Last week saw more work on Saba, with Karel and Hanne making a first playable prototype. I got to play it together with Erwin and the direction seemed promising. So we documented it and shared it with the client and got some enthusiastic responses from them. Erwin also walked through the museum and mapped the WiFi signals in all its rooms. The file should help Alper figure out if we can do indoor localization. The next step is to develop the design and art further and present it, then move on to a first playtest in the museum with our target audience.

Together with Irene I prepared for my talk on Pig Chase at Interaction12. We also published the next installment of our series of posts on the game’s design process.

I also met with Ianus and Alexander to discuss a new This happened event taking place in Amsterdam, which we’ve since announced.

I finished the week with a trip to Berlin where I participated in the Global Game Jam together with Alper, Hessel, Karel and Niels. Making a game in 48 hours is an endeavor fit for the insane but we came together nicely as a group, had fun, hardly slept, got to see something of the city and made a game that was at least mildly interesting. It’s called Nakatomi Rider and you can download it and play it if you have a Mac, a PS3 controller and a friend to join you.¹

1. There’s a great report of our adventure by Niels over at Bashers.

I spent some time early this week with Frank to discuss productional details for the games I selected for Tweetakt Festival. It’s always interesting figuring out what the most suitable way of presenting interactive work is. Later this week, the program was announced and I posted a quick overview of what you’ll be able to play. A few more might be added to this list.

Pig Chase got some more attention from domestic media this week with a nice article in Dutch newspaper NRC.¹ I also worked with Irene on reviewing the first set of blog posts I’d written and planning more, which I will hopefully get around to writing at the start of next week.

On the Saba front: Hanne, Karel and I visited the museum and received a tour from the museum’s educator of the room we’ll be initially designing for, an awesome cabinet of curiosities. We spent time doing preliminary design and I did some more project management type things (budgets, planning, etc.)

I also worked with Karel on getting the materials for Galaxy Tours ready for their final touches. And I sat down and wrote a first draft of the rules, which is always a challenge. Writing clear rules is hard.

In between all this I managed to discuss preparations for the next This happened with Alexander and Ianus (stay tuned for the announcement in a few weeks). The group chat for our Global Game Jam Berlin posse was also abuzz with discussions about how to best set up Unity for rapid development and group collaboration. And Arjen published a nice article on his experience working on Katsuo.

And finally, at the end of today, I ran another playtest of Hamachi, a party game I’m making with Tim Bosje. I was pleasantly surprised by the response it got. We’ve identified a few rules changes and will do another round of testing, and then it might just be ready for writing, graphic design and publishing. We already made plans for the next game.

1. I did receive a bit too much credit in this article. From reading it you might conclude I am the sole designer of the game, which is not the case. At least as much credit goes to my colleagues Irene and Hein.

• Fingle by Game Oven; like Twister for your fingers with a Barry White feel.
• Hokra by Ramiro Corbetta; two-versus-two player minimalist digital sports game with more depth than you’d think.
• Johann Sebastian Joust by Die Gute Fabrik; a deceptively simple physical game set to music by Bach that makes inventive use of PlayStation Move controllers.
• Room Racers by Lieven van Velthoven; racing game played on a course made with physical object placed on the ground.

You’ll notice all of these are multiplayer games, and many have an openness to them that allows for inventiveness and creativity from players. That’s a sort of theme that emerged while working on the selection with the folks at Tweetakt. It’s very different from last year, which involved many installations.¹

These will all be playable from March 23 to April 1 on the Neude square in Utrecht, the Netherlands. If you manage to visit Tweetakt, I hope you’ll enjoy playing.

1. That’s not a value judgement, just a shift of interest on our side.

The last post on Katsuo was about the very early stages of the project, and a lot has happened since. It wasn’t an easy run, but then again I never expected it to be, as we had some ambitious demands for the project. We wanted it to use time travel as a meaningful part of the gameplay, not really an easy mechanic to design. We also intended it to use various aspects of live action roleplaying while the game was meant for players who usually don’t do roleplaying games. This meant that the rules should provide sufficient handles for inexperienced roleplayers, yet offer enough of the freedom that I feel defines LARP.

After doing research on time travel mechanics, I started designing and testing a lot of different ways to play with time travelling and chronology. I had decided to leave the roleplaying aspects a bit more in the background for the first prototypes and tried to get my hands on a way to make people feel like time travelling through gameplay first.

Testing concepts over and over again, some playing cards were hurt in the making of this game I'm afraid.

This resulted in a lot of quick prototypes, of which most were more complicated than I desired them to be, but actually making people have the experience of playing with time proved to be hard. Even more so because the game was to be played on the streets, without a professional game master, as is the usual way with urban games and especially live roleplaying games.

For a player to have that experience of playing with time we had to make the game evolve while it is being played without the players doing that themselves. They had to feel like something magical was happening. I played around with different ways to achieve this without a game master, resulting in various concepts: We tested a game where players managed energy bricks and after a certain amount of playtime went back to the start of the game and changed what had been done, making them change actions and outcome of earlier plays. I also did many tests for an idea where players changed historical story-lines for better or for worse, but this proved to be hard to put into effective gameplay. I tried to work with allowing players to get certain objects needed for the game from the future, which would commit them to send those to their past selves when that future has come, much like the game of Temporal Chess that I played when I started this project.

This illustrates how complicated some of the tests quickly got.

I also tried games which focused more on roleplaying, like a game where players would force other players to play out certain scenes and in this way change a general storyline to win. Or a game where players would play the same scene or happening a couple of times, changing it every play-through, much like a puzzle where you go back in time until you know how to change the events that will take place. But with all these games I ran into the same problem. Once they got close to bringing a genuine feeling of really playing with the past or future, they had to become (or already were) rather complex to hit that spot.

So after many tests, we decided to go with a game in which time travel is more of a narrative element rather than a gameplay one. Each player was assigned a character who is a time traveller from the past or future and had gotten in this particular time by accident. In order to have the time vortex return them home they had to recreate the circumstances that had made it appear in the first place. They had to re-enact five scenes on different locations at a set time. These were described only briefly, for example, “a secret deal was made near a bridge.” This made the game a roleplaying adventure through the city, while looking for the next suitable location on a tight time schedule.

To make things more interesting however, every character had a secret agenda and didn’t want to return to their own time at all. To manipulate the time they would be sent back to, they had secret objectives which they would have to perform while enacting the scenes. These were linked to their character. For example: Dracula had to make someone scream, and another character, an impersonator of Shakespeare, had to get someone to quote from a theatre play.

I think the combination of characters from different timezones roleplaying in the middle of the street in Utrecht resulted in a very interesting game. There are tweaks to be made to the game for a next play-through and I would certainly change some of the rules. But after going through a lot of concepts and trying so many forms of gameplay, for now Katsuo has came to a satisfying conclusion.

The studio schedule for this week was packed, various appointments for different projects involving a diverse configuration of people. I also had a speaking engagement lined up for Thursday, at Eurosonic Noorderslag. That still needed some prep and the plan was to do that in between the other stuff.

Of course, I had to fall ill with a nasty head cold halfway through the week.

Nevertheless, I managed to prepare the slides while nursing myself at home on Wednesday and jumped on a train northbound on Thursday. The talk – a romp through various reasons why I think play is important, what makes games special, and what wonderful things they can do – went well, but didn’t get the exposure I was hoping for. So I think I’ll shelf it for another go and some redevelopment at a next occasion.¹

I also got to hang out with the fun and clever Matthew Sheret before and after the talk, and saw Monobanda’s DIY DJ get some well-deserved exposure.

On Friday I was still recovering, managed to get some work done but stopped early. So I am finishing up on a Saturday afternoon now.

Other than this, I worked with Irene on a number of blog posts we’re writing about Pig Chase’s design process. The first one, a brief anecdote of how the idea for the project first emerged is already up.

While on the subject of Pig Chase, we got another round of nice publicity this week, with articles on Boing Boing, io9 and Huffington Post, amongst others.

I also worked with Hanne, Alper and Karel on Saba. It was our first proper design session so there was a lot of hand-waving, discussing the brief, sketching and even a round of the Metagame to flex our game-debating muscles. We’ve made plans for some field research, which will happen next week.

Alper’s also looking into various iOS game development technologies, and helped me out with finding a tool to map the WiFi signals in the museum, which we might use for indoor positioning.²

By the way, Alper wrote a brief note on his move to Berlin and his plans for a Hubbub satellite studio there.

So, crisis averted. Let’s hope next week unfolds in a slightly more orderly fashion.

1. My mention of how Hubbub is organized, something we call the Heist Model, did get some nice response though.
2. It looks like Netspot will do the trick.

For reasons both personal and professional I have relocated to Berlin to start afresh in that great Athens on the Spree. Berlin is seeing a resurgence of digital/creative activity that is garnering quite a lot of attention not to mention speculation. Let the reasons for that be what they are, what matters to us is that it is a proper metropolis with both opportunity and urgency for playful experiences.

Having just arrived, the help of (friends of) friends¹ has been invaluable to get started quickly. The temporary office space, knowledge of the local bureaucracies and the connections made, that would otherwise have taken months of attending meetups in shady bars, have all been invaluable. I am surprised how seamless the transition from a city in one country to another can be with our professional communications and culture homogenized by the internet.

Picture by Edial Dekker

Last week, my first week in Berlin in earnest, has been focused on looking for office space and getting some work done that had been left because of the move and the holidays. The start of the week I spent doing a thorough traversal of Berlin’s coworking spaces² and these last couple of days have been more productive working at the center of most things digital here, the Betahaus.

Setting up shop for Hubbub as well as my other professional affiliations, I’m looking for a shared studio³ to go to every morning, where I can have a desk and where I can put my screen and books. This place would be preferably located somewhere in or near Kreuzberg. I have some promising leads, but if you can add to those, do get in touch.

In time we are planning to expand into a location where a handful of people can work on projects in a comfortable fashion. The Berlin studio will always remain tightly connected to the Utrecht mothership, but it should be able to operate autonomously in the same loose fashion that most of our collaboration takes place. A colony on another planet, if you will, though right now Berlin is a bit more hospitable than Mars.

With regard to connections, I have met up with the local indie game developers during a previous visit and Hubbub will be out in force for the Global Game Jam Berlin at the end of this month. Even though I am a debutant in that particular format, we hope to present a respectable showing with the help of some more experienced team members. I am particularly interested in meeting people busy with games for social/organizational change in Germany and comparing notes with what works and what doesn’t. But if you are otherwise interested in playful experiences to get people to engage and create I would of course also love to get in touch⁴.

1. Just to name Third Wave, Gidsy, Hybrid Plattform, Mozilla besides many more.
2. I visited Studio 70, Wostel, Weserland, Pulsraum, Nest, Co-up, Tante Renate and Betahaus.
3. The transience of coworking is not that appealing to me though I have founded and helped manage several coworking spaces in the Netherlands.
4. Email alper@ this domain.

This is week 126 of Hubbub’s public existence, since first mention of it in a blog post on Leapfroglog.

After a rather quiet first workday of the year mostly involving rather uninteresting administrative duties, thinks kicked off properly on Tuesday. I sat down and wrote texts for the Tweetakt festival guide, about the games I’ve selected for the playful exhibition. I think I’ll keep these to myself for now, but I can say things will be quite different from last year, with lots of multiplayer options, and interestingly enough many more screen-based games (hadn’t planned for that).

On Wednesday I mainly occupied myself with work on my talk for Noorderslag next week, and also a little bit of work on my talk for LIFT (which I thankfully have a bit more time for).

Yesterday (Thursday) I was joined by Karel to work on Galaxy Tours, the game heretofore codenamed Iruka that we’re making for Noordhoff about astronomy. It’s a team-based boardgame that can be used in the classroom to substitute for a traditional lecture. We’re nearing the finish line on this one, just a few final game design issues resulting from a playtest that need to be taken care of, plus some polish on the graphic design and we can deliver it to the client.

I also met with the Universiteitsmuseum (the Utrecht University’s local science museum) to discuss planning of Saba, a game we’re making for families visiting the museum. The project team for this, consisting of Karel, Hanne and Alper, will kick off next week. I’ve also interviewed a possible candidate for production assistance on this project, as I could use some help with planning, monitoring and logistics.

Today I was planning to work with Tim on Hamachi (a party game we’ll self-publish), but he has fallen ill so we’re postponing that for the moment.

In stead, I will make use of the extra time to put some more thought in my Noorderslag talk.

I have a number of talks both short and long lined up for the first few months of this year. Let me run them down for you:

• I’ll present a talk titled ‘The Game Has Changed’ – about the role of play in society and its meaning for creative disciplines – at Eurosonic Noorderslag.
• At Interaction12 I’ll do a short case report together with Irene van Peer on Pig Chase.
• I’ll do another case report, this one on Koppelkiek, at Social Cities of Tomorrow.
• And finally, I’m honored to be speaking at LIFT12 as part of the session on ‘The New Face of Gaming’ alongside Hide & Seek‘s Tom Armitage.

Somewhere in between all this, myself and a remarkable group of individuals I am lucky enough to collaborate with on a regular basis will head to Berlin to participate in the Global Game Jam.

Not a bad start of the year, right?

January – We start development on Code 4, a game for organizational change commissioned by the Dutch Tax Administration. It is codenamed Maguro.

February – I head to Cognitive Cities in Berlin which turns out to be an excellent experience. I stay in a Kreuzkölln apartment with Alper and Alexander and manage to take in quite a bit of what makes this city so appealing.

March – Tweetakt Festival takes place, featuring an exhibition of playful interactive work that I was asked to curate. We also run a This happened with talks on the works on display. This is also the month The Village opens, a new coffee place that becomes an instant favorite of mine.

April – We finish work on Code 4 after a successful pilot run and deliver it to the client. By this time Niels has written a lovely triptych of blog posts on what it feels like to work on the game.

May – I go to Manchester for FutureEverything and present New Games for New Cities.

June – A three-week tour of Japan makes for the perfect break from work and also provides me with a massive jolt of inspiration, culinary and otherwise.

July – Summer in the Netherlands means not much of anything gets done.

August – We bid FourceLabs, who we’ve been sharing a studio with since July 2010, farewell and move to a space of our own in the Dutch Game Garden. This involves replacing the floor, which turns out to be more of a challenge than anticipated.

September – A new project for Noordhoff codenamed Iruka starts. I also present The Transformers at dConstruct, and talk about both Pig Chase and Code 4 at the DiGRA conference Think Design Play.

October – Work continues on Iruka, punctuated by attending Playful in London which does not fail to please (and I don’t just say that because they put me in the site header).

November – We playtest Iruka and we start work on a promotional video for Code 4 (which at the moment of writing is nearing completion).

December – We have a party to celebrate the new studio. The concept video for Pig Chase is published.

Iruka and the Code 4 promotional video will bleed over into the new year. We’re also getting ready to start work on Saba, a game for a local museum. Other than that there are tons of plans for the next year, so I look forward to it with much excitement. Which leaves me with saying thanks for reading, I hope you’ll keep following us in 2012 and happy holidays!

Today I’m excited to be able to share the video sketch we made as a first step towards this game.

You can watch a larger version of the video on Vimeo.

We’re making a game for several reasons. On the one hand, it allows you to experience questions related to the subject of pig farming first hand. Questions such as: are pigs intelligent animals? Is farming pigs for meat cruel? And so on. The other thing a game can do is transform how you relate to pigs. We’re exploring a new relationship, one that takes elements from how we deal with animals in the farm, the circus and the home.

The video sketch of Pig Chase is our way of putting the design of the game out there, to see how the world at large responds to it.

The choice for light as a medium is the result of a systematic exploration of what kinds of stimuli pigs respond to. We were aware of some evidence indicating pigs enjoy light. But when we saw how they reacted to a laser pointer, we knew we were on to something.

In case you’re wondering: yes, the plan is to actually build this thing. That’s the next step.

I’m looking forward to exploring the forms of play this system affords. I’m also keen on experimenting more with the idea of a symmetrical play space, and forms of play that are actually cognitively challenging to pigs. On the human side I am mostly fascinated by intimacy with an animal that is actually quite remote.

For more details, including full credits of everyone involved, refer to the official Playing with Pigs project website. There’s also a press release available, and a set of high resolution images.

Finally, I’d like to highlight the amazing work done by my collaborators: Irene van Peer, who has been my sounding board on interaction design from the start, and whose expertise on everything ranging from participatory design methods to materials and construction has been indispensable. And Hein Lagerweij, whose broad range of video production and motion graphics skills have made this whole thing come to life in an amazing way. I’d also like to thank Clemens Driessen for his perspective on the ethics around technology and livestock farming, and Marinka Copier for her trust and vision.