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Swarm Toolkit games at iglab | Simon | 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
Playgrounds | Tarim | Altern8PTTP is about creating playgrounds. Playgrounds for everyone to play in. Although these playgrounds exist in the physical world, you don't play on them by climbing all over them - you play using some kind of digital interface - which gives a lot of different ways to play.
If this is too much of a nebulous and abstract concept for you to grab hold of - then the PTTP Media Sandbox commission is about making one, as an example, which will give you a much better idea of what this means in reality.
I like to think of this from the point of view of four different types of people, or roles:
- The Designer
- The Players
- The Audience
- The Geeks
The person (or people) who design the playground. Although they have some ideas of how it might be played with - they need to make the playground open. When it's finished, they're going to have to, "give it away" and see what people do with it.
People who play (obvious, huh?) - using whatever kinds of digital interfaces that are available.
The people who watch. Any player who is waiting their turn to play will almost certainly be a member of the audience. (No, I'm not telling you anything ground-breaking, yet.)
(It's ok, it's not a pejorative term if I am one myself.) These are people who design new interfaces for players to play with. It might be an interface that lets more than one person play at once. Or that uses some aspect of the environment to control the playground. Or some new physical interface, (dance mats?), which players can play on. The interesting thing from a geek's point of view - is that they don't have to ask permission from the designer to create a new interface. They simply queue up like any other player. Sometimes, the geek might be the designer in a different role or sometimes they will be a player who has an interesting idea about how they want to play.
