The last post on Katsuo was about the very early stages of the project, and a lot has happened since. It wasn’t an easy run, but then again I never expected it to be, as we had some ambitious demands for the project. We wanted it to use time travel as a meaningful part of the gameplay, not really an easy mechanic to design. We also intended it to use various aspects of live action roleplaying while the game was meant for players who usually don’t do roleplaying games. This meant that the rules should provide sufficient handles for inexperienced roleplayers, yet offer enough of the freedom that I feel defines LARP.

After doing research on time travel mechanics, I started designing and testing a lot of different ways to play with time travelling and chronology. I had decided to leave the roleplaying aspects a bit more in the background for the first prototypes and tried to get my hands on a way to make people feel like time travelling through gameplay first.

Testing concepts over and over again, some playing cards were hurt in the making of this game I'm afraid.

This resulted in a lot of quick prototypes, of which most were more complicated than I desired them to be, but actually making people have the experience of playing with time proved to be hard. Even more so because the game was to be played on the streets, without a professional game master, as is the usual way with urban games and especially live roleplaying games.

For a player to have that experience of playing with time we had to make the game evolve while it is being played without the players doing that themselves. They had to feel like something magical was happening. I played around with different ways to achieve this without a game master, resulting in various concepts: We tested a game where players managed energy bricks and after a certain amount of playtime went back to the start of the game and changed what had been done, making them change actions and outcome of earlier plays. I also did many tests for an idea where players changed historical story-lines for better or for worse, but this proved to be hard to put into effective gameplay. I tried to work with allowing players to get certain objects needed for the game from the future, which would commit them to send those to their past selves when that future has come, much like the game of Temporal Chess that I played when I started this project.

This illustrates how complicated some of the tests quickly got.

I also tried games which focused more on roleplaying, like a game where players would force other players to play out certain scenes and in this way change a general storyline to win. Or a game where players would play the same scene or happening a couple of times, changing it every play-through, much like a puzzle where you go back in time until you know how to change the events that will take place. But with all these games I ran into the same problem. Once they got close to bringing a genuine feeling of really playing with the past or future, they had to become (or already were) rather complex to hit that spot.

So after many tests, we decided to go with a game in which time travel is more of a narrative element rather than a gameplay one. Each player was assigned a character who is a time traveller from the past or future and had gotten in this particular time by accident. In order to have the time vortex return them home they had to recreate the circumstances that had made it appear in the first place. They had to re-enact five scenes on different locations at a set time. These were described only briefly, for example, “a secret deal was made near a bridge.” This made the game a roleplaying adventure through the city, while looking for the next suitable location on a tight time schedule.

To make things more interesting however, every character had a secret agenda and didn’t want to return to their own time at all. To manipulate the time they would be sent back to, they had secret objectives which they would have to perform while enacting the scenes. These were linked to their character. For example: Dracula had to make someone scream, and another character, an impersonator of Shakespeare, had to get someone to quote from a theatre play.

I think the combination of characters from different timezones roleplaying in the middle of the street in Utrecht resulted in a very interesting game. There are tweaks to be made to the game for a next play-through and I would certainly change some of the rules. But after going through a lot of concepts and trying so many forms of gameplay, for now Katsuo has came to a satisfying conclusion.

Today I’m excited to be able to share the video sketch we made as a first step towards this game.

You can watch a larger version of the video on Vimeo.

We’re making a game for several reasons. On the one hand, it allows you to experience questions related to the subject of pig farming first hand. Questions such as: are pigs intelligent animals? Is farming pigs for meat cruel? And so on. The other thing a game can do is transform how you relate to pigs. We’re exploring a new relationship, one that takes elements from how we deal with animals in the farm, the circus and the home.

The video sketch of Pig Chase is our way of putting the design of the game out there, to see how the world at large responds to it.

The choice for light as a medium is the result of a systematic exploration of what kinds of stimuli pigs respond to. We were aware of some evidence indicating pigs enjoy light. But when we saw how they reacted to a laser pointer, we knew we were on to something.

In case you’re wondering: yes, the plan is to actually build this thing. That’s the next step.

I’m looking forward to exploring the forms of play this system affords. I’m also keen on experimenting more with the idea of a symmetrical play space, and forms of play that are actually cognitively challenging to pigs. On the human side I am mostly fascinated by intimacy with an animal that is actually quite remote.

For more details, including full credits of everyone involved, refer to the official Playing with Pigs project website. There’s also a press release available, and a set of high resolution images.

Finally, I’d like to highlight the amazing work done by my collaborators: Irene van Peer, who has been my sounding board on interaction design from the start, and whose expertise on everything ranging from participatory design methods to materials and construction has been indispensable. And Hein Lagerweij, whose broad range of video production and motion graphics skills have made this whole thing come to life in an amazing way. I’d also like to thank Clemens Driessen for his perspective on the ethics around technology and livestock farming, and Marinka Copier for her trust and vision.

I enjoy doing workshops because I get to see how others deal with the unique challenges of designing physical games. Things like recruiting players to an ongoing game, or considering the role bystanders. I learn something from both the successes and the failures of participants. It’s also a challenge to create a workshop program with just the right amount of guidance (not too much, not too little, much like finding the right balance of rules in game design).

The most recent workshop we ran took place in the days before Playgrounds Festival. There were several on offer to students of art schools from the region. Other workshop facilitators included Vlambeer and PIPS:lab.

The workshop was about designing games for the main conference, which would take place later that week. So the audience was conference-goers, always a tough crowd to get involved into a game. They’re usually too busy running from session to session and chatting in the hallways. It turned out this also applied to this conference, even though it was called Playgrounds. (It’s about motion graphics, animation, that sort of stuff, mostly.)

The brief allowed for a variety of forms, such as street games, conference games and party games. We also allowed participants to choose their own location in and around the conference venue.

We had three days, and divided it up in equal parts: introduction to the field & ideation, prototyping & design and finally testing & evaluation.

An impression of what was made

I was really happy to see the variety of games that emerged. I had collected a bunch of example games to get the participants started: Mafia, Cruel 2B Kind, Capture the Flag, Prui and James Wallis’s GameCamp minifig game. We also played a game of Ninja Tag to warm up. I’d like to think this underlined the idea that there are many ways to create interesting play experiences.

(Watch this video on Vimeo.)

In order of appearance the video shows a Tron light-cycles inspired game where you try to surround your opponent, a tagging game, a game about hunting foxes, a paint-with-your feet game, and a drawing game using markers tied to cycling helmets. Like I said, a nice range of games offering quite different kinds of play.

Some observations

Concepts that rely on spontaneous audience participation have an immediate disadvantage. In particular when the act to be performed is slightly theatrical and/or silly. Best to have a sign-up booth and have players come to you. You don’t want to put people on the spot, much less in front of their friends. Play is voluntary after all. You can and probably should go out and do promotion for your game and draw people to your booth. When promoting your game it is very important to have a clear and short description of the game experience you’re offering.

A common pitfall in the design of physical games is that the activity created is evaluated on how amusing it is to observe, in stead of how interesting it is to do. There’s a difference between what a US or UK audience and a Dutch audience are willing to engage in. Within those national groups there are again massive differences from subculture to subculture. This is an issue because the current state of the art is mostly influenced by creators from the Anglo-sphere.

Playtesting highlighted these issues for many of the games and as such it was a massive learning experience. It takes courage to put your game out there at a conference, to ask a complete stranger to have a go. I admire the participants for having the guts to do this, even if not all games were as successful at drawing in players.

Where to go next

I have the feeling that the street gaming scene has become somewhat conservative. So I would like for future workshops to push at its boundaries. This means setting new briefs, perhaps more focused briefs, ones that deliberately break with current street gaming form. One idea that has been on my mind for some time is to look at toys, and focus less on rules design. This is inspired in part by Doug Wilson’s work on Johann Sebastian Joust, and projects like Ringg, which came out of the Utrecht School of the Arts. A workshop about rules-light, open-ended tools for play. You’re welcome to steal this idea for your own workshop, or invite me to come and run it at one of your events. Either way, I’d be happy to hear from you.

I should thank Sarah Lugthart and Leon van Rooij for inviting me to their festival, and all the workshop participants for their enthusiastic involvement. In addition I should point out the significant contribution to this particular workshop by occasional agent of Hubbub Arjen de Jong.

1. For example, here’s one for Utrecht School of the Arts students in the lead-up to the NLGD Festival of Games 2009, and here’s the one I ran at NLGD Festival of Games 2009 itself.

Code 4 is the large-scale game for organizational game we made for the Dutch Tax Administration in collaboration with Demovides and the Utrecht School of the Arts. It uses various media to propel players into a game set in the near future, which is interwoven with their daily work. Broadly speaking, the aim was to improve participant’s skills in terms of organizational capacity and client-centeredness..

Read DiGRA practice paper

In September, I presented a practice paper on the game at the DiGRA 2011 Conference: Think Design Play. It’s in the conference proceedings but I’ve uploaded a PDF to this site as well for your reading pleasure.

Watch the Chi Sparks talk

Agent in charge of all things software Alper Çugun spent a high-paced 10 minutes talking about the game and its creation process at Chi Sparks in June. Below is a video of that talk:

And of course, a full project write-up is in the portfolio. As mentioned before, we’re working on a video illustrating the player experience. So stay tuned for more on that.

Curating a playful exhibition

The lovely folk at Storm have asked me to return as curator of the playful-slash-interactive exhibition that will be part of youth theatre festival Tweetakt 2012. I did the one this year, had fun, learned a lot too and we got some nice responses so I’m keen to have at it again. It’s early stages so I am mostly making lists of interesting work that has caught my eye over the past year. The next step will be to filter it and try to come up with a cohesive selection. Some patterns I’ve spotted thus far are tentatively titled Robots and Making. We’ll see how those develop.

Publishing on Code 4

You may have noticed a new project writeup in the portfolio about Code 4 (previously referred to as Maguro). We’ve talked about it at Chi Sparks and Think Design Play and are now in the process of producing a short video that’ll hopefully give you a better feel for the player experience. One of the challenges of working with pervasive games is that a lot of the action happens off the screen and so there are few artifacts that we can use to show the game. The game is in fact a performance that needs to be registered, so that is what we’re doing now. I’m working with the great Hein Lagerweij on this one who I first collaborated with for the Buta videosketch. Speaking of which…

Publishing on Buta

We screened a sneak preview of the Buta videosketch at Think Design Play and I think it’s safe to say we raised a few eyebrows. It was interesting presenting work at an academic conference where most of what was presented were articles. I got the sense some attendees weren’t as accustomed to responding to stuff as they are to discussing ideas. On the upside, I noticed lots of comments and questions that were exactly the kinds of considerations we want to stir with this video. I am going to ask for a bit more patience on your side and promise you’ll get to watch the video yourself soon.

Art van Triest and Hein Lagerweij at the Vechtclub

Making a game that teaches astronomy

Finally, there’s Iruka, which is the main project happening in the studio at the moment. It’s me and Karel Millenaar (game design heavyweight) working with Noordhoff Publishers (producers of teaching materials for all levels of education) and the Amstelveen College (a secondary school) to explore the opportunities games and play provide in the classroom. Specifically, we’re looking at novel teaching methods for the ‘general natural sciences’ course which is mandatory for all fourth-year students in VWO. This course covers a lot of subjects, but we’re building a pilot around astronomy. That’s right, we’re exploring space! We’ve come to the point where a concept has been approved and we can start to work out the details and build a prototype. Playtesting will happen in the classroom throughout the rest of this year and hopefully, come january, we’ll have something to share with you.

Anyway, that’s it from me for now. As always, if any of this peaks your interest, don’t be shy and drop a note below.

It takes a while for the realization to truly sink in. The project that kept Kars, Karel, Alper, Simon and me busy during the early part of 2011 is done. It’s been delivered to the client, as well as to the client’s client. And all layers of client seem to be happy. Which, in turn, makes us happy.

By the time you read this, our project has been revealed as being called Code 4. And the ‘large governmental organisation’ we made it for, turns out to be the Dutch Tax Administration. Currently the game’s had multiple runs and should be causing organizational change like there’s no tomorrow, right now.

Asked by Kars how I feel about the project, the thoughts that pop up are not really about Maguro – they’re about me, and about these other guys. As a writer, freelancer, web guy, I’m used to working alone. Twitter, Facebook and e-mail are my only contact with the outside world. Projects seamlessly flow into one another. I don’t think about my processes, they just happen instinctively. All that changes when you work in a team. Which took a while to adjust to – but I think I nailed it in the end.

And what a team it was. I guess it felt like being in a rock band because that’s what I associate with a bunch of smart, too-cool-for-school kids, each complete with their own incredible super powers. (That’s a link to the first part in this series, which is wrapped up by this post. Be sure to also read the middle episode. You know what they say about middle episodes in trilogies.)

I then say something about the game’s iterative development process, which revolved so fast that each prototype felt more like a trampoline than the intended quiet moment of reflection. It’s a miracle that in the end, the plan got together – which I love. Or maybe it’s just a lot of intelligence, experience, hard work and perseverance stacked together. In a box. With a ribbon.

We head out to Luce, where they serve great cocktails and grappa, it turns out. The food is nice, too. An iPhone game called Coin Drop is discussed, which I dismiss as being a poor man’s Peggle, but end up spending the next few days getting all of the game’s stars anyway. Next, we determine that the idea that doing something in real life is always better than doing it virtually, is a decidedly calvinistic way of seeing things. After which we all agree that games are really about learning to learn.

Late at night, Karel starts drawing up two of the game concepts swirling around that enigmatic mind of his. Naturally, the end of project Maguro is the beginning of something new.

It’s been over half a year since I last talked about the projects we have on deck. I thought I’d do a quick post to give you a sense of what’s going on.

• We’re in the process of wrapping up Maguro. The game – titled Code 4 – is finished and has seen several successful runs already. Since this is a game that runs internally at the Dutch Tax Administration, we’re working to produce some additional materials that illustrate the player experience. We’ll also talk about the game at Chi Sparks, and (hopefully) at this year’s DiGRA conference; Think Design Play.
• Buta – the game for pigs and humans that we’re working on with the HKU’s DPI research group – is continuing at a steady pace. We’re planning the shoot for the video-sketch at the moment. With a little luck we’ll be able to share it by the end of summer.
• Project Katsuo – best described as a casual LARP with a time travel theme – has emerged from concept stage and we are now at a point where we think we might have an interesting game on our hands. It’s an internal research project, so it might take a while before it sees the light of day, but I’m hoping we can share the outcomes of it sometime this year.
• Iruka is a new project scheduled for the final quarter of this year. We’ll be inventing new ways of using games in middle education for a publisher of teaching materials. We’re collaborating with a middle school so we can do experiments in the classroom. The games will focus on teaching science.
• Finally, Saba is also a new project, starting in July. We’ll be producing a game for the visitors of a science museum with the aim of getting them in a scientific mindset.

So it looks like we’ll be keeping busy the coming months. I am excited about the science theme running through a few of these projects. It’s an opportunity to develop some of our ideas around systems literacy further.

The Hubbub studio is across the street from the square where Tweetakt’s pavilion was located so I had ample opportunity to observe people’s response to the exhibition. It was lovely to see how each got ample playtime and were for the most part instantly understandable and engaging – something often lacking in interactive art.

The works

So we had Funky Forest (Emily Gobeille & Theo Watson) in which children plant trees and divert the flow of a river to make a forest grow. Watching children play with this is lovely. The river responds to their body movements, as do the forest’s animals. The trees grow in shapes mirror the children’s poses.

Watching people punch away at Love Hate Punch (Stella Boess & Stefan Gross) provides a visceral experience due to the booming subsonic bass sounds triggered on each punch and the bright flashes given off by the punching bag. You almost feel sorry for it.

Players of Bandjesland (Monobanda) collaborate to create a continuously changing dance music composition. It is a zillion times more interesting to watch than your average electronic live set as the tools used are old-fashioned cassette tapes placed on a large table. The recording station, which consists of a huge cap that players stick their heads in, adds an extra slightly absurd spectacle.

Hand From Above (Chris O’Shea) wasn’t set up in the aforementioned greenhouses, but was outside of course, on a large screen for all visitors of the square to see. The sheer range of behavior displayed by people as they discovered a large hand was playing with them is dizzying, from timid bemusement, to elaborate performances mainly put on by the smallest of kids.

And finally Sound Chaser (Yuri Suzuki) offset some of the more physical installations with its otherworldly soundscapes emerging from little cars tirelessly racing a track made out of broken records.

This happened…

The icing on the cake was This happened – Utrecht #10, which took place on the second day of the festival. We were guests of the good old Academy Theatre, where we were given the small cozy room seating 70. An awesome line-up and a thoroughly engaged crowd (we filled each and every seat) made this into a magical night of honest but inspiring stories about how these projects get made, and great dialogue between speakers and audience.¹

This was one of my first proper gigs as a curator of interactive work and I must say it has wet my appetite. I am already looking forward to my next chance.

1. Check out the photos on Flickr by Hein Lagerweij and others.

Learning Lab

A block from the Learning Lab game Regulator Rally

The first one is Learning Lab, a design research project we ran in the last few months of 2010. It was commissioned by an experimental educational program for VU and UvA students aimed at developing leadership skills. We designed games and playful interventions for the program, as well as a blog-based metagame. Have a look at the project description and if you’re curious to know more read the posts in the project blog archive. If you’re interested in ways to use play in higher education, let us know.

PLAY Pilots

The PLAY Pilots home page

The second project has been a little special for me, since I was able to give something back to the rich cultural life Utrecht has always spoiled me with, and it allowed me to work with some of the most talented studios in the city. PLAY Pilots is a project commissioned by the city and province of Utrecht which we directed. We were asked to work with festivals and games studios to see how play could be introduced in more traditional cultural domains. It resulted in three wonderful live games, and an online game that tied them all together. Check out the project description, the PLAY Pilots website and the accompanying process blog. We’re always keen to work with cities to see how play can make cultural infrastructure more accessible to a new audience. Do let us know if you’re looking for help in that domain.

Project lead Kars calls our client, then summons tech lead Alper and game design lead Karel. They study the game’s progress. They inspect the underlying code. Kars is stressed out, slightly. Karel is relaxed, but probably only at the surface. Alper seems grumpy, but when someone mentions this, he murmurs, “You haven’t seen me grumpy yet”, which sounds like a threat.

It’s interesting how the shift happens. You don’t really notice it until it’s already, irreversibly, passed.

That’s what occurs to me while tapping away at my keyboard, trying to ignore the ruckus about bugs, filling in fake news reports and in-character e-mails. The pilot has already started, but we’re still creating copy for the later parts of the three-week run. Today we have to finalize what players will be reading next week. Everything goes into the materials document, which is now at around 10.000 words – and counting.

I’m lucky enough that I can make use of Arjen’s services. Arjen is Kars’ new intern, a quick and faultless writer if I’ve ever seen one. His work makes me curious to see what he’ll come up with on project Katsuo. Together we hurry to slam our messages into shape.

In the middle of all this, Kars brings in a box of tiny, delicious cakes from a nearby bakery, to celebrate the start of the pilot. Not sure how to react to cake while there’s so much stuff to do, we all take our picture and tweet it.

I remember vividly how it used to be. Just weeks ago we were slowly but steadily developing ideas, solving problems, trying to incorporate client’s suggestions. Not every solution was immediately clear, but the process felt controlled and reassuring.

Outside it was dark, cold and rainy, inside the atmosphere was upbeat. Jokes were cracked. Discussions were had. Nobody really knew how the project would end up, but we were giving our best and confident that we’d get there.

Then, from out of nowhere, things were caught in a maelström, sucking everything in. The path forward was now clear – in a way, this was what we’d been waiting for. However, at around the same time that client’s intentions, team’s vision and team members’ tasks finally lined up, deadlines were suddenly looming.

This changed the atmosphere, too. We were still having lunch in the city, but in more of a hurry, with no time to get coffee afterwards. We were still cracking jokes, but harsher than before – like we’d become seasoned sailors on ocean steamers. The change was subtle, but it happened, alright.

At the end of the day, the showstopper bug is squashed, of course. Zooming out, things are actually looking great. Karel’s game design is now set in stone – and working. Simon’s visual design is splendid. Alper’s tech is running without a hiccup.

Next week, Arjen and I have to deliver one more batch of copy, and then we’ll have time to take a good look at whatever it is we’ve written. The insights that will undoubtedly emerge will be used for two weeks of ‘refactoring’ the game, after the pilot and before the true kick-off. And maybe, just maybe, there will be time to grab a coffee downtown.