‘Events – Work With Us’
Games at the Southbank Centre’s Festival of Death
Tuesday, 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. There’ll be a remixed version of the Game of Life, a selection of parlour games, a chance to create your own eulogy, and We’d Like A Word In Private, a game of bickering (and potentially treacherous) hitmen.
We’ll be at the Southbank Centre from 12 to 5, and you can drop in for board games or parlour games, plus we’ll be running a different game on the hour, every hour, from 1pm to 4pm.
There’s also an awful lot of other interesting things going on at the festival – talks and workshops and readings and more – so do come along! Entry to the festival is £12, and then you can wander along to whatever events within it you feel like.
Edinburgh Playtests
Saturday, December 3rd, 2011
In Edinburgh? Available some time over the next few days? Fancy having some free fun, and helping us test some exciting live games?
From Sunday to Wednesday, we’re going to be trying out four brilliant new games from Scottish artists. They’re all going to be part of the New Year Games event – but for now, we need to try them out in the venues, and see how they work. There’s a sonic maze in St Giles cathedral, a navigational challenge in the National Museum of Scotland, a reimagined Hopscotch in Dance Base and a paper aeroplane challenge with an invisible band in the Hub. They’re all free, and they’re all going to be a lot of fun, so if you’re around, do drop in to one or more and have a go.
The games will be running:
- Sunday 4 December, 3-4pm: Throw Things At FOUND, in The Hub, Castlehill
- Monday 5 December, 3-4pm: Scotch Hoppers at Dance Base, the Grassmarket
- Tuesday 6 December, 5:30-7:30pm: Dreadnought at the National Museum of Scotland (please call 07855 673 689 in advance for this one)
- Wednesday 7 December, 4-6pm: Resonate the Labyrinth at St Giles, the Royal Mile
The New Year Games
Friday, October 28th, 2011
We at Hide&Seek are thrilled to announce our very first game for next year. Early next year, in fact. Very, very early next year.
On 1 January 2012, Hide&Seek will be running The New Year Games, an amazing afternoon-long game across Edinburgh’s Old Town, as part of the annual Hogmanay celebrations.
We’ll be working with brilliant Scottish artists in some astoundingly beautiful venues, filling the streets with fun. We’re not allowed to tell you any more about it just yet, but: seriously, you should come. Edinburgh. 1 January 2012. 2pm to 6pm. Wrap up warm.
And if you’re going to be in Edinburgh, or you’re interested in coming up, and you’d like to help out, then let us know – email chris@hideandseek.net. We’re definitely hoping to see some Friends of Hide&Seek there, so get in touch if you want to hang around in Edinburgh for a few days, generally have fun, and help us run one of the biggest street games ever.
Picture by Chris Yunker: Edinburgh
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
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.
Hinterland in Edinburgh
Monday, July 4th, 2011
Forest Fringe, Edinburgh
12-6pm, 15-27 August
We’re not quite sure what’s in there, to be honest. The Hinterland is entered by telephone, and each instance of it is quite personal. The little we know comes to us second-hand: rumours of Parisian affairs, pixellated simulations, and a DMZ at the deepest point.
You have to go in alone. That’s essential, apparently.
The Narrator is on hand to guide you, although again, his identity and intention are not known to us.
You look into the Hinterland / And the Hinterland looks into you…
Hinterland is a poem that you play. Begin your journey at the Hinterland Waystation upstairs at Forest Fringe, receive your first canto, and go forth into Edinburgh, seeking conversation with a perfect stranger. If you manage it correctly, that conversation will yield words for the Narrator, who will repay you with a reading that is yours and yours alone.
Four cantos, each more filled with jeopardy than the last, taking you through a landscape built from misunderstandings, invisible borders, crossed lines and untranslatable sayings. Leave the Edinburgh you thought you knew, and the words you thought you said behind…
Hinterland is supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
National Maritime Museum Sandpit: Voyages
Friday, June 3rd, 2011
From 12:30pm to 5pm on Sunday 17 July, we’re going to be playing games to celebrate the opening of the National Maritime Museum’s amazing new wing! Come along for a free afternoon of delights, as we try out new games themed around voyages and the maritime, inside and outside the museum itself. Book spaces from 12:30; games begin at 1.
Adrift (Kevan Davis): A handful of shipwreck survivors navigate their way home, with only a limited food supply, and the suspicion that whoever sunk their ship may also be onboard…
Ms Lidbetter’s Bakery presents Battle of the Seas: See if your fleet’s tactics can control the most treasured trade routes… before your rivals gets there first.
Mutinous Sea-Dogs (Will Pearson): A social card game where you try to maintain command over a mutinous rabble or overthrow the oppressive captain.
A Motley Cruise (Simon Katan): Arr me hearties! This is a game for pirates and privateers. Sail the high seas to chase down your enemy and steal their bounty.
Games we Played in Berlin (Hide&Seek): Two fast-paced no-tech games we learnt at the recent “You Are GO!” festival in Berlin: the sneaky and agile Ninja, and the frenetic Danish Clapping.
What’s the Point (Dusty Button): Explore the distant corners of the museum, using a map, a compass, and your wits.
Critical Acclaim (A Door in a Wall): A game of reviews. Build your article from existing quotes in order to deceive your opponents.
SeE HoW (Emma Davenport and Sophie Nathan): Reckon you got what it takes to be at sea? Sign up for the ultimate nautical training challenge and become a definitive expert SeE CaDeT.
Shore Leave (Anna Brownsted): a fast-paced good-time game for sailors and landlubbers alike. Compete with your fellow sailors to see who can have the most fun before it’s time to return to the ship…
Semaphoria (Holly Gramazio): Use three brightly-coloured flags to send instructions to your team-mates, in a race against another crew.
Spin Your Partner (Hide&Seek): Time for a sailors’ jig! Take your partner and spin around in this fast-paced trading dance game.
Hornswaggle! (Drew Crow): Use your phone and your wits to avoid the booby traps and find the treasure, but hide it well because you’re not the only one after it!
Three Little Brigs (Hide&Seek): Add to a slowly growing map, and choose your ship’s route around the collaborative coastline.
In all there’ll be a dozen games across the afternoon, mostly for adults but some family-friendly. Some high-tech, some using nothing more complicated than paper; some raucous, some for the sedate ponderers among us; for one player at a time, or for groups of forty. We’d love to see you there.
Facebook event is here.
The Sandpit is Hide&Seek’s irregular playing and playtesting event. For artists and designers it’s a chance to try out new ideas; for everyone else, it’s a chance to play new games for the first time, or to revisit old favourites. There are always plenty of games going on, so there’s bound to be something that suits you.
Picture by JeffOliver
Southbank Sandpit: the Seaside
Friday, June 3rd, 2011
Come along to the Southbank from 6:30 to 10pm on Thursday 4 August for a free evening of games and playful experiences! As part of the Southbank Centre’s seaside weekend, we’ll be running a night of seaside-themed games in Royal Festival Hall and around the Southbank. Book places in games in the Clore Ballroom from 6:30; play begins at 7.
There’ll be folded pieces of paper and running and sneaking and waving flags and building things and knots and boats and maybe even a real live deck chair. We’re still confirming the game details, but there’ll be:
I Say (Rosie Fairchild): Hunting and escaping, sneaking and finding are at the heart of this thrilling chase game around the Southbank.
All Hands On Deck (Hide&Seek): You just want a nice sit-down in a deck-chair – but the deck-chair inspector and that pesky seagull have different plans.
Bucket and Spade (Nichol Keene and Toby de Angeli): Two teams battle it out using anything from mime to song to work out clues and create the perfect day at the seaside.
The Future is Not a Noun; It’s a Verb (Charlotte Jarvis): Psychological experiment, performance, social intervention and comic turn.
Charabanc (Tom Armitage): Ah, the race for the last seaside parking space: Mum’s tired, Dad’s lost, the kids need the loo, and EVERYONE’S COMPLAINING. A noisy, competitive role-playing team game for two or more groups of four.
Competitive Sandwich Making (Tim Mannveille and Clare Huxley): Test your skills in the ancient art of tessellating pieces of cheese to make the perfect sandwich.
Do Whales Eat Sand? (Silke Abele): Cunningly discard seaside ‘objects’ with the help of creative and convincing arguments in order to win treasure for your team!
Mission (Bread and Goose): An unwitting passer-by is thrust into a world of espionage, deceit, and corruption. Can you decipher the clues and complete your mission?
Ms Lidbetter’s Bakery presents Battle of the Seas: See if your fleet’s tactics can control the most treasured trade routes… before your rivals gets there first.
Time*Trails (Sophie Sampson and Michael Dales): Find the hidden history of the South Bank! Time*Trails brings the Festival of Britain alive in the very spot it took place using the GPS technology in your iPhone.
A Motley Cruise (Simon Katan): a game for pirates and merchants. Sail the high seas to chase down your enemy and steal their bounty.
Werewolf: nothing to do with the seaside, but someone’s going to play it anyway, might as well make it official…
Wish You Were Here (Holly Gramazio): a game of seaside postcards and censorship – can you get your joke past the all-seeing eye of the Postmaster?
Plus a rockpool, masks, more spy trails, an actual genuine sandpit with real sand in it, a family car journey, and maybe even an actual genuine ice-cream: fifteen games across the site, most new, a few familiar; some high-tech, some using nothing but flags or ice-cream or sand or water; some for one quiet player, some for forty runners-around and jumpers-about.
These games are intended primarily for adults.
Tell us you’re coming on the Facebook event page, or just turn up on the night!
The Sandpit is Hide&Seek’s irregular playing and playtesting event. For artists and designers it’s a chance to try out new ideas; for everyone else, it’s a chance to play new games for the first time, or to revisit old favourites. There are always plenty of games going on, so there’s bound to be something that suits you.
Picture by 55thstreet
Games at You Are GO!
Monday, May 16th, 2011
From 17-19 June, Invisible Playground will be running Berlin’s first festival of street games, You Are GO!. Hide&Seek will be there with three games: Semaphoria, a game of flag-waving and secret messages; the Stag Hunt, a game of chasing and balloons; and Pingus, a game of industrious but dim-witted penguins.
Plus there’ll be brilliant games from other designers and groups, including Packet Sniffing – a game that uses your actual sense of smell – and a mix of clapping, smuggling, LEDS, surveillance and much more.
Picture by Pink Sherbet.
Spin Your Partner and Taunt! at Igfest
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011
We’ve mentioned Igfest before – Bristol’s festival of street games; it’s now just around the corner, on the 28th and 29th of May, and the schedule of games is looking amazing.
We’ll be there with two games: a quick run of Taunt!, which you might remember from last year’s Weekender: a game of shouting, etymology, insults, teamwork and more shouting and insults; and Spin Your Partner, a brand new… something-or-other… that’s part game, part dance, in the style of an old-fashioned ceilidh.
There’s also Igfest’s own amazing chase game 2.8 Hours Later, plus games from SF0, Come Out and Play, and more – if you can make it, you should definitely come and play!
Picture by jonesor under a CC license
PlayStation GameRunners
Monday, September 20th, 2010
Fri 8th October will see an amazing day of play as part of the PlayStation GameRunners project, an experimental project where PlayStation, members of the public and young people from diverse backgrounds come together to create social games.
The project has been developed by PlayStation and Hide&Seek with a team of 8 initial Game Runners who PlayStation have picked to train as game designers. The event, in a central London location, will run all day – do come along and play!
Hide&Seek Workshop: Stories Without Borders
Monday, September 20th, 2010
The second of Hide&Seek’s upcoming Script Factory workshops deals with transmedia for writers.
Stories have always been everywhere, but they’re now expected to be everywhere at once. As traditional, linear narrative forms forge closer relationships with digital, interactive and distributed formats, it’s getting harder to know where a story should start and stop. Working across these media provides extraordinary opportunities for evolving how we tell stories, but also presents technological, practical and conceptual challenges for writers.
This workshop will present a short series of in-depth case studies showing how stories can be successfully seeded across different media, giving writers tools to tackle these arenas and a chance to test them out in an exploratory and supportive environment. Perfect for those experienced at writing, but new to writing across platforms, this workshop follows on from the general Introduction from Transmedia, but can also stand on its own.
Book places at the script factory website; or see this information in pdf form.
Hide&Seek Workshop: Introduction to Transmedia
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
The first of Hide&Seek’s upcoming workshops with the Script Factory will run on 27 October, 10:00 to 5:30.
From major studios to micro-distributors, experiments in transmedia – screen storytelling in a networked world – have taken many forms. There have been blockbuster games, film characters with their own social network pages, fictitious websites: a dizzying array of attempts, many with mixed results. Ensuring success is hard: attracting audiences, managing digital production and safeguarding creative integrity are all big challenges.
This workshop, designed for producers, directors and writers, gives a general overview of these formats, a clear insight into their value and opportunity, and strategies for how this content can be effectively integrated into the production process.
Details and booking at the Script Factory website, or in pdf form.
Transmedia Training Days
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
Hide&Seek have formed a new partnership with The Script Factory, Europe’s premier script development organisation, to launch two brand new workshops this Autumn.
If you read about the amazing Wonderlab and thought it sounded interesting, or if you’re beginning to work in transmedia and want to kick-start your career, then these events are for you. The day-long workshops are devised and run by our very own Alex Fleetwood and Margaret Robertson, and they’re going to be brilliant.
On Wednesday 27 October, there’s an Introduction to Transmedia: a day for directors, producers and other film industry pros looking to understand the increasing opportunities for screen storytelling in a networked world.
And then on Thursday 28 October, it’s time for Stories Without Borders, a practical workshop for writers focusing on how stories can be successfully seeded across different media. The workshop will give writers tools to tackle these arenas and a chance to test them out in an exploratory and supportive environment. If you’re experienced at writing, but new to writing across platforms, this is the workshop for you.
The workshops cost £120 + VAT, or £210 for both. Places can be booked via The Script Factory.
Photograph by ktylerconk: Quill and ink.
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