Call and Return and the Ludogeographers

On the 19th of September, players of Call and Return will start to tackle a series of creative missions that will send them out across the city exploring places, materials and the way contemporary culture permeates through them.

The city in question could be Birmingham or Tokyo, Bristol or Kyoto, and as well as negotiating their immediate surrounding, players must also negotiate interactions with other people across different geographies, languages and time zones.

An avatar explores the streets of San Francisco

Call and Return is the second in the Emergent Game series: projects that investigate group dynamics, collaborative creativity and the use of digital technologies to adjust how we relate to public spaces.

Missions are not location-specific, so players can be based anywhere: all you need is access to an internet connection, a sense of humour and a soft toy to represent you in the game (we play anonymously).

Instructions on how to sign up can be found here:
http://ludogeography.org/projects/callandreturn/
(don’t worry, this is the most complicated bit of the process – it gets easier from here on in!)

To complement activities taking place on-line (once again most of the conversation will take place via twitter.com) there are opportunities to get involved in various events:

Monday 8th of September
Workshop at hanare, Kyoto
http://hanareproject.net/workshop_lecture/index.html

Saturday 13th of September
Workshop as part of the Dislocate08 festival, ZAIM, Yokohama
http://www.dis-locate.net/workshop2.htm

Then we pull together the contributions from the workshops and on-line conversations in a weekend of creative missions as part of a festival of pervasive games in Bristol:

Friday 19th – Sunday 21st September
igfest, Bristol
http://igfest.org/

Loki and Yohmoh explain emergent game to Simon at igfest

It doesn’t matter if you can’t make it in person to any of these events – remote players have an equally important role to contribute. Sign up now to join the conversation and influence the directions the game goes in. For a flavour of what it might evolve into, see the Emergent Game website for what happened last time.

Ludogeography

Call and Return is a project initiated by The Ludogeographic Society. The Ludogeographic Society grew from collaborations central to the development of the first Emergent Game earlier this year: Ana Benlloch, Stuart Tait and myself.

To coincide with Call and Return, we are also launching www.ludogeography.org where we will document the activities of the Society. Likewise for http://twitter.com/ludogeography: if you use Twitter follow @ludogeography for updates on what we are doing, or perhaps just subscribe to the RSS feed.

Call and Return is supported by:
Arts Council England
Dislocate 08
hanare project
igfest

Thanks also to Antonio Roberts and the igfest volunteers for helping to staff the Bristol activities.