Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Category Archives: Featured

Engaging sleep mode

First of all, best wish­es for the new year. Before look­ing ahead, a quick look back. 2015 was great for us. In our end-of-year review of 2014 we said we want­ed to bal­ance cre­ative suc­cess with more com­mer­cial suc­cess. And we did. Busi­ness was good in 2015. We did much more con­sult­ing com­pared to the year […]

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Shifting from Gamification to Playful Design

This is a light­ly edit­ed tran­script of a short lec­ture I deliv­ered some time ago at an off-site gath­er­ing orga­nized by one of NL’s largest con­struc­­tion-ser­vices busi­ness­es. The event explored the poten­tial of games, game design and gam­i­fi­ca­tion for prop­er­ty devel­op­ment and con­struc­tion. This talk cre­ates a com­mon frame of under­stand­ing about gam­i­fi­ca­tion and why […]

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‘Playful Design for Activism’ at E‑Motive Day 2015

At the start of this year I was invit­ed to demo Stand­ing and to speak at E‑Motive Day, a join­ing of inno­v­a­tive civ­il soci­ety organ­i­sa­tions inter­est­ed in (as they put it) North-South exchanges. In my lec­ture I talked about how Stand­ing works and why it is inter­est­ing for civ­il soci­ety organ­i­sa­tions (or NGOs). I also […]

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New Planning Methods

This is a write­up of my talk at the event ‘Nieuwe Plan­ningsmeth­o­d­en’ (‘New Plan­ning Meth­ods’) in Pakhuis de Zwi­jger, Ams­ter­dam on Octo­ber 8, 2015. Hel­lo. My name is Kars Alfrink. I am a design­er and part­ner at Hub­bub, a small play­ful design agency, based in Utrecht and Berlin. Hub­bub helps organ­i­sa­tions do things with games, play […]

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Procedural Instruments Enable Powerful Ways of Making and Seeing Playable Systems

“No Man’s Sky is so big, the devel­op­ers built space probes to explore it for them.” That’s from a Poly­gon report on what is prob­a­bly the most hyped videogame of the moment. The main thing that seems to fas­ci­nate peo­ple about No Man’s Sky is its exten­sive use of pro­ce­dur­al con­tent gen­er­a­tion (PCG). Put simply, […]

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Designing Playful Museum Exhibitions

In Feb­ru­ary of this year I went over to Rein­wardt Acad­e­my to work with exhi­bi­tion direc­tion stu­dents. I was invit­ed by Mario Jelle­ma to share my per­spec­tive on the role of play and play­ful­ness in muse­ums. I enjoy talk­ing to stu­dents, but I like work­ing hands-on with them even more. So we turned the session […]

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Three Perspectives on Serious Games

At the end of last year I was invit­ed to give a talk at Cre­ative Morn­ings Utrecht on the theme “edu­ca­tion”. I fig­ured it would be a nice oppor­tu­ni­ty to share the things I’ve learned over the past 5+ years of prac­tic­ing applied game design. I tried to con­nect a wide range of sources with […]

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Five Behaviour Design Principles You Never Suspected Would Work

A while ago, I was invit­ed by friend-of-the-stu­­dio Iskan­der Smit to speak at a Behav­ior Design Ams­ter­dam meet­up. Much of our work is relat­ed to behav­iour change, but we try to steer clear of the reduc­tion­ist think­ing that is quite preva­lent in the field. So I decid­ed to use the oppor­tu­ni­ty of pre­sent­ing to a […]

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Video of our Playing with Rules workshop at Mozilla Festival 2013

This Octo­ber Kars and I were in Lon­don (see notes for that week) to do a work­shop titled Play­ing with Rules at Mozil­la Fes­ti­val among many oth­er things. We mod­i­fied an exer­cise we had used pre­vi­ous­ly in a work­shop with Sebas­t­ian Deter­d­ing. The task is to take Parcheesi and mod­i­fy it to address a social […]

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