Week 161

Week one-hundred-sixty-one was a long one. It effec­tively ran from Mon­day to Mon­day. I caught my breath yes­ter­day and am back in the sad­dle now. Let’s see what happened.

Kohi sketch­ing, Sake playtest­ing & Saba filming

It all started a bit sub opti­mal with myself being a bit under the weather. How­ever, there was a sig­nif­i­cant amount of prepa­ra­tion ahead of me for the Hide&Seek Week­ender, so I sol­diered on.

On Mon­day I did some sketch­ing for KOHI, so that Alper could con­tinue to build and Simon could get started on the graphic design. The result was a larger stack of sketches than I had expected so they’ve got their work cut our for them.

I worked on prepar­ing my Hide&Seek lec­ture. Wrote an out­line, got some feed­back on it from Alper and also from Alex which was all encouraging.

On Tues­day I headed to Ams­ter­dam for another SAKE meet­ing with the Gids edi­tors. I brought a paper pro­to­type and had them play through it with some fun and inter­est­ing results. The first mechan­ics seem to work but they do need some com­ple­men­tary ones to pre­vent the whole thing from spi­ral­ing out of control.

After the playtest we met with writ­ers who had expressed inter­est in par­tic­i­pat­ing. We ran through our plans and answered their ques­tions. A num­ber have since com­mit­ted to the project, so that’s encour­ag­ing. Our crew is almost complete.

On Wednes­day I headed to the Uni­ver­siteitsmu­seum to assist Stef with the Beesten­bende (SABA) pro­mo­tional video shoot. We had three lovely fam­i­lies who played part of the game as we fol­lowed them, and answered some ques­tions on cam­era. That should give us enough mate­r­ial to cut together a nice short clip that will hope­fully con­vince lots of fam­i­lies to come and play.

I should also men­tion we’ve sub­mit­ted Beesten­bende for a Dutch Game Award in the cat­e­gory best seri­ous game. I think we’ve done some­thing spe­cial in the games-for-museums space and I hope it will be rec­og­nized by what is the most impor­tant indus­try award of the Netherlands.

Hide&Seek Week­ender

The rest of my time before fly­ing to Lon­don on Fri­day was taken up with prepa­ra­tions for Cer­e­mony of Sur­prise. Print­ing and cut­ting cards, mak­ing hand­outs, and keep­ing in touch with Tim as he ran around the city pur­chas­ing the last of our party items.

Once we’d arrived on Fri­day after­noon I killed a few hours in our hotel room mak­ing slides as Tim explored Lon­don. In the evening we headed to the South­bank Cen­tre for the first evening of the Hide&Seek Week­ender. Games I played included Dis­co­tect, Ord­nungswis­senschaft and Search­light. We ended the day eat­ing a bur­rito from Wahaca and hav­ing a real ale at the Harp.

On Sat­ur­day I fin­ished my slides as Tim went out hunt­ing for cake. In the after­noon we played more games at the Week­ender — Killer Queen was a high­light for me — and sat in the sun eat­ing var­i­ous tasty dishes pro­cured from the Real Food Mar­ket. We killed another hour or two play­ing a game of new Netrun­ner in a quiet cor­ner of the South­bank Cen­tre, which Tim had brought to try out.

In the evening we played more games at the Hide&Seek party, includ­ing the mind-bending Who Took The Apple?, the chaotic Do Move Say and the awk­ward Sword­fight. I also enjoyed catch­ing up with var­i­ous lumi­nar­ies from the Lon­don games scene.

On Sun­day, we ran Cer­e­mony of Sur­prise from 1-6pm at the Week­ender and had a blast. We ended up run­ning eight games, each last­ing around 45 min­utes. Groups ranged from eight to fif­teen play­ers. I par­tic­u­larly enjoyed how the game con­sis­tently built up towards an actual party atmos­phere. Peo­ple singing to each, shar­ing cake and so on, seem­ingly for­get­ting they were on a podium in a huge fes­ti­val hall.¹

At the end of Sun­day Tim hopped on a plane home and I returned to the hotel, tired but satisfied.

And on Mon­day I had the plea­sure of attend­ing Play­ing in Pub­lic, the con­fer­ence that rounded out the week­end. I was really impressed with the thought­ful treat­ment of the topic by every­one involved, bal­anc­ing ide­al­ism with prag­ma­tism with not a hint of cyn­i­cism to be found.

I par­tic­u­larly enjoyed Pat Kane’s analy­sis of the olympics as mas­sive pub­lic event with a play­ful under­cur­rent, and Clare Reddington’s thoughts on design­ing pub­lic play that were firmly grounded in the Per­va­sive Media Studio’s prac­tice. Other high­lights included the heart­warm­ing panel on regen­er­a­tion games, Ben­nett Foddy’s slightly sadis­tic med­i­ta­tion on suf­fer­ing in the olympics and Jason Anthony’s ideas about slow tech­nol­ogy.

My own con­tri­bu­tion con­sisted of around 20 min­utes of ram­bling about the weird, leg­i­bil­ity and the use­ful vs. use­less games dichotomy. It got a nice writeup at Wired UK if you’re curi­ous. I’ll post slides and notes soon(ish).

If you can’t tell this was a smash­ing week­end and I am super happy to have been part of it. Thanks to Alex, Holly, Sarah, Bron­wyn, Tom and the rest of the Hide&Seek crew for hav­ing me.

Now to squeeze as much as I can from what remains of this week.

1. The rules and card PDFs have been updated, by the way. So I invite you to make your own set, invite some friends and give the game a go. If you do, let us know how it went. [↩]