We’ll be absorbing all of this and working out what we should change, what can be different in time for the Sandpit on 25 May, and what needs to happen over a longer timespan. For those of you who were interested but couldn’t come, these are the main things we talked about, and our initial notes from discussions… if you have anything to add, or think something below is a great or a terrible idea, then please do comment!

MAKERS

We talked about artists, designers and makers and what they find valuable about the Sandpit, and what we could change to make it more useful or fun. There were a few suggestions and thoughts that kept coming up…

• People would like to be hooked up with actors/musicians etc who might want to be part of the game
• Qualitative feedback would be great for designers
• It’d be nice for designers to be able to see each others’ games
• Some sort of discussion forum online would be useful in the design process
• Being made to do a three minute explanation of rules is very useful
• A comments booth/wall/cave would be a nice place for players to write their feedback
• It’s important to signal to the audience that this is a testing event rather than a load of finished products
• Starting games on the half hour is good, rather than a more convoluted schedule
• Playtesting is very valuable and works pretty well in the H&S office
• Not having a totally packed schedule is good, and gives audience time to mull etc

PLAYERS / AUDIENCE

We asked for people to let us know how they felt about the experience from the playing perspective, what might make them feel more welcome, or more easily able to navigate the schedule and work out what they wanted to do, what types of games they would like to see more of, and generally what would make Sandpits better for them.

PROGRAMME

• The programme layout needs to be more user friendly, with a clear timeline of what you can do and when
• Maybe we could split up games into categories: feeling energetic / feeling loud / feeling puzzle-solve-ey
• Diagrams and symbols could be used – eye catching and simple
• A smart phone app or website with more info would be useful
• Maybe we should make the programme more playful or interactive
• Maybe we should mark the games that are good for newbies – make it more accessible for those who have never been to one of these events before
• Let people know clearly whether a game is performative or not – often people are put off by the thought of performing in front of others

WATCHING / PARTICIPATING

• For a game to be fun to watch it needs to be visually exciting or funny to watch
• Often games are sporadically spread and don’t give the opportunity to be viewed
• Big group games / contained spaces for games
• People would like a space to actually watch the games: a viewing gallery, commentators, screens with live relay
• Ways to understand games are good: signs explaining what the games are / rules, helpers at each game explaining rules, games that can be understand by watching play
• An audience guide should show which games are good to watch
• Bigger signs
• “I don’t want to book in advance – I want to see what looks good on the night and be able to sign up to it there and then”
• We could build up players’ confidence through less demanding (but equally fun) games
• Games are more exciting to watch when the audience knows more than the players – when they’re in on the secret
• It’s good when the audience can be involved somehow: as judges, as obstacles in course
• Volunteers should be briefed better to know what each game is

PICK UP AND PLAY BOOKLETS

• You’re less likely to actually play something there and then if you just see the book on a table – facilitated play is better
• PUAP booklets could be given out at sign up desk
• We could make games more visible – ‘ooh what’s that they’re playing? oh – it’s a game from this book; let’s all join in!’
• There’s too much choice in books – not sure where to start. Maybe BGRK style cards, with one game per card? Helpers to encourage specific games?
• A manned PUAP space for people to turn up and play
• A more visually exciting format – a playful layout? Fewer games, more visually presented?

OTHER STUFF

• Could there be rewards for loyalty? Incentives to come back again
• Back by popular demand: could there be a game that gets voted for y makers to return
• Everyone wants to play Sangre y Patatas again…

LOGISTICS

We asked for thoughts on logistics, the website and what would be useful there, how to make it run more smoothly, andin particular for thoughts on booking places in games. Some of the responses that kept coming through were…

SCHEDULING AND TICKETING

• Trying to get a space can be frustrating
• There are conflicting times and a rush as soon as the door is open – the regulars get all the spots in smaller games
• Flexibility is important – running a game more that once
• A balance of drop in games
• Game designers relying on volunteers needs time to brief them to make sure they know what they’re doing
• Let people register for games in advance (iPhone app, website, scanner register)? How to deal with the fact that people often don’t turn up?
• Think about the one on one festival format at BAC – with a menu, you pick what kind of experience that you want (“scary” “scarier” “lovely”) and get a set of 2-3 games
• Have themed desks – “storytelling games” “running games”
• Book in advance but if you don’t turn up it becomes available? How to manage the fact that games will book out and that will put people off, but many of the people who booked won’t turn up?

PROGRAMMES AND SPREADING INFORMATION

• Have symbols for physically active games
• Big signs that say something useful – spaces left in different games on a projection screen?
• Think about “If I walk in as a stranger how do I read this?”
• “This is what it feels like” so people who don’t play usually can connect with it
• Communication between signing up and knowing where to go
• A pick and mix menu? Recommendations? “recommended game journey”?

OTHER

• Get better at email address capture
• “You can’t sign up – but go and watch this…”
• Facilitated pick up and play?
• How to deal with people who lose their stickers
• Staggering – you can’t sign up for everything
• Maps are always great
• Feedback from audiences is important
• Roping in audiences – whose responsibility is it to fill the game?
• Fewer games running more frequently?

WEBSITE

• A record of games would be good – “What games were played at that sandpit?”
• A way to link games networks
• Video documentation – release forms?
• More opportunity for feedback – online space for commenting
• Blog posts about specific games are great
• Capturing interest – games to play online?
• Games that are coming up – discussion and game development?

PRESENTATION

• Comperes are good
• One person to worry about the telling of everyone else
• Coloured balloons? More bunting? Clearly marking the space
• More readily identifiable volunteers / briefers / team members
• Good props

THEMES

We talked separately about each of the four themes, and people came up with bundles of possible approaches and ideas…

SPORTS AND GAME SHOWS

• Drawing players from audience, audience participation and yelling out
• Prizes in game shows (they are often nominal, and not really the point/draw)
• People identifying with game show contestants and thinking what they would do – “I would be so good at that” or, “I’m so glad I’m not the one doing that”
• Audience knowing/seeing more than the players
• Using the identification between players and audiences
• Individuals acting as superheroes, versus a team and tribalism
• People can immediately identify with a team
• People support contestants/players because of “the story” – like “housewife from Manchester”
• Consider an overarching game/competition throughout whole Sandpit – scoreboards, house points and colours

PERFORMANCE

• Existing games/performance: charades, lying and acting, pantomime
• Use props – they help identify players, are vehicles for performance, give people an excuse to play
• Props can also be given to observers, creating a way for observers to become participants
• Using screens and silhouettes to make the game observable in an unexpected way
• Give audience members a way to control the performers
• Games that have a basic rule for joining and anyone can come and go as they please, like the “human instrument”
• Could there be an overarching narrative or metagame (like the Rubik’s cube game)

MOVEMENT AND SPECTACLE

• Design games to be expandable, so more people join throughout the course of it
• Bear in mind the type of foot traffic going by
• Use/create locations that are spectacles in themselves
• Games that structure in different levels of participation
• Games that structure in checkpoints scattered around, where you can start at any of these, reducing the barriers to starting play

FAMILIES

• Different team options:
• All adults versus all children (although these oughtn’t be too physical, because that can be scary for children, unless adults have handicaps i.e. binocular football)
• Parallel games rather than oppositional (so parents can egg children on and vice versa)
• Each family a team against other families
• Having different roles within a team, some of which children will be better at
• Take advantage of children’s strengths: creativity, interpreting the world differently, being small and able to crawl through small things, not feeling as self-conscious
• Don’t just think about stereotypical family with small children – there may be grandparents, teenagers, one parent with three children, two parents with one child
• Parents get really competitive on behalf of their children – can we use this?
• Predicting preferences (like the game Mr & Mrs) could be fun with children who change what they like on a whim
• Situations where roles are reversed – children have power over their parents, are instructing their parents where to go (although it has to be enjoyable for the parents too!)

• Segue by Enterplay
• A Small Town Anywhere by Coney
• Scoop! by, well, us.
• Moveyhouse by Andy Field

So we’ll get to all of those soon! But for now, a game that has had nothing to do with Sandpit (SO FAR), the mighty IGF-nominated global folk game megahit, Johann Sebastian Joust.

If you haven’t played the game yet, then please watch the following video:

Johann Sebastian Joust! from Die Gute Fabrik on Vimeo.

So now you know how to play the game. Because the first reason why JS Joust is an excellent game for audiences is because you learn to play by watching. It’s simple to grasp – protect your Move controller while disrupting others – and you rapidly start building strategies for how you will play when you get the chance. Tied in with this is the fact that each JS Joust game lasts a minute, maybe two – and that means you see the game end-to-end and over and over, embedding the whole structure in your mind. Short Sessions was Frank Lantz’s answer to pretty much every game design problem presented at last year’s Practice conference – and one of the things that Short Sessions enable is your audience to become ready participants. Tagging out of the game is as simple as handing your controller to another player.

This means that the game space of JS Joust encompasses both players and audience members, and the transition from one condition to the other is as easy as it’s possible to be. This, for me, is the most exciting part of JS Joust as a game with an audience – the way that players and spectators are part of one experience, and your status as either is freely decided by you. I’m really hopeful that we’ll see many games in this year’s Sandpit series that draw inspiration from this model of permeability and freedom.

Finally, it’s super-important to note that JS Joust has awesome production values – the glowing Move pixels, the gorgeous soundtrack – and that it generates moments of performance. You can play it to win, just for fun, or to show off. Those who know me will be unsurprised to discover that I show off a bit while playing it, including a memorable bout that culminated in two players duelling along a row of picnic tables. These moments of performance can emerge accidentally or through player intention, and frequently, they can be dazzlingly funny.

So.

Learn to play by watching.

Short sessions.

Awesome production values.

Generates moments of performance.

These are our first touchstones for amazing Games with Audiences.

We’ll be curating an event crammed full of brilliant games from the year’s Sandpits – so at the moment we have no idea what those games will be! But there’ll be a focus on games that are fun to watch as well as to play, on movement, on families, on performance (from players and professionals), on spectacle.

There’ll be games to play and games to watch, games with comperes, and secret games hidden in corners. There’ll be scheduled games, games where the audience plays a role, and games you can just turn up to.

We’re still designing and curating games for the afternoon, so we don’t have a full schedule yet, but keep an eye out – we’ve got some amazing games that we’ll be announcing soon.

There’ll be games to play and games to watch, games with comperes, and secret games hidden in corners. There’ll be scheduled games, games where the audience plays a role, and games you can just turn up to.

We’re still designing and curating games for the afternoon, so we don’t have a full schedule yet, but keep an eye out – we’ve got some amazing games that we’ll be announcing soon.

There’ll be games to play and games to watch, games with comperes, and secret games hidden in corners. There’ll be scheduled games (book places from 6:30), games where the audience plays a role, and games you can just turn up to.

We’re still designing and curating games for the evening, so we don’t have a full schedule yet, but keep an eye out – we’ve got some amazing games that we’ll be announcing soon.

Come along to the Southbank Centre from 6:30-10:00 on Friday 25 May, for a free evening of games – new sports, reimagined game shows, competitive commentary, pen-and-paper pursuits, and much more.

There’ll be games to play and games to watch, games with comperes, and secret games hidden in corners. There’ll be scheduled games (book places from 6:30), games where the audience plays a role, and games you can just turn up to. Come along! Tell other people to come along! Let us know you’re coming on the Facebook event!

We’re still working out the final details of the schedule, but games will include…

Antiques Fraudshow (Mink ette)
Just like the quintessential TV show, experts hear and tell stories about ‘treasured family heirlooms’ But are they in the know or just blindly guessing? You decide.

The Puppet’s Journey (Miss Lidbetter’s Bakery)
Build your own puppet and then lead it through challenges and past gatekeepers. Only one puppet will emerge triumphant.

Political Football (Gareth Briggs)
Tired of football already? Then change it! A new sport where the audience change the rules for the players.

Updraft (Marc Vousden)
Quick fire balloon batting action. Fast moving teams of two get their balloon to the scoring zone while avoiding their opponents’ buffeting breeze.

You’re In A Room (Fruitbat)
Guide your team-mate through a mysterious dungeon. Play as a dungeon explorer, or create new dungeons for others to play!

The Rolling Stones (Guerilla Dance Project)
An ambient game in which sculptures make music. Caressing smooth marble has never been so much fun.

Johann Sebastian Joust (Die Gute Fabrik)
Johann Sebastian Joust is a no-graphics, digitally-enabled folk game for 2 to 7 players, designed for motion controllers (such as the PlayStation Move). Channel the power of J.S. Bach, and try to jostle your opponents’ controllers while protecting your own. Presented by The Wild Rumpus.

International Golf Proxy (Simon Katan)
Golf for your head. IGP fuses the warmer/colder game with poker style betting under a golf umbrella.

Major League Qwazball (Josh Hadley)
It’s the biggest day in the Qwazball season, and your team has made it to the final! Will your cheers and support be enough to propel them to glory?

Stratego-go-go (Nick Giles)
Enter the playing field and head towards your opponents’ flag – but be careful; the route between may be strewn with stronger players, bigger numbers, trickery and traps.

Book a space on Eventbrite if you’re coming, so we know how many people to expect!

So, you may have already seen that we’ll be running a series of game events in London this summer – and that we’re calling on YOU YES YOU to be involved: to play things, to make things, to help us improve, to invite other people to come along, to wave flags or plot or hide or run or draw or throw balloons from distant balconies.

The whole series of events will be particularly exploring the theme of games with audiences: games that are fun to play as well as to watch, games that beguile passers-by and turn them into participants. Each Sandpit will have a different approach to this underlying idea, but it’s a thread that will run throughout the year, culminating in a weekend-long festival.

On Friday 25 May, we’ll be at the Southbank Centre from 6:30-10:00. We’ll be playing games inspired by sports and game shows. New sports, competitive commentators, quizzes, challenges and more – sports and game shows do amazingly well already at being games that people like watching, and we’re eager to learn from them! Tell us you’re coming on the Facebook event here, or email holly@hideandseek.net if you’re interested in making a game – because the timing’s so tight on this one, we’d love to hear from you ASAP… for the May Sandpit we’ll need at least an initial contact by 12 noon on Friday 11 May.

On Monday 18 June we’ll be at the Southbank Centre from 6:30-10:00 again, and we’re particularly interested in exploring performance – games that inspire performance from players, or involve performers that players respond to or interact with. Get players to sing? Hide a choir under a table? A movement game where playing well looks like dancing? Something else entirely? You tell us – the deadline for this one is 1 June, but the sooner the better.

On Sunday 15 July we’ll be in Holland Park in the afternoon, as part of Kensington and Chelsea’s InTRANSIT festival. We’ll be playing games focused on movement and spectacle. A picnic game, a deckchair game, a guided tour with a twist, walking games, something where people run with huge swathes of fabric down the paths? We don’t know yet.

And in August we’ll be thinking about games for families (though of course you don’t have to be a family to come). How can adults and children play together? What sort of games work best for groups with impatient tiny people who don’t want to hang around for twenty minutes waiting for the scheduled start time? How can disparate groups of players, from lots of different ages, play the same thing?

Then from 14-16 September we’ll be back in the Southbank Centre, for the Hide&Seek Weekender, combining some of the best games to emerge from the Sandpits with exciting work from around the world.

And of course, there’ll be a few games that don’t fit any of these themes – a game that’s played around an educational lecture? A game played entirely in the dark, with night vision goggles for spectators? Only time will tell.

The Nitty-Gritty Details For Artists and Designers

So, if you want to play, that’s all pretty straightforward: turn up, find out what the games are, take part.

If you’re interested in making games, you probably need a bit more information. We had a discussion group on 2 May, with notes available here, and you can read on now for an outline of how it works, and what’s different from previous years…

How it works

If you haven’t made a game for a Sandpit before, here’s how it works:

We circulate details of the event – that’s this blog post, here. You read it, and have a think. Maybe you have a fully-formed design. Maybe you have an idea. Maybe you’re interested but don’t have an idea yet, and aren’t sure what a game idea even looks like. These are all fine! Email holly@hideandseek.net and say you’re interested, and we can talk about what you’d like to do and work out whether it’s a good match for the Sandpit.

If it is, we’ll talk through the game with you as much as we need to, looking at how it works and poking and prodding at it until you’re sure it’s an idea you’re happy with, and we’re confident that it will work as a game. This could be anything from a five-minute phone call to a series of meetings where we all scribble on bits of paper and frown and say “but is it fun?” a lot. We’ll also talk about budget – the fees are small, but they exist, along with support for production costs.

Then we figure out what the needs of each game are – does it require a particular space? Some people to help run it? Furniture, sound, a chat with someone who understands biochemistry? – and sort out the logistics: where, when, with what stuff? There’s usually a mix of games that players can drop into whenever they like, and scheduled games that take place at a certain time (which often run more than once).

On the day, players come along and play drop-in games, and sign up to a few different scheduled games. We gather them at the appropriate time and hand them over to artists/designers (or facilitators, if the game’s being run by someone else). And then they’re in your hands.

And the end of the Sandpit doesn’t need to be the end of the game. One of the things we value about the Sandpit is that it can act as a development and testing ground for games that go on to all sorts of different things – games that were originally developed at the Sandpit have run at Soho Theatre, Latitude, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Come Out and Play, Igfest, You Are GO!, the V&A, BAC, Supersonic, local councils, festivals, for private clients and pretty much all sorts of places.

What’s different from before?

If you have made a Sandpit game before, here’s what we think is different, though this could change following the discussion group:

We want to make the events feel more approachable to newcomers – they have to stay fun and friendly and exciting and cluttered and colourful, but we want to make sure that people who just turn up – not really knowing what’s going on – have something to do and an easy way in, that nobody who’s interested ends up feeling like a stranger at a party. The focus on audience-friendly play is part of how we want to address this.

We want to work harder on helping more games to have a life after the Sandpit – whether that’s getting the rules online and picked up by other players, developing the game further at future Hide&Seek events, or working with other organisations and venues to run games that get a further life after the Sandpit.

Budgets will remain small – it’s still a development event – but there’s a bit more flexibility about how they’re structured, and how they meet the needs of an individual game. We’re interested in developing some games over more than one Sandpit, or working on some games that are explicitly intended for the Weekender and making sure they get played and expanded across the summer.

And finally – Sandpits have been growing over the last four years, but there’s only so many games we can fit into an evening, especially since we really want to let some games develop over more than one event. So where previously we’ve tried to fit every new game idea into a Sandpit, we don’t think we’re going to be able to do that this year. Of course we’re still going to try to have loads of different games from loads of different artists and makers, but we probably won’t be able to include everything, much as we’d like to.

We think these are the right changes to make, based on feedback from past years, the increasing numbers of games around London, and what we loved about other people’s festivals and events. We hope they sound okay to you too.

What to do

If you’re interested in running games at any of the currently scheduled Sandpits, please get in touch! With an idea, or just an impulse… because it’s almost the end of April, it’d be particularly great to hear about anything you’d be interested in running in May, but do get in touch about any other ideas as well! Just email holly@hideandseek.net.

We’re really excited about this years’ events and hope to hear from you soon, and to start playing.

Picture by Andrew Birley, of Rosie Fairchild’s “I Say”.

Here’s another announcement that we’re bursting with excitement about:  Sandpits and the Weekender are back!

The Sandpit is a space where anyone (including YOU) can experiment with new ideas for games that take place in public spaces –  a place where players, artists, game designers, makers and thinkers of every stripe can get together, play stuff, and talk. They feel like big parties to us. We love them! They look like this.

The Sandpit series will culminate in the Hide&Seek Weekender at the Southbank Centre on 14-16 September – a weekend-long festival filled with games that were developed through the Sandpit, running alongside playful work around the world.

We have a theme for this series – Games With Audiences.

We’re going to blog a lot more about what this means (with examples!) over the next few weeks, but for now:

If you’re a game designer: it means developing games that that are fun to watch as well as play, that provoke performance, that smooth the path for spectators to become players and vice versa, and collaborating with amazing artists.

If you’re an artist: it means disrupting the traditional boundaries between performer and audience through games, bringing your craft and talent to bear in a new environment, and collaborating with amazing game designers.

If you’re a player: it means feeling welcomed and cared for, no matter what your attitude to playing in public, and stimulated with dozens of new experiences.

If you’re keen to learn more, we’re having an open meeting to discuss the series in the Hide&Seek studio on the evening of Wednesday 2 May. If you’re a designer, player, or just an interested person, we’d love to meet you! Please book a place and come along.

If you’ve got thoughts you’d like to throw in the pot, or you’re interested in volunteering or being involved as a designer, do comment here or email holly@hideandseek.net.

We’ll also be announcing Sandpit dates and themes later in the week, so keep an eye out for that…

Thanks to Arts Council England, the Southbank Centre, RBKC and the InTRANSIT festival who are supporting this year’s events.

Picture by Digital Flapjack