Posts Tagged ‘london’
Games in London
Thursday, February 17th, 2011
There’s a flurry of interesting Gamey Stuff in London over the next few weeks… giant Senet, bowling game sound effects, wandering around the British Museum, and pub-based parlour games.
On 17 February (that’s TONIGHT, yes), it’s a British Museum Late from home live art, with a giant game of Senet from 815Agency; anyone who was at our Weekender or V&A Late may remember them from the wonderful Pass The Impossibly Large Parcel. There’ll also be a feral choir, dancing, clay to play with, and theatre from Periplum (who made The Bell, above), all themed around the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
On 5 and 6 March it’s the Barbican Weekender, complete with Playlab’s face-matching game Ichi Face, and Cory Arcangel’s bowling-game-themed installation in the Curve.
And then on 10 March there’s Mr Ball’s Parlour Games, a night of games like Charades, the Hat Game, Pictionary and other parlour game fun, run by the mythical (or at least historical) Mr Ball. Teams of players rotate through different opponents and games through the night, so by the end you’ve had the chance to play practically everything, and meet pretty much everyone. From 7:30, in the cosy back room of The Duke of Wellington on Balls Pond Road.
London Poetry Game – the first time
Monday, June 21st, 2010
In 2007, at the very first Hide&Seek Weekender, I designed and ran something called the London Poetry Game. It was my first go at designing something on a grand scale… Basically, I wanted players to go out into London and find translators of a poem. A poem where each line had been translated into a different language… Translations were phoned in to a hotline, and then cut together to make the poem.
Unsurprisingly, the game had several flaws which were revealed in playtesting. And when I say playtesting, I mean the public running of the game – I didn’t know what playtesting was at the time… I’m running the London Poetry Game again this year, so I thought I’d share a little summary of all the things that went wrong. I hope to correct at least some of them this time around.
- We didn’t distribute the flyer or publish the pdf online, so access to the game was limited to a very small group of players at the BFI. I dropped some flyers off at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden. They were bemused.
- The time available to the very small number of players was too brief to let them play as part of their daily lives, but too extended to capture their attention and interest.
- The challenge to players – figure out what language each line has been translated into, find a stranger who speaks that language, and get them to call a number to leave a translation – is really pretty hard. And there wasn’t a great deal of reward for players.
- The poem selected – W.H.Auden’s September 1, 1939, proved problematic for several reasons. It was full of archaic language that was hard to translate – and the lines themselves made little sense in isolation.
- I did the translations myself, using a mix of Google Translate, international friends, and loitering around the public library in Finsbury Park, asking strangers if they spoke any foreign languages and if so would they mind translating a line of a poem for me, in the name of interactive art. I had no means of checking the translations.
- Producing the translated poem required the graphic designer to install multiple foreign language sets, which introduced some errors into the translations, making them illegible even to foreign language speakers.
- The last two points meant that many players hit a confusing translation, which left them with a bewildered stranger telling them that the line that they were trying to translate made no sense. Most people quite rightly stopped playing at that point. I basically bullied my friends into completing one verse of translations..
- I was responsible for taking the MP3s and editing them together, which, I did, kind of, whilst also, you know, running the whole festival and getting drunk a lot. To think it was only three years ago… Anyway, that was terrifically inefficient.
- The final performance was very pretentious, as I insisted on reading out the whole of the poem, even though the players had only made a translation of one verse. Not as pretentious as going on to make a speech about how Pervasive Games were The New Punk Rock, but hey.
Despite all of these things, I think that the bit of poem that we did manage was rather beautiful, as you can hear for yourself.