Introducing BARG

BARG:

A gathering of folks who’d like to discuss social games and playful things with an aim to either designing their own or just getting involved in playing some interesting stuff. Story-tellers welcome.

Thursday 29th from 7pm.

Why:

Over the last few months I’ve increasingly been approached by people wanting to discuss various ideas for games and other playful experiences. Floating around out there are some awesome nuclei for interesting projects waiting for a few extra ingredients to take them off the drawing-board and into practice. Likewise there are people wanting to work on projects, but haven’t yet got a project to work on.

Just before Christmas we realised we had reached some sort of critical mass where it made sense to get people together in the same room talking about their ideas and sharing their experiences. I reckon those of us looking to organise events need to skill up fast and then just get on out there and do it.

Then there are also some people looking for somewhere for their cognitive surplus to happen. Great! Let’s get the would-be-designers in the same room as the would-be-players so they can find out what makes a compelling experience and try out some of their ideas.

What:

Next week’s BARG meet-up is a chance for us to find out who’s out there and what they’re interested in. Ideally this would then lead onto regular meet-ups where we can get more involved in sharing our combined knowledge and also playing some games.

Listen carefully to this next bit – I don’t want to have to say it too many times:

BARG is not about ARGs.

Here are 3 reasons why latching onto the term ARG (Alternate Reality Game) is not useful:

1. There doesn’t seem to be a working definition of what ARG actually means. This is in reference both to Dan Hon and Alex Fleetwood’s observations at last year’s 4Talent Inspiration Session (there are podcasts at that there link – have a listen) that this is still an emerging discipline and we don’t quite know what it is yet, and also to Andrea Phillips’ post, which I’m choosing to interpret as being about the futility of trying to label these things anyway.
2. Everything you know about ARGs is wrong. We can do better.
3. ARGs are a small subset of the interesting stuff out there and we wouldn’t want to limit ourselves before we’ve even started, would we?

A much more useful way of identifying BARG’s territory would be to steal from the Hide & Seek approach:

Imagine a board. It’s got four corners. One corner is marked ‘Games’. The others are marked ‘Technology’, ‘Public Spaces’, and ‘Artists’. Anything that could be placed on that board…

Hide & Seek

So, that could include ARGs with their concealed narrative elements distributed across various on- and off-line platforms, but it could also be running blindfolded around a labyrinth marked out by humming people, sitting in a darkened room trying not to get eaten by werewolves, flattering a man in a paper-mâché stag mask until he lets you tie a balloon onto his antlers or cycling around the city at night with a GPS unit looking for the voices of strangers.

I don’t think it’s quite enough to just stand around and chat (although plenty of chatting will be done) so, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like later meet-ups to include elements of unconference where people give small presentations and/or discussions on a particular subject as offered on the night by those in attendance. We definitely want to be going outside and playing some stuff too.

For this first meeting though, our aim is to find out who we all are and what we’re interested in. Please be impressed at our self-restraint in not immediately building blogs, fora or wikis. Once we know what we all want out of this, then we can decide on what are the best online tools to facilitate that and think about giving BARG its own corner of the interweb. In the meantime, please feel free to use the comments on this page to help feed into how BARG could be useful to you.

Where:

We’re starting off in the Lillie Langtry function room in the back of the Old Lamp Tavern, Digbeth, Birmingham. It lacks an internet connection (this may or may not be important) but it’s fairly central, near some bus routes (45 and 47), a reasonable size, and has a video projector should we need one.

Any suggestions for alternative venues for later gatherings are welcomed. Here’s a venue wishlist that people with more experience than us have put together.

When:

This first one’s in the evening, but later on we might try a weekend afternoon for the purposes of trying out street-based stuff in daylight. Let us know what you think.

London and Bristol both host monthly meetings of a similar sort. Do you think we could manage that too?

Who:

BARG is organised by myself and Charlie Pinder (aka @pindec). Charlie tinkers with things, sometimes at mook studios and was introduced to Nikki via @cross_triangle. She likes cheese.

BARG is an informal chance to mix with people with similar/sufficiently different senses of fun. We were kind of hoping you’d come along…

BARG?

“BARG” is neither an agenda for location nor genre. It’s just the noise Charlie and myself both spontaneously made within seconds of resolving to make the meeting happen. Names and labels often fail, so we’re sticking with the noise. Here’s a picture, from the pindec pen, if that helps:

BARG: unstoppable, projectile, transmission of stuff. Also a way into events called BARGcamp, potentially on a BARGe, because it turns out we also like to play with language too.

GPS signal stability in Digbeth, Birmingham

It’s not that grate, akshully.
(click for map of full walk.)

mscape for randomised story-telling

Just before Christmas I responded to a call for artists from a Primary school looking for ways of

• Making use of the “outdoor classroom”
• Exploring the creative potential of ICT
• Enhancing literacy teaching and learning
• Actively involving pupils in documenting their own learning journeys
• Supporting reflexive practice

I think I had my application in – suggesting application of mscape – within an hour of first getting the notification email.

Experience has shown that it can be a bit tricky explaining the principles of the software to people who are not familiar with the technologies involved. Talking sticks to the rescue.

In preparation for meeting with the project coordinators this morning, yesterday I prepared a quick demonstration mediascape to hint at how these things might be used as an impetus for creative narrative. (I’d never been to the school before, and so didn’t attempt to try and create something specific to the location).

Although it was only intended as a quick demo, I’ve become quite taken by the idea so I’m blogging it in case anyone’s interested in providing motivation or situation for putting it into practice. :)

It’s a very simple set-up in terms of the coding involved: just a series of regions placed around the (in this case) school environment with onEnter/onExit events that trigger an alarm that randomly selects a sound file for addition to the playlist.

The interesting bit came when trying to decide what the sound files should consist of.

The context I’m imagining is a small group of pupils carrying a talking stick-esque device around with them as they set off on an improvised adventure around the designated area. This could be based on a classic journeying quest; be it to find an object or explore uncharted lands. Our intrepid adventurers move around in real space, but use their imaginations to reinterpret their surroundings and invent new things within it.

The role of the talking stick-esque device is to randomly interject prompts that the adventurers must respond to in real time within their narratives: if the stick yells out a warning to “hide!”, then hide they must; if the stick wonders if anyone lives here, then they should assess the surroundings and decide if it’s a suitable habitat for whatever characters are in the story…

Here are the prompts I used for the demo: (Many thanks to @goodhen whose response to my twitter request added a large number of these to the list.)

Look out! | What was that noise? | who’s this? | And so, off they went | oh no… | Good news! | Don’t move! | Shhhhh! Listen | What’s that over there in the distance? | Is anyone else getting that strange feeling? | Whatever you do, don’t make any sudden movements… | I think we need a change of plan | Be careful | Quick! What are we going to do? | What’s that smell? | Is there something hiding in there? | What was it he said again? | Quick, run for it! | Hide! | What should we do next? | Is it safe? | Look! Up in the sky! | Oh! That reminds me! | What *is* that?! | I feel weird. What’s happening to me? | I’m hungry | huh, is that an elephant? | I don’t believe it! | Of course! | I knew that was going to happen | oh, wait a minute | hang on | are you sure this is a good idea | what do you think will happen? | [Gasp] | ouch | do you think anyone lives here? | Is it a message?

What type of prompts inject the narrative with the sort of elements that make for a gripping narrative and what sort of prompts inject the narrative with opportunities for pupils to develop the sorts of skills their teachers might be looking for? And are these things different? …oh, and how can they instigate interactions with/responses to the surroundings too?

Also for consideration: How to start off the story – should you set a particular scenario and then can you tailor your prompts to that? Would it work equally well with trigger regions placed randomly, or should they relate to the ‘interesting’ features of the landscape? With more knowledge of yarn-spinning, would it be a good idea to add conditional logic to the prompt selection such that if x has already been played, then do/don’t play y?

landmarks

About 6 months ago I started getting very interested in how people navigate their way around a particular part of the New Forest.

Having now been to The Other Canada I returned to Canada Common a couple of times over the last week or so with the beginnings of an idea to collate the material I gathered from the dog-walkers into a mscape-driven thingy that then presents you with different guidance and instructions depending on where you are and which direction you are heading in.

I still haven’t decided on exactly how I’m going to tackle it, so I just took the opportunity to observe and ponder, trying to place the information people had given me back into the landscape it referred to.

The the GPS trace shows that, despite the cold weather freezing most of the water on the common, there were still a few parts I struggled with (for example, the S shape in the middle of this image as I try and decide how best to cross a small stream!)

[note to self: must take a look at how to import the log into Google Earth – I don’t like all those artefacts that appear on the images imported into mscape]

I have to say though, the best tracks laid that day were the snuffly ones made by the ponies.

This video shows the landscape I’m investigating in 2 revolutions: the first with no markers; and the second with labels indicating some of the landmarks people use to navigate by [warning: not suitable for those prone to sea-sickness].

landmarks from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

A few photos from the walk:

can you get there from here?

This afternoon I went out to a nearby and conveniently large, open area of common to test a new version of the code for the project I started last month.

The code works a treat – which is great – but I can confirm the experience of using it is rubbish without the sticks and someone else to play with.

Can you get there from here? from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

Season’s Greetings

Just a short interlude to acknowledge the time of year…

Merry Christmas and wishing you all a most interesting 2009.

(Good behaviour is rewarded with praise and the occasional treat.)

signage

I spent this afternoon accompanying Ben Waddington and Nicky Getgood on a tour of Digbeth, during which I spotted this selectively-faded sign:

Ouch.

…which in turn has prompted me to post these photos of signs from in and around Banff. Suggestions for alternative meanings in the comments please!

I’m also going to shoe-horn this list of bus rules into the post, just ‘cos I think it’s fab:

Remember: good behaviour may be rewarded with an occasional treat; bad behaviour may result in a private chat.

Contents May Vary, issue 2

Just before I left for Canada I received a big envelope full of copies of the Contents May Vary publication I had some work included in a while ago.

I’ve now got more that I could ever possibly need for my archive purposes, so if you’d like a copy let me know and I’ll send you one.

pulse

Pulse from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

Percussion for Hill and GPS

Here is a [completely non-representative] taster of what was coming out of the cardboard boxes:

Percussion for Hill and GPS from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

The drumming and breathing was commissioned from Adam Kinner (the saxophonist from this post). He’s recently started a blog and I definitely think it’s one to watch for the future. Go have a look-see.