Emergent Game playtest at BARG #3

This time last year we (myself, Ana and Stuart) pulled a few strings behind the curtain of the first Emergent Game.

Last September we experimented with simultaneous play in the UK and Japan, culminating in a weekend of missions to coincide with igfest in Bristol.

Both versions used Twitter as the primary means of communication between players. But whereas the first game unfolded over about 2 months, the second one ran over a much more compressed timescale (for players at the festival, only a few hours maximum). Here Twitter became more of a hindrance than a help. We were spending far too much time explaining how it worked and then it was too much work for our players to try and monitor new players and who it was they should follow in order to be a part of the overall conversation.

We did however see some amazingly creative stuff come out of the workshops we ran in Kyoto and Yokohama, so when we were approached to maybe do something at a certain London-based games event it was kind of obvious by that stage that the festival context requires a Twitterless version.

So, last night’s BARG was dedicated to trying a low-tech Emergent Game.

Naturally the soft toys and creative, open-ended missions were still there, but the online communication was replaced by a massive grid marked out on the floor of the Lamp Tavern pub in Digbeth.

The Grid

Each mission had its own row, and each player had their own column. Documentation for the successful completion of a mission goes in the relevant cell. Et voila: a hugemongous pseudo scoreboard that instantly shows you how active you are being compared to the other players! We loved how we were always in it.

This time-lapse video shows the construction of The Grid and then stuff getting added to it as the game progressed:


Emergent Game playtest at BARG 3 from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

I keep watching this video over and over again. Did you spot Ben having a tête-à-tête with George (quite possibly the world’s softest octopus)? Did you like the Grid Dancing? Did you notice when Bobbity took Milo and some of the others down the road to the abattoir?

Why would Bobbity be taking Milo and some of the others on a trip to the abattoir? This is why…

Milo’s profile:

Milo the butcher McCreedy

Milo’s postcard to another player:

Visit Sunny Wormwood Scrubs

Dear George...

Milo’s hat:

HATHATHAT!

Milo’s suggestion for an ingredient to add to stone soup to make it oh-so delicious:
[…well, you can probably guess!]

There were many other glorious moments too, but you’ll have to have a look at the Flickr group pool or track down some of the players to find out what they were. What it boils down to is that I was seriously impressed/delighted/entertained at the way characters for the toys were rapidly developed and maintained throughout the whole 2 hours we played for.

It was also nice to speak to Lorna and realise that the toys provide something of a magic vest: investing the players with special powers for approaching strangers and talking about random stuff.

Last night we played with about 10 people in the back room of a pub in a less than salubrious industrial area of Birmingham. I can’t wait for the opportunity where we play with lots of strangers in a location where there’s lots of scope for roaming around outside and interacting with strangers not in the game!

Many thanks to Ana, pindec and Antonio for helping to organise the event, and more thanks heaped upon all those who played and gave feedback afterwards.

Time now to start thinking about what to do at BARG #4. Any suggestions from some of the people who have approached me over the last few months with the line “Nikki, I’d like to talk to you about an idea for a game…”? You know who you are!