Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Week 178

So it’s been a snowy week here in Utrecht—and I’m pret­ty sure it’s been more than chilly in Berlin too. We start­ed the week ear­li­er than usu­al, on Sun­day, with myself plug­ging away at a revised chap­ter for the Game­ful World book—trying to cram in as many ref­er­ences as I could, and gen­er­al­ly clar­i­fy­ing and stream­lin­ing my argu­ment.1 I was joined by Alper who had been in NL the past few days. We paid a vis­it to Plof for some fries—can’t get prop­er Dutch fries in Germany—and The Vil­lage for some cof­fee, and by the end of the after­noon Alper hopped on a train back to Berlin.

Those small Utrecht rituals #wander

Mon­day I’d planned to spend most of the day fin­ish­ing the chap­ter, but I was rude­ly inter­rupt­ed by a Dutch tele­vi­sion news crew, who asked my opin­ion on what turned out to be a real­i­ty game gone awry. Most of these were begin­ner’s mistakes—such as a too-seri­ous theme—that could’ve been eas­i­ly avoid­ed by read­ing a few bits of Per­va­sive Games. If you’re inter­est­ed (and under­stand Dutch) here’s the short item they pro­duced from inter­views with myself and the stu­dents that were tar­get­ed by the game.

Most of the rest of the week was tak­en up with fur­ther work on KAIGARA. Alper pro­duced a tech­ni­cal memo and I cre­at­ed a one-slide pre­sen­ta­tion of the game con­cept. The two togeth­er are used to get buy-in inside the client organization.

Aside from this, I spent some time with Her­man on Thurs­day talk­ing about HIRAME, which is on the back burn­er for the moment but will shift back to the fore­front mid Feb­ru­ary in all like­li­hood. We also dis­cussed the sec­ond phase of KANI, for which you might remem­ber we did con­cept devel­op­ment mid-2012. It took a while, but it now looks like we will be asked to actu­al­ly build the thing.

All of which means the first half of 2013 is start­ing to look busy. Good.

Back in Berlin, Alper also worked on a posi­tion paper that will hope­ful­ly lead to us par­tic­i­pat­ing in a game­ful-design-relat­ed work­shop at an aca­d­e­m­ic con­fer­ence. Being non-aca­d­e­mics this is always a slight­ly painful process for us, but the orga­niz­ers explic­it­ly reached out to prac­ti­tion­ers which we find com­mend­able so we’ve giv­en it our best shot.

Final­ly, and hap­pi­ly, on Fri­day con­tracts were signed for the first stage of FURAPPA, which is con­cept devel­op­ment also, for our very first Ger­man client. This is some­thing Alper has been busy with for some time. I’m real­ly excit­ed about this and I hope it will be the first of many more clients out­side of the Netherlands.

View from Neude square looking down Voorstraat, with snow and finger in front of lens

  1. You can now sign up to receive an email once the book is avail­able. []
This entry was posted in Weeknotes and tagged , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.