Taste the Game went really well yesterday and I’ve had loads of positive feedback, which is always nice.
Jumping straight in to planning the next one for the 29th though, so here’s a simple slideshow of my photos and video on the basis that it’ll tell you as much as any words I can put together right now will…
A big thank you to everyone to contributed and took part.
Over the last month I’ve been project managing a commission from the Midlands Arts Centre to deliver 2 pervasive games based events as part of their free summer programme.
Working together with the BARG network and a handful of more seasoned games designers based in London, we’ve put together an afternoon of games and activities for this Sunday that is intended to serve as an introduction to pervasive games.
There are more details about the event and what will be on offer on the BARG website, but basically what you need to know is that it’s free, will run from 2-4 (info desk open from 1:30) and it’s going to be great fun!
As well as the project management side of coordinating a team of eleven across different cities and also liaising with the venue, it’s been interesting spotting where little arty bits have come into it.
The main game of the afternoon, Bull Hunt, needed the construction of a bull’s head mask. A fairly obviously arty activity and one I quite enjoyed doing – I was working quite closely from photos of the bull sculpture outside the BullRing in Birmingham city centre and it was good to have to think in a sculptural way again.
Anyway, you know me, so the really interesting part came last Tuesday when it got it’s first public outing…
Sat with it next to me on one of the sofas in the mac, I found myself constantly talking to strangers. People asking what it was for, spotting what it was modelled on, asking how it was made. There was a fab ‘WOW!’ from a little girl too!
There were also some good conversations with members of staff – we’ve been holding various meetings in the building and I’ve been making sure I speak to the floor managers etc wherever possible. I love the way that novelty objects can so easily mediate interactions.
So, reaction to the bull as a mask was good, but reaction to it as a costume with someone inside it was even better! Thanks to Pete, Ant and Libby for all being game to give it a go.
We got some good photographs and also made a quick video to promote the game:
Bull on a bike.
Have you seen this bull? from BARG on Vimeo.
I generally struggle to find licence free music to use as backing for the videos I make, sites like opsound tending to be a bit too electronic for my purposes. This time however I came across this collection from Kevin MacLeod. Short pieces in different styles just right for testing your resolve in editing down your footage to a minute or two!
Throughout the process of putting this event together it’s also been interesting (sorry I keep using that word, but I wouldn’t want to get stuff written down if it wasn’t!) looking at how I’ve been looking at the space. The mac recently underwent a huge renovation project to the extent that it’s basically a new environment, significantly different to what it was like before. However, I’ve only ever seen the new mac through the eyes of someone planning an event there. What space would be good for what sort of activity? How are people moving through this area? What are the acoustics like here? Where can I put 60 helium balloons and a trestle table?
I’ve been at the mac loads now, but never once stopped to look at the art in the galleries or to check what’s on at the cinema! Different. Eyes.
Another month to go (we’re doing a second event on the 29th of August) and then we’ll see what it looks like after that. I suspect it’ll be another area filled in on the “Own this City” map I’m slowly constructing of places in Birmingham I feel I have some sort of ownership over after having played games there.
On Monday, Public Historian made a request:
Can someone recommend (or, oh my, “curate”) the most awesome/vital/important things to come out of #museumnext? Too much information.http://twitter.com/publichistorian/status/5180816482
On Tuesday, @MuseumNext asked a question:
Does the Cathedral and the Bazaar apply to museums? – http://bit.ly/AkIgzhttp://twitter.com/MuseumNext/status/5196698213
The wikipedia article that @MuseumNext links to includes a list of 19 steps to creating good open source software. My response to this was that I was excited by the prospect of a similar list for open museums.
We rattled off 19 steps that, for the most part, swapped in museum terminology for the software design terms. When I first started writing this post on Tuesday afternoon, it was with the intention of digging a bit deeper to check that what we had here wasn’t just some diverting wordplay. I thought I’d supplement each step with references to things that were discussed at the MuseumNext event and it would nicely serve as a redux for Suzanne and others who weren’t able to attend.
Anyway, it didn’t quite work out like that. We really did cover a lot of stuff at the event and most of it was brainstorming in small groups – so even the attendees only have a small part of the overall picture of what happened there.
I gave up on this post for a bit, but I’ve not managed to bring myself to delete it. The thing is, these steps are just too relevant to my work and I feel I need them in the system (equivalent of pinning them up on the wall by a desk) as a reminder as to what’s important for a meaningful participatory approach. So, I’m going to press the publish button after all…
Apologies to Suzanne that this isn’t the nice summary we had both hoped for, but also an invitation for people to chip in with their thoughts. Maybe we can yet use these 19 steps as a framework about which to curate awesome/vital/important things. The comments are yours…
Over the day and a half of MuseumNext I met a lot of people who are very passionate about a whole range of different things. We know this is the driving force behind good projects.
We also saw examples of projects that scratched itchy participants: for example Advice: Give it, Get it, Flip it, Fuck it and the Living Library. Maybe a combination of the two is the driving force behind great projects?
@MuseumNext included the caveat “works if you say everyone is a curator”.
I’m going to reference the original essay “it’s almost always easier to start from a good partial solution than from nothing at all.”
After Nina‘s presentation on the Friday morning, someone asked where was a good place to find out more about awesome projects – Nina’s blog being an obvious place to start.
I’ve done nothing much more than dip my toes into the world of museum/exhibition design, but I’m aware of a number of people in that area blogging and reporting back on inspiring projects. There also needs to be a place where we can celebrate and openly discuss our failures too (there may be such a place already, either online, or in the form of face-to-face exchanges such as MuseumNext) so we can learn from our, and others’, mistakes. I tried to do this with my How to Wow series of posts and I know it’s not necessarily easy, but it reaps its rewards later down the line.
In our group discussing the Exhibition Gaming wild idea, we kept coming back to the belief that institutions starting to work with games-based projects should think in terms of a programme of games-based projects to give the institution an opportunity to learn and develop.
We also commented that our sessions had generated a lot of questions and that it would be unrealistic to try and answer them all in one project. Choose a few key questions, design for those, then incorporate the successes into the next project.
Again, from the text of the original essay: “starting over with the right idea is usually more effective than trying to salvage a mess”. [reference]
I’m using the work “projects” rather than “exhibitions”. “Project” seems to imply more of an evolutional development to me. Maybe there’s an exhibition along the way (I’m resisting saying “at the end”)? Maybe that exhibition has changed form a couple of times?
How often do the audience get to nominate the project?
I’m curious. How long do museum projects last for? Long enough to sometimes need to find a successor for them?
I also can’t help but think that there’s something in the notion that curators are handing over a participatory project to the audience and that a) the audience/participants should therefore be fully equipped with the skills and resources to get the most from the project and b) the curator should see themselves as only being the first in a line of custodians.
Throughout the MuseumNext event there seemed to me to be a recurring theme of institutions having to learn how to relinquish control.
I particularly like participants-as-co-developers as a method of giving co-ownership to the project.
This, to me, implies testing. In my role as game designer, that equals play-testing. I’m learning to play-test components, rather than build it up into a nearly finished whole before I test it. Testing unrefined bits of things makes it easier to throw stuff out. See the section of the “Cooperation and Engagement: What can board games teach us?” video below from about 8 minutes in for an example:
“If you try to polish a prototype too early, you become married to it, and you don’t want to make changes…”
This reminds me of tales told by Alternate Reality Game designers who spend ages devising the most fiendish puzzles imaginable, only to watch as the players’ hive mind strips it bare in 20 minutes!
The original “smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around” reminded me of Nina’s diagrams from her presentation:
Institution as content provider ...or as platform provider?
I’m not sure I can add anything more to those two. Maybe the typewriter for comments is a nice illustration of valuing your participants.
*nods*
Can you substitute the word “communication” for “design”? What are the implications for that?
This is how smart platforms enable users to steer around dumb content.
It’s also one of the key reasons that I work in the way that I do – it’s so much more interesting to set something in motion and then allow participants to take it somewhere you never dreamed of. Be flexible and responsive when this happens.
(Original: When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!)
I used some creative license in interpreting this one – mostly riffing off the idea of gateways…
In our games group we talked a bit about providing multiple entry points into a project. Nina also talked about offering multiple engagement points and not focusing solely on creators.
Rather than saying to make entry points as easy as possible though, I think there are cases for providing either a grain of sand to needle at what might otherwise be a no-thought-required entry (fairly literal example, the Would you go to Mars doorway to the Facing Mars exhibition), or to make entry a challenge or a thrill (Ref: Another Exclusivity Paradox: Secret Gardens, Hidden Museums). Thus making entry points just difficult enough and no harder than that.
I’m mostly thinking of a comment made by someone in our group who flagged up that there was often a language barrier between institutions and that terms could have very different meanings to different organisations. I might also be thinking of grumblings in response to this post about the Ashmolean in Oxford.
Particularly with reference to games and not having everything immediately apparent after the first glance, but also the Another Exclusivity Paradox: Secret Gardens, Hidden Museums mentioned above.
Motivation, motivation, motivation.
Use the communications medium that’s most natural to your intended audience.
Have you got anything more you’d like to add? What thoughts do these spark off for you?
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):
@alexhughes, @benjibrum, @graphiquillan, @haling, @lauraehall, @mookstudios, @soba_girl.
A very big thank you to all involved!
… we interrupt our planned schedule of strategies for progressive education to bring you this post about finding somewhere nice to sit down…
Right now I’m surrounded by people who are great at clustering together with other people to Make Stuff Happen. Some do it in their spare time outside their work, for others it is their work. All the time I’m hearing of people coming up against potentially plan-scuppering hurdles when they get to the stage of finding the appropriate space.
We spent months trawling around trying to find somewhere suitable for fizzPOP and now BARG‘s having a hard time to find a venue for a planned BARGcamp. On some occasions the solution has been for me to invite people into my home so we had a place to do stuff.
And that’s just my own experiences. Multiply that by everyone else who’s trying to organise events, meetings and coworking sessions and I think it’s fair to say that a lot of time and energy is being wasted on venue-finding when it could be spent on something more productive. We need to get more joined-up about this to save on all the leg-work.
Efforts have been made before in various places: Paradise Circus started a venues page, there have been attempts at mapping free wi-fi in Birmingham and it damn near killed off the first Emergent Game when I set players the mission of locating free internet access near them.
The free availability of Wi-Fi is often important, especially in the case of coworking, but there are other factors as well, including, but not limited to:
I suspect the intricacies of being able to list the features of different spaces in an easily contribute-to-able way and to allow for people to add comments giving information on more subjective aspects of different spaces will require something custom made. In the meantime though, we need to do a bit of work to figure out what exactly this tool is that we need.
(protovation means I expect this to be not quite right, but when we find out why it’s not quite right we’ll know what Round Two has to be…)
I’ve rustled up a quick google spreadsheet with some of the things that people have already indicated they would like to know about potential spaces. You can either edit the spreadsheet directly, or you can use the form. (The form is also at the end of this post.)
Please can you help me put information about useful spaces in this form?
The idea is that the information should be useful, but we’re also sort of trying to break the form by finding things that don’t quite fit (that’s why I’ve started off with interstice). It’s started off with a coworking brum bias, but once we get that nailed we can start expanding it out.
Please check the spreadsheet first to see if the venue has already been added. If it has, then feel free to add any extra information; if it hasn’t then please start a new entry. If you haven’t got all the information, don’t worry – someone else can come along later and fill in the gaps. If you need a new space for a different type of information, just add a new column. It would also be nice if you could edit the form to include the new column, but failing that, just leave a note here and I’ll do it.
If you’ve found something that breaks the system in any way, please also add a comment on this post so we can learn from it.
Here are those links again:
spreadsheet
form
hashtag: #catel
This post has been brewing for several days now and has just been tipped into existence by the latest post on Museum 2.0 about deliberately unsustainable business models. Other kindling includes: this comment from 2007 where I suggest some metallurgical references for renaming structural holes; Pete Aston’s tweet about being comfortable with the idea that he’ll be doing something completely different come 2015; and the job titles I variously use to describe to people what I do which include “transdisciplinary independent person”, “investigator” and “interstitial”.
We are the Interstitials is a metaphor based on principles of interstitial solutes in metals.
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.
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