Hide&Seek 3: and the rest

I’ve already written 2 posts about the now somewhat distant Hide&Seek Festival of social games but there’s still a shed-load of goodness to cover so I’m going to blitz it here and hopefully get most of the important bits into the annals.

I’m warning you now: it was a busy day…

Let’s try for a chronological approach so I don’t miss stuff (and also because that finishes somewhere around Fort Gype and that’s a damn good way to finish!).

Cruel 2 B Kind

I missed out on Cruel 2 B Kind due to Twitter flakiness, which was a pain in the bum but there you go. I arrived in the kill zone at 12 on the dot and strolled around a bit hoping to be the victim (or at least a witness) of an assassination by one of the following methods:

• A: Serenade your victim pleasantly.
• B: Compliment their eyes.
• C: Mistake them for somebody famous (be nice, no famous serial killers or Jade Goody please).

It wasn’t to be though so, pausing to take in Volume, I made my way to the Southbank Centre.

Sleeveface

You know the silly seafront set-up where you put your face in a hole and take on someone else’s body? Well, sleevefacing is where you supply the body and a record sleeve provides the face…

I got coerced into this by one of the stewards (OK, OK, I asked him for his suggestion of what I should do first…) and although it took me a while, I did eventually get quite into it.

I was stood around for ages waiting for The Man With The Camera but it was interesting to watch others being arranged:

This would be awesome with a greater variety of props (or pehaps the other extreme and no props at all). Check out the Flickr pool for some cool examples of some very pre-meditated sleevefaces. However, you have been warned: it’s very addictive…

I had my trusty brown anorak with me, so I opted for a bit of Tony Hancock:

There is a sleeveface website and I also believe I’ve seen some sleeveface-style billboards around town too…

And I Saw

Lists? Compiling lists of noticed things? Lists? Did somebody say lists? Noticing stuff?

Bit of a no-brainer really, of course I was going to wander over to this table and find out what was going on.

And I Saw… describes itself as being a bit like a treasure hunt. And I spy. The difference being that you play by SMS, some of the things you are seeking are mobile, new things are being added all the time and you yourself are being sought.

On joining the game you are given a large sticker with a unique code number on it. You are then sent out into the game zone to seek out other stickers. When you find them you have to text the number on that sticker to the And I Saw… phone number. Because you’ve already registered your number, some automagicery calculates who has seen the most items, which items have been seen the most and which players have been seen the most.

Inside the Southbank Centre was a good place to start because lots of people playing the indoor games were already stickered-up. I was about to head out for the outdoor area (between the London Eye and the OXO tower when I met Lionel Richie again and we got chatting.

We ended up walking together looking for stickers and having a really good discussion about the application of games in our respective fields of work (I think she worked in an adult training sort of context, but I can’t really remember now…) and analysing how And I Saw… was modifying our usual behaviour. This was particularly evident in her case because she was a Londoner and a frequent visitor to the Southbank area.

The things that really worked for me (luckily I have unlimited texts with my phone contract) were a) the way looking for a particular object/objects completely changed the way I engaged with my surroundings and b) the encounters we had with the other seekers playing the game. It was a really nice mechanism for going up to random strangers, sharing a quick exchange and then moving on. I also very much liked the way that most players were developing their own little rituals around what they did when they found a sticker. Most people had fallen into the routine of photographing each location, but others were taking it further and taking photos with mascot toys etc etc.

I only discovered the And I Saw… website fairly recently: turns out I was the 4th most seen player, but only saw a rather pathetic 20 items (compared to angelsk’s 60).

After an hour or so, Lionel and I happened to end up by The Eye as the Cruel 2 B Kind assassins had their end of game picnic. We hung out a bit, chatted, heard tales of trying to assassinate non-players, tales of mass team serenades and generally helped eat the chocolate cup-cakes before they melted in the sun (well, it would be rude not to…).

mscapes

I then had a bit of a gap before the start of The Lost Sport of Olympia and went off in search of padding.

I’ve been lusting over mscapes for a couple of years now, but not had a chance to try it out so, when I returned back to the hub in the Southbank Centre and saw that the mscapes table seemed up and running, I jumped at the chance to sample Duncan Speakman‘s Always Something Somewhere Else.

Despite a few technical hiccups at the start, I can only reiterate what the people on the video at the previous link said: a beautifully haunting, in-your-own-world experience. I particularly remember the point at which the voice of the narrator invited me to find some stone and I reached out to place my hand on a pillar of the Thames-side architecture…

London-as-Tokyo

I’d been keeping watch for Momus’ transposed tour, London-as-Tokyo all afternoon, so it was a tough call when I came across them part-way through Always Something Somewhere Else, but I did have to turn off the iPaq and listen to some beautifully wonky descriptions of wherever it was that we were.

Here’s a short extract of them taking about mobile phones and then going off on one about “chotto”.

London as Tokyo from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

Whilst Momus was holding forth confidently on a wide range of subjects it was worth taking a few moments to tune into the reactions of passers-by who weren’t aware of the context for London-as-Tokyo!

The Lost Sport of Olympia

It was as good as I had hoped. More here.

Stag Hunt

I had no idea (no pun/old joke intended) what this was about but the crowd that drifted back from the labyrinths just sort of evolved into the Stag Hunt crowd and I had no complaints… It turns out the game was massively oversubscribed, but we got around that by working in pairs.

A sample ruleset for Stag Hunt is available on the Hide&Seek site or you can listen to/watch the rules as they were given to us on the day over on Vimeo. In brief: approach the stag with two other balloon-carrying team-mates and sweet-talk him into letting you tie one of the balloons onto his antlers. Team with the most balloons on antlers wins.

Once we’d organised ourselves into 4 teams there was a mad dash as, once we’d got a balloon per pair, we legged it outside to try and find the stag.

Stag Hunt from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

Getting the first balloon onto the stag’s antlers was fairly straightforward, it was after we’d returned to the Southbank Centre, collected a new balloon and started out to try and find the stag again that things got really interesting…

By this time the stag had moved further away and the initial crowd had dispersed so we genuinely had no idea where to look inside a large playing area (10 mins walk from the Southbank Centre in any direction …except for the river). We occasionally saw clusters of balloons moving around, but nothing that suggested they knew where the stag was either!

We began to ask passers-by (in an incredibly deadpan manner) if they had “seen a man wearing a morning suit and a large white stag mask that people were tying balloons to”. We had an interesting range of responses including: the who-are-these-loonies look; grins; detailed information of what direction they had just come from; and, winding us up with false sightings. This is what really made Stag Hunt for me – the leakage of the game out to include ‘non’-players.

Alas, no-one had seen the stag but we continued to scout around and managed to collect a few more team members before we eentually found the stag again.

Time was running out now so there was a frantic succession of attempts to win the stag’s favour as he made his way back down the waterfront towards the Southbank Centre.

Often they involved ruthlessly employing the services of a small, cute child.

The rules were now being much more strictly enforced so there was a leap-frogging effect as threesomes located themselves in the stag’s path, at 5 pace intervals, poised ready to put their flattery tactics into action. It was fab. People were getting really creative! We had serenades, human pyramids, human letter-forms spelling out S T A G (didn’t work) and all sorts. I have no idea what the non-playing public in the area thought must have thought all these nutters with balloons must have been doing. Hopefully there are a few tourists who now believe this is a traditional Sunday-afternoon pursuit…

Anyway, when it came to the count we (the purple team) lost out on first place by one single balloon…

Anyhoo, I can genuinely say I was thoroughly glad I had taken part. Stag hunt: hilarious, exciting, creative and just plain silly. I would love to try variants of this game that allowed for greater use of tactics in locating and tracking the stag as well as, as Jane asked, interfering with the balloons of other teams.

Things wound up with a great photo-opportunity with a business card that had been planted in someone’s bag (presumably as a trail-head into some new ARG):

Not going home yet

Stag Hunt was officially the last event of the festival, although there were still pockets of activity and board game construction going on inside the building. Mostly though there were lots of people who know that they should go home now, but also that they really didn’t want to.

I know I promised you Gype, but I’ve decided to put that in a 4th, post-festival post…