‘News’
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!
Open data and fake science
Thursday, May 5th, 2011
It’s not all been Royal Wedding picnics and bank holiday fun and games for Margaret. Last week she wrote about SpaceChem in the latest of her “Five Minutes Of…” series for Gamasutra and just yesterday she added to Culture Hack Scotland‘s growing number of videos grappling data & technology questions (see the whole set here).
#chs11 minivideo – Margaret Robertson from Hide & Seek from festivalslab on Vimeo.
Games This Summer
Wednesday, April 13th, 2011
The sun is out, tiny ducklings are announcing the arrival of spring, and we’re sure your minds will be turning to thoughts of racing through streets having excellent fun. To that end, we have some good news and some sad news.
The good news is, we’re going to not just one but TWO international* festivals over the summer. From June 17-19, we’ll be at You are GO!, Berlin’s first ever pervasive games festival. We’re bringing our balloons, flags, parlour games, and all the usual Hide&Seek fun – plus there’ll be games from Come out and Play, the Copenhagen Games Collective, and Berlin Invisible Playground (who are organising the whole thing).
Then in August from the 15th to the 27th, we’ll be at the impossibly lovely Forest Fringe in Edinburgh. We’ll be working with poet Ross Sutherland to make something new out of last year’s London Poetry Game, and we’re looking forward to collaborating with the wonderful artists and thinkers in residence to create all manner of games, experiences and adventures in and around the Forest Café.
(Incidentally, if you haven’t already signed the petition to save the Forest Café, please think about doing so. It’s one of the few remaining independent spaces in Edinburgh, and we would all be poorer for its loss.)
The sad news is, as we don’t have any regular source of funding for events at the moment, we won’t be able to run a Hide&Seek Weekender this year.
We hope and intend to be back next year, and we will definitely be running a few London Sandpits over late summer and autumn. We should have some dates confirmed in the next month or so and you’ll all be the first to know. In the meantime, if you’d like to help out with the development of an interesting new project that we’re working on, drop kim@hideandseek.net an email with “DEATH” in the subject line, and we’ll drop something quick and fun in your inbox.
Finally, we hope to see you all at Igfest in Bristol at the end of May, which will have a plethora of amazing games including the unmissable 2.8 Hours Later.
[* Scotland is totally international. Ish.]
Picture by Robert Smith
Tate Trumps wins at Guardian Megas!
Friday, March 25th, 2011
We’re very excited to announce that Tate Trumps won its category of Culture & The Arts at the Media Guardian Innovation Awards last night.
Tate Trumps is, of course, our iOS app that turns the permanent collection of Tate Modern into a game. If you’ve not played the game, there’s no better time to check it out next time you’re at the gallery. It’s available now in the iTunes App Store – and it’s entirely free.
Many thanks, of course, to everyone who’s been involved in the project, especially Play Nicely, Mobile Pie, and Tate Media, with whom we continue to work. It’s a privilege to be able to bring both our cultural and playful instincts to bear on the collection of such an august institution.
Tom Armitage, Games Designer, Hide&Seek
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011
Following on from BERG’s announcement of his departure yesterday morning, and Tom’s own announcement yesterday afternoon, we would like to announce the arrival of Tom Armitage as Games Designer at Hide&Seek.
We’re thrilled to add Tom to our most precious resource. Brains. (Not in a zombie way, mind – that would be short-term gain and long-term waste). We really, really like Tom’s brain. He thinks deeply and hard about games, design, and the world, in a way which we care about very much.
Here’s Tom talking about Things Rules Do at the Interesting North conference earlier this year:
And here are just a couple of things that Tom has written about game design: on Game Dev Story and narrative exoskeletons, and musing on the potential of GTA: West Side Story. Tom’s site, www.infovore.org, has a tag for all his game posts if you wish to read more.
So it’s clear that we’re adding a person who thinks very interestingly about games and their design. But what’s important about this hire for Hide&Seek’s continuing development as a creative studio is that Tom’s games thinking is embedded in both his consideration of other kinds of culture, and in the insight he has earned as a developer of significant talent and experience. It expands our range considerably to have a person who builds smart things on the internet in our creative team.
We can’t wait to add Tom to the conversations that we’re having with our clients and partners across visual art, theatre, film, music, musical theatre, and the rest… And we couldn’t be more excited about what we’re going to make together.
BGRK: Valentine
Thursday, February 10th, 2011
At the end of last year, we put out the Boardgame Remix Kit, an app, ebook, paper book and set of cards. It’s full of 26 new games you can play using games you probably own already (Trivial Pursuit, Cluedo, Scrabble and Monopoly); it’s completely unofficial, very pretty, and an awful lot of fun.
And as 14 February approaches, we’ve been thinking: wouldn’t it be great to have some Valentine remixes? A game of romantic love, say; a game of lust; a game of bitter breakups, romance in all its forms. So we’ve made four entirely new remixes, and we’re releasing the rules for free. Download them all as a lovely pdf from the Boardgame Remix Kit site, or just read them online…
- ROFDLT is a two-player game of sexy acroynms, using Scrabble tiles and your own lewd ingenuity.
- Divorce! is a Monopoly remix for two grumpy players. Struggle through your marriage and its inevitable decay, trying to grab hold of as much joint property as you can.
- WLTM Humpty Dumpty creates personal ads from Trivial Pursuit answers: I’m a decepticon who’s into Charles Dickens, and my friends tell me I look like the Caspian Sea.
- And I Brought You This Piping To Show You My Love sends you roaming the Cluedo mansion, desperately trying to win over your beloved with the perfect romantic gift: would they like the rope, or is the candlestick more to their taste?
Tate Trumps shortlisted for Megas!
Tuesday, February 8th, 2011
Tate Trumps has been shortlisted for the MediaGuardian Innovation Awards! It’s been listed in the Culture and the Arts category, alongside all sorts of amazing projects in a dozen different categories. It’s terribly exciting!
Latest Boardgame Remix Kit news
Monday, December 13th, 2010
The Boardgame Remix Kit is now out as an iphone app form, as well as an ebook and set of cards! Meanwhile, the first reviews are beginning to filter in, and we’re all blushing furiously at boingboing’s declaration that it’s “the most insanely clever Christmas gift idea of the year”. If you haven’t already had a look, do head over or read the sample pdf!
Boardgame Remix Kit available for purchase!
Friday, November 26th, 2010
Hide&Seek’s very first Christmas product is now online and ready to buy! The Boardgame Remix Kit, which (in case you’ve missed us raving on about it already) takes the boardgames in your house and proposes new kinds of fun to have with them.
The eBook is available immediately, with other goodies (paper book, beautiful card set, iPhone app) coming shortly. If you need a bit more persuading, then a short sample chapter is available for you to download free of charge from the site at www.boardgame-remix-kit.com.
Announcing the Boardgame Remix Kit!
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010
So. Have you ever wondered what would happen if zombies invaded the Cluedo house?
Or if your Scrabble words fought each other?
Or if Trivial Pursuit was a drawing game?
Then you want the Hide&Seek Boardgame Remix Kit! It takes the games you own and gives you a lot of totally new things you can play with them, including:
Full Houses: Like poker with the Monopoly properties
The Knowledge: London cabbies travel from street to street, answering trivia questions as they go
Jostle: A word game with Scrabble tiles where you never have to wait for your go
Hunt the Lead Piping: Forget the board, there’s been a murder in your actual house
Doctor Orange in the Turret with a Raygun: A creative murder game
Plus Zombie Mansion, Them’s Fightin’ Words, Judy Garland on the Moon
with a Bassoon, Blockade! and many more.
The Boardgame Remix Kit will be available as an ebook, old-fashioned paper book, iPhone app, or a limited-edition set of cards. We’ll start taking orders in a week or so – sign up on the website and we’ll let you know when it happens, or else just keep paying attention – we’ll definitely be blogging and tweeting about it again!
Copyright © 2010 Hide and Seek Productions Ltd. All rights reserved.
All trademarks are the property of their respective owners and are used solely to identify the products sold under or by reference to them and no representation is given concerning as to their use. The Boardgame Remix Kit and Hide and Seek Productions Limited are not endorsed by or associated or affiliated with those products or their manufacturers. Boardgame Remix Kit is a trade mark of Hide and Seek Productions Limited
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