We’ve launched a first version of PLAY Pilots; a web site we’ve been working on the past few months. It is the next phase of our engagement with the city of Utrecht on cultural innovation through play, which I alluded to in this post.¹

At this point, the site allows you to see what custom-made live games PLAY Pilots will run at selected festivals (the first one being an awesome spring rider race produced by FourceLabs). You can also play an online game which is all about facing off with your friends in subcultural style battles. If you play any of the games you can pick up collector’s items at the festivals.

We’ve been documenting the process behind the website as well as the live games on a dedicated blog so check it out if you’re interested in how this stuff gets done. PLAY Pilots is as much about doing interesting things with play as it is about sharing the things we learn along the way.

Our list of things to improve and add to the site is growing steadily, and we’ll be patching it up as we go so if you have any suggestions, drop us a line.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the team behind the web site, who have worked super hard on it this past period. They are Alper Çuğun (engineering), Bernard Vehmeyer (copy) and Simon Scheiber (design). It’s been a pleasure having them on board as agents of Hubbub. Many thanks to Jeroen van Mastrigt for entrusting us with his brainchild PLAY. And finally, the city and province of Utrecht for providing us with the means to make this happen.

1. English speaking friends take note, the project is firmly aimed at a Dutch audience so I’m afraid it won’t make much sense to you, alas!

If you look in the footer of this website, or on its contact page, you’ll see a new address. Neude 5, Utrecht, NL.

We’ve been happy renters at the Dutch Game Garden for almost two years now so when they announced their move to a new location of course we wanted to stick with them and move too.

What might have helped is the fact that the new location is freaking awesome. Right in the center of town on the Neude square, where things are always going on.

We are in a sweet little studio, which we share with our good friends at FourceLabs. I’m sure it’ll serve us well in the next phase of Hubbub that lies in front of us. Design requires a certain type of space and I think this ticks all the boxes.

My uncle used to work in this building. He worked at ABN AMRO (a bank). Before that, I am told this was a furniture factory named Wyers.

An old postcard of the Neude square with a nice view of the Wyers building.

Now, it’s filled to the brim with games companies. Well almost, I’m told there’s a few places left. So if you’re interested, drop by and check it out.

In fact, even if you’re not looking for a new studio but are just curious, drop by.

So we have five sets of bocce balls lying around (or jeu de boules, as we like to call the game in the Netherlands). They’re left over from our little stint at NU Grounds. We were planning to run Bocce Drift there, but did not get around to it. So let’s play it anyway, in Utrecht, on Sunday 22 August, starting at 15:00 hours at the Neude square. Everyone’s invited, including you.¹ Sign up for the game at the event’s Facebook page.

What is Bocce Drift? I guess it is best described as a mashup of boules, and the Situationist Dérive. Each round of play picks up where the last one ended, so you’re lead through the city by the course of the balls… Who knows where we’ll end up?

It was designed by David Jimison and Jeff Crouse² and I think first played at Come Out and Play 2007. You can read the rules on the wonderful Ludocity site – which features many other great games. But don’t worry, we’ll explain how to play at the event.

What else? Ah yes, there’ll be drinks afterwards and you get extra points if you wear a silly hat. Hope to see you there!

1. This way, at least I did not make a fool of myself by relieving the local toy shop of all their bocce sets for nothing.
2. Thanks for sharing the game with us, guys.

Here’s the first column I’ve written for Bashers, the premier source of games journalism in the Netherlands. I’m planning to devote subsequent columns to discussions of other pervasive games. Many thanks to Niels ‘t Hooft for indulging me.

Do you know a game called Cruel 2 B Kind? It works like this: the goal is to assassinate as many people as possible by giving them a compliment. They try to do the same. You can keep from being attacked by quickly giving a compliment in return. The problem is, you don’t know ahead of time who the other assassins are, and who are just innocent by-standers. So you might end up complimenting a total stranger on his new shoes, or stroking someone’s ego with the question, “Excuse me, aren’t you Brad Pitt?”

The catch: You don’t play this game on your PS3 or Wii. You play this game outside, on the street, with real, live people. The software is nothing more than a set of agreed upon rules. The hardware is the city, and a number of attributes to make keeping score easier.

These kind of games make me happy. I love their simplicity and the way they play – pun intended – with social conventions and the way we experience our daily surroundings. From the viewpoint of a game designer, if you reduce a game to its set of rules, there is no difference between designing a game such as Cruel 2 B Kind and Far Cry 2. A game wants to be played. The fun that’s unique to games comes from playing them, the pleasure of play. In this way a game distinguishes itself from things such as movies and books. And that’s why I see games not as the newest descendant in a long list of narrative media.

If I were to do that, I would have to make a clear separation between video games and the rest; board games, role-playing games and pervasive games such as Cruel 2 B Kind. Then I would have to perform a mean feat of historic revisionism.

If you look at games as I do, as one big family dating back to at least 3000 BC (the age of an early version of Backgammon), then it becomes clear what it’s really about, and that is the player and what you as the game-maker allow him to do. That is, to me, the most important part of game innovation: which activities, which playful experiences can we offer people with games? What can we let them do that can give them another perspective on themselves, on others, on their world?

As Cruel 2 B Kind shows, a computer isn’t necessary for this. We were perfectly able to play before the arrival of PDP-1 (the computer Space War! was programmed on), and this will always be so. There is, however, such an array of technology today that it would be absurd to ignore it in the gaming world. But the way I see that is inspired by Frank Lantz of Area/Code: a game isn’t something you put in a computer, it’s the other way around: You can (if you want) put computers in games.

This piece originally appeared on Bashers in Dutch and was translated by Alexis Moran Translations.

1. The book was printed in a limited run but you can find the full document at Issuu.
2. I’m sorry to say it’s in Dutch, though.

Not included is arguably the most fun part of the afternoon, which was a playtest of an audience game I’ve been designing. I’ll devote a separate post to that once I get the video footage of the session sorted.

Many thanks to Alie Rose for making this happen and to all who attended and participated. I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope you did too.

About a game

I figured it’s easiest to start with an example. Here’s a video of a game we did last year for the European youth year which took place in Rotterdam.

So how it worked was these kids were all starting movements. They competed for territory by planting flags. They could then campaign for their movement at these places. They were scored based on the number of followers they got. And the winner got cash and coaching to make their movement a reality.

The game was designed to have them experience the value of collaboration first hand. It was also used as visual indicator of what was going on in the city during that year. And it transformed an area of Rotterdam, which is usually almost exclusively used for shopping, into a political arena, sucking in pedestrians and redefining the relationship between young people and adults.

Hyperlocal game design

So I’d like to talk to you today about what I find some of the most exciting stuff to work on at the moment, which is this idea of hyperlocal game design.

“In the end, the design of technology […] must let us actively practice at something, however humble. Taking part in locale is one such activity.”

—Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground

That kind of departs from the above quote from Malcolm McCullough’s book Digital Ground, where he argues that technology, urban computing if you will, should facilitate people’s participation in place-making.

Because, to some extent, many urban spaces have become just that, space, without any history, layering, local-ness to them. They could be anywhere. And so McCullough argues for designers to be sensitive to place and deploy technology in a way that is appropriate to it.

And I think that to a large extent what has been going on with games in cities, often at least, is that they don’t really relate to the specifics of the location² and I think that is a shame. Because I think games can be tools to ‘re-place space’, if you will.

So maybe, another example of a game we did will help to clarify the point I’m trying to make. We did a game called Koppelkiek in a troubled neighborhood of my hometown Utrecht, called Hoograven. It was commissioned by a design event which looked at the function design can have for society.

We were kind of inspired by this idea of Jane Jacobs about the charms of city life being the many interactions with strangers. Which kind of runs against much of the contemporary thinking about integration issues, which basically says we should al become BFFs, so to speak.

So we came up with a game that would gently encourage casual interactions in the neighborhood through a very light-weight ruleset that would run pervasively over a period of three weeks. The basic idea was: you take photos of yourself with others in various situations for points.

You would upload these photos to a website for points and get bonus points for completing collections. We set up shop in the neighborhood, assisting players and exhibiting all the photos in the windows of a shop that was about to be demolished. (Part of the area was being redeveloped during.) In doing so we hoped to create a physical feedback loop, and to increase the chances of people encountering the game spontaneously.

And we came up with assignments that were place specific, although there were also many generic ones. Here’s a collection of photos for the front door assignment, for instance.

In any case what was interesting was that people were relieved about something happening in their neighborhood that wasn’t about the problems there. But in stead was just something different from the stuff that was usually going on (which wasn’t much).

So I think of this game as a way to kind of amp up the diversity of uses of the streets. Again, inspired by Jane Jacobs and her thoughts about the emergent, complex order of city life. I think there’s a real role for urban games there. And it is one that is at the core of why I started Hubbub. I don’t want to see streets be used just for shopping and commuting. There’s more to life than just this.

It’s also, for me, interesting to think about how you can use games to achieve local effects. Not by forcing them onto people by submitting them to arbitrary rules and telling them it’s a game. That’s bad design. There can be a loose coupling between a game and its second order effects. As I discussed before with Change Your World, which is mostly about skills and attitudes.

But another aspect of a game like Change Your World, and many other event-based games, is an effect similar to what is common practice in the world of culture jamming, which is this idea of the temporary autonomous zone. We’re in Copenhagen, Christiania is a wonderful – albeit permanent – example of this. But carnivals and block parties all to some extent fit in this category.

This effect comes about through a mutual agreement on rules. Actions and interactions in the city get new meanings. When speaking of this dynamic, game designers use the term magic circle. In a similar manner, Frank Lantz of Area/Code has said “games are stylized systems of social interaction.”

Take boxing for example. Within the artificial reality of the boxing ring, punching someone in the face gets you points. Doing the same outside of the magic circle of boxing, on the street, would likely get you jailed. I can’t put it more bluntly than this.

And there’s this really interesting dynamic between passersby not in the know and game players. It is part of the fun. In the excellent Playmakers documentary you see a geocacher who really enjoys doing something out of the ordinary that no-one notices. This reminds me of the hobo code and warchalking. It is a very effective pattern.

Whereas other players, like those engaged in a game of capture the flag (or The Soho Project, from which this image is taken) enjoy the fact that people are startled by their odd behavior. This is play as performance and when artfully done can make a game in a spectacle that is as enjoyable to watch as it is to play.

There’s many aspects to game design. When you ad place specificity to the mix it becomes even more challenging than it already is. You need to immerse yourself in the environment. We set up a temporary studio in a vacant shop when we were doing Koppelkiek. We sought out community leaders to have them be ambassadors for our game. We ran playtest in situ. Etc.

And we walked the area many times to get a sense for its formal properties. To get a sense of the systems and the processes that were already there. This we did before we even started designing the game. We’ve been very inspired by the vocabulary developed by Kevin Lynch for this. It provides you with a much more fine-grained view of how a city is experienced, at least visually, in terms of wayfinding. It has you look at cities at a higher resolution.

But of course, with computing becoming such a huge influence on city life. Lynch’s stuff isn’t enough. The challenge, as Adam Greenfield has rightly pointed out, is that a lot of the computational layers of the city are opaque. We need new tools to map those.

And just as a side note, when it comes to a literacy of urban computing, I think there’s real opportunities for the application of urban games there. We can make games that make people more aware, of aware in a different way of the technologies embedded in the urban fabric. As for instance Chromaroma does, by using the London Oyster card as its input, and visualizes your trips as you score points by traveling.

And finally, to bring this back to architecture and city planning, what I find very exciting is that urban games pose real challenges to those disciplines in the sense that they demand them to kind of plan for the unexpected.³ Or at least allow for enough space, looseness for play to happen.

Which is commonly known as adaptive design; allowing people to re-appropriate their devices, environments, etc. And you know what? Game designers could really offer some help there, because like cities, their rulesets need to allow for play, they can’t be too tight (no choice, you’re railroaded), or too loose (confusion, no meaningful choices). So I guess, ultimately, the effect I hope we can achieve with these kinds of games is enhancing the autonomy of the urbanite.

1. I’m still not satisfied with how SlideShare deals with notes so I’ve only shared the slides there.
2. This applies to many location-based ‘games’ we’ve seen lately, such as Foursquare and Gowalla.
3. Who’d predict the way this traceur uses this grate?

I’ve always found neighborhoods under construction curious places. There is a strange tension between the place as planned and the place as executed and subsequently lived in. Leidsche Rijn is a new neighborhood being built in Utrecht (which is my hometown and also where Hubbub’s studio is located). When it is finished in 2025 it should house 80.000 people; quite a large number for a small country such as the Netherlands.

In this shiny new urban landscape we will be running several low tech urban games coming Saturday (5 June) as part of the NU Grounds games festival which is being organized by Cultuur 19. We’ve made a selection of games designed by local students from the HKU and some golden oldies from Ludocity (many thanks to the creators of those games for open sourcing them). Some will involve stalking, others swashbuckling and still others aimless wandering. Several will involve balls of some kind. But in any case, all should be good fun. Our base of operations is the Paper Dome (an architectural curiosity itself) and the games will be playable from 13:00 to 17:00. (We’ll run two tours, one starting at 13:30 and a second one at 15:30.) Do come along.

More details on the full event (in Dutch) are available at the Cultuur 19 website.

It seems that the brave new playful world promised by pervasive/urban/locative/alternate-reality games mavens of the past decade hasn’t really materialized. Gaming hasn’t left the living room much, it still mostly happens on screens and – despite new motion controllers and more connectivity – it’s still not offering many new social or physical experiences. Or is it?

In this talk Kars Alfrink, game designer at Hubbub (NL), looks at what’s going on with physical, social games in cities, drawing examples from both his own practice and those of his peers. As a designer, what’s a productive way of thinking about play, what novel applications might you consider and what does it take to design for playful interactions?

where: The Auditorium, Strandboulevarden 47, Østerbro 2100

when: 5-6pm. Thursday, May 27th, 2010

These are sketches from a presentation that I delivered a while back to a room full of organizers of cultural events and creative agencies from Utrecht. This was the culmination of a study commissioned by the city of Utrecht, in which we looked at ways of adding playful elements to the programs of some of the city’s major events. The presentation was received well and we are now moving forward with some of the ideas first explored in the study, so I thought it would make sense to write a bit more about that first step here.

First, a bit of context; this project – which for obscure reasons we codenamed Tako – is part of a larger thing named PLAY, which is the brainchild of Jeroen van Mastrigt, professor at the HKU‘s game- & interaction design research group. The aim of PLAY is create a place where the general public can experience playful culture in all its facets, where creators of games and play can present their work and where organizations from various domains can meet, collaborate and learn about what it means to be playful in an age of pervasive technology. The exact shape and form of such a place is kept deliberately vague, something to be explored and gradually determined over the coming years. The study Hubbub was asked to do is one of the first steps in this long-term process.

So, our task was to meet with a number of organizations in the city who organize events in what some would call the ‘traditional’ cultural domain. Together they make up a significant part of the cultural infrastructure. Their topics include film, theatre, classical as well as contemporary music, animation and even the culinary arts. To what extent were there opportunities for mutually beneficial collaboration with these events, so that we could experiment with playful add-ons to their programs and they could connect with existing and new audiences in playful ways?

The process we employed was relatively straightforward. We met once with each organization, and performed a semi-structured interview exploring their background and goals as well as concrete plans for the upcoming edition. We also investigated previous experiences with games culture and tried to get a sense of some of the important issues each organization was dealing with at that moment. This last aspect in particular proved fruitful for finding ways of aligning playful concepts with organizational needs. Most conversations also included some initial brainstorming about potential concepts.

We next processed all the interview notes and rapidly generated and visualized concepts for all events. These then formed the basis for a big deck of slides we used to present the outcomes to all organizations as well as key creative companies and individuals. The presentation was used to gauge the response of the organizations to our ideas and collect feedback. Luckily, the general consensus was that we were on the right track, and that it would be great if some of these concepts would be made reality. To wrap up, we collected all the feedback, annotated the slides and published it privately for the benefit of all the participants.

I think we achieved several things with this project. We now have a clearer a clear view of what is going on with some of the city’s major cultural events. We’ve managed to provide them with a different perspective on what games and play can offer them in terms of audience engagement. And lastly, we have a bunch of concepts that we know are considered valuable by these cultural events and are therefor worth pursuing further.

Looking back, I think this project really demonstrates the value design processes can have in the cultural domain. I’m also super excited about directing a number of playful projects that are incredibly situated in an urban context, and that relate to the physical and social life of a general (non-geek) audience.

So what’s next? The past few months were spent finding the means to realize at least a subset of these concepts. It looks like that’s been taken care of. So we are now in a good position to select a first group of events to work with and connect them to suitable creative companies. If all goes well, you’ll be able to play with the first results of those pilots come fall this year. We’ll continue posting on the project’s progress here.