I should thank Nicolas Nova for inviting me to speak at the conference, and my colleague Alper Çuǧun for his contributions to this talk.

Networked Publics

A useful model for thinking about the public sphere is offered by Larry Lessig. He describes four modes of regulation that together constrain what we can do in publics:

1. Law
2. The Market
3. Social Norms
4. Architecture

These four modes shape and influence each other. The last one, architecture, is the world as we find it. For instance, the built environment, the bricks and mortar. At least, this is the case in the physical world. In online spaces, architecture is synonymous with code, with software.

But of course, due to the fact that technology now pervades physical reality, architecture and code together constrain behavior. The internet isn’t a place set apart. There is nothing virtual about it. And so our publics have become networked publics.

A common way of thinking about publics is in terms of privacy. But Paul Dourish and others suggest it makes more sense to think about networked publics in terms of accountability. Law, the market, social norms and architecture/code make us accountable towards each other in myriad ways. And this accountability in turn give rise to publics.

Pranks & Riots

So how are our networked publics doing? Clearly, the answer to this as far as I’m concerned is: Not so good. What worries me most about public life is our collective tendency for willful self-separation. Two recent Dutch report serves as a useful illustration of why I think this is a problem. The first describes how people tend to choose schools based on their perceived social class. We prefer to send our kids to schools used by “people like us”. You can see how this creates a reinforcing loop.

The second report shows that whereas social stratification based on hereditary characteristics and wealth may have largely disappeared, class based on education is on the ascendant. So those two create a vicious cycle: I choose a school based on my position in society, and this position is largely derived from my education.

I’m not saying hierarchical organization of roles in society is necessarily a bad thing. We can’t all be, or don’t even want to be CEOs. But what is an issue, is that this new lower class feels under-appreciated, feels it has less influence than others and doesn’t have the same access to networks.

When I try to imagine what that must feel like, I am reminded of a post on operational closure by Levi R. Bryant, a concept from systems theory which he describes as follows:

“Operational closure is not a happy thought. It presents us with a world in which we’re entangled with all sorts of entities that we can hardly communicate with yet which nonetheless influence our lives in all sorts of ways. “

So public life for a large part of society feels Kafkaesque. It’s kind of like an office job. You feel like you have very little agency. And what do we do to stay sane in the office? We play pranks.

Pranks, such as the infamous stapler in jello, are a way to reclaim agency. They function as a kind of ritual or public event. They allow us to change something about the state of the world, however temporarily.

These pranks play out on a different scale in society. Recently, some of them have proven to be quite destructive. But they are attempts at reclaiming agency nonetheless. A Londoner asked by a television reporter if rioting was the correct way to express their discontent replied:

“You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”

It’s a way to game the system, a way of hacking the attention economy of the overlapping media landscape.

The source of this discontent is described by Ben Hammersley as follows:

“Indeed, a small part of the trigger for the London riots can be understood as the gap between the respect given to peoples’s opinions by the internet, and the complete disrespect given by the government and the ruling elites.”

So it can all be understood as Lessig’s four modes clashing. New architecture, the emergence of massive social networking sites, gives rise to new social norms which in turn are not shared by all. Elected officials and the people voting for them don’t feel mutually accountable anymore.

The question for me is if we can conceive of other rituals, other types of public events, other ways to prank our way out of this feeling of a lack of agency that are less destructive. And at the same time if we can have these rituals effect actual change.

Ritual

This is something we’re deeply interested in at Hubbub. Many of our projects can be understood as attempts to invent new tools for transforming society. These tools are games, because games are a medium native to networked publics. Games can be rituals or public events for the 21st century.

A useful frame for thinking about public events can be found in Models and Mirrors by Don Handelman, a book I was introduced to by Sebastian Deterding. Handelman argues we should understand public events first through their design. He describes two types of events: the events-that-mirror and the events-that-model.

The first class of events “reflect versions of the organization of society that are intended by the makers of the occasion”.

The second class, the events-that-model, have a greater autonomy in relation to the social order. They offer a controlled transformation of social phenomena. The event-that-models can do this because it is systemic, it has internal causal relationships. Handelman talks about these events being versions of the world, transformed through practice, with changes subsequently affecting the lived-in-world.

This concept of events-that-model is readily applicable to games. They are systemic, they are made up for rules. As a player you interact with these rules, they afford and constrain behavior.

They are also autonomous, commonly seen as a separate from ordinary life. In How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost puts it this way:

“When games invite us inside them, they also underwrite experimentation, ritual, role-playing, and risk taking that might be impossible or undesirable in the real world.”

This idea has become known as the magic circle, which refers to games taking place in a time and space set apart.

But not all games act on the world, as Handelman writes. They are not all events-that-model. In fact, many serious games are more like events-that-mirror, or events-that-present about which he writes:

“A tacit premise of numerous events-that-present is that one learns through repetitive participation, rather than through forms of organization that generate transformative experience.”

As such, serious games suffer from the ludic fallacy. We should know by now that we can’t reliably simulate the world. So why limit ourselves to producing games for change that attempt to do exactly this? Also, these games rob players of agency. This just won’t do for our purpose, which is to make games that improve people’s sense of agency.

Games can be transformative. They can be places made of architecture and code that we inhabit temporarily. Where we can experiment with and even invent new social norms. It is possible for these norms to be brought into the lived-in-world. The interplay of online opinions and expectations of politics as described by Ben Hammersley is an example of code affecting social norms. And social norms can also affect architecture itself. Such as in Harbour Laboratory by Danish art collective Parfyme. It is a playground for inventing new uses for the Copenhagen harbor, some of which were later implemented.

One way games can change the world is by affecting players. Games are subjective simulations. There is always a gap between our mental model of the world and the model a game presents us with. The process by which we resolve such tension, a middle road between wholesale acceptance or rejection, is described by Ian Bogost in Unit Operations. He calls our discomfort with subjective game models simulation fever. And the way to cure this fever according to him is to work through it. To play a game and understand what it includes and excludes. So just like recovering from a physical fever changes our immune system, critically understanding a game in this way changes our view of the world. So again, to draw a parallel to Lessig’s four modes, here code affects social norms.

For instance: System Danmarc is a Nordic LARP which took place in 2005. It puts players in a near future where social stratification has been magnified. They quite literally lived on the streets for a couple of days. It’s necessarily a subjective, incomplete simulation of social injustice. It demands from players to work at understanding in what ways it is incomplete and in the process, reevaluate their mental model of social reality.

But perhaps this idea of simulation fever is too indirect for your tastes. Games can also directly act on the world, similar to how acts of speech can. At a wedding ceremony, the words “I now declare you man and wife” changes something about the state of the world. These are known as performative speech acts. In How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost labels games that do similar things performative games.

With performative games it’s important we don’t just focus on the effects a game should have on the world. We should make sure players are in on it. They need to understand the meaning of their actions both within and outside of the game. As a counterexample, take Luis von Ahn‘s ESP Game. The actions of players in the game are leveraged to improve image search. However, players aren’t aware of this. So in this case, although the ESP Game changes something about the lived-in-world, it is not performative. One could say it is exploitative. I find games like this morally problematic.

A better example would be Cruel 2B Kind by Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost. It’s a street game that uses acts of kindness as player actions. These have meaning in the game and outside of it. At the outset players aren’t aware of who the participants are. Because of this non-players are “caught in the crossfire” of compliments and other pleasantries. So, non-players are affected by the players’ actions. However, players understand these consequences and play because of them.

Playing with Pigs is a project I am involved with at the Utrecht School of the Arts in collaboration with Wageningen University. We’re using both simulation fever and performativity in an attempt to transform how humans relate to pigs. We’re designing a game that can be played by both species together. By doing so we hope to give these largely invisible animals an active role in the ethical debates surrounding animal farming and meat consumption.

We don’t want to prescribe how people feel, but in stead we set up a system that produces simulation fever. Humans are put in a symmetrical play space with pigs and accomplish tasks together. This raises the question: who is playing with whom? Humans work through this and come to their own conclusions. We think that is more powerful.

It is also a performative game, a game that does work. It acts on the world. Pigs, intelligent animals that they are, get bored easily in their monotonous pens. We leverage human activity to entertain them, and the humans are in the know and play because of it.

So games can affect the world that don’t rob players of agency but in stead empower them. We can do this in a directed and designed way without instrumentalizing games and exploiting players.

Trust

So that’s my proposition for what games can do for our networked publics, how they can be new rituals.

Last year at STRP, Bruce Sterling described four possible futures. They were layer out on the obligatory two-by-two along two axes: high tech to low tech and high art to low art. Most of these futures were far from desirable. The exception was the high tech and high art future. In Sterling’s words, this quadrant makes no sense, it seems logical but feels weird. In future scenarios this is always the most valuable quadrant because it offers surprises. It lets you think about the future in a way you haven’t before. Sterling calls it Apple Boutique World. It is a civilized world with a civilized internet and its motto is “don’t be vulgar”. And in this world, we have:

“Social improvement games that actually solve problems… Places where there are millions of people playing games and actually improving society by being in the game.”

I think that’s a goal worth pursuing, and I hope I’ve given you a framework for thinking about how to do it.

If you’re in policy, I would ask you to try and understand, engage with, and trust in the good that can come out of these games and what they can do for publics. Because I truly believe these games can be engines for cultural invention. Engines that are native to our networked publics. That might give rise to new ways of restoring accountability and agency to our society.

I felt a bit apprehensive about this one: dConstruct tends to have a pretty heterogeneous audience, so it’s hard to know what kind of talk to shoot for. In addition, I was slightly worried about how people would react to my comments on the UK riots, being an “outsider” myself.

However, I get the sense people appreciated my attempt to connect design (game design in particular) to current issues, which is gratifying. I guess I should’ve just trusted Andy Budd’s judgement when he okayed my abstract. Him and the rest of the folks at Clearleft did an outstanding job putting this on and I am glad to have been part of it.

So below are some of my slides and notes. This isn’t a verbatim account of what I said that day, but rather a kind of hypertext remix. It’s become a bit of a long read, but I do hope it’s worth it. Enjoy, and do get in touch if you have any comments, questions and so on.

Update, October 6, 2011: a video of this talk is now up on vzaar.

Preamble

I started with an introduction on how I was planning to talk about reuse of old buildings, and how neighborhoods as a whole benefit from this. I had been planning to make this talk a continuation of, and an elaboration on, this earlier post. In addition, I would have included ideas on how new tools are allowing us to shape our surrounding in increasingly dramatic ways. Enrico Dini’s D-Shape is a great example of this.

But then, I said, the recent UK riots made me change plans. I felt it would be a bit too frivolous to sing the praises of gentrification, since at least a few areas that serve as popular examples of the phenomenon (such as London’s Hackney) were hit pretty badly. So instead, I decided to talk about the dark side of gentrification.

Unseeing

As a start, I described the wonderful, weird place known as Baarle-Nassau in the Netherlands and Baarle-Hertog in Belgium. It’s a town with some of the craziest borders you’ve ever seen. Over twenty Belgian exclaves in Dutch territory make up Baarle-Hertog. An additional number of Dutch exclaves are embedded in those Begian ones again. This complicated mess emerged from a series of medieval treaties, agreements, land-swaps and sales between the Lords of Breda and the Dukes of Brabant. (If you really want to know, head over to Wikipedia.)

The situation on the ground is seriously odd. (So odd, in fact, that it’s a regular subject of light news entertainment.) Borders are marked with special tiles throughout the town. There are buildings right on top of these borders, which means you can enter a home from Dutch territory and leave it into Belgium (and vice-versa). It gets stranger even, with homes that have their entrance on a border leading to two addresses, and stories about mixed-territory restaurants having to ask diners to move from the Dutch to the Belgian part of their establishments when Dutch closing time had passed.

Baarle is a bit similar to the cities of Beszél and Ul Qoma, as described in China Miéville’s excellent The City & the City. Like Baarle, they are two cities that take up the same geographic area. But Miéville goes one step further and includes the idea of “crosshatched” areas. That is to say: areas that are considered to be in both cities, but have different names and occupants are thought to be in one place or the other. This is because the residents of the book’s two cities are trained from birth to “unsee” the residents and buildings of the other city. So if an inhabitant of Beszél comes across someone who is in Ul Qoma in a crosshatched square, they are required to ignore each other. If they don’t, it’s considered a gross transgression, and a shadowy organization known as ‘Breach’ steps in to disappear the offending individuals. In practice this rarely happens as residents are thoroughly conditioned to pick up on the subtle differences in behavior of others, as well as the distinctions between the two cities’ architecture.

Miéville’s book is clearly inspired by places like Baarle, but also what happened in the Balkans and Berlin. The Berlin wall serves as a particularly disconcerting example sine the borders were closed overnight, separating people from their jobs and families. An insane situation if you think about it. But what makes The City & the City so disconcerting is that it goes beyond the idea of physical separation leading to social separation. The social separation in Beszél and Ul Qoma happens without physical boundaries and (to a large extent) through mutual choice.

And so you would think stuff like this is the purview of weird fiction, the stuff writers like Miéville excel at. But in fact, it’s very close to my experience of life in neighborhoods around the world. As an example I’ll quote from an anecdote shared by James Meek at the London Review of Books blog, which is a description of an incident at Broadway Market in Hackney, London.

“As Ghaith [a friend of the author from Iraq] and I walked down the street a disturbance began. A group of about thirty young black kids were moving together, looking anxious and excited. Some had makeshift weapons in their hands, poles and lengths of broken-off wood. After a moment, between a gap in the shops that looked through to the base of a tower block, we saw the reason for their anxiety – two tiny figures on bikes, dressed in black, hooded and masked. As we watched, one of the figures reached into the pocket of his hoodie and lifted – just enough to show – a hand gun, spreading panic among the larger group.

The trouble subsided as quickly as it began and the participants dispersed before the police arrived. Throughout the episode, a young, casually dressed, thoughtful-looking white couple sat at a table outside a wine bar, watching and sipping white wine. The neck of the bottle leaned, misted with condensation, from the rim of an ice bucket on the table. The couple didn’t look concerned that the gang confrontation or turf battle, whatever it was, would affect them; the feuding kids didn’t seem to see them, either.”

Not alone is this an example of how surreal life in gentrified areas can get, it is also of voluntary self-separation. I think this kind of behavior can give rise to tensions and if driven to extreme forms leads to terrible things such as the UK riots.

A flash crash of civil society

Now I was shocked and saddened to see the riots happen. Of course, I experienced none of it first-hand but did get a sense of its impact on local communities through some of my London friends on Twitter. As the events unfolded, I felt compelled to dig deeper, to try and understand some of what might have caused the riots. However, the purpose of this talk is not to provide a definitive explanation of the riots. I won’t presume I can. But what I did find has lead to some insights. Insights that, in turn, give rise to some important questions. (If I had to recommend one post on how to view the riots it would be this one.)

For instance, I came across this quote, from a Londoner who was asked wether rioting is the correct way to express your discontent. The person responded:

“You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”

Which exemplifies the shortcomings of mainstream media of providing certain groups within society with a voice. It can also be read as an attempt by these groups to hack the attention economy of the overlapping media landscape. A kind of gaming of the system.

Of course, civil disobedience isn’t anything new. Rioting is of all times. A favorite example of mine are the Provos, a Dutch counter-cultural movement that made things uncomfortable for the authorities in the mid-sixties. They’re mostly known for their nonviolent “ludic actions”. For instance, they would go out on the streets with blank banners, banners with nothing written on them. And still, they’d get arrested. This way, they highlighted the oppressive regime they were living under, at the time.

So although there’s nothing curious about rioting, what is new is the scale at which it can be ‘organized’ on short notice. This, of course, is enabled by the new tools we have at our disposal, things like Twitter, and BBM. (More on the role of social software in the riots in this Ars Technica piece.) In addition, contemporary western society seems to have become significantly more volatile. I’m confident this can be attributed, at least in part, by the incredible amount of positive feedback loops present in our media landscape. Messages get passed around indiscriminately and each referral amplifies the chance of an idea (however harebrained) spreading further.

And so similar to what black box trading algorithms did to the stock market (the May 6th, 2010 flash-crash on Wall Street, an occurrence popularized in design circles by Kevin Slavin) these new tools and the mediascape have done for society, leading my friend and collaborator Alper to label the UK riots a “flash crash of civil society”.

Now I’m not suggesting the tools are the problem. After all, they can be used for good as much as for evil, as exemplified by the #riotcleanup hashtag people rallied around to clean their neighborhoods right after the trouble started. I don’t think we need less use of these tools. In fact I think we need more use of them, but also a different use.

And so the big question that all this leads to for me, is how can we make society more resilient? How can we use these new digital tools to do so?

Testbeds & meeting places

I think what made the riots so unsettling is that they highlighted the fragmented nature of the neighborhoods in which they took place. Looters weren’t just acting unlawfully but also, apparently against what is considered socially reasonable. Who would loot in their own neighborhood? But for all intents and purposes, parts of these neighborhoods were in separate cities, like Beszél and Ul Qoma, or Baarle. This is the result of the rules people choose to live by. The willful self-separation. I wonder what might happen if we make these rules more tangible. What if before the riots took place it was already clear that in terms of the rules people live by, these neighborhoods were in different cities?

Since all of this is about rules, and games are made up of them, I think we can use games to make a difference.

One way games can create change is through a practice Ian Bogost has dubbed ‘procedural rhetoric’. We can make persuasive statements in the shape of simulations or rule-based representations (games, in other words). Bogost calls the cognitive friction players experience when confronted with a subjective simulation of reality, that differs from their perception of the world, ‘simulation fever’. It is by working through this fever that people might adjust their view of things. The fact that games are about rules makes them well-suited for dealing with complex systemic issues, like the social ones I’ve been discussing so far.

For example (and this is taken from an excellent article on procedural rhetoric by Bogost in the book The Ecology of Games) Animal Crossing can be experienced as a critique of consumerist society. You know, you start the game and are immediately in debt to Tom Nook (whom I’ve come to despise, and I’m not the only one). So you need to work to pay off your mortgage but you’re constantly tempted to buy stuff to fill your house with. The game is a pretty accurate depiction of (an aspect of) how many of us lead our lives. What’s nice is, you can also decide to step out of this rat race in the game and just be idle and do nonproductive stuff and experience the bliss of this. So it’s not all bad. That’s what makes it a good procedural critique. You get to play with the rules.

In a similar way, we can make games about how we currently live together and about how we could live together all at once.

The popular approach to affecting people’s behavior is to incentivize it with tangible or artificial rewards. This is not intended to be a definitive critique of gamification. Others have done this in a most excellent manner. Suffice to say gamification focuses on rewards, and disregards rules. By offering rewards for reciprocity, it suggests there is no intrinsic value in it. This is a problematic thing to do.

I’d rather see us use games as testbeds for new ideas. A favorite example of mine is Parfyme’s Harbor Laboratory. An art project that took place in Copenhagen in 2008. Parfyme created a playground where people could come in and experiment with alternative uses of the harbor. So this can be thought of as an open-ended game. Within a game like that you can try new things and see what sticks. These things can subsequently be applied outside of the game.

Social self-separation acts as a filter bubble. I’m no stranger to the comfortable feeling of being surrounded by like-minded individuals. But we need new perspectives too. So I’m proposing we can counteract this filter bubble with games that let you experience alternative views. On the one hand, games can model such new perspectives.

On the other hand, a game can be a place where you run into people with alternative views. Sure, the video game scene can tend towards monoculture, but other kind of games, folk games for instance, are great at bringing people from diverse backgrounds together. For instance, playing chess in the park. But I am now also thinking of my experience playing Johann Sebastian Joust and new games during the DiGRA 2011 conference. Games like this work because they condition social discourse through rules. But they are malleable as well, so they can be adapted by play communities and are thus more accessible than your typical video game.

Preconditions

So there’s a potential to use games to achieve greater social resilience. But to get there I think we need to adhere to a few principals. Together they form the contours of what I’m aiming for.

First of all, and this has been brilliantly discussed by Tom Armitage in a recent blog post at Kill Screen, such a game shouldn’t be apart from everyday life, but should fit into it. We should be able to make it part of our routine. The mixed-up-with-everyday-life part of pervasive urban games has always been what I find most exciting.

But, and this is a big but, the current form of urban games prevents them from being played at scale. They are typically event-based, limited to specific times and locations and can only handle a small number of people. They tend to be costly to organize, if calculated on a per-player basis.

I mentioned Visible Cities by Holly Gramazio and Kevan Davis (which I discussed before) as a great game about unseeing that is played in public space. It lets you experience the weirdness of this behavior in an exaggerated manner. I think that’s a powerful idea. But as I said, it won’t reach a large number of people due to its form. This is not a critique of the game, I know the designers deliberately chose this form and aren’t as interested in reaching large numbers of players as I am. But still.

For a game’s rules to spread far and wide they need to be meme-like. I’m thinking of something like BookCrossing. Granted, it’s not a game, but it is a ruleset that spreads easily and as it spreads gives rise to (in this case) a bottom-up global library. Or games that border on social practices like Mafia / Werewolf. Those are also simple enough rulesets, freely available, that have spread like wildfire in certain communities.

Meme-like rules need to require little to no central authority. Games like this need to be self-governing, in the manner of family board games. Similarly, BarCamps are self-spreading rulesets that when put into action are (to a large extent) community-governed.

Of course, for a game like this to spread as described and do all these things it needs to be digital, it needs to live on the network, be discoverable, shareable, etc.

An idea

When I was building this talk an idea emerged of a kind of game that might do the things I am talking about. So I thought it would be worthwhile to put it out there, to see if there’s anything in it.

To explain it, I first need to talk about Nomic. This is a game where a move consists of suggesting a new rule for the game. Players vote on suggested rules and when accepted a new rule immediately becomes part of the game. This way, Nomic is a simplification, an abstraction of legal systems. In particular of their self-amending principal, because the rules governing the introduction of new rules are themselves subject to change. So it’s a ruleset in constant flux.

I sometimes think that nowadays, we’re all engaged in our own private game of Nomic. That is to say, we continuously reconsider the rules we chose to live by (at least some of them) in the hopes of improving our existence. Of course, there’s rules external to ourselves which we are subject to as well. Rules governed by law, the government, cultural conventions. But it seems that the influence of these large institutions has waned and the space they’ve left now has to be taken up by self-selected individual rules. And we’re still kind of figuring out how to live well together in such a situation.

But if code is law, as Lawrence Lessig has argued, then there is an opportunity to take this intangible, massively parallel game of Nomic and codify it, using social software.

Perhaps we can create a game to negotiate these individual rulesets. A game where the tacit rules of individuals and groups are made explicit. The incentive for players to participate is actual power, a stake in the total rulespace. This game might function as a sandbox for new rules, that we’d collectively like to live by outside of the game. And in doing so, it might become a platform for a more resilient mode of coexistence.

I’m not saying this will prevent riots, but it might. It is my hope that with these new shared rulesplaces we might start to reintegrate the fragmented nature of our most vibrant neighborhoods. My intention is not to iron out the seams that make them interesting, but to create new interconnections between the islands that they are now made up of, using the transformative capacities of games.

Update, September 21, 2011: in addition to the quote I lifted from him, Alper Çuğun made significant contributions to this talk, which I neglected to mention at time of publishing.

Think back to your childhood. What did you play with? My mom is a preschool teacher. So whenever I was bored we were given clay, wax crayons or cardboard. Later on I got heaps and heaps of LEGOs. And I drew a lot. Lots of play for me and my brother and sister consisted of creative play.

My friends however, they had He-Man… and Transformers and later on M.A.S.K. Remember M.A.S.K.? I was so jealous of them. I always wanted to have those. I sometimes went over to play with them. And it was fun, no doubt. But at the end of a play session like that, we wouldn’t have made much. Perhaps we would have told a few stories. But they tended to be oddly similar to the cartoons these toys are based on.

The crayolas and the He-Man toys represent two very different types of tools for play. One is about open-ended play, and the other is about pre-scripted play. One is creative, productive or even transformative. The other is consumptive, confirmative or even prescriptive. It is my opinion that what the world needs right now is for us to play more with the former – the crayolas – and less with the latter – the image-focused toys. Because the types of skills we develop as we play with the crayola-like toys of today, are the types of skills we can use to address some of the issues we’re faced with in contemporary and near-future cities.

Put differently, one kind of play is about the actions you engage in. The other is focused on the thing. It’s the difference between this adventure playground, where kids have built their own castle, and the playground on the right, where kids are provided with one. You can see the former requires very different skills from the latter.

Let’s talk a bit more about those skills, shall we? It turns out open-ended imaginative play builds a set of skills collectively known as executive function.¹ I use the term “skill” loosely here, it’s actually a concept “used by psychologists and neuroscientists to describe a loosely defined collection of brainprocesses that are responsible for planning, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, rule acquisition, initiating appropriate actions and inhibiting inappropriate actions, and selecting relevant sensory information.”² An important part of executive function is self-regulation. Self-regulation is what children develop when at social, imaginative, unplanned unsupervised play. Simple things like a game of hide and seek, perhaps with some socially negotiated rules thrown in.

When no-one is telling you what to do…

So open-ended play builds self-regulatory capacity in kids. But that capacity carries on into adulthood. It’s this capacity you use to overcome obstacles, to master cognitive and social skills and to manage your emotions. It’s the stuff that kicks in when no-one is telling you what to do. Vital stuff in today’s atomized, hyper-individualized world. At least, if you want to live well, and want to live well with others.

The problem is, fewer and fewer of children’s playtime is unsupervised and unplanned. In fact it has been co-opted and commercialized to a large extent. This has been going on for decades. It started with things like this, Mattel’s toy gun called the Thunder Burp. No longer did you need to build your own gun from twigs or tubing and use your imagination to fill in the rest…

And this co-optation of children’s play by corporate interests has taken on grotesque forms now, such as in this thing called KidZania…

KidZania is a themepark that offers children an “educational experience”. It’s a child-sized consumerist utopia where kids play at having various jobs, such as flipping burgers or working in a print shop. They earn KidZos which they can deposit at a bank and use to pay for other activities or physical items. Most of the activities are sponsored by large corporations – the parks would not be financially feasible otherwise. So the burgers activity for instance, is sponsored by a certain fast-food chain featuring golden arches. And here kids are “playing at” filling a coke bottle.

There are KidZania parks across the world, in Mexico, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, Portugal and Dubai. There’s a ton more being planned to open. Of course KidZania markets to parents, who, driven by the urge to give their child the very best upbringing they can afford, can’t resist. As a result, children are brainwashed to be good consumers with corporate jobs. All in the name of “education”. I’m not saying the parents are blameless, and surely my personal politics are shining through here, but I do believe this is a striking example of how we have come to see play.³

Let’s return to the adventure playground

We see play as something that entertains. Something you consume. In any case, recall the importance of executive function, of self-regulation, and how it is trained through open-ended play. Now think about the types of play children – and adults – are being provided with. What we need is the opposite of what we are given. So let’s return to the adventure playground.

Now, we have several generations who have grown up with less practice at self-regulation. That includes myself and quite a lot of you out there today. At the same time, our world has gotten more complex. Dealing with all this complexity actually demands more self-regulatory capacity from us.

When I say complex I don’t just mean complicated. I mean we’re continuously dealing with systems made up out of small parts interacting in various ways. In aggregate we cannot predict the outcomes of those interactions. An example we can all relate to is the recent global credit crisis. It is tempting to think it was the result of the shenanigans of a few irresponsible bankers. But in truth, it was the result of a hugely complex system’s failing. Our actions as home owners have certainly contributed to the ultimate catastrophe. It’s hard though to see how our individual choices can lead up to such events.

It’s the butterfly effect, a seemingly minor event leading to significant outcomes. Like Edward Lorenz said: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” I think we can all become better butterflies, with more sense of how our actions contribute to the whole. This will not happen through top-down control. It requires self-directed work from all of us.

But with less self-regulatory capacity, we’re less able to motivate ourselves in the work we do, and the other activities life confronts us with. And we got here, at least in part, thanks to the co-optation of open-ended play. What I find perverse is that there are people who propose to use the same planned, pre-scripted play to increase our ‘engagement’ with whatever is the work at hand. It is now often called gamification. But it started with relatively benign stuff like these loyalty cards. I think, if we go down this route, we’ll be in more trouble than we already are. In stead, we should be helping people develop those self-regulatory skills so they themselves can transform whatever context they are faced with.

I have many issues with gamification. There have been plenty of solid retorts on many levels by lots of people smarter than me.⁴⁵ But let me offer two points of my own: one, gamification forces people to play. And two: it indiscriminately slaps reward systems on tasks both shallow and deep. It risks hollowing out intrinsically rewarding activities.

My pal Karel here has a keen sense for this. When I gave him this Akoha card after treating him to coffee and having a nice conversation, he was far from charmed. In fact he was insulted. This photo was taken shortly before he tore up the card, preventing me from cashing in my points. In his view, having a cup of coffee with a friend is worth the trouble in and of itself. I shouldn’t need a game to go through the trouble. And you know what? He’s right.

It’s also the case that whereas true play is always engaged in voluntarily, many gamification designs leave you with no choice. You are confronted with a system you must use for utilitarian reasons, and now you are asked to jump through additional hoops so that you will be more “engaged”. You do not play a gamified system, this system is playing you. It starts with simple things like the virtual plants on the right of this Ford Fusion Hybrid’s dashboard…

…and it ends with at least mildly worrying things like My Coke Rewards, which incentivizes the consumption of Coca-Cola.

In addition, making good games is hard. Consider the many mediocre games on the market. Here’s a few of them listed on Metacritic. Do you really want your banking system to be gamified by some well-meaning but blissfully ignorant designer who has been asked to “just add points”?

Gamification won’t save us

So I’m sure it’s clear at this point that I do not believe gamification will save us. It adds points and badges to the systems we suffer under everyday, without actually fundamentally addressing their nature. One thing I think we need to do is to take up that gauntlet. And when it comes to games and the complex city life we live nowadays, I think we should be focusing on the people in the city, in stead of the stuff. Because it is ultimately the behavior of the people that shapes the city, all the way to its built form. And games are excellent shapers of behavior.

The things that make life worth living in any city are non-scripted. Some call it citymagic. It is the joy that results from having such a high concentration of people in one place, all going about their business each with their own hopes and desires. Good cities are those where citizens feel they have the agency to do this, and where they are not afraid of unforeseen consequences to their actions. It’s like Jane Jacobs said:

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

Now, the networked city makes this challenging for us. Many if not all aspects of life are now structured by information technology and much of that technology is finding its way into the built environment. The trouble is, to the ordinary citizen the processes that are influencing our lives so strongly are opaque, and often inscrutable. Like this CCTV camera, which is designed in such a way that you cannot tell wether it is aimed at you or not…

One way to address this is to bring better design to those urban informatics. This is a worthwhile endeavor and I am glad super smart folks are engaged in it. My proposition though, is that games can contribute to the building of the self-regulatory skills that citizens need to both better read and write the contemporary city.

Literacy of the networked city

This literacy of the networked city is something that resides in people, not things. And I think games and play are an excellent training ground for this kind of literacy. I’ll give you an example in a minute, but before I do, remember that what makes cities magical is all those people you do not know. The serendipitous encounters and the great things they are up to. And that, to live well in the city, it is of the essence to give each other the much needed space to do this. To realize, in other words, that strangers are your friends, without them actually having to be your friends.

Recently I participated in my first alleycat. They’re scavengerhunt-like races organized by bicycle couriers and cycling enthusiasts. You typically ride them on one of those fashionable fixies. It was a lovely experience.

Not only is it a great way to serendipitously explore the city, but it’s also a lovely structure for interaction with strangers. I wasn’t too familiar with the city, so I tagged along with a few other riders who had a nice pace. We roamed the streets like a pack of stray dogs and fluidly weaved through traffic.

Some of these guys really have superhero-like skills when it comes to wayfinding and reading traffic. It was mentally expanding to witness. Afterwards we had a beer, a chat and then we went our separate ways.

The point is not that these games turn you into instant friends. In stead, the point is that you’re reminded that any fellow citizen can be the occasional team member, someone you hook up with to achieve something, and that’s it. That’s an important realization for any urbanite to have.

More interactions with strangers: at one point during the race I rounded a corner and there was a group of children at a tram stop cheering us as we came past. For a moment I felt like Lance Armstrong, and I am sure they were playing at what they had seen on TV. Smiles all around. So playing a game like this builds skills, and realizations, any urbanite needs to better deal with strangers.

The question is, what the alleycat of transmobility looks like. How do we race each other when we’re using our Boris Bikes and our Oyster cards to hop from modality to modality? Perhaps it’s Chromaroma, perhaps it’s something else, but in any case, we need these games and we need our systems to accommodate them.

When the now still analogue wayfinding system in the tube is replaced by a piece of urban informatics, I want it to still allow for this kind of stuff. Because it’s these little things that make our cities such wonderful places to live in.

It’s the age-old dilemma of city planners; planning for the unexpected. Anticipating, for instance, what this free runner is doing with these street lights, is next to impossible. Attempting to plan for it is almost paradoxical. But it’s vital. Because in addition to building useful skills for urban living, self-initiated play like this, the things people get up to without topdown instigation, is what keeps the city vibrant and alive.

I visited Berlin a while ago, and during a night of touring the city’s bars and clubs, we came across a public toilet that had been converted, guerilla style, into a music venue. Seriously. In one corner there was a band making a ton of noise. Here’s a small clip taken that night… There was a guy in the other corner selling beers for next to nothing. We were asked to make a small donation for the band. It was wonderfully grassroots and strange.

Bring more of life into games

So these games I’m talking about make life more interesting and build useful skills that exercise your capacities as an urbanite to the fullest of your potential. Life doesn’t need to be made more like a game, we don’t need a game layer. We don’t need to be put through an adult-sized KidZania. In stead, we need to bring more of life into games. And each game we play can be a prayer or a meditation for a better world.⁶

Put people before stuff

My time is almost up so let me make a few final requests. To those of you who shape urban policy and deal with the deployment of urban informatics: please put people first in your work, trust in their capacity to do wonderful things and enable them to do so. To those in the business of making games, put people first too, and try to see that games can be so much more than mere entertainment media ready for mindless consumption.

And to all of you, the players, when you get back from this conference, or better yet when you go out onto the streets of Manchester tonight: Play a little. It’s good for you. And it’s good for your city.

1. “Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills”, NPR
2. “Executive functions”, Wikipedia
3. “State of Play”, The Morning News
4. “Can’t play, won’t play”, Margaret Robertson
5. “Exploitationware”, Ian Bogost
6. “Spissify Da Gamify”, David Calvo

Today I will talk about how to use ‘mobile’ games (actually pervasive games) to affect players permanently, similar to how a fever can change your immune system.

Nordic LARPs

A while ago this book came out. It is a gorgeous collection of articles on live action roleplaying games (LARPs) created in the Nordic countries. It’s big, coffee-table sized, with lost of nice photos. I can recommend you get it.

What’s fascinating about the form of LARPing that has emerged in the Nordic countries is summarized in one word: ambition. On the one hand these LARPs are ambitious in terms of their production values. One fantasy LARP involved a huge robotic dragon that breathed actual fire. On the other hand they are ambitious in their scope. Nordic LARPs dare the go beyond orcs in the woods and address ‘serious’ topics.

Here’s an example. System Danmarc is a game created to address issues of social injustice. The creators call it a political action LARP. Players spent a weekend in Copenhagen in a purpose built slum set in the near future and were subjected to all kinds of unpleasantness. Their characters were not allowed to end the game in any better condition than they began, underscoring the hopelessness of their situation.

By juxtaposing this dystopia with everyday life in Copenhagen, the game’s designers created friction between what players as well as audience considered to be real. Players gained empathy for the social underclass, the audience was confronted with a situation that magnified what was otherwise happening out of sight.

Simulation fever

This friction is what I think games applied to social issues should look for. Game designer and critic Ian Bogost provides us with a helpful concept in his excellent book Unit Operations, in which he proposes a theory that can be used to analyze video games.

Bogost says that all games in some way are simulations, and that any simulation is subjective. The response people have to this subjectivity is one of either resignation (uncritically subjecting oneself to the rules of the simulation, taking it at face value) or of denial (rejecting simulations wholesale since their subjectivity makes them useless). Taken together, Bogost calls these reactions simulation fever. A discomfort created by the friction between our idea of how reality functions and how it is presented by a game system. The way to shake this fever, says Bogost, is to work through it, that is to say, to play in a critical way and to become aware of what it includes and excludes.

So let’s look at a game Bogost uses as an example of a thoroughly subjective game that gives rise to powerful feelings of simulation fever. September 12 is a newsgame by Gonzalo Frasca which models the futility of the US response to the attacks of September 11. You control the reticule and can fire rockets at the terrorists. The rocket, however arrives with a delay, this making civilian casualties inevitable. Civilians mourn the deaths of their kind and subsequently convert to terrorism themselves. People’s reaction to this game, and its colored portrayal of the situation are telling. Games like this can affect people strongly and I think lastingly.

What’s exciting about Nordic LARPs like System Danmarc is the fact that the simulation inducing the fever coincides with the reality it critiques, thus amplifying the confusion for players and audience alike.

Permeability

A game that takes this to new extremes is a cross between a pervasive game and a LARP called Momentum. It is even less separate from everyday life. Players start the game as themselves and play at becoming possessed by the spirits of deceased historical figures such as cybernetician Norbert Wiener. They went and acted out rituals at various urban sites to assist these spirits, and were of course confronted with unwitting audience. The question then becomes: am I playing at being possessed, or actually possessed, and what is the difference anyway? Momentum was a vehicle for providing players with a new perspective on the machinations of consensus reality.

A traditional idea amongst games people is that games are apart from reality, that they are a ‘safe place’. It was first popularized by Johan Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens. That actions in the game do not affect our lives outside of it. The previous examples show that the edges of the magic circle are blurry.

But also in a traditional game like MTG you can see people bring things to the game and take them from the game. Magic: The Gathering’s designer Richard Garfield calls this the metagame. Magic games include stakes in the form of cards and those are quite real. They represent cash money. The economy around the game is also very real and not tied to one time and place.

So what does that mean for those of you interested in making games for public space? Simulation fever and the permeability of the magic circle show that games can be used to effect meaningful change. It is vital however to think about games in non-utilitarian ways. The game doesn’t have to be the change itself and the change doesn’t have to be limited to people’s skills, but can include their mental states. So let’s turn our attention to applied pervasive play in public space.

Public Space

In a recent report on a conference called Wireless Stories, Michiel’s¹ colleague Martijn de Waal mentions this project. Climate on the Wall by the Digital Urban Living Lab was an attempt to facilitate a conversation about climate change using an interactive urban projection. It turned out people didn’t talk on the wall (and in fact subverted it for their own ends) but they did talk amongst themselves.

Martijn points out two things creators should take to heart when they want to spark debate in public space: involve people, and make it open-ended. I have some suggestions for how to do this, using games. (He also laments the lack of scaleability of locative stories, something I myself, from a business perspective am also constantly thinking about.)

The way to involve people is to make it about people, and what people do. Make it ‘readable’ for outsiders. Allow for entry-points. When we went to play Bocce Drift in the city, people could immediately see what we were doing and could join in. Technology often requires conscious design for it to be embodied in this way.

The way to be open-ended is to resist over-specifying (parts of) the design. A common pitfall for novice game designers is to make intended player behavior the goal of the game. The challenge is to have this behavior emerge from a game’s goals and constraints. Maguro, but also Change Your World, a game we did for the Rotterdam Youth Year are about coordination within large groups. We don’t tell them to coordinate, we create a situation within which the way to win is to coordinate.

And when it comes to scaleability, draw inspiration from Wanderlust’s elegant design. It’s locative storytelling, but less specifically coupled to locations and as an added bonus, it uses no proprietary technologies. It runs in a browser.

Some design guidelines

To summarize, here’s some guidelines we’ve been using in recent projects, like Maguro, which I can’t talk about specifically, but can discuss in general terms. Maguro is an applied pervasive we’re designing for a large government service. The aim is to ignite an organizational change through a game is mixed up with daily work activities.

So Maguro is a game that is half-real (similar to Momentum) that do not set themselves totally apart from reality. We do this because we want to seduce players to draw lessons from their game experience for real life. We want to infect them with simulation fever. So Maguro’s game mechanics are inspired on the daily work of the players. The setting is also one step removed from their daily reality.

It’s fine to say you play this game and then it changes you and then we’re done, goodbye. But we don’t want to leave the players empty-handed when the game is done. That would be a cop-out. We want to support them in sustaining this change. So what we’re looking at, is creating tools that are first introduced in-game. Things that are useful for players, that let them play the game more effectively. If a game is about collaboration for instance, you can imagine a tool in the form of social currency that allows players to rate each other’s effectiveness. (That’s a crude example of course, real solutions would be a little more sophisticated.)

These tools, however, exist at the edges of the game and reality. We design them in such a way, that once the game is over, the tools, and their associated behaviors, can continued to be used by players. In this way, a game’s intended effects can be sustained more easily beyond it. So the aforementioned social currency could carry over into post-game reality, and continue to affect people’s behavior in interesting ways.

Like I said, I can’t show you the game in question (yet) but we’ve seen promising results. I am convinced that this way, we can do games in public space that are more than just fun, that do create change outside of themselves – by means of simulation fever – and that enable players to sustain this change, using tools that exist on the edges of game and reality. Thank you.

1. Michiel de Lange moderated the event.

It was a swell evening, with Mediamatic’s exhibition of arcade machines of various vintages serving as a fitting backdrop. Sitting in the front row, watching lots of clever folk talk about all kinds of games-related stuff was a rare treat. Thanks to Evelyn for inviting me.

Hi there, I’m Kars. I’m the founder of Hubbub, we’re a design studio for physical social games in public space, based in Utrecht. We make physical games, we want to make games that are embodied. That make use of people’s experience of physical reality, and their social lives. Such as cardboard tube fighting.

And we are very interested in doing this for the city of tomorrow, so we have a keen interest in urban life and how it is shaped by technology in the near future.

We’re organized according to something we’ve come to call “the heist model”, inspired by films such as Ocean’s 11. That means each Hubbub project is run by a team of independent specialists that converge around a shared interest.

So I want to start by sharing some things that excite me at the moment. The fact that Will Wright – of Sim City, The Sims – is doing a TV show called Bar Karma in stead of a game for instance.

Or Keita Takahashi – creator of Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy – designing a playground. He’s not just designing for humans, but also for animals.

Trans-species interaction is something that we’re doing some work on ourselves. Such as a project codenamed Buta commissioned by the Utrecht School of the Arts, where we’re designing play between humans and domestic pig.

Other work on the horizon for us is a pervasive game for a large government service. The game will be used to affect the behavior of its employees and bring a little light in an office environment. Much like our friend David Brent is doing here.

More things that excite me: NIDHOGG is a two-player indie video game that is played on big screens for large audiences. Play as performance. I though it always requires a physical act, turns out screen-based interaction can have that quality too. Genius.

A big chunk of our time this year was taken up by a project that was about play as performance a lot. It’s called PLAY Pilots. You may have heard of it. This started out as an investigation I did into the opportunities for playful additions to the major cultural events in Utrecht…

…and ended up as three live games created by three Utrecht-based studios for three lovely festivals.

The first one you’ll hear more about, that’s Wip ‘n’ Kip by FourceLabs for Stekker Fest. A spring rider race with physical chickens and a digital race track on a big screen. All players got a little code with which they could claim their race times and see a slow-motion video of their race on our site.

The second game was made by Zesbaans for the Netherlands Film Festival. It’s called De Stereoscoop and is like a set of turn tables with which you can scratch and mix a huge database of clips from Dutch films from the last 30 years. De Stereoscoop printed receipts when you unlocked a badge because you made an interesting mix. You could claim these online and see what films you used to get it.

And finally, Monobanda made Bandjesland for Le Guess Who? It’s like this loop-based sequencer that uses old fashioned cassette tapes with newfangled RFIDs inside of them. And a lot of blacklight. We recorded most of the “music” people made during the play sessions and put those on SoundCloud. We also stored all separate samples and made those available too.

To tie it all together we came up with a social game that’s about dueling with your friends using moves from various subcultures. It’s a sort of competitive slot machine that piggybacks on Twitter.

And finally, in 2011, we hope to take these games, and new ones, and go on a tour of the country in our very own magic bus. So we hope to see you there!

Hello, my name is Kars. I am the founder and principal designer at Hubbub, a studio that investigates ways of affecting society and culture using games in public space. Thank you Jacco for inviting me here. So I was asked to talk about design. These kinds of presentations often start with a definition of design. I wont’t do that. Instead I’ll start with an example:

This is Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfus) in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. You are all familiar with this film, I assume? What Roy does in the film, building this mound without knowing up front what it is or what it means: designers to this all the time. They engage in thinking through making.

These are images from the Lyddle End 2050 project, instigated by Russell Davies. He invited people all over the world to imagine the future by modifying model railway stuff. The idea is that making models is a kind of time travel. It’s also interesting to see how it’s kind of a collection of individual imaginings that gel because of the few small constraints. Russell calls this way of working ‘speculative modeling’.

Design

So anyway, design deals with the future all the time. It shares this with science fiction. Where the two overlap, people often talk about design fiction. This is when one uses the techniques of design to create believable potential futures or to suggest alternative presents. One person who is quite active in this field is the science fiction author turned design critic Bruce Sterling. In a recent article, he writes that we are experiencing “a massive cybernetic hemorrhage in ways of knowing the world”. We have so many ways of examining reality, that this has lead to a collapse of our value systems. Old ways of determining what is worthwhile have gone out the window.

He also describes how design and science fiction as a result have become unable to effectively imagine any future. This is the problem I find myself confronted with. But I’m not the only one. Famous sci-fi author and contemporary of Sterling, William Gibson, has stopped writing science fiction. The same goes for Kim Stanley Robinson, whose recent book is on Galileo Galilei. In an interview he says:

“If the world is a science fiction novel then what do you read? What can the literature do for you?” What indeed.

The way to deal with this, as Sterling writes in the aforementioned article, is to map the edges of what we currently find imaginable. To get a sense of the contours of that gap. And subsequently to plug it. The way to plug this hole is through action. Through pragmatism. I think that is the only viable stance. In this time, when we (or at least I) have been kind of totally gobsmacked by current events, “peak everything” as John Thackara likes to call it. The way to move ahead is by doing, by constant self-improvement, through ‘practice’ as German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls it. In fact, I think the “gaming mindset” that Jane McGonigal talks about is similar to this stance. So we as game designers might need to become more like our players. Fearlessly venturing into the unknown, thinking through action, constantly self-improving.

But anyway, back to the gap. What might the contours of that gap be? I would like to look at two areas where I feel like I am running up against true unknowns. One is the urbanist, dealing with the cities more and more of us humans find ourselves living in. The other is biological, dealing with the living, the myriad species we share this planet with, all the way down to the smallest ones, like bacteria. And the building blocks of life. At the end, I hope you’ll come to share my vision, which is that we need a new kind of game design, one that is much more relational and environmental, to deal with these unknowns.

Cities

So cities. Let’s start by agreeing that humans are becoming an urban species. More and more people find themselves living in cities. Over 50% of the globe’s population. We’ve kind of invented cities to augment our abilities, as these kind of engines of culture. Cities work (or used to work anyway) because it allowed all these different kinds of people, all with their own specialities, to live in close proximity to each other. They enable rapid exchange of ideas. They increase serendipity, which is this driving force behind invention. No wonder designers love busy urban centers.

Cities are becoming the new states, they are leading the way, in stead of the nations they are part of. In developing countries people move into the city in the hopes of finding a better life. Developing cities put a tremendous pressure on the environment, this we all know. Old ways of building cities don’t work anymore at the current scale. Old cities need hacking and fixing. At the same time, they’re our best bet of surviving into the future. Matt Jones wrote a design fiction piece about this with the wonderful title ‘The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future‘.

But it’s not just about the good old cities in the western world. It gets weirder when you look to the developing world. We really do not know what life is like in those cities, what makes them work. Let alone what game design for those urbanites looks like. Take the city of Shenzhen, for instance. Wholly owned by manufacturer Foxconn. It was dubbed iPod City because it manufactures Apple parts. More than 14 million people live there. Life is governed by “a schizoid mix of global capitalism and hardline communism”.³ Can you imagine these people playing Xbox Knect? I can’t.

But what will they play? And, as applied game designers, what issues can we address? If we want to invent for such a culture, we’d first need to get to know it. I myself have worked on applied urban games in the past for underprivileged areas of Dutch cities. We focused on creating games that increase social cohesion, renew people’s sense of agency in the hopes of rekindling citizenship, but really, those are all issues relevant to Western contemporary cities. If iPod City is the future of cities, I want to know what the social issues are there, and start designing for those.

Science fiction author J.G. Ballard predicted Shenzhen, to an extent. In his novel Super-Cannes he describes an elite worker’s paradise called Eden-Olympia. It’s a closed society where everything is perfectly arranged. The protagonist enters this paradise and discovers an underworld where people engage in heinous acts. The thing is, the residents welcome this underworld, and are even encouraged to engage in it by resident psychiatrists as a stress release. To escape from the boredom and social restraint that governs their everyday life. I don’t know. But maybe applied game design can do for Shenzhen what this underworld does for Eden-Olympia? Offer a release valve?⁴

When I was preparing this talk I thought I would leave it at that. But this being a talk about design I felt obliged to at least make a small attempt at envisioning what such a game might be. So on the way here, in the train, I did some quick sketches. The first, as you can see, is me trying to figure out what a person in a Shenzhen-like future city might be dreaming of. Again I honestly do not know. The only way to figure out is to go to such cities and explore what life there is like.

The second was inspired by some quick research I did on social games popular in China. It turns out many of the games on Chinese social networking sites are clones of the ones we know from Facebook and such. Like Farmville. There’s one important difference though: many of these games are much less ‘friendly’ and feature competitive, even nasty elements. In the Chinese equivalent of Farmville, you can steal stuff from other players homes, or leave pests in their yards… So I was thinking back to Ballard’s Eden-Olympian underground, and was wondering if a pervasive game that would catch on in Shenzhen might involve pickpocketing? Anyway.

Biology

Lets move on from cities to biology. Maybe it’s best to start by telling you about a project I am involved with, which I have codenamed Buta.⁵ Project Buta is about exploring the potential of games for interaction between humans and domestic pig. You could call it a critical design project, where we are attempting to come up with designs that are feasible on the one hand, and on the other hand embody the many ethical standpoints one finds in the meat industry: those of farmers, consumers, citizens, animal rights activists etc. What happens to people’s perception of pigs if they play with them and discover (like I did) that they are at least as intelligent as your pet dog?

So trans-species interaction. That’s a truly brave new world, something I can only see the contours of. Natalie Jeremijenko is a designer who is very active in this space. She talks about re-scripting the ways we relate to our environment, including the living species we co-inhabit it with.⁶ Many of her works are very playful. Like this tadpole walker, or this rig that one can use to communicate with fish. Compared to humans, animals are a wholly unexplored terrain of playmates.

Or consider the field of synthetic biology, which looks at biology as a material for design. Every year, at the iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machines) Jamboree, teams of students compete in the creation of new living systems. On of last year’s entries was an e.coli bacteria that can secrete one of seven colors. It was dubbed E.chromi. Designers who were part of this team proposed a thing called Scatalog: cheap, personalized disease monitoring using this new bacteria. You eat the bacteria, they colonize your intestines and color your feces if a disease is detected…

Can you imagine using living materials as a platform for your game? The mind boggles. OK, one more. This is design fiction, but let’s be honest, if we can get bacteria to make pretty colors, why can’t we make trees grow conductive layers so that they can become a platform for computation? This is Computational Wood, a project by Matt Cottam. Imagine trees that can act as computers. As they grow, they might become more powerful machines. Machines that could be used for play and games.

So, again, some sketches. Future games might be created around synthetic substances. Maybe you can play a game of food poisoning. You sneak a game substance into your friend’s food without him noticing. Next day he wakes up with a green tongue. You win.

I have a sneaking suspicion the only reason we haven’t seen soccer matches between humans and dogs is because the dogs will surely win.

In summary…

Let’s summarize the points I’ve been trying to make. To start, designers deal with the unknowable all the time. They explore the unknowable through making. But myself, and many designers and futurists alike are having issues with getting a clear picture of what lies ahead. It seems as if there are uncharted limits to our current-day imagination. I have tried to show you two domains where I myself have run into these limits, where I have to throw up my hands and say: “I don’t know”. In the hopes that we can start moving beyond those borders. Not by talking, but by making. What’s our Devils Tower?

The first domain is: the future of cities. We are an urban species, and if we want to arm ourselves for future life we’d better learn to live well in cities. But the future city looks nothing like the one we know now. It’s probably something like Shenzhen. What does life look like in there? What kinds of play can we imagine in that space? It’s partly a new technological frontier, partly a social one.

The second is: the realm of the living. Biology is becoming a material for design. This includes game design. Can you imagine a game that runs on bacteria? Or that you play with your backyard fox? Just like we need to learn to live well in cities. We need to learn to live well with the other species inhabiting this planet. Play is a universal, trans-species language. Future applied game design will need to deal with the biological as much as with the technological. The line between both will surely blur.

So those are some of the limits of the imaginable, as I see them. I hope you feel an urge to plug the hole in our imagination of this future as much as I do. And I would suggest we do this through action. The main challenge I see with all this is nicely summed up by a quote from the architect Eliel Saarinen:

“Always design a thing by considering its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”

It reminds me of the Ray and Charles Eames film Powers of Ten. In other words, we need to become better at understanding the effects anything we make has on its surrounding context. We might need new tools for this, or new ways of looking at things. It might be that the games we make are a way to see these second-order effects.

The future of applied game design, in other words, is a future where design has become very much a relational, and environmental discipline. But perhaps it already is.

1. The slides without notes are also up on SlideShare.
2. A video of the talk is now up on Vimeo.
3. For a fascinating account of Shenzhen, see ‘The ballet of iPod City‘.
4. For a view on Ballard’s significance for video game design, have a look at the article ‘Ragdoll Metaphysics: JG Ballard, Boredom, And The Violent Promise Of Videogames‘ by Jim Rossignol.
5. I am working on this at the Utrecht School of the Arts’ Design for Playful Impact research program.
6. For a good introduction to Jeremijenko’s work, check out this TED talk.

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?

On Wednesday 14 April I co-hosted the first Best Scene in Town workshop on invitation of Waag Society’s Ronald Lenz. The other co-host was The Mobile City‘s Martijn de Waal. Best Scene in Town is a design contest wherein participants are asked to create an urban game, narrative experience or tour using 7scenes; Waag Society’s “mobile storytelling platform”. The winning entries will be playable at this year’s Nuit Blanche in Amsterdam. As part of the contest, several workshops are offered to inspire and assist those interested in participating.

This first workshop was focused on games and architecture. Both Martijn and I were asked to give a short presentation on the main values of architecture and game design respectively, and then go into a few future scenarios. I’ve posted the full presentation I gave to SlideShare but here’s an excerpt of the scenarios, because I think that’s the most fun part.

Scenario 1: “Would you like points with that?”

The first scenario is about what happens when all mundane activities are turned into games.

It’s an extrapolation of things we are seeing now, such as Foursquare (which attaches points to visits to the pub) and car dashboards like the one found in the Ford Fusion Hybrid, which attaches a score of sorts to your driving behavior.

The way this future would feel is that you are constantly given points for things you do. Those points are most likely awarded by businesses and governments, to manipulate your behavior. For instance, an electrical toothbrush might award you points for loyal brushing behavior. Those points could result in a discount on your health insurance…

This future works thanks to the proliferation of cheap sensors and networking. These are barely games. The sensing makes your everyday activities measurable. Then, simple game mechanics like collecting and rankings are stacked on top. It’s not about make-believe, it’s about improving who you are and what you do.

Scenario 2: “Be who you aren’t.”

The second scenario I’d like to share with you is about where I think digital games as an entertainment medium are headed. It’s about the player as performer, augmented by a large range of personal technologies.

This scenario is an extrapolation of the social physical games we’ve seen emerge on consoles, such as Guitar Hero. These games are a social activity, you can be a player but you can also be a spectator. They’re performative. And the tech makes you feel awesome, if only just for a minute. It lets your pretend you’re a rockstar. Pretending is at the core of these games and I think that when they collide with lifestyles such as goths (who pretend to be Victorians, essentially) we’ll be in for a surprise… (As another example, you could say parkour players are pretending to be superheroes, or Super Mario, at least.)

So imagine you could embody your ambitions, the things you aspire to, without actually having to become them. If you fancy yourself a bicycle courier you can play the Fixie Hero game and show off to all your friends. There’ll be tech that lets you pretend to ride a bike really fast and dangerous without actually, you know, going fast and being in danger. But you’ll feel like it, and you’ll look awesome doing it. Or you can pretend to be a pilot, a fireman, an artist, a head of state, you name it.

So this future is mostly facilitated by progress in post-GUI technologies. It’ll be brought about by all kinds of wearable, portable, personal tech that’ll amplify various senses and capacities. They’ll be stylish, fashionable and fit in with your lifestyle. (Not like these MIT geeks, in other words.)

Scenario 3: “Warning: alternate reality in progress!”

The third and last scenario is about games as tools for proposing and effecting change.

It takes as its starting points a recent trend in the design world, called design fiction. It’s about telling stories about possible futures and making artifacts that represent said future. Here’s a photo from the Lyddle End 2050 project, which was a collaborative effort to build a model of an English village as it might look in the future. On the other hand we have things like alternate reality games that employ a range of media to create the illusion of a coherent mirror world. Zona Incerta, for instance, was a Brazilian ARG about a big corporation buying up the Amazon, which caused quite a stir.

This future has you stumbling across other people’s realities constantly. You might have some way of filtering them out, or there might be legislation that forces people to warn you about them. Conversely, you yourself might construct and play in realities that you would like to see happen (or would like to prevent). It’s culture jamming gone mainstream, in other words.

This future functions mainly thanks to our overlapping media landscape and the fact that our experience of reality is already fully mediated. Cheap tools and platforms for media production make it possible for individuals and small groups of people to produce and run these games.

Like I said, the whole presentation is on SlideShare.

The teams in the middle of developing their concepts

After our presentations, the workshop kicked off in full. Seven teams worked on concepts ranging from a tour of local markets where the goal was to learn about and collect ingredients for recipes representative of the many cultures that make up the Bijlmer, to a game where you’re awarded points for starting street parties.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the atmosphere and the output of this workshop. I’m curious to see what will result from next editions, since those will continue to collide contrasting fields such as museums versus advertising and film & theater versus interaction design.

I proposed several ways games can be used to make a change in cities and tied each of them to a past project. I also discussed a few things we learned with each of them.

Mega Monster Battle Arena™ – a mashup of music theatre and gaming – created a context for community involvement in a cultural production. We had a broad range of people from the local community involved in all aspects of the production, but also (most importantly) in the performance itself.

• The way to combine a story and a game successfully is to find a structure that can accommodate both. We did this by drawing inspiration from martial arts movies such as Enter the Dragon, which mix story bits with fighting set pieces.
• It can be helpful to conflate the fictive space with the physical place of a performance, as we did by setting the story in an arena. This gives you the excuse to involve the audience without breaking frame.

Change Your World – a team-based street game for youth – was a safe environment in which players can develop real-world skills. This was just a fun game to play on face value, but had embedded in the rules ways to encourage participation.

• We had a lot of benefit from the flags we employed. Being physical artifacts, they had a lot of affordances that were readily available to us. This you don’t get in software, where you need to build every property of an object yourself.
• We did not instruct players on how to play the game (that would have been boring). In stead, we gave them a goal and tools and set some boundaries and let them discover the best way to play.

Koppelkiek – a social photo collecting game – created a meeting place for diverse individuals in a troubled neighborhood. The game provided an excuse and a framework for strangers to have brief interactions with each other.

• It’s not easy to reach a neighborhood as a whole. The way we gained access was through key figures in the area’s social scene. They became ambassadors for our game.
• The trouble with a purely pervasive game is that it isn’t anywhere in particular and does not consist of readily identifiable events. We decided to mix in fixed places and events to manage the game’s dramatic arc.

So that’s what I talked about mostly. It was nice to be the pragmatic one at an event, for a change. The discussions we had throughout the evening – about the impending gamepocalypse, for instance – were stimulating as well. Thanks again to Juha for the invitation. And if you’re into urban computing and haven’t been there yet, make sure you head to the next event.

The talk’s title refers to alchemists’ quest to turn lead into gold, which sometimes feels similar to what we’re trying to do with pervasive games in public urban places.¹ To summarize: I start by talking about the fact that games are essentially useless, and that this means applied game design should look for useful results in second order effects. I argue that the contribution of urban games lies primarily in the increased diversity of use of our streets, which is a good thing in itself. I talk about the care designers need to take with the games they deploy, since not everyone is looking to play and we should respect that. Playing games is a voluntary thing by definition. Towards the end I go into different strategies for using games to increase systemic awareness using several games as examples. I wrap up with a look at reward systems we commonly find in games like Foursquare, which now serves as templates for a lot of work in this area. I feel that this leads people away from what game design is about in the first place: creating interesting activities.

View a video of this talk at Hamburg University’s Podcampus, and view the slides and notes for this talk at SlideShare.

Update: below is a video of this talk on Vimeo.

Some recommended sources that served as input for this talk:

• James Wallis, Callois Completeness
• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• iMomus, Pervasive urban gaming: count me out, and in
• Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: Check-Ins Check Out

1. In the sense that the initial aim might be unattainable, but the insights we gain along the way might be worthwhile in itself.