Hide&Seek 4: Gype and etcetera

All the other stuff that happened as part of the Hide&Seek festival was great, but the highlights of the day for me were what happened after the festival had officially finished.

The hardcore gamers loitered around for half an hour or so, not yet ready to concede that it was time to wrap up and go home. A few people were constructing a board game from rules appropriated from different parts of the festival, the stewards were starting to take down the banners and one of the iglab Simons was pootling around on a little orange bike…

Then somebody suggested KerPlunk and half a dozen of us huddled in the corner playing with straws and marbles. One round of KerPlunk (Just for the record, Simon and I won!) was enough to bridge the transition and then suddenly everyone was properly back into game-playing mode and it was clear none of us would be going home just yet.

Gype

I also remember that it was we who invented the well-known and widespread national game of Gype. All sorts of variations and complications were invented in connection with Gype. There was Land Gype and Water Gype. I myself cut out and coloured pieces of cardboard of mysterious and significant shapes, the instruments of Table Gype; a game for the little ones. It was even duly settled what disease threatened the over-assiduous player; he tended to suffer from Gype’s Ear. My friends and I introduced allusions to the fashionable sport in our articles; Bentley successfully passed one through the Daily News and I through some other paper. Everything was in order and going forward; except the game itself, which has not yet been invented. Autobiography_(Chesterton)/Chapter_X

Simon had been proposing a motion that we played Gype since before KerPlunk and, after explaining a bit about the rules (not dissimilar to those of Mornington Crescent), that now took off.

I also had to take off at this point because I desperately needed to take on board more fluids. When I got back from the bar the game was in full swing with 2 pieces of A5 paper, three dice of a sort that I didn’t recognise and the counters from a chequers set.

I haven’t got any photos of this first round of Gype – I was too busy tending to my drink – but you’ll just have to take it from me that it was an awesome thing to watch. These were people who take playing very seriously indeed, given free reign to make it up as they went along. Dare I say there was an element of competition there too…?

Watching it, there was no way you could tell that it was being fabricated on the spot. At one point one of the players drew a distinction between Land Gype and Water Gype in such a matter-of-fact way that I had real difficulty in sorting out fact from fiction. Seriously: probably not until an hour or so later …and now I see the two different Gypes are mentioned in that quote above. Now I don’t know what to think!

I finished my drink and got re-absorbed into the group of players. Another strange position to be in as you try and dream up a creative move for your turn, but the landscape keeps shifting so much after the moves made by previous players that it becomes all but impossible to do anything but wait and then react spontaneously when it’s your go. I found out later, via Jane’s post, that this had been designated a game of Speed Gype. I’m not sure if this was just a follow on from the Speed KerPlunk we had been playing before, but it’s a really nice tweak to keep the pace up and get the creativity flowing nice and fast without too much analysis.

As it happens, I was just planning how I would see if I could score some points by throwing the dice at each of the three counters in the central triangle formation when Simon, the player before me, used a tablecloth move.

Our reaction was similar to that in the video and, to an enthusiastic chorus of “GYPE!” Simon was declared the winner.

Fort Gype

Turns out Speed Gype was just the warm-up.

We then moved over to a court that had been marked out on the floor earlier in the festival (possibly for freemasons) and Fort Gype began.

Fort Gype follows the same sort of rules as Speed Gype, but utilising the cool Southbank Centre squidgy furniture to (we assumed) build a fort. Spectators from the last game joined us as players so we were probably up to about 20 players now.

The opening moves were fairly straightforward placements of the furniture, with the occasional “lock-in” move thrown in for good measure.

Things got more interesting once there were more things to respond to. [How about starting a game of Fort Gype with randomly rolling a few items onto the ‘board’ to kick-start this process?] I was about 10th to make a move and, with my lime green seat-like-thingy I opted for an ‘entrapment’ move with one arm pinned under the furniture. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but the way things worked out I had an increasingly restricted view of what was going on!

From my not-so-much-of-a-vantage point I tried to take a photo every move. You can see the results here on this Flickr photoset.

As the play progressed we started to build upwards and more and more people added themselves to the structure. I think this would be a really good aspect for Fort Gypers to investigate further: I mean, if you’ve got a bunch of people with squidgy furniture it’d be a shame not to incorporate more bodies, right?! OK, OK thinking like that blatantly goes against the fundamentals of Gype! Still, I would have liked to have played a few rounds to see how things got refined.

Eventually the inevitable happened and the tower collapsed: thereby signalling the end of the game. This was good because then we didn’t feel so bad when the member of Southbank staff came over and informed us how expensive the squidgy furniture was and, sorry to be the bad guy, but would we mind stopping abusing it please…? Fair enough!

The third bus

There was no escaping it: the festival had drawn to an end and it was time to relocate. After a lot of conferring the general plan seemed to be food and then more games. Several people stated the need for showers before anything else happened and so we arranged to meet an hour later in the middle of Westminster Bridge. By this stage we knew that locating food was not going to be a straightforward matter and would involve getting on the third bus and then, whilst on the bus, figuring out the rules that would allow us to then get off the bus…

I told you these were hardcore gamers.

The last train

Unfortunately for me, the last train back to Brum on a Sunday is horribly early so I had to say my farewells before everybody had even reconvened on the bridge.

Whilst the others got up to whatever banana-assisted adventures their journey took them on, I had my own trials awaiting me: “the train is to long, can you all move forward a carriage please”; delays in leaving Marylebone; the train in front hitting livestock…

Sat in the foyer of Banbury railway station waiting for the replacement coaches to arrive at 1am felt so incredibly desolate compared to the atmosphere I had left a few hours before. The stark difference in attitudes between the pissed-off travellers and the Stag-chasing gamers was huge.

I wanted to suggest a game of Gype or Werewolf, but thought I’d get lynched. For real.

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…

Hide&Seek 2: The Lost Sport of Olympia

This was one of the big draws for me: I’ve not been following The Lost Ring ARG particularly closely and have only the faintest awareness of the background narrative and puzzles but I’m fascinated by the Lost Sport that it all supports.

In brief:

A labyrinth is marked up on the ground and a blindfolded runner has to try and exit it as fast as possible.

A bunch of other people become the walls and hum to guide the runner around the labyrinth.

That’s it! Simple, right?

…except that photo above is just the training labyrinth – the easy one for beginners so you can get the hang of the basics. And with 15-20 enthusiastic strangers all dashing around the place trying to get into position (once the runner has gone past you, you need to leg it to the other end of the wall) things can get fairly chaotic.

That’s where things start to get a bit cunning.

Before we could attempt the labyrinths, we all had to do what was essentially a quick personality test:

You can do it online here. This will categorise you according to your strengths (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it’s flawed but…) and from here you are guided towards different roles within the team.

We each got a couple of colour-coded stickers that identified out different strengths and jobs were allocated for coordinators and time-keepers etc etc. I think the strengths is a really nice aspect of what’s going on because even if they are inaccurate you immediately have a set of goals to work towards and that then means you also have something to gauge your personal development. It also saves a lot of time when you can cut through a lot of the decision-making negotiation and immediately short-list potentials for a particular role (that’s not to say we didn’t stray from the guides later on, once we’d had a chance to develop as a group…)

I am apparently a mix of Sophia (“I bring wisdom, creativity and cleverness to our mission. I am one of the knowledge-seekers”) and Thumos (“I bring courage, energy and determination to our mission. I am one of the adventurers”) the latter of which meant I got to have a quick go at being blindfolded and trying to navigate the small labyrinth.

I can definitely recommend the experience!

We were apparently doing pretty well with our time of about 30 seconds (the records seem to be about 15 seconds) so we were rapidly ushered on over to the next one – 5 7 circuits rather than three:

Here is some video of another group on the labyrinth for what I think might be the first time.

The Lost Sport: 5 circuit walk-through from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

It takes Toby about 1 minute 40 seconds to get around without a blindfold on. What’s interesting here is that you can see the different roles that have been established: the runner; the walls; a coordinator; someone to walk the route ahead of the wall so the wall knows where to go and, naturally, a healthy number of spectator-participants too! I’m not sure if these are roles that have already been identified within the back-story and accumulating research into the Lost Sport, but in our group they (almost identical roles) seemed to evolve fairly naturally.

What’s really, really interesting from my perspective is the team feedback that happens after each attempt. Various people are asked for feedback, the plan is modified a little and something new gets tried. Love it.

Here’s their blindfolded run. (The speeded up section at the start is them seeing if it’s feasible to have people permanently stationed on the tricky corners.) Note there’s now also someone coordinating the hum.

The Lost Sport: 5 circuit labyrinth from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

These guys really got it together after a few goes and I think there may have also been a record set. You’re looking at a time of about 2 and a half minutes. I think I heard someone say the Olympic-sized labyrinth (8 circuits) takes about 8 minutes to complete…

This is fitting right in with some of the things I’ve been thinking about recently and I would absolutely love to use this as a framework for a cross-disciplinary project looking at behavioural issues with perhaps a class of primary school pupils with any group of students to investigate any number of questions involving group dynamics, collaboration and probably lots of other stuff too. There’s so much you could do with this just by backing off and letting the class group figure stuff out for themselves.

Of course I would also be really interested in getting a Birmingham-based group of adults together who would like to spend some time figuring out how to get the labyrinth-running down to a t (it’s all in the wall, it’s all in the wall… and I think there’s a fair chance that less is more). It’s a great challenge, fun, and surprisingly addictive. The surprising thing for me was that when I asked if there were already any groups established in Birmingham, I was told that in the whole of the UK there was only a London-based group and an intermittent one in Leeds. London wins again? Bah!

About 15 people who fancy an afternoon in the sun should do the trick. Anyone up for it?