‘News’
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
Announcing: Dreams of Your Life
Friday, November 25th, 2011
We’re proud, delighted and honoured to announce our latest project, for Film4. The press release follows – as we build up to launch on December 1st, we’ll be writing about it in earnest. If you’d like a sneak preview, drop us a line in the comments!
Film4 has commissioned a unique and innovative multiplatform experience to support the release of Carol Morley’s feature film Dreams of a Life.
Dreams of a Life, which is co-produced and co-financed by Film4, movingly pieces together the true story of thirty-eight year old Joyce Vincent, whose skeleton was discovered in her bedsit three years after she had died. The accompanying digital commission, www.dreamsofyourlife.com, (please note: site launches December 1st) has been developed by interactive agency Hide&Seek, as a thought-provoking and immersive experience which engages users in the themes explored by the film.
Award-winning writer A.L. Kennedy has crafted the absorbing and sometimes unnerving narrative, which prompts responses to questions on society, friendship, love and loneliness. This is played against the backdrop of beautiful and haunting time-lapse imagery, created by photographer Lottie Davies.
The launch of www.dreamsofyourlife.com will also be supported by a mobile touring installation, allowing audiences to interact with the experience on iPads at selected venues in the cities where the film is playing.
www.dreamsofyourlife.com, commissioned by Hilary Perkins, Channel 4’s Multiplatform Commissioning Editor for Drama and Film, launches on 1st December 2011. Dreams of a Life is released in selected cinemas on 16th December.
The Show Must Go On: our new game launches!
Thursday, 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. Unfortunately there’s been a terrible case of bad luck – you’ll need to retrieve the sheet music, assemble props, build the set, light the show and dress the chorus, with just moments to go until curtain up… Each of the five minigames is designed to give you a different kind of fun – they’ll test your brains, your thumbs and your nerve.
If the magic of text on screen isn’t enough to persuade you, why not take a look at the trailer to help you get in the mood? Or have a poke around the Show Must Go On website, for more pictures and the story of how it all came to be.
If you’d like to help out with the whole launch-and-excitement, here’s what you can do…
Buy it! Well, of course we’d like you to buy it. It’s presently only available on iOS devices, but you can also gift it to friends with those devices. It’s only 69p!
Review it! Reviewing games in the App Store helps other people decide that they, too, would like to buy it. See point 1. Of course, if you have a blog or own a newspaper, we’d love for you to place your review there as well.
Follow us on Twitter or Facebook! If you send us a story of your strange backstage mishaps, you could win two Royal Opera House tickets, a VIP backstage tour, and 50 (50!) CDs from EMI.
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
A week left to play Hinterland!
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011
Hinterland – our poem that you can play – continues its run at Forest Fringe until the end of the week. We’ve had a great response to it to date, with many travellers entering the Hinterland. If you’re in Edinburgh and would like to play, you’ve got until the end of this week to do so.
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…
Talk To Me: Tate Trumps exhibited at MOMA, New York
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011
We’re very excited that Tate Trumps is being exhibited at MOMA as part of Talk To Me, their exhibition of 21st Century design, which runs until November 7th.
The official website explains the exhibition in more detail:
Talk to Me explores this new terrain [of design], featuring a variety of designs that enhance communicative possibilities and embody a new balance between technology and people, bringing technological breakthroughs up or down to a comfortable, understandable human scale. Designers are using the whole world to communicate, transforming it into a live stage for an information parkour and enriching our lives with emotion, motion, direction, depth, and freedom.
It’s a marvellously broad catalogue, and it’s a privilege to stand alongside so many other excellent works, including several from friends, colleagues, and previous collaborators. If you’re in New York in the next five months, do check it out.
(And, although it’s sold out now, it’s worth pointing out that tonight, Kill Screen are hosting PopRally: Arcade – an interactive evening of games inspired by the exhibition).
Two Upcoming Sandpits!
Monday, June 6th, 2011
It’s been a while since the last Sandpit, our irregular playing and playtesting event for trying out new game ideas. But we’ve now got not one but two Sandpits just around the corner – and this time they might, for the first time ever, even involve some actual sand, because they’re both themed around the sea.
The first will be on the afternoon of Sunday 17 July, at the National Maritime Museum, with games inspired by voyages and the sea; and the second in Royal Festival Hall at the Southbank Centre, on Thursday 4 August, as part of a collection of seaside-themed Festival of Britain celebrations. Both events will be free.
If you’ve ever thought you might want to try your hand at running a game at a Sandpit, now’s the time to get in touch. Email holly@hideandseek.net for a copy of the call for game ideas, and to get more detail about how it all works. And if you’d rather just play, stay tuned for more details about the games, coming up over the next few weeks!
Picture by 55thstreet
Hinterland Scratch at BAC
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011
Following on from our collaboration on last year’s London Poetry Game, we’re joining forces with Ross Sutherland on a new poetry / game hybrid. Close followers of last year’s project will be pleased to note that we’re bringing even more poetry and even more game. Hinterland is about the space that appears when we speak languages that aren’t our mother tongue. And maybe also a bit about how rubbish so many of us tend to be at speaking languages other than English.
The full shebang is going to debut at this year’s Forest Fringe in Edinburgh, and in preparation for that BAC have generously offered us a week’s residency to try some things out. So, two things to look out for! We’ll be posting up some poetic games for you all to play that week, and at BAC on Friday 17th at 8.30pm there will be an informal sharing of the work we’ve done so far, with an emphasis on the word ‘informal’.
More info and pay-what-you-can tickets available here.
Green Lantern Fans help out in Astrophysics research
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
As part of our work on the Green Lantern campaign, we’ve created studytheskies.com. It’s the fruit of a partnership with Warner Bros. and Oxford University to bring hardcore astrophysics and superhero movie fans together.
The Zooniverse is a set of citizen science projects which lets internet users analyse photographic data generated by some of the world’s largest telescopes. The telescopes have generated hundreds of thousands of images – far more than any team of researchers could hope to check. Users log in and use a simple set of tools to spot important features: the shape of galaxies, or the location of craters on the moon. The aggregate data from the massed ranks of internet amateur astronomers is then passed back to research teams for analysis.
The Milky Way Project one of the Zooniverse’s latest ventures. In it, users analyse photographs from the Spitzer Space Telescope, maintained by Nasa, orbiting the earth. The particular feature people are looking for in these is photographs are ‘bubbles’ produced by the formation of stars. They manifest in the photographs as green rings. Yes, that’s GREEN RINGS. Which, as you’re all Green Lantern experts by now, you’ll know ties in perfectly with the backstory of the movie.
So, fans who have been following the intriguing narrative being played out at NewtonAstronomers.com have gained access to the telescope and have already classified thousands of images using a customised interface, earning rewards from characters from the world of the movie. And fans who aren’t taking part in that strand of activity can access a simpler version at studytheskies.com.
We’re delighted that Warner Bros have been so supportive of this element of the campaign – it feels great to be helping scientists in their work.
Hide&Seek, Artists in Residence, Southbank Centre
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
We’re delighted and honoured to announce that we’ve been invited to become Artists in Residence at the Southbank Centre. Since 2008, we’ve produced a number of Sandpits and Weekenders at the SBC; throughout that time, it’s always been a pleasure to work with the team there, and to make games for this unique space.
If you’re a studio making social games and playful experiences, with a stated interest in running, sneaking, gathering, noise-making (and the list goes on) – then there may not be a better place in the whole world to work than the 27 acres of the Southbank Centre’s site. There are staircases, hidden gardens, great public squares, bounded by the cinematic backdrop of the Thames and London beyond it. Playing there, over the last few years, we’ve come to know this place in a particular way – through a set of breathless moments, a set of mental snapshots, moments in the great story we tell about the games that we play.
And now, we’re taking those experiences into a new kind of conversation. We’ve been asked to understand the way the organisation works in greater depth, and to contribute ideas and imaginings to future festivals and projects. We’re at the very, very beginning of that journey, and it’s much too early to know what will result, but my hope is that it will represent the very best of what Hide&Seek is capable of producing as a studio,that it will closely involve the makers and players of the Sandpit community, and provide many more opportunities for magical play to happen in the heart of London.
Picture by digitaldust.
Games IN SPACE
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011
It’s time to play… in SPACE. Hide&Seek’s latest project can be found at the blog of the Newton Astronomers blog, a bunch of amateurs with a little 8″ reflector telescope who have been picking up something strange in the sky. It’s just possible that they could use your help:
I’m posting this here on our website (which is still embarrassing by the way Ben), just to stake our claim on a genuine discovery. Otherwise it’ll be the supernovas all over again, and someone who has an in with the establishment will take all the credit for our discovery.
Alternatively, if you’re in the mood for something more heroic, you could head over to the Green Lantern Boot Camp and play a game that will help catapult you into the realms of the superheroic! Train your will and your courage! And your sword! And your lightning bolt! And also your angry swan and eventually your giant squid!
There have been some brilliant ads for the game on the back of comics and science fiction magazines, and the story’s progressing apace, so do have a look!
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