All Play

Melbourne Ukulele Collective

2012-08-05T11:13:00.000+01:00

List Your Top Five Anything

2012-08-05T10:54:00.001+01:00

A front window in Carlton Melbourne that asked you to post a list of your top 5 anything through the letterbox; they are then displayed in the window.

Jimmy Stewart on tour

2012-03-01T15:39:00.004Z

photo by Natalie Walter of Exposure LiveThe play what I wrote with the very long title - Jimmy Stewart, An Anthropologist From Mars, Analyses Love And Happiness In Humans (And Rabbits) - is starting to tour, in a delightfully ad-hoc fashion that entirely suits its informal nature, hosted by friends in all kinds of places. More details soon. And possibly more tour dates.BIRMINGHAMWed 21st March,

An academic nightmare

2012-02-01T20:02:00.002Z

Papa Sangre, a game I helped make, has been analysed by Andrew Hugill at De Montfort University in terms of its audio composition. It's delightful to see something you made through such an academic lens. The following comment, a wonderfully formal admission of fear, reminds me of M.R. James.The sense of danger is surprisingly realistic, especially given the compromises in verisimilitude that are

Hole In The Wall

2012-01-05T15:30:00.000Z

one machine talks, the other is silent

2011-12-31T17:11:00.003Z

I've set up a few VOIP phone numbers which record incoming voicemails as sound files and then email them onwards. Every so often, these numbers get called by bots doing automated market research. It takes a little while for the bot to register that there is no human response. This is a recording of that little while.thevoicethattellsyouyouhavenonewmessages (mp3)

The experience of an event...

2011-12-29T17:24:00.002Z

It's become somewhat of a cliché for me to say this - get it in Bullshit Bingo any time I'm doing any kind of public speaking - but I've been owing a post on the origins of this to Andrew Haydon for nearly a year now. So here goes.The experience of an event begins for its audience when they first hear about it and only finishes when they stop thinking and talking about it.In making the kind of

Ganesh Versus The Third Reich

2011-12-29T14:21:00.002Z

In near impossible-to-judge review category of favouriteculturething, there have been many contenders on which I may write more anon. Two stay headlocked.In one corner, the dazzling behemoth of Infinite Jest, which has been the reading experience of my life, measured out in tea spoons across five months, two continents, and six conversations started by strangers purely because they saw I was

O Walshy

2011-12-29T13:07:00.003Z

Click to download the rest of it.

MONA

2011-12-29T12:03:00.002Z

MONA is an extraordinary place, an art gallery that is a Pharoah's tomb meets a Bond villain's complex. And I mean those both literally. It's hollowed out inside a hill beneath a vineyard. The vineyard was bought in 1995 by a local gambling savant: David Walsh. Walshy is Hobart's benevolent anti-Bond. He has an Aspergian mathematical ability, and heads a syndicate banned from most casinos around

Zen Moment

2011-12-26T19:29:00.007Z

The story behind this one, you'll have to imagine. Or ask me.

Review Of The Year

2011-12-26T19:29:00.001Z

Last December, I met for a drink with one of my oldest and bestest friends, Jimmy Smooth. We hadn't seen each other for way too long. There were very many stories to share. So we invented what isn't so much a game as a conversation format: the Review of the Year. One person decides an award category - like Best Surprise - and describes what would be awarded - like a jack-in-the-box with your own

Love this

2011-04-03T19:25:00.001+01:00

I recommend watching while wearing good headphones (and drinking a good cup of tea).

Humbled by serendipity

2011-02-14T13:11:00.002Z

On my way last night to a meeting re The Loveliness Principle with Rhiannon and Rachael, its two brilliant co-makers; running late as ever. Debated whether to get a taxi as I was so late, but walked to the first bus stop. Ages for a bus, so walked on to the High Street, no cab firms in sight, down to the next bus stop, bus suddenly appeared and due in a minute.But then a man appears asking for

Five years ago (almost)

2011-01-16T20:09:00.002Z

Walking along the South Bank today I paused by a jetty that juts into the Thames. Five years ago (almost) it was one station in an adventure on Valentine's night that I was involved in making, a night of almost alchemical serendipity: nobody died; they made the boat in the nick of time; it was a mild, clear and moonlit February night; three pairs of people met and fell in (some kind of) love;

The Challenge of Conventions

2010-09-18T14:47:00.003+01:00

I'm winded by that last post, so this one is now a series of bullet-points that I hope to expand upon later.This is a post that Annette Mees, one of my fellow co-directors in Coney, asked of me towards the upcoming pilot of Art Heist.Flow Theory was reverse-engineered by Cziksentmihalyi from the question 'what are you doing now and how happy are you doing it'.If you picture a graph with the

Papa Bound Conventions

2010-09-18T14:30:00.003+01:00

I spoke last week at the Media Arts Festival at the Roundhouse, on a panel on games chaired by Clare Reddington chair of the Pervasive Media Studio, alongside Margaret Robertson all-round game-egg of Hide & Seek, and Alice Taylor fab digital-game-commissioner for C4 Education, a splendid line-up to be asked into.I spoke on Papa Sangre, a game I'm making for the iPhone alongside a brillliant array

Make Believe by Jimmy Stewart

2010-07-13T18:44:00.004+01:00

I was asked along to deliver a 5-minute provocation to Wonderlab today, and posting the essay here by request.--------------------------Hello, I’m Tassos Stevens. I’m a co-director and runner of Coney, an agency making play where it’s all about you, founded on principles of adventure, loveliness and reciprocity, amongst others.But I am not here to talk about that. Actually I’ve brought along

Horses for Courses

2010-06-10T16:19:00.002+01:00

This is a placeholder for a full post I should write about different digital platforms and how and why people use them.This arising from a discussion on Twitter with @ellinson and @matttrueman (and I am @tassosstevens)

999999

2010-06-07T00:12:00.001+01:00

The most famous sequence of numbers in pi is the Feynman Point which comprises the 762nd through 767th decimal places of pi '...999999'. It is named after the physicist Richard Feynman for his remark that he would like to memorise the digits of pi as far as that point; when reciting them, he would be able to finish with '...nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, and so on'. The Feynman Point is

WorldCupLondon

2010-05-21T14:35:00.002+01:00

It's the World Cup. And maybe no better place outside South Africa to watch it than London, where every nation of the world lives somewhere, and so it's always possible to find that somewhere showing any game to the people who really give a shit about the result.Some of my most memorable ball-watching experiences have been thus - an Italian bar in Soho erupting as they stole the game from Nigeria

Nostalgia, perfectly formed

2010-05-20T18:54:00.000+01:00

North/South

2010-05-02T00:31:00.003+01:00

I flew east from London on Thursday afternoon.The plane looped north of Iceland to avoid any ash 15000 feet beneath, then over northern Greenland, waves of brilliant white slashed by black rock, this view North.It then swept over Canada and down the Rockies before bumping down into Los Angeles on Thursday evening, just as the sun was setting.A couple of hours in a transit room and we took off

Please come to the Opera House, Langtry

2010-04-20T10:14:00.003+01:00

Out in Texas on a road-trip, I drove west as far as Langtry, as far as I dared before I had to turn again to reach Austin in time. It was a dot on the map next to the Rio Grande. And when I got there, here's what I found.At the end of the 19th century, Langtry was ruled by Judge Roy Bean. 'I am the law west of the Pecos River', declared Judge Bean to the rest of the USA. His courthouse doubled as

Time, it's a funny thing

2010-04-11T14:17:00.005+01:00

I did a Peachy Coochy - the live art world's version of Pecha Kucha - on request of Tipping Point last summer as part of a night of reflections on climate change. A friend just requested I share words and pictures, so all follow.---------------------------------I've never done a Peachy Coochy before. I was invited a week ago to do this one. I did a first burst of writing for it last Friday. Then