For Saba, this meant sitting down with Hanne, Karel and Alper remotely to MoSCoW the list of improvements that resulted from the last play test. I shared the list with the museum and talked it through with them on Wednesday. They had prepared their own list so we merged them, resulting in a list we’re both satisfied with. This has now been frozen and when I return from my break we will pick up from there.

On the Kani front, I did some estimates for a production budget on Tuesday, discussed some of the finer points of our concept with Hanne on Thursday and sketched out a rough concept storyboard on Friday. This week – tomorrow in fact – we’ll present the whole thing to the hospital. Hopefully by the time I return we’ll have a positive response from them and can start building a team for production.

With Irene I had another chat about how to approach the production of a playable prototype for Buta. With some assistance of friends on the internet we now have a firm grasp of the technologies involved. So we are now in a good position to finally hire our team and then kick off the next phase once I get back.

Finally, I at last found the time to post my Lift12 talk. Alper presented his thoughts on gamification through the lens of love, dating and relationships at NEXT in Berlin. I’m sure he’ll get around to posting that here eventually too.

So, a few more days to go and I’m off to the other side of the globe for a few weeks of R&R. You can expect to hear from us again once I return on Monday, June 4.

I should thank Nicolas Nova for inviting me to speak at the conference, and my colleague Alper Çuǧun for his contributions to this talk.

Networked Publics

A useful model for thinking about the public sphere is offered by Larry Lessig. He describes four modes of regulation that together constrain what we can do in publics:

1. Law
2. The Market
3. Social Norms
4. Architecture

These four modes shape and influence each other. The last one, architecture, is the world as we find it. For instance, the built environment, the bricks and mortar. At least, this is the case in the physical world. In online spaces, architecture is synonymous with code, with software.

But of course, due to the fact that technology now pervades physical reality, architecture and code together constrain behavior. The internet isn’t a place set apart. There is nothing virtual about it. And so our publics have become networked publics.

A common way of thinking about publics is in terms of privacy. But Paul Dourish and others suggest it makes more sense to think about networked publics in terms of accountability. Law, the market, social norms and architecture/code make us accountable towards each other in myriad ways. And this accountability in turn give rise to publics.

Pranks & Riots

So how are our networked publics doing? Clearly, the answer to this as far as I’m concerned is: Not so good. What worries me most about public life is our collective tendency for willful self-separation. Two recent Dutch report serves as a useful illustration of why I think this is a problem. The first describes how people tend to choose schools based on their perceived social class. We prefer to send our kids to schools used by “people like us”. You can see how this creates a reinforcing loop.

The second report shows that whereas social stratification based on hereditary characteristics and wealth may have largely disappeared, class based on education is on the ascendant. So those two create a vicious cycle: I choose a school based on my position in society, and this position is largely derived from my education.

I’m not saying hierarchical organization of roles in society is necessarily a bad thing. We can’t all be, or don’t even want to be CEOs. But what is an issue, is that this new lower class feels under-appreciated, feels it has less influence than others and doesn’t have the same access to networks.

When I try to imagine what that must feel like, I am reminded of a post on operational closure by Levi R. Bryant, a concept from systems theory which he describes as follows:

“Operational closure is not a happy thought. It presents us with a world in which we’re entangled with all sorts of entities that we can hardly communicate with yet which nonetheless influence our lives in all sorts of ways. “

So public life for a large part of society feels Kafkaesque. It’s kind of like an office job. You feel like you have very little agency. And what do we do to stay sane in the office? We play pranks.

Pranks, such as the infamous stapler in jello, are a way to reclaim agency. They function as a kind of ritual or public event. They allow us to change something about the state of the world, however temporarily.

These pranks play out on a different scale in society. Recently, some of them have proven to be quite destructive. But they are attempts at reclaiming agency nonetheless. A Londoner asked by a television reporter if rioting was the correct way to express their discontent replied:

“You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”

It’s a way to game the system, a way of hacking the attention economy of the overlapping media landscape.

The source of this discontent is described by Ben Hammersley as follows:

“Indeed, a small part of the trigger for the London riots can be understood as the gap between the respect given to peoples’s opinions by the internet, and the complete disrespect given by the government and the ruling elites.”

So it can all be understood as Lessig’s four modes clashing. New architecture, the emergence of massive social networking sites, gives rise to new social norms which in turn are not shared by all. Elected officials and the people voting for them don’t feel mutually accountable anymore.

The question for me is if we can conceive of other rituals, other types of public events, other ways to prank our way out of this feeling of a lack of agency that are less destructive. And at the same time if we can have these rituals effect actual change.

Ritual

This is something we’re deeply interested in at Hubbub. Many of our projects can be understood as attempts to invent new tools for transforming society. These tools are games, because games are a medium native to networked publics. Games can be rituals or public events for the 21st century.

A useful frame for thinking about public events can be found in Models and Mirrors by Don Handelman, a book I was introduced to by Sebastian Deterding. Handelman argues we should understand public events first through their design. He describes two types of events: the events-that-mirror and the events-that-model.

The first class of events “reflect versions of the organization of society that are intended by the makers of the occasion”.

The second class, the events-that-model, have a greater autonomy in relation to the social order. They offer a controlled transformation of social phenomena. The event-that-models can do this because it is systemic, it has internal causal relationships. Handelman talks about these events being versions of the world, transformed through practice, with changes subsequently affecting the lived-in-world.

This concept of events-that-model is readily applicable to games. They are systemic, they are made up for rules. As a player you interact with these rules, they afford and constrain behavior.

They are also autonomous, commonly seen as a separate from ordinary life. In How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost puts it this way:

“When games invite us inside them, they also underwrite experimentation, ritual, role-playing, and risk taking that might be impossible or undesirable in the real world.”

This idea has become known as the magic circle, which refers to games taking place in a time and space set apart.

But not all games act on the world, as Handelman writes. They are not all events-that-model. In fact, many serious games are more like events-that-mirror, or events-that-present about which he writes:

“A tacit premise of numerous events-that-present is that one learns through repetitive participation, rather than through forms of organization that generate transformative experience.”

As such, serious games suffer from the ludic fallacy. We should know by now that we can’t reliably simulate the world. So why limit ourselves to producing games for change that attempt to do exactly this? Also, these games rob players of agency. This just won’t do for our purpose, which is to make games that improve people’s sense of agency.

Games can be transformative. They can be places made of architecture and code that we inhabit temporarily. Where we can experiment with and even invent new social norms. It is possible for these norms to be brought into the lived-in-world. The interplay of online opinions and expectations of politics as described by Ben Hammersley is an example of code affecting social norms. And social norms can also affect architecture itself. Such as in Harbour Laboratory by Danish art collective Parfyme. It is a playground for inventing new uses for the Copenhagen harbor, some of which were later implemented.

One way games can change the world is by affecting players. Games are subjective simulations. There is always a gap between our mental model of the world and the model a game presents us with. The process by which we resolve such tension, a middle road between wholesale acceptance or rejection, is described by Ian Bogost in Unit Operations. He calls our discomfort with subjective game models simulation fever. And the way to cure this fever according to him is to work through it. To play a game and understand what it includes and excludes. So just like recovering from a physical fever changes our immune system, critically understanding a game in this way changes our view of the world. So again, to draw a parallel to Lessig’s four modes, here code affects social norms.

For instance: System Danmarc is a Nordic LARP which took place in 2005. It puts players in a near future where social stratification has been magnified. They quite literally lived on the streets for a couple of days. It’s necessarily a subjective, incomplete simulation of social injustice. It demands from players to work at understanding in what ways it is incomplete and in the process, reevaluate their mental model of social reality.

But perhaps this idea of simulation fever is too indirect for your tastes. Games can also directly act on the world, similar to how acts of speech can. At a wedding ceremony, the words “I now declare you man and wife” changes something about the state of the world. These are known as performative speech acts. In How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost labels games that do similar things performative games.

With performative games it’s important we don’t just focus on the effects a game should have on the world. We should make sure players are in on it. They need to understand the meaning of their actions both within and outside of the game. As a counterexample, take Luis von Ahn‘s ESP Game. The actions of players in the game are leveraged to improve image search. However, players aren’t aware of this. So in this case, although the ESP Game changes something about the lived-in-world, it is not performative. One could say it is exploitative. I find games like this morally problematic.

A better example would be Cruel 2B Kind by Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost. It’s a street game that uses acts of kindness as player actions. These have meaning in the game and outside of it. At the outset players aren’t aware of who the participants are. Because of this non-players are “caught in the crossfire” of compliments and other pleasantries. So, non-players are affected by the players’ actions. However, players understand these consequences and play because of them.

Playing with Pigs is a project I am involved with at the Utrecht School of the Arts in collaboration with Wageningen University. We’re using both simulation fever and performativity in an attempt to transform how humans relate to pigs. We’re designing a game that can be played by both species together. By doing so we hope to give these largely invisible animals an active role in the ethical debates surrounding animal farming and meat consumption.

We don’t want to prescribe how people feel, but in stead we set up a system that produces simulation fever. Humans are put in a symmetrical play space with pigs and accomplish tasks together. This raises the question: who is playing with whom? Humans work through this and come to their own conclusions. We think that is more powerful.

It is also a performative game, a game that does work. It acts on the world. Pigs, intelligent animals that they are, get bored easily in their monotonous pens. We leverage human activity to entertain them, and the humans are in the know and play because of it.

So games can affect the world that don’t rob players of agency but in stead empower them. We can do this in a directed and designed way without instrumentalizing games and exploiting players.

Trust

So that’s my proposition for what games can do for our networked publics, how they can be new rituals.

Last year at STRP, Bruce Sterling described four possible futures. They were layer out on the obligatory two-by-two along two axes: high tech to low tech and high art to low art. Most of these futures were far from desirable. The exception was the high tech and high art future. In Sterling’s words, this quadrant makes no sense, it seems logical but feels weird. In future scenarios this is always the most valuable quadrant because it offers surprises. It lets you think about the future in a way you haven’t before. Sterling calls it Apple Boutique World. It is a civilized world with a civilized internet and its motto is “don’t be vulgar”. And in this world, we have:

“Social improvement games that actually solve problems… Places where there are millions of people playing games and actually improving society by being in the game.”

I think that’s a goal worth pursuing, and I hope I’ve given you a framework for thinking about how to do it.

If you’re in policy, I would ask you to try and understand, engage with, and trust in the good that can come out of these games and what they can do for publics. Because I truly believe these games can be engines for cultural invention. Engines that are native to our networked publics. That might give rise to new ways of restoring accountability and agency to our society.

I ran the play test together with Erwin, for whom this was his last contribution to the project. We would have loved to have him around for production support longer, but he has six months abroad doing something completely different ahead of him. Perhaps we’ll see more of him afterwards.

The Saba tests went relatively smooth, although of course there are plenty of things to improve on, which is the whole point of the exercise. Things are coming together nicely and we are more or less at the stage where we can start “plussing”. On Thursday and Friday I devoted some time to documenting findings. Editing video, writing down notes, that sort of thing.

For Kani, I met up with Herman and Hanne on Tuesday to reflect on our experience running the workshop the week before. We made plans for the final leg of this engagement, which is a concept presentation that includes our research findings and a plan and budget for production. I worked some more on the concept part with Hanne later in the week.

On Friday I did some long overdue work on Hamachi together with Tim. It’s an experimental social game we’ll be publishing under a CC license. It’s almost ready. We’ve been tweaking copy and designing the print-on-demand bits. I found myself googling for funny photos of animals and pulling them through an Atkinson dithering app. A suitable way to finish the week, I guess.

On Monday, I worked together with Hanne to prepare for the design workshop at Kani’s client. We had been developing an idea for an exercise with which we could get some feedback on our conceptual direction as well as get a feel for our target audience’s willingness to play.

We played through the thing as we had planned, concluded it wasn’t quite up to scratch and made some necessary adjustments. After another play-through we felt confident it would be up to the task. We prepared some slides to guide the group through the exercise, finalized our materials and called it a day.

On Tuesday we ran the workshop on site at the client’s hospital. We shared insights from our interviews with various representatives of the many different disciplines that keep a hospital running. We were taken on guided tours to get a sense of the physical space and then we ran our playful exercise. The format held up well. It was easy enough to get into, people had fun. We got a lot out of it both in terms of observed behavior as well as content produced by the participants. All stuff to chew on in the week to come.

The rest of the week I worked with Alper to finalize a new test version of Saba. I focused on getting all the copy and art in, while he worked to make the game’s engine tick. Next Wednesday we’ll go back to the museum and test with a number of families again. It’s the first full version we’re testing in terms of content and features. I’m curious to see how it will hold up.

In between, I had the pleasure to visit Delft University of Technology on invitation of Ianus to critique work by Design for Interaction students. This consisted of several handfuls of concepts communicated in the shape of postcards, which I was sent without knowledge of the brief. I went through all of these, judging whether I “got” what each concept was about, what I thought about the way it was communicated and wether it made me think of any other work in the field. I shared my perspective in a short, 45-minute presentation early on Friday morning. Afterwards I hung out in the central space of Industrial Design Engineering’s lovely faculty.

Finally, I should mention we published a final post on the making of Pig Chase’s concept video over at the Playing with Pigs blog. This one is about various ways i which making a concept video can be a valuable design exercise.

And with that, another long weekend kicked off, this time because of the Netherlands’ notorious Koninginnedag.

I’m also very happy about the addition of Rik Nieuwdorp of Claynote to the team. He’ll be taking care of the game’s audio. We’ll use sound sparingly as this is a game for a museum and we don’t want to annoy non-players too much. However, some carefully placed audio will certainly enhance the player experience greatly.

In the meantime Hanne and I have been preparing a few exercises for a workshop next week with Kani‘s client. We’ll have a sizable group of hospital employees to work with. The main exercise is aimed at getting some early feedback on one game idea we consider promising. At the same time we’ll test if our target audience can relate to some of the concepts we have made central to our approach. It’ll be a bit game-like but loose enough to allow for improvisation and surprises.

On Buta‘s front, the search for a creative technologist who will complete our team continued. I’ve approached a few folks again, with some positive responses. This person will be responsible for building the tablet app, working closely with Aduen, our hardware engineer and Hein, who has joined us again to do graphic design.

I also wrote two submissions – one on Code 4 and one on Pig Chase – for GDC Europe. Although none of our work fits neatly in any of the conference’s tracks I still felt it was worth a shot. Let’s hope one or both get accepted.

Finally, I met up with Noordhoff to evaluate Galaxy Tours. As I wrote earlier, the prototype we’ve produced won’t be developed further which although the reasons for this are sound is a bit disappointing of course. However we’ve learned a lot from this project about using games for learning in secondary education. We’re planning to share these things with the client internally and I hope to be able to do the same here at least in part after that.

As a nice roundoff to the week, the shiny laser cut door sign I ordered from Ponoko arrived this morning. It complements the dark wood of our studio door nicely. Now you’ll have no trouble finding us, next time you’re in the Dutch Game Garden.

• Kani: Together with Hanne I attempted to synthesize some of the major requirements and we generated some additional game ideas on Tuesday. On Thursday, with Herman, Tjerk-Jan and Hanne I worked on the program for a a design workshops we’ll run with the client in a few weeks.
• Saba: On Tuesday with Hanne, Karel, Alper and Erwin, I reviewed the latest playtest. We determined necessary changes and planned for the next iteration, which will culminate in another playtest in two weeks.
• I also reviewed a number of entrants into the A MAZE. Indie Games Award 2012 competition. The shortlist is now online with some lovely offbeat games in there.
• Other than that I did a bit of work to finalize a few Playing with Pigs blog posts that should be published over the course of the next couple of weeks.

That’s it. Have a good weekend.

Saba is a game for the Utrecht University Museum. Families visiting the museum play using one iPhone while exploring its rooms. We are initially focusing on its cabinet of curiosities. The goal is to have them look at the exhibits through the eyes of a scientist. We’re midway the design phase with this one.

This week was all about finishing a digital prototype for testing on Friday (today). Hanne and Karel finalized copy and art, respectively. I then worked with Alper to integrate as much of it into the game as possible. Poor Alper was a bit under the weather so we had a bit of a delay getting to full functionality. Nevertheless, after a heroic last sprint on Thursday, we finished a playable version. This morning I ran two tests with help from Erwin. Two families – both friends of Hubbub – played through the game while we observed. It was rewarding to see, for the very first time, players work through the whole thing without our assistance. We’ve discovered plenty of issues, a lot of them interface improvements that in hindsight are always obvious. Other issues relate more to our use of the turn taking and players sometimes feeling a bit left out of the action, something that will require a bit more cleverness from our game designers.

Kani is just getting started. It’s a design research project commissioned by a hospital. I’m working on this with Hanne as well, and Herman, who was our partner on Code 4. We’re looking at improving certain aspects of the patient experience, but since its very early in the project there’s not much more to say about it than that.

We had two internal design workshops this week. Herman also conducted numerous interviews with assistance from Tjerk-Jan, with hospital personnel representing the full range of disciplines. We’ve mostly been exploring the enormous amount of requirements that have arisen from the brief, as well as our desk research and preliminary findings from the interviews. This has already lead to some exciting ideas that I can’t wait to develop further. But before we settle on one direction, we’ll generate some alternative scenarios in the next week. We have more than enough requirements, it is time to start synthesizing.

And with that it is time for me to wish you happy Easter. We’re off the air for an extended weekend. Back on Tuesday!

I met with the client on Wednesday, discussed various practicalities related to the game’s content, its branding, etc. I also showed work in progress, which I think is an important thing to do so that clients remain involved beyond the formal delivery moments.

Later that week I produced a simple prototype of the complete game using my sketches. This acted as a kind of sanity check on the interaction design and as one might expect resulted in more changes to my sketches. Alper joined me in the Utrecht studio from Berlin and we went over how we’d integrate all the content in the app. There’s still quite a bit of development work to do, so he’s been keeping busy.

We now have one more week before everything needs to be pulled together and we can hand it to a few test families we’ve recruited. Exciting times.

Meanwhile Tweetakt was in full swing. I managed to spend quite some time at the festival pavilion and observed lots of people playing the games I’d selected. It was encouraging to see all games get lots of playtime, I think my strategy to go for social, accessible games really payed off.

We also ran an edition of This happened as part of Tweetakt. Several of the talks were about the games on display, others were about different but equally interesting work. We had a good turnout, a great atmosphere with lots of laughs and honest talks. As this was my last event as a curator, I couldn’t be more pleased.

Finally, some posts elsewhere that you might have missed: another bit on the creation process of Pig Chase – about how we discovered pigs respond to light – and a post in Dutch over at Bashers on why I think The Resistance is an excellent psychological game.

On the project front, here’s what happened this week:

• Saba: we’ve started integrating art and copy into code. Alper has been sending out the first prototypes through TestFlight. They’re quite rough still, but progress is good. We also spent some time looking at where we might want to use sound. We’ll do this sparingly as it’s a museum game and we don’t want to disturb non-players too much, but some non-visual feedback is welcome. Finally, plans for a second playtest in two weeks have been made.
• Buta: I put finishing touches on a new set of blog posts, which also includes a bit of video shot during field experiments. Hein helped us out with adding subtitles and some color correction. We’ll probably start publishing these next week. We’re also getting close to completing the team for production of a playable prototype, so hopefully we’ll manage to kick that off in a week or two.
• A new project, Kani, which is related to healthcare, kicked off today. So I spent some time preparing for that. Reading some research sent to us by the client, thinking about questions we might ask folks we’ll be interviewing, writing up some preliminary thoughts on how games might help, that sort of thing.

On the studio front, I purchased two pieces of art from the brilliant Joost Stokhof, which I first spotted when it was on display in The Village. So now I have some cyclists, and Bill Murray stealing a bike on the walls. Rolling curtains also arrived, so we’re all set for summer.

And with that, I’m hitting publish and heading outside to play some games and sit in the sun on the Neude before the Tweetakt opening show starts. Have a great weekend.

Johann Sebastian Joust by Die Gute Fabrik (photo by Marie Foulston)

Hokra by Ramiro Corbetta (photo by Elliot Trinidad)

Fingle by Game Oven

Room Racers by Lieven van Velthoven

Sloopvogel & Arcrane by Team Dynamo, FourceLabs and the Utrecht School of the Arts (a new addition)

There are also many interesting theatre and dance performances on offer. In short, go.

Update: I totally forgot to mention we’re also putting on another This happened, with several talks about these works. All seats have been snatched up, but you could try the waiting list.