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The Comfort of Strangers (in broadmead) | Simon Johnson | Simon Evans | Simon JohnsonWe've been testing our latest game 'The comfort of Strangers' over the last few weeks, with greater and lesser success. We played a great couple of games in broadmead today. There were only six of us playing so we didn't reach the swarm levels we aim for with the game, but as a proof of principal the game was a great success. The most fun was had when we headed indoors to the galleries shopping center. The game made traveling by lift or escalator a thrill. There was a feeling of secrecy, of being hidden in the crowd. There was also the curious experience of silence. OK, broadmead on a Saturday was not silent, but the game acts as a kind of 6th sense. It endows you with the mysterious ability to aurally detect people at a distance. This aural adaptation was the focus of my attention in the galleries today. As the contact is intermittent, the game voice (Jenny Agutter) only pipes up from time to time, leaving the focus of your attention on a kind of silent space of expectation.
I tend to avoid broadmead generally at these busy times. But today these random strangers born of this city did indeed bring me comfort. Today I relished the throng of the crown, the bottleneck at the lift, the gaggle of teenagers and the prams wheedled like charriots. Infact I got to enjoy them all twice. When I got back to the lab, I got to read the bluetooth logs with lists of all the devices encountered during the game, players and non-players. Here are some of the device names that frequently crossed my path: "asbo", "monks babe", "pronged fork", "Iwonka", "MRS Willy", "numba1hustle", "Whats This?", "Am so fly. . .", "Ports", "G@Y", "DeadPoetic" and " k800i". There were more a lot more in fact there were so many that the bluetooth struggled to keep track of them all and connection to others came in bursts(not very good for the game…). There are a couple of alternate technologies we might use for the game to get over some of the drawbacks presented by bluetooth. We will in all likelihood abandon bluetooth now. But in terms of immersion in a cultural soup bluetooth is a winner.
heres a vid
/simonJ
Swarm Toolkit games at iglab | Simon Johnson | Simon Evans | Simon JohnsonSo we finally go play our SMS games. The two we played yesterday were Scramble and RGBargy. Actually we played RGBargy with some people at the PM Studio during the day, we did play Scramble at iglab though. The game went well but im pleased to be moving away from this area of testing. Moving now into testing using urban games and mScapes. Me and Duncan had two other games we were play testing at iglab too. HipSync (Previously called LipSync) and HollaLuLu both got their first outing last night. Both were pretty successful. It was amazing to see how quickly people developed a visual language to communicate with each other in HipSync. For the first few rounds infact I thought we'd made it too easy. The tracks we selected were all from pretty distinct genres, Rock, Electronic, Celtic and er Chris Isaak. We played it for about 5-6 rounds decreasing the duration each time till the last round when people had 5s to get into thier groups *and they could do it…*. HollaLuLu was a winner too. The spectacle of a city square filled with people hollering and running and trying to find the others in their group was truly beautiful. But for me the greatest strength of this game was the feeling of insurgency. The way the players took ownership of the public spaces they entered and the palpable presence they had in each of the spaces they entered. This is a lot to do with the numbers. We had 16 people playing last night so there were a mix of moments when people were safely wrapped in the blanket of the crowd and moments when people felt exposed and foolish. I think games like this function best when the density of the playing population allows people to experience both these social relationships. Perhaps feeling just a little foolish at some point helps to enhance the pleasure provided by the crowd and its legitimacy. Like Melvil's Ishmael says as he lies in bed "because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast".
anyway here's a short vid duncan made that captures the feeling of the game loud and hectic…/simonJ
