost about a penny to send a single SMS. There are many SMS gateways, all offering similar services, and my choice came down the simplest one to integrate. Luke Redpath’s Clickatell gem made integrating text messaging into the Ruby application trivial.
SMS also proved useful for getting in touch with players in the field. Audio transcription is hard – especially given some of the questions we were getting players to answer! One afternoon in the run up to launch, I quickly added a way for the Hinterland team to send any player a custom text message, which proved handy on several occasions.
We never really had many problems with the design of the game itself, but we used the feedback and experiences of the early players in Edinburgh to constantly improve it for others. As the Edinburgh run progressed, we added clarity to some dialogue that had proved confusing, and added many more pauses to the dialogue: there were certain points where, as a phone was passed back and forth, players and their interviewees would miss crucial words. With hindsight, I’d have spent longer on the canto editing tools earlier: there was still a bit too much that only I could alter, and spreading the load of the production work would have left me more time to solve more specific problems with code.
The Hinterland web application – powering both the simple public website and the telephony back-end – didn’t gain much major functionality in the weeks between the scratch at BAC and the Edinburgh run. What it did gain was polish: a better understanding of the game’s requirements, of the workflows that made production run smoothly, of the nature of telephony, and the elements of the poem that needed clarifying to players. The project benefited hugely from how quickly we got to an end-to-end working prototype, and it was great to be able to scratch code at the same time as scratching the game design.
Picture by Maria Hägglöf
Sandpit at the NMM: Thursday 13 October
Friday, September 23rd, 2011
On Thursday 13 October, from 6:30 to 10pm, we’ll be at the National Maritime Museum for the last Sandpit of the year! We’ve got the run of the whole museum, so we’ll be filling it with all sorts of strange games and exciting corners, in honour of the opening of the new Traders wing…
This Sandpit is a ticketed event. Tickets are £5, available through Eventbrite, and include entry to the new High Arctic exhibition (normally £6).
The Sandpit is a regular playing and playtesting event, where artists, game designers and theatre-makers present completely new games. There’s running and scurrying and solving and hiding and plotting; paper and brightly-coloured hats and treachery and more. It’s intended primarily for adults.
Print, Print Superstar, from Sophie Sampson: a fast and furious block printing game for four people. This is a two round game, referencing the glorious precision of indian wood block printing. Think of it as competitive craft.
Trade Winds, from Francis Barking: Find your port in a storm. A
breathtaking voyage across 5 of the seven seas.
Headmaps, from Marc Vousden: a game of blindfold navigation. Listen carefully for the other ships, and see if you can navigate your way safely through the ports.
Treasure Maze, from Viviane Schwarz: Treasure-laden ships capsize above the sprawling maze of the sea. Dive for treasure and hide in secret caves from deadly sharks.
Spice Wars, from Minkette and Katy Bateman: A fast-paced physical game. Dodge cannonballs and race against the clock to get your goods safely home. Which company will be victorious?
Unlimited Port-ential, from Nick Giles: Ply the seas to make your trade routes, and see the world. Only no-one’s told you where anything is – perhaps one of those nice explorers knows.
I <3 Celebes, from Matthew Marcus: A game of (ir)responsible capitalism in 19th century Indonesia.
Schooner or Later, from Casework: A large-scale trading game for wool, tea and pepper – just don’t let anyone catch you breaking any local port laws…
Smugglers Run, from A Door in a Wall: A game of smuggling with themes of trust, negotiation and corruption. One for those of you with honest smiles and a taste for betrayal.
Rangoli, from Jenifer Toksvig and Ben Davies: Ganesha is the elephant-headed Hindu god with four arms. Ben is going to draw Ganesha making a Rangoli with a brush in each hand. If you too have four arms, you can make a Rangoli on your own! Otherwise, you have to pair up into groups of 2 or 4 people and make a mirror Rangoli as a team.
Take Me To Your Scientist
Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
This event has now sold out – really sorry to everyone who missed out! But why not come along to the Sandpit at the National Maritime Museum instead?
Ever wanted to save the Earth from invading aliens? And/or: ever wanted to wander around part of the Science Museum at 11pm at night? Either way, now’s your chance: on Wednesday 28 September, we’ll be running a brand new game at the Science Museum from 10pm to midnight, as part of the Player live gaming festival.
Take Me To Your Scientist will pit you and a hundred other players against the terrors and bureaucracy of the Intergalactic Threat Assessment Committee. The ITAC are coming to Earth to figure out just how dangerous we are – do we need to be watched? Put into quarantine? Worse? You’ll need to decipher, sneak, and invent if you want to convince the ITAC that we’re really very nice.
Tickets are £8, plus a £1 booking fee. To book a place, call the Science Museum on 0870 870 4868.
Picture by Janine Matheson
What We’re Playing: Summer 2011
Friday, September 2nd, 2011
After a summer of projects in Edinburgh and further afield, as well as various holidays, the team are back in the studio – which means it’s time for another round-up of what people have been playing recently.
Alex:
Comedian Dies in a Middle of a Joke is a new project from performance poet, H&S collaborator and all-round man of excellence Ross Sutherland, and was playtested at Forest Fringe on August. It is an interactive play for fourteen people, with a further thirty-odd people watching them play. It’s November 1th, 1983: the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war. Comedian Joe “Pops” Pooley is headlining his local comedy club. As if his job wasn’t hard enough this evening, the venue has found itself trapped inside a six-minute time-loop.
The way it works is that, on your seat when you sit down, you find a simple instruction and some tiny bits of costume. They tell you to do something when the comedian gives you a cue; for example, there’s a soldier’s hat, and when it’s your turn, you say ‘show some respect, you _______‘ where the blank is to be filled by an insult of your choice. All fourteen people do something at some stage. Then, the six minutes come to their sad end and time spins back, and everyone moves up a seat. So a new comedian, and everyone gets a new costume and a new heckle to deliver.
At this point, the opportunity to play spread out before me like the most amazing vista. I get to deliver seven heckles, on cue, and it’s allowed! It stimulated amazing creativity in the players and much hilarity for the audience – everyone starts to collectively understand the opportunities the form affords you – and witty or surreal takes on the structure are rewarded with big laughs. The truly lovely thing was that it didn’t rely on amazing performance – the funniest and loveliest comedians were often the ones who just gamely ploughed on with no attempt to deliver like a stand-up. Ross has designed for this wonderfully – you’re told at the outset that this is a terrible set, that Joe really died that night, and there’s nothing you can do to save it.
It was a huge amount of fun and I can’t wait to see how it develops.
Holly:
Mostly I’ve been learning to navigate first-person video games. I find it really, really hard. In the real world, I navigate by motion – the set of movements I have to go through to get from one place to another, the stairs, the fence to climb over, the feel of the step down from the footpath to the street. In third-person-viewpoint games, I do at least see my character making those movements – but in first person, that’s gone too, and I’m left running repeatedly into the sides of doorways and shouting WHAT DO YOU MEAN GO NORTH STOP SHOOTING ME STOP IT STOP IT.
There was always an obvious solution to this: sit down and play a game for a good five or six hours, persevering past the first-hour hump of wandering around and bumping into stuff. But I’m lazy, and I’d never found a first-person game I liked enough to keep playing past that hump, not until Portal 2. Portal 2, of course, was ideal – not just because it’s brilliant, or because you spend it largely not being shot at, but also because it’s made of so many discrete small-scale fairly-easily-navigable levels.
The trouble came when I finished Portal 2: what next? The answer turned out to be: Modern Warfare 2, and specifically: the suspension bridge in the co-op Special Ops mode. Even I can’t get lost on a bridge, and if someone else can shoot 80% of the bad guys then that makes things a lot easier. Eventually my co-operator got tired of it, and I was forced to manage the bridge on my own; and then on a harder setting, and again, and by then I was sufficiently used to it to try navigating something a little less two-dimensional.
I’ve been trying different games, since then, and getting used to how it all works. One moment of revelation came when I realised that the trigger button is called the trigger button because you’re supposed to pretend it’s a trigger on a gun. It’s not just another arbitrarily-named button like A or B, and – and this is key – you can reliably expect pulling it to result in some shooting.
It’s going okay, overall! I’m still easily confused by rooms with multiple exits and quite bad at shooting imaginary enemies in the head, but I’m getting better. It turns out to be quite good fun.
Tom:
I’ve been drop-kicking angels with a giant stiletto heel made largely of hair. Which means only one thing: it’s been a summer of Bayonetta. I described it to a friend as “great, but a very me-kind-of-game“. By which I meant: the plot is daft, the cutscenes absurd, but the mechanics at the heart of it are where the magic lies.
Bayonetta is a third-person action game directed by Hideki Kamiya – previously responsible for the Devil May Cry franchise. The titular witch strings together combinations of attacks through three three attack buttons – one for hands, one for feet, and an extra one for “shoot” (which largely serves to juggle and extend combos). Every button press is sacrosanct: tapping a button unleashes an attack instantly. Attacks can be strung together into a huge number of canned combos, which is par for the course. Except: by holding an attack button at any point, you pause the combo, cancelling that attack into a barrage of gunfire from the limb in question (because Bayonetta’s the type of girl to strap guns to her feet). And so the huge branching tree of potential combos branches further when you take the ranged-cancels into account – and further when you contemplate the various combinations of weapons on offer.
Coupled to these combat mechanics are a dodge system that rewards perfectly-timed dodges with a brief burst of slow-motion – “witch time” – that lets gives you a few seconds to deal out even more damage, and powerful “punishment” attacks that are doled out as rewards for consistent combos without taking damage. You can begin to see how everything locks together tightly: dodge opens up opportunity for attack, cancels let you switch attention between enemies, and long combos reward you with an instant-kill attack on another foe.
It looks like a blur to an observer; if you watch a video of the game in action it’ll likely seem bewildering. But what makes Bayonetta so great is that every single action the character performs – everything in that blur of colour – is completely down to player action. There’s an incredible sensation of total control as you dole out damage, dodge attacks, dash to the other side of the arena, dodge another attack, drop into Witch Time and reel out a combo only to cancel it into attacking a different opponent, dodge them in mid-air and then kick a giant angel into a guillotine you’ve magicked up out of nowhere. The violence isn’t what’s makes it good; it’s the tactility of it, the knot of systems that are perfectly balanced, the sensation of total control that’s so rewarding when it trips off your fingers at sixty frames per second.
Also, you get to boot angels in the face with a giant stiletto made of hair.
Chris:
I’ve been tearing around a slightly disappointing cityscape at break-neck speeds, avoiding the police and miraculously surviving a series of clearly-fatal collisions in Need For Speed Most Wanted. (NB: this is the original Most Wanted for the original Xbox by EA Canada, not Criterion’s reboot for current-gen consoles).
I keep playing this even though I’m not a massive fan of the game. The trouble is that the balance between isn’t-it-fun-driving-really-fast and isn’t-it-fun-to-do-things-in-a-real-world-that-you-can’t-normally-do is just a bit off. Interacting with the world consists of a) getting annoyed that that truck pulled out in front of you and b) having to gain ‘bounty’ points by annoying the police and then running away and not getting caught. This interrupts the driving-really-fast fun. Every time I hit the point where I’ve won the current races and have to go and irritate the police in order to progress, I put it down and do something else for a while.
The real kicker is, even after you’ve won a race, any police following you must still be successfully avoided before you can save your game. Frustrating.
Andrew:
I’ve been playing Infinity Blade. The aim of the game is to kill a range of foes as you wander through a castle, making your way up to the penthouse dwelling of the fearsome ‘God King’, all in the name of revenge. I started off quite enjoying this sword swinging fantasy fighter. Some moves to master, lots of weapons to choose from and some gruesome sound affects – it kept me busy on a few train journeys.
When I finally defeated the God King, the finale seemed to suggest I was about to move on to the next level – but then the game took me back to the start, with my player standing on a rock, looking at the castle and saying ‘father, I will avenge you’. Which was a bit confusing, considering that I had just kicked some arse. And, annoyingly, despite defeating the God King – who wielded the aforementioned Infinity Blade – I didn’t actually get the Blade myself to use.
Once again I face up to my nemesis – the God King – checked his status, and saw to my horror that his power had doubled since the last time I beat him. No matter how good you get, your player needs a certain level of weaponry and shielding to defeat the God King, and the inventory is set up in such a way that after you reach a certain point, players need to start spending serious cash. (for example I bought the sword Khill for 39,500 gold pieces – the next one up is Echo, a snip at 199,990 gold pieces).
So though it was a good diversion for a while, it quickly became very boring. And I couldn’t understand why the eponymous Infinity Blade wasn’t the most expensive inventory item – it seemed to undermine things a bit!
Science and fiction
Thursday, September 1st, 2011
Wrapping up our look at the Green Lantern campaign, Sophie takes a look at the role science played in the project.
The narrative techniques that have developed around ARGs are a nice fit with a project interested in scientific method. Investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, correcting and integrating previous hypotheses, documenting and sharing them are the meat of both communities. A game makes this satisfying with a feedback loop that lets you know you’re right. (What I think of as the ‘Aha-Yay loop’). Real scientists get very little of that, and work much harder for it, but I suspect they recognise the feeling of suddenly understanding what was previously opaque.
Our interactive narrative for Green Lantern was centred squarely on a tie-in with the Milky Way Project, a citizen science projects that uses a flash interface to get regular people to identify and classify green rings in beautiful images of the Milky Way. They’re taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope, which orbits the earth like a cryogenically cooled giant coffee pot, taking infra red images. Too many for paid researchers to ever look at – the full dataset has tens of thousands of images in it, and having a single human classifying them – while humans are better at it than computers – is much less good than having the average of many opinions.
In story terms, having this at the centre had interesting consequences. Bringing together real science with a comic book mythos has some interesting wrinkles – you need to know precisely where the laws of physics stop applying.
The point about superheroes is that they’re super – joyful avatars of unlimited power. Stories feel real when their worlds have internal consistency, and this could never have that. Instead we had two spheres – the real world, and the superhero-world that happens when a Green Lantern puts on a power ring. The consequences of those two worlds overlapping provided some of the high moments of the story, and when the ability to overcome physics arrived in the story, it felt momentous.
Green Lantern Boot Camp Game: Playtesting and Categorisation
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
Green Lantern is one of the most creative superheroes – he can solve problems with any object he can think of. The process of playtesting a game where an angry swan (it’ll break your arm!) can meet a steel chair (classic WWE weapon) was a lot of fun and inspired this from Holly.
One of the things I like most about playtesting is the detritus that accumulates around it: the piles of index cards with SLEEPY PANDA or HAND GRENADE written on them, the pirate-coin hoards bought for a pound from party shops, the silly hats, the stickers, multi-coloured pens, the tiny model dinosaurs, the always-bewildering-in-retrospect score charts.
And one of the other things I like about playtesting is the mental equivalent of these piles of tiny objects – the little odd things that you didn’t expect to think about, but which turn out to be vital. With Green Lantern Boot Camp, it was categorisation.
When I started work on the game, a lot of the important design decisions had already been made – for example, the decision that players would have a limited array of “constructs” which they could summon, and that these constructs would be divided into five categories. What those categories are, though: who knew? But they had to contain everything a Green Lantern might want to send into battle, divided up into five different types of thing, five discrete chunks of the world.
Twenty Questions divides the world into three categories: animal, vegetable or mineral? The Australian Aboriginal language Dyirbal famously has four, according to Lakoff:
- Men, most non-human animals
- Women, fire, water, birds and monnotremes
- Edible fruit and vegetables
- Everything else
John Wilkin’s seventeenth-century invented language has forty categories, and Jorge Luis Borges uses these forty as a jumping-off point to imagine his own unlikely system, in which everything in the world boils down to fourteen categories including “belonging to the emperor”, “embalmed”, “piglets” and “from a distance look like flies”.
It’s a lot of fun, this divvying-up of concepts into types of meaning; De Bono uses it as the basis for a charming game in which players divide eight random nouns into two meaningful categories (you can give it a go in Kevan Davis’s implementation here). And part of the reason it’s so much fun is because of what it reveals about the world of the person doing the dividing.
So if I were divvying up the whole world into five categories for my own purposes, they might look like “sentient things” (real people, IM windows, blackbirds), “consumable input” (chocolate, books, the moon), “things that have to do with moving about” (the sea, dresses, staircases), “systems” (ideas, rulesets, recipes) and “things I don’t care about much”. That’s fine for my experience of the world; but it wouldn’t be very useful if I were a Green Lantern training to manifest giant green constructs and send them into battle.
The categories we ended up with for the Green Lantern Boot Camp were “animals”, “weapons”, “blunt objects”, “sharp objects” and “natural forces”. And what these suggest is, perhaps, that the Green Lantern’s world is rather a grim one. If I suddenly had the power to summon enormous green constructs of anything I liked, I expect I’d use the power for things like really delicious food, flying office chairs, enormous balloons, friendly dodos. But for the Green Lantern, it’s all about the type of damage that something can do in battle.
Transmedia for Comics fans
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011
Kicking off a series of posts on our work on the Green Lantern campaign, creative producer on the project Sophie Sampson looks at how the project approached that troublesome t-word: transmedia.
Transmedia is a difficult term these days – I’m still not quite sure I know what it means, despite making a load of projects that seem to fall under that umbrella. What is emerging under the label is a set of tools that are really useful in engaging fans. ARGs for example, developed as an entirely internet-native form of narrative. Super-hard puzzles that only four people in the world can solve don’t seem that fun to me, but the idea of stories that talk back to you and show how you changed them really does work.
The thing that unites comics fans is their love of a satisfying story, and with Green Lantern we wanted them to feel able to step into the DC Universe and have a personal stake in it. Rather than an entirely linear narrative, the structure was a series of ‘bombs’ – exciting moments that were cool and shareable on their own, although richer if you were following the surrounding narrative.
The main bomb was our tie-in with the Milky Way Project, which generated the most press and fan comment, as people realised that the fictional science and real science had merged, and in effect they were doing something genuinely useful and being rewarded with story.
The activity was followed by the next bomb – the discovery of a piece of binaural 3d audio, featuring the main villain of the film doing his terrifying thing and overwhelming a Green Lantern. This was shared and spread by fans, but also reached mainstream film and geek blogs that were reporting on the build up to the film.
Interestingly, the finale wasn’t designed to be that kind of moment. We took the narrative right up to the first midnight fan screenings, and concentrated on an emotionally satisfying conclusion that would get much richer when the fans went to see the film and could see their actions played out on the screen.
This was something I was nervous about – tradition dictates the finale should be a giant, interactive extravaganza where players feel they are influencing the outcome, right? But as everyone knew the spaceship would arrive and the movie opening date, trying to make that the moment where you feel you’ve won would have been hollow. Trying to pretend the fans could influence an outcome everyone knew was set in stone would have destroyed their sense of agency.
We concentrated on getting the community to feel a part of the protagonists’ journey and wrapping up the narrative in an emotionally satisfying way. What could have been quite small and underwhelming ended up feeling huge, partly because it built right up to the opening of the movie, multiplying excitement for those who were following.
There’s a real question mark about managing scale when making this kind of activity. The first few days when word spread among fans that you could get a personal email from a DC Comics character were a bit white-knuckle. It wouldn’t have been possible without a writer whose job was entirely answering fictional email, but that could have scaled up and extra writers slotted into the pipeline if necessary. It was a bespoke solution, but the fans really noticed and appreciated the efforts Warner Bros were putting in on their behalf. As making the fans feel loved was the main brief of this activity, I feel like we definitely got that right. And fictional inbox zero is an incredible feeling.
Recent work: Green Lantern
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011
Green Lantern was released in cinemas this summer, and Hide&Seek worked on a range of games and interactive experiences to tie into the movie. There’s an overview of the campaign and its components on our Green Lantern project page – and throughout the course of this week we’ll be publishing a few blogposts about the process behind the campaign.
Coming up this week are:
- Tuesday – Transmedia for Comics Fans
- Wednesday – Playtesting and Categorisation in the Boot Camp Flash Game
- Thursday – Science and fiction
Denizens of the Hinterland
Monday, August 22nd, 2011
The Age of the Audience?
Wednesday, August 17th, 2011
At 3pm tomorrow I’ll taking part in a panel at Forest Fringe, Edinburgh on the topic of Interactivity in the Age of the Audience. One of the questions that we’ve been asked to consider is whether, as Charlotte Higgins contended in this recent blog post, intimate theatre might in some ways be considered ‘decadent’.
I think there’s something important to be addressed in this. All forms of interactive, participatory work face a distribution problem; it is inherently harder to scale interactive work to reach a large live audience than a traditional proscenium arch show. A 2-handed play can reach 900 people, where is it’s very hard for 2 performers to interact personally with anything like that number.
Because Hide&Seek come at this from the perspective of game design rather than theatre production, we sometimes arrive at rather different solutions. One of the things I love most about the Tiny Games we’ve just installed across the Southbank is how neatly they solve this distribution problem – they are permanent, always-on, one-on-one play experiences for a huge number of participants.
Hinterland addresses distribution and access in a different way. It’s a game that you play via your telephone. Once you’ve come to Forest Fringe and signed up for the game, you are keeping your eyes and ears open for a particular kind of stranger. Once you’ve found them, you answer some questions together and phone them in to the Operator. Soon after, you receive a poem to your phone which has been shaped and altered by the conversation that you had and the answers that you left.
In the language of theatre, I guess this is two kinds of one-on-one. The first is with a stranger. The second is with the game/poem. But rather than queueing for your encounter (and that queue extending out the door), the queue is hidden from view – it’s in the space between encounter and poem. Important work is happening, but it’s not interfering with your experience of being in Edinburgh, getting on with other things, seeing other shows.
I think my conclusion here is to take issue (with apologies to the wonderful Non Zero One who don’t deserve the aggro) with the title of the panel “Interactivity in the Age of the Audience”. Audiences require performers, spaces, stages and backstages – the highly evolved technologies of the theatre. And they tend to get start times, intervals, endings. All of that is inherited infrastructure from a previous age – infrastructure that often works against interaction. It’s hard to play in the aisles, the chairs get in the way.
What I’ll be arguing for tomorrow is for new platforms for participatory work – ones that are fluid and responsive, that scale as well for interactivity as proscenium arch theatre does for spectacle. They will undoubtedly admit and engage audiences, but they’ll be designed with playing, making and talking in mind.
Fox Hunt at the Southbank
Wednesday, August 17th, 2011
On Saturday 20 August, from 12 to 4pm, there’s going to be a fox hunt at the Hayward. We’ve been working with the Hayward and The Fox Project to create a game for familes - a chance to find out more about foxes, track one around the Southbank, and follow it to its den.
It’s a drop-in game, so turn up whenever you like and have a play!
Picture by Joao Maximo under a CC licence.
GDOET: Everyday Gaming
Tuesday, August 16th, 2011
This month, my Kill Screen column is about Everyday Gaming.
It’s about the way what’s often called “casual gaming” is, in fact, just gaming that fits into everyday life, and the many ways there are to achieve that. And it focuses a little on mudanity, on “the everyday” itself – something I properly came to through Joe Moran‘s marvellous Reading The Everyday:
Most often, [design] is something people engage with without knowing it’s there. “Design,” it turns out, is usually the answer to the question we so rarely ask of the products we use everyday: “What made this good?”
It is because things are well designed that we let them into our lives and build our routines around them. “Design” is so often used to describe things that are striking, outlandish, and, in the adjective “designer,” the things that loudly proclaim their provenance. But for me, the most endearing and perhaps the most human design can be found in the mundane, where it goes softly spoken.
And so, I thought it worth examining the relationship of the Everyday with game design.
You can read “Everyday Gaming” over at Kill Screen.
Tiny Games at the Southbank
Monday, August 15th, 2011
This is a tiny game that we made:
It’s one of ten tiny games that have been stuck to the ground around the Southbank. It’s two sentences long. Part of the reason it’s so short is that it’s site-specific: designed to be played on a piece of ground with big square pavers, like the space you can see here near the Hayward Gallery. When the playing field is right in front of you, the rules can be a little more succinct.
This is another tiny game:
And this is another one:
The games don’t need any equipment, or preparation; you just need to find them, and read them, and try them out.
We spent a day wandering around the site, looking at all the stuff, all the places to run or jump or peer, and this is what came out of it: these three-line invitations to play, turned by the Southbank into these lovely half-hidden vinyls, fixed to the actual architecture of the site until 4 September.
I’m so excited about this project – I’ve rarely been as pleased by anything as I was by walking along the riverside on Friday, looking up to a balcony above, and seeing a family playing People Poohsticks. I’m not going to tell you any of the rules, though (you can have two more titles: Chessy Chase and I’m, like, obsessed with lemon muffins). If you want to play, you’ll have to go to the Southbank and find them.
Arriving at the Hinterland
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
This is a blog about the genesis of our poem you can play, Hinterland. For information on the project and how to play, please visit hinterland.hideandseek.net)
With just a week to go before the Hinterland opens up at Forest Fringe in Edinburgh, I wanted to look back briefly on the genesis of the project. The story begins at Hide&Seek’s very first event and my very first game, in 2007 at the BFI delegate’s centre, when it was called the London Poetry Game.
Some principles have run through all three versions of the game: 1. The game requires you to talk to strangers via a specially-created telephone hotline 2. Your reward for taking part is a poem. 3. The game is about cities and the languages spoken within them and 4. The game is not really that much of a game at all.
Looking back, it’s clear that my own insight into this particular form has developed over the four years I’ve been working with it. The way I work with technology (and the people who work with technology), the assumptions I make about people’s willingness to take action as part of the games I design, and my understanding of how (or if) a game can have a political perspective, have all progressed some distance in that time.
Back in 2007, it ran like this: I took some verses of September 1, 1939 by W.H.Auden and translated each line into a different language, and printed the new poem out with the rules on the back. Players had to go out and find bilingual speakers of those languages, and get them to phone in both a reading and an English translation of the line. Those lines were then compiled into a presentation of the poem at the end of the festival, which consisted of three parts: 1. a reading of the poem in the many languages; 2. a reading of the poem in the multiple translations and 3; a reading of the original poem, by me.
Except it didn’t work out that way, of course. Not really knowing what playtesting was, I encountered all my problems in the field. Players weren’t so interested in the task, describing it as ‘a bit stressful’ and ‘difficult to do’, and so we didn’t get anywhere near a complete poem. Also, I was (while running the festival at the same time) my own audio edit guy. We set up a phoneline with that automatically generated .wav files, which I then cut together using an open-source sound editor.
The performance at the end, therefore, consisted of me playing the short audio file I had managed to put together, and then manfully reading a rather long poem to a patient but disengaged audience.
The way I understood the problems with the game were primarily practical and functional – deriving from my assumption that if I could fix the way we communicated the game to players, and fix the way we created the audio file, then the project would work fine. I documented those problems in more detail in a post last year.
In 2010, we were able to fix all those things. We worked with technologist Chris Thorpe to create a dedicated website for the game, poet Ross Sutherland to create a more accessible poem for translation, and producer Sarah Ellis to create robust translations and a community engagement programme. Nick Ryan devised a sound editing process and created an audio realisation of the poem. We were embedded within the 2010 Weekender with a much greater pool of players to draw on. And Ross created a video document of the project which summed it up wonderfully.
Symphony (The London Poetry Game) from Ross Sutherland on Vimeo.
And yet… This smoother, more efficient, more effective execution of the game now yielded a different set of problems. Players still participated in the game more out of enthusiasm for the concept than out of any real sense of fun. And our attentions were turned more closely to the second set of participants in the game – the people who the players seek out in search of translations. What was in it for them?
I have always hoped that the London Poetry Game would ‘say something’ about our multicultural urban lives. That a game which brings speakers of different languages into proximity with one another was by definition a good thing, that it ‘created dialogue’ and ‘opened our ears to the different languages spoken in a single street’ (those two culled from various application texts for the project over the years). But maybe the noble aims were muddied by the framework in which the game operated. An English-speaking creative team, making a game and a poem in English, which gets English -speaking players to act on its behalf, by requiring (forcing) bilingual (‘native’) speakers of other languages to perform limited actions. Maybe there was something a bit colonial about all that…
(I think it’s worth noting how it was only possible to address these higher concerns once the basic problems with execution were fixed. I’d like to revisit this in a future post – maybe collaborative projects have a hierarchy of needs?)
In answering that challenge, I have been fortunate enough to continue the collaboration with Ross and Sarah, and draw the essential understanding and input of Tom Armitage, newly-minted game designer and technologist at Hide&Seek. Through a longer period of development, we’ve had a chance to reflect on the affordances of the hybrid form we have created, to work through (with a residency at BAC) the dramaturgy of the player-stranger dialogues that the game generates, and to examine how a poem could be generated from the actions of players in a more discursive and gamelike way. We’ve thought a lot about how a game for two players where one player speaks more languages than the other creates a very interesting power dynamic. We’ve prototyped, playtested and discussed, and in doing so come up with something that has travelled a very long way from its last iteration.
I don’t want to spoil the game for potential players by telling you what’s in the Hinterland. But I think it’s definitely true to say that there’s more game, more poem and more dialogue in there than there was before. I hope you’ll join us if you’re able…
Obscure Games Pittsburgh: another upcoming festival
Friday, July 29th, 2011
Obscure Games is a Pittsburgh-based group that runs Steel City Games, one of the the ever-growing family of pervasive game festivals – in fact it’ll be the last festival of this summer games season, running on 27 August.
All the different game festivals have something that sets them apart, and in the case of Steel City Games, it’s that the people who run it are… well… pretty athletic. They jump over things. They run around for fun, then come up with excuses to run around some more. They explain games using phrases like “well it’s human pinball meets baseball. And soccer. Played on a hill.” Along with the New York-based Institute for Aesthletics, they may own more sports bibs than every other game design group combined.
The other thing that feels really special about them is how often they run with other people’s games, taking rulesets available on Ludocity and coming up with newer, often rather stranger, variants. There’s Black Stag, a scarier version of the Soho Stag Hunt (which was first played in London back in 2007). There’s Visible Cities: Special Delivery, a version of Visible Cities (first played at the ICA and the National Theatre last year) that adds a new aim for players and a different type of urgency.
This sort of development feels enormously valuable: designers taking other rulesets and game ideas, and building them, and then putting them back into circulation. It helps turn the pervasive games world into an actual community and a growing form, with discourse and development and responses and the capacity to build on itself. And it means the things they make are important even to designers and game groups who aren’t ever going to actually go to Pittsburgh: the games may be location-specific, but the knock-on effects aren’t.
Obscure Games currently have a Kickstarter up for their festival; they’re looking for supporters to help them sort out all the boring game details like insurance, and all the ridiculous exciting game details like running 24 games in 24 hours(!).
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