a two day workshop event … for museum professionals who are interested in innovative new ways to energize audiences and create more engaging experiences for museum and gallery visitors.
We made sock aliens; constructed quilt panels from Action man clothes; killed virtual spiders; and made Frisbees out of milk bottles (of the plastic variety).
It wasn’t long though before we were down to the serious business of the 7 Wild Ideas that had been submitted to the conference as the case-studies we would work on.
I joined the Exhibition Gaming team in response to Daniela Bauer’s vision of museum visitors being pawns in a game. Unlike some of the other Wild Ideas that were very much linked to specific contexts faced by particular institutions, Daniela was approaching this as a Psychology researcher and so our discussion was in general terms rather than attached to a particular location or design brief.
That didn’t stop it from being very in-depth though.
I first came across some of the awesome participatory work being done by museums via people from the sector involved in games such as Superstruct and Signtific Lab. Although I’ve as yet had no direct experience of working with museums, the discussions I’m reading coming from this direction have definitely inspired and influenced my thinking regarding participation. I therefore attended MuseumNext expecting to be out of place – in a good way – and expecting to learn loads.
I was and I did! Hurrah!
I’m fairly sure we didn’t answer any of Daniela’s initial questions, but in exploring them we came up with about 20 new questions. These questions were quite wide-ranging, but also with a significant amount of overlap. We were originally trying to work towards a framework for designing a museum-based game, but I think what we may have ended up with was more like a framework for institutions to start putting together a design brief for a potential game.
Collaboratively-made sock alien
The second day of MuseumNext started off with a very interesting presentation from Nina about participatory museums, after which we had two un-conference sessions. Incentivised by the prospect of being able to take a sock alien home (he needs a name, btw) I had offered to run a practical Lost Sport of Olympia session.
Although the people in our Wild Idea group had some great ideas about doing interesting stuff in interesting places, not many of them seemed to have had any experience of being on the receiving, playing end of such things. I thought the best thing I could offer was to give them a chance to actually feel what it’s like to be in a group of strangers doing something a bit odd in a public place. I asked for chalk and permission to temporarily deface the forecourt of the Centre for Life and got both.
So, I missed the first of the un-conference sessions because I was outside figuring out how to draw a couple of labyrinths without the usual marked-out length of string. Fortunately the ground was paved with bricks so I was able to use a combination of counting them and using my shoes to measure out radii.
It was well worth the effort – a good group of people decided to brave both the weather and the public gaze to come outside and play for the second un-conference session.
Action shot of me explaining how it works (photo from MuseumNext on Flickr)
A brave volunteer gives it a go (photo from MuseumNext on Flickr)
Things get competitive as we split up into two teams. (Photo from MuseumNext on Flickr)
After the un-conference sessions wrapped up, we reconvened our Wild Idea groups. Daniela had identified three parties that she wanted to investigate their motivations for getting involved in museum gaming: the institution, the audience and the urban gamers (there was a little confusion over this, but I think she meant the game designers, rather than players already in pervasive/urban gaming communities). It was really useful to examine these three groups and see where their motivations overlapped and where they differed.
After that we returned to our big list of questions and, working in threes, we tried to answer a few each. Again, I learned loads from this.
I’ve been working with game mechanics both in my own work (for example, Emergent Game and the Bournville scavenger hunt) and also through BARG for a year or two now, and I’m keen to start applying some of my skills to some issue-led contexts. I want problems to try and address!
I gained a lot through speaking with museum (and psychology!) professionals of all sorts and it has really helped me to better appreciate the sorts of issues institutions might be trying to address through the use of games and playful experiences. Also what the main concerns they may have in doing this and where likely pitfalls may be.
A massive thank you to all the MuseumNext team and all the participants: I have a feeling that the effects of this one will be reverberating around for quite some time to come.
A few weeks ago, one @kitlarks (who I don’t know) appeared on Twitter, apparently having been blackmailed to sign up in order to receive a huffing duck from, I believe, @EmmaGx (who I don’t know either).
I don’t really know what the deal was, but it appeared to involve signing up, a certain number of posts and an uploaded avatar in exchange for a drawing of a huffing duck. This seemed to me to not be a Twitter-like way of approaching things.
Anyway, one thing led to another (not exactly crowd-sourcing, I know, but an interesting exercise nonetheless) and a collaborative huffing duck was incrementally produced in a vaguely exquisite corpse-esque manner. Ok, not exactly exquisite corpse either…
You can see the animations of the cumulative contributions here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
As you can see, the internet badgers ate the huffing duck during the process of adding the head at stage 8. Unfortunate, but if you look carefully there’s a nice after-image huffing duck in glorious Technicolor burned onto your retina, and that’s perhaps as it should be.
I’m not sure what happens to the huffing duck next: whether it fades to white, or whether it will be resurrected to continue its evolution. In the meantime however, this post is by way of setting aside a small slice of cyberspace to say that a huffing duck happened and it happened because of these people (alphabetical order):
We are the Interstitials is a metaphor based on principles of interstitial solutes in metals.
We are the Interstitials:
We are smaller than the structures around us. We inhabit the gaps the host matrix cannot occupy itself.
Our small size gives us speed and responsiveness and though the sites we may occupy are ultimately determined by the host matrix, we are mobile and select which of the available positions we inhabit.
Our host is rigid; bound to the other similar entities around it in predictable patterns. We are independent; we may cluster around locations or other interstitials, but our interactions shift as required. We frequently move on, jumping between adjacent sites. There’s no problem, it’s just how we are.
Our host may regard us as defects, but though our numbers are small, our effects are wide-reaching and can drastically change the properties of the matrix we operate within. The energy-fields around us, induced by our presence, often make it easy for us to interact with other types of perceived ‘defect’, often impeding their motion or changing the way they in turn affect the matrix.
We are small, we are mobile, we affect. We are the interstitials.
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.
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:
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:
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.
This was an amazing experience in itself, but to turn it into Learning we are doing it again.
Next month Ana and I will fly out to Japan where we will be contributing to the Dislocate08 festival.
Dislocate is an ongoing project examining the relationship between art, technology and locality. Exploring the impact of new media upon our experience and expression of place, Dislocate08 examines the creative potential of the technologies which surround us to heighten our awareness of our locality, transforming our encounter with our direct environment and the manner in which we attempt to communicate this to elsewhere.
Being in Japan also gives us the opportunity to work with hanare: a sort of artist-led space/meeting space/café space in Kyoto. (You may remember the 4649 project.)
On the 8th of September we’ll be doing a workshop at hanare, and on the 13th of September we’ll be doing a workshop as part of Dislocate. We’ll be using these workshops to shape the Japanese component of a long weekend of Emergent Gaming happening on the 19th, 20th and 21st of September. Why? Because Emergent Game has also been accepted as part of igfest (Interesting Game Festival) in Bristol.
So, coming up is the second iteration of Emergent Game in which we’ll be investigating what happens when you have two groups of players exploring places separated by differences in language, culture, geography and timezone.
As some of the players will be in the UK and some in Japan; some having online access and some not; there will be variations in what is possible: part of the game experience will be how your avatar negotiates this. Perhaps you will make friends with a player in another country and barter things with them by post; perhaps you will be a ‘lone avatari’ with a mission of your own; perhaps you will find new spaces online where participants can interact.
We’re still negotiating the starting points for these activities and, of course, the eventual shape of them will largely be determined by those who get involved. But for now the initial instructions from the first game apply to the one coming up in September.
We’d quite like players based in the UK (or elsewhere) to get involved (online) in the two workshops on the 8th and 13th and we definitely want you guys involved in the weekend of the game itself (19th-21st) which is when we’ll be running the mission challenges. The way we see it working is that you now have a few weeks to find a toy to represent you, set up a Twitter account for it and to start some conversations with other players. Be sure to set the location in the Twitter settings to “emergent game” and to follow the likes of @yohmoh and the other soft toys located in emergent game. The rest will take care of itself.
This headstart will substitute for the workshops we’ll be doing with the players in Japan, so use this time productively…
The Ludogeographic Society
During the course of the first Emergent Game, a new collaborative group was formed between myself and two other artists I worked very closely with to realise the project: the aforementioned Ana Benlloch and also Stuart Tait. The Ludogeographic Society will be an identity we will use for future collaborations that explore similar territory to Emergent Game so this upcoming game will be realised as a project under the name of the Society, rather than under my name alone.
We’ll let you know when The Ludogeographic Society’s website is up and running, but in the meantime announcements will be made here and via the usual channels.
All theotherstuff 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.
I’ve already written 2posts 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”.
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!
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.
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.
Saturday was the big ‘closing’ event for Emergent Game (again, we all seem to have trouble thinking of it in terms of being the end) and, as usual, my head’s full of stuff that I’m going to inflict on you as part of the process of sorting through it and pulling out threads. There are lots of photos to be shared and stories to be told, but I expect this will be done in a different place and in a different voice.
Here are some initial thoughts from the point of view of organising the event:
What is?
Partly through needing some distance and partly through commitments to other projects in the interim, there was quite a long gap between the NGA festival-related part of The Game (up until 20th of June) and the Grand Finally.
Though I didn’t have a lot of time for directly organising stuff, it did give me the opportunity to think a lot about more general things like what sort of an experience I wanted it to be. The event had been presented in terms of being a combination of the City Wide Treasure Hunt mission (coming from random descriptions in the festival literature) and the Ludens’ Tea Party mission – both big scorers within The Game and ideal ways to combine cabaret and collaboration.
As it began to take shape in my head though, I increasing lost sight of this and, especially after going to Hide&Seek last weekend, was thinking more in terms of the types of behaviours I wanted to encourage.
That sounds odd. What I mean is…
…that after much thinking I decided that the aim of the day was not to discover the location of some object or to solve a puzzle; it was to give people the opportunity to do things they wouldn’t normally do, within the framework of a larger context that added layers of excitement such as trying to remain anonymous when you knew there were other Ludens criss-crossing the same space at the same time.
Looking back at it now, I’m wondering if it’s enough to regard the larger context as being the day’s event, or whether you have to include all the play that came before it? Would the Grand Finally have been possible/as successful had there not have been the 2 month’s worth of conversation and interaction that built up the characters and narratives involved?
Certainly when I was planning who should do what, a lot of the missions were based on references to things that had developed out of the game. @egorbeaver was given a lot of teaparty themed activities, @cross_triangle’s day was based on glyphs and @LeonHerring got to spend some time at the beach. With other players I knew who they were in real life and so was able to build in references to things outside of Emergent Game.
The other benefit to having been through all the missions and stuff beforehand was that I’d got a sense of what, for me at least, provided the buzz: knowing that you might find yourself at a drop-off point at the same time as another Ludens; having to work with your avatar in public locations; having to either explain to Sapiens what was going on or pretend that nothing out of the ordinary was going on and it’s perfectly normal to be taking photos of this soft toy in this shop thank you very much.
By the time it got to In Deep End-Dance day I knew that I wanted In Deep End-Dance Day +1 to be based around the following:
A Common starting point and a common end point (i.e. the pub!)
Going to parts of the city you probably hadn’t been to before
Interactions with Sapiens
Remote interactions with Ludens – i.e. transfers of information and objects
Possibility of accidental direct encounters with Ludens – i.e. crossing of paths
That and 2 things to follow up on after a barrage of phonecalls and texts to possibly friendly Sapiens were pretty much all I had to go on at the start of spending the day in town looking for ways to string it all together…
Interactions with Sapiens
In moments of optimism I had thought it might be nice to have Sapiens tweeting in tasks etc over the course of the event, however the degree of interaction from Sapiens up until this point had been, frankly, disappointing so I gave up on that idea.
In comparison, the support I had from random strangers as I wandered around town and made strange requests was phenomenal.
First stop was the Borders bookshop in the BullRing where a supervisor friend volunteered two front-of-store staff to be in on the Grand Finally. Thanks to them I was able to leave several mission packs in a couple of different locations.
Four of the Ludens and two watchers passed through this space in the first hour or so of the event – I’d like to see the cctv footage!
Likewise, assistance from the staff at the Pen Room really made a huge difference. I’d only had a glimpse of this place a few years ago and wasn’t disappointed on going back for a closer look. I strongly recommend you do the same.
In the 2nd of the two pen room rooms is was immediately apparent that this was somewhere to send not only cross_triangle, but also the stamptmeister Loki. A big thankyou to Malcolm both for his enthusiasm and his assistance in relaying contents of emails.
A meeting in a coffee shop then secured the assistance of Zebra Scraf Woman on the Fluxus boat trip …and also the name of a friend’s mum librarian …which led onto one of the players being shown some of the Central Library’s Shakespeare Collection.
The other big contribution came from the security staff at the Victoria Law Courts at the top of Corporation Street. This is a favourite hidden gem where I usually take visitors to the city. Once you’re past the x-ray machine you’re immediately in another world of 19th Century architecture. Check. It. Out. (information sheet available from the desk inside)
I checked to see if they’d be open to the public on Saturdays and at first it looked like they wouldn’t and that I’d have to come up with another idea. So I asked them if they could think of any alternative locations and that drew a blank. …and then suddenly I’m proudly being shown the portcullis over [under] the main entrance [can anyone confirm this is the only one still in use in the world?] and we’ve worked out a deal that if I send a player along first thing then they’ll probably still be there and everything will be OK. Love it – and what’s more it sounds liek they were conducting their own personal treasure hunts when LeonHerring turned up with Leon’s mission:
As the Grand Finally progressed we also had encounters with various unsuspecting members of the public including (but not restricted to) most of the staff of Borders, someone with a clipboard, the man with the cigar photographed with egorbeaver at a prominent Birmingham landmark, the person ad Hudsons who took temporary custody of the receipt for the mug that had the photo of the man with the cigar photographed with egorbeaver at a prominent Birmingham landmark printed on it and the patrons of the children’s library. Job done.
Timetabling
Some of the players had to get to certain places by certain times before Law Courts shut or boats set sail. The timetable looked like this: (click for larger)
Needless to say most people werelate turning up for the start and a few coffees later quite a few things had to be jiggled. Didn’t seem to matter too much in the end, but lesson learned to leave more allowance for this sort of thing next time around.
Love it or hate it we relied on Twitter really heavily through all stages of Emergent Game. It’s caused us headaches on more than one occasion so I made sure everyone had my phone number before the Grand Finally began. Just as well really, because somewhere between Manchester and Brum egorbeaver discovered egorbeaver was suffering from the same PIN thing that had prevented me from playing Cruel 2 B Kind the weekend before.
So, for the first hour or two I was relaying instructions to egorbeaver by text. Luckily I did then manage to log onto egorbeaver’s account from the Grand Finally HQ in Coffee Lounge and get things working again later!
One thing I hadn’t really anticipated was the extent to which 7 people tweeting would eat up the battery life on our phones. We’ve talked about the benefits of using Twitter for a decentralised method of communication, but my phone gave out about 20 minutes before the end and we came really close to losing a few of the others too.
Next time around we’d have to consider either a) doing things over a shorter time-scale, b) doing things over a much longer timescale (i.e. you can go home and recharge between missions) or c) making more use of direct messages so that players only recieve tweets for them and not so much of the general chit chat. Hmmm, not sure if I’d want that or not…. I’m curious to find out more about egorbeaver’s experience of playing for a few hours with Twitter silence to see what this is like in comparison to having an awareness of what the other players are doing.
The other thing I like about public tweets is that they are then available as an archive of what happened in the way that direct messages are not.
Documentation and commentary
Puppet Mastering the Grand Finally was an intensely hectic experience. I didn’t get a chance to pause for the whole 3 and a half hours and only got the chance to go for a wee when Loki’s brain went bork and Loki joined me for a few minutes before going to collect the mug.
I’m definitely thinking in terms of this being a two-person job next time around. There certainly wasn’t any time available for live blogging or LudensShow tweeting for the benefit of any Sapiens.
I’m really glad that Alex and Vanessa agreed to join us as Ludens Stalkers and help document the event. I’ve now got some great images of various players at different points of the game and it seems like most of them were unaware they were being followed!
Although we heard a few tales in the pub afterwards, I’m really hoping the Ludens will take the time to write up their experiences so we can start to piece together what happened and, more importantly, what it was like to be in it.
The meet up
So, the guessing game is over! Now we know who they are! (Well, some of them, anyway.)
A bunch of Ludens in a pub eating beevapoo… who could have known that would have made me feel so happy! :)
One of the things several people commented on as the Ludens started to appear was how so many of them were women. Normally I’d pay as much attention to gender labels as I do to those for Art and Science (i.e. I try not to), but it does seem this is something significant. It would be interesting to find out who all the other players are to see if this trend is carried out across the whole Ludens population.
It’s interesting to look back now with hindsight and look at the different assumptions I made about whether Ludens were male or female. In my mind’s eye egorbeaver was male until I got the furball in that box and somehow the handwriting was female too. Oh, and the singing voice!
Ditto for cross_triangle: female handwriting on the labels that accompanied the treasure. What the hell does female handwriting look like?!?! How do I have an opinion about what female handwriting looks like?!!?
It occurred to me this morning that what we had in the pub was a bunch of web-literate people talking about digital stuff …who mostly happened to be women – and it all felt very, very different to the one blogmeet I’ve been to.
Anyhow, it feels like it would be a heinous crime to reveal anyone’s identity, so I’m going to leave it there.
Lessons learned and a big thank you to all those to whom I owe thanks.
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.
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.
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?
Yesterday I journeyed to London for the last day of this year’s Hide&Seek Festival. It was a packed day and there’s so much I want to get written down that I’ve decided rather than write an impossibly long post (impossible to read, let alone find the time to write) I’m going to break it down into chunks. That way I can prioritise stuff and hopefully keep the momentum going.
First up I’m going to tackle things that happened on Friday. When I wasn’t there. When things happened that I don’t know about!
Fixed to one of the pillars in the indoor space for Hide&Seek were two tantalising sheets of paper. Perhaps visual aids from a presentation? I don’t know what the topic of discussion was or who was doing the discussing…
Several of the phrases on them jumped out at me immediately so this post is going to be a bit of a Counsel for the Artist on them where I take them out of context and jot down some of the trains of thought they triggered. (Blog-as-notebook: more for me than for you!)
I had much the same reaction to several things mentioned in this recent post from Jane McGonigal, so, since there’s a high chance this panel might be where the visual aids came from, I’m going to bundle them in together…
ARGs for the (socially engaged) arts
Emergent Game! …or rather what I hope Emergent Game might become a few iterations down the line…
[I know it isn't an ARG and, with hindsight, it didn't really evolve into a game either. Perhaps in a parallel dimension I named it Emergent Play instead?]
It was reassuring to see Jane’s comments about extent of active participation
…more than 50% of ARGs fail to be good at either of this, not through any failures of the designer, but through the failure of players to show up and actively participate. Which, by the way, is the standard percentage of social media projects that fail to reach a community size of any viability and fold within the first year.
I don’t think the game format helped to overcome limited engagement (one of the problems with getting people involved in participatory art projects that we wanted to explore) but now we’re (nearly) the other side of Emergent Game I still think a game format has a massive potential as a tool to drive socially-engaged projects. I’m hugely proud of the way the Ludens consistently managed to floor me with their generosity of time, energy and creativity – not only in the physical/digital things they produced, but also the extent to which they developed the various narratives and characterisations within the project. How can that effort be harnessed to other goals?
…the pyramid of participation. The power law curve. 80% of your “players” won’t DO anything except casually look at it or poke at it. That’s how ALL social media works. 1% of your players will do 90% of the active “gameplay”. Which isn’t really gameplay by the way, it’s social media creation (wikis, forums, videos, etc.) So when you imagine your great big player base, be realisit [sic]. Don’t try to make social media work like a game. Social media thrives on superusers, not the base, not the typical user.
Is it possible to regard all the Ludens as the Emergent Game power users? Maybe.
We had several players get enthused at the workshops only to never be heard of again. Some players we know dropped out because of work commitments, others because they were intimidated by Twitter, others probably lost interest or decided it wasn’t for them. Generally though, those that took part during the Game phase were very committed.
Power users and the value of spectatorship
Having spoken a lot with Markuz about modes of participation it was important to me that Emergent Game made official provision for an acknowledgement of those who wanted to participate just by watching. We tried to leave the barrier between Sapiens (spectator) and Ludens (player) as permeable as possible with opportunities for Sapiens to get involved although, this pretty much didn’t happen.
A phenomenal amount of my time was spent catering for the Sapiens by way of the daily commentary and @TheLudensShow. Although we didn’t have anyone comment on the website, web stats and secondary write-ups did justify this effort to an extent. By its nature, degree of engagement with Sapiens is a tricky one to judge.
At this point I’m still undecided about whether what grows out of Emergent Game should try to be all-inclusive and cater to the ‘typical user’ that Jane alludes to or embrace the power user and the ‘elitism’ that comes with that. I still stand by “Strive to achieve modest connections” from Counsel as a quality-rather-than-quantity approach but I suppose the final verdict depends on the particular context for which you are trying to use the game. Sometimes elitism can be good, right?
Collective Intelligence and real world problems
I now firmly believe the “game” needs to be about something real. Pick a real mystery or problem and do a real investigation and give players social platforms like ARG players use, and have puppet masters oversee the pacing/tempo of the investigation, giving feedback and showcasing excellent play/work.
Although we tried to foster a spirit of Collective Intelligence with some of the resource-mapping type missions within Emergent Game, the closest we got to dabbling in it was with the second reconnaissance mission to map free internet access.
We needed to do this in order to assess what options were open to us for the main game play later, but this rather rapidly became interpreted from outside as being a “free WiFi in Birmingham” challenge. We weren’t too happy with this, even though the mission did partially come from awareness of a particular context in Birmingham.
As it happens, a request came through from Sapiens Nick Booth:
I’d love it if the ludens could add anygeo tagged images to this flickr group set up a while back
This group map had three images on it before the Ludens came along and added a few. There was also a similar story for several other Brum WiFi mapping attempts we came across: there was obviously a need for this information to be pulled together, but when it came down to it no one had knuckled down to produce it.
Although Recon2 all but killed off our pre-game, in the end I think we did quite well, comparatively.
Is this just because we had an elite team of superusers, or down to working within the motivational framework of a game?
Misc
Other phrases from the post and posters I could go into in more detail – but I won’t right now – are:
“Engage people in public space”
“Player ownership”
“Entertainment” (- important because people are giving up their free time)
“Children and ARGs” (- more on that in the Lost Sport post I’ll write next)
“giving feedback and showcasing excellent play/work.”
“have an actual IP people care about” (- can you use a game to make people care about something?)
“but it’s ART” (- we had real problems with the art community not seeing Emergent Game as art – mostly it was the educationalists and the social media types who really got excited about it)
“I don’t want the core experience to be conversation, I want to it to be action and post-action storytelling.”
Probably I’ll be coming back to most of these later (in posts with rather more photos and videos, I promise!).
I work in the grey areas between and across Art, Science and Technology, instigating enquiry-led processes that are
often highly participatory in nature. This website is where I track the projects I'm involved in and the things that feed
into and sprout off from my work.
"Genzaichi" (audio clip for pronunciation) resonates strongly with my work which often tackles underlying themes of how we respond to and interact
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