Hack days as ludic practice

It was at DiGRA that I first heard Eric Zimmerman talk about the idea of this being a ludic age. We’re in the period that follows the information age, which we’ve more or less left behind. In the ludic age, says Zimmerman, “information itself is put at play”.1

What does that mean? It can’t just be that it means we’ll get more games, and more kinds of games. That can be part of it, but there must be more to it.

I think hackatons are part of this idea of information put at play. A short while ago, I attended what was probably the most ambitious open data hack day of the Netherlands thus far.2 Code Camping Amsterdam was host to almost 200 designers, technologists and civil servants who spent a day building useful or otherwise interesting hacks with newly opened up government data.3

Together with Chris Eidhof, I messed with a neat collection of old colonial maps. We made an attempt at unorthodox, playful displays of the maps, highlighting their visual richness. But we were thwarted by some less-than-optimal metadata. We did finish a prototype though, which shows a treemap of all the maps per half century.4

The opening screen of the app, showing a treemap

The opening screen of the app, showing a treemap

Although we did not manage to pull off a gorgeous Bloom-like data toy, or a playful tool for understanding like the ones Bret Victor has been writing about, I still feel us hacking away at maps is an example of activity in the ludic age.

For starters, we spent a Saturday, for fun, attempting to make something that presents a government data resource in an interesting way to the general public. That is not an information age activity, we weren’t doing this for profit, we weren’t even doing it as part of some kind of civil action, we were doing it for the fun of it.

Our means of arriving at the app were playful. We weren’t working according to some industry-standard methodology. We were flying by the seat of our pants. I would never work like that in a regular Hubbub project.5

Chris Eidhof and myself at Code Camping Amsterdam

Chris Eidhof and myself at Code Camping Amsterdam. Photo by Jean-Pierre Jans.

Finally, this was a collaboration, but between two people who had never made anything together before. For something like that to work, for Chris and myself to work well together, I think we had to arrive at something very much akin to Bernie DeKoven‘s well-played game. We were hacking together because we both wanted to. We were playing (hacking) hard, taking it very seriously, while at the same time aware of the not-seriousness of it all. We could fail, it would be OK. And we were mindful of each other’s agendas. Of what each of us wanted out of the game (that hack day).

So on many levels, even if the product ultimately isn’t incredibly playful, just a humble iPad app (with some very pretty maps) our means of arriving at it were a fine example of ludic practice in the post-digital age.

  1. Here’s a video of Eric’s talk at DiGRA and this is a profile video about some of the same ideas. []
  2. It was organised by Hack de Overheid (“Hack the Government”) of which Hubbub CTO Alper is a board member. []
  3. If you read Dutch, this is a neat article about the event published in Parool. []
  4. Chris wrote a post about his experience too. And here’s a post in Dutch about the app at the Open Cultuur Data blog. []
  5. There are moments in a design process where you more or less do, of course, that’s part of invention, but there’s equal parts structure, normally. []
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Making physical games at Playgrounds Festival

Over the years, I’ve run a variety of game design workshops, both standalone and as part of larger events.1 They’re typically aimed at creating simple, analog games that can be played inside or on the streets.

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

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

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

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

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

An impression of what was made

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

(Watch this video on Vimeo.)

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

Some observations

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

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

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

Where to go next

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

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

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

Action stations

I’m writing this from behind a new desk. These were designed by my brother Ties. He’d done a pair of desks for BUROPONY before and when I saw his new design for a meeting table I asked him to also make a smaller version that could be used as a desk.

Early model

The design is reminiscent of those wooden dinosaur skeletons. All the parts are milled from birch wood plates and slide into place without the need for glue, nails or screws.

Wooden dinosaur skeleton

Plans

We did have to sand them down and lacquer them, though. That was a bit more work than I had expected… (Good thing I had help from my brother and sister.)

Maggie and Ties sanding

There was a bit of space left on some of the plates, so we also made monitor stands that can hold a stack of A4 sized paper.

Monitor stand

I think they look really neat and I can tell you they’re a pleasure to work from. I love the natural unfinished look, and the feel of the wood grain. Here’s a few more shots.

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A roundup of Code 4 publicity

We’ve been talking about Code 4 at various venues the past few months. So I thought I should collect the results from those events here, in case you’ve missed them the first time around.

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

Read DiGRA practice paper

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

Watch the Chi Sparks talk

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

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

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Occupy the future at Playful 2011

After making the many different creative industries out there take games seriously (and subsequently sort of regretting the consequences) Playful was back this year and decided to look towards the future. Ever since I presented there in 2008 this has probably been my favorite event of the year. So I returned after a much-regretted hiatus to attend Playful 2011 – the shape of things to come.

Longing for a Death Star

Conference director Toby Barnes kicked off the day bemoaning the fact that there was still no Death Star floating somewhere in space. He longed for a return of ambitious future thinking as opposed to the more mundane, close-to-home, near future foresight that seems to be in vogue. The “where’s my jetpack” argument, basically. But Toby qualified this further by adding he was longing for more folk wanting to make “a dent in the universe” because, as was implied, that is what these times call for.

Escaping the prison of imagination

He was later scolded by Marcus Brown, being accused of living in the “middle aged future” a neat term he coined to describe the fact that current innovations are shaped by the ideas imprinted on our collective unconscious by science fiction of the 70s and 80s, best exemplified by the uncanny resemblance of Siri to HAL-9000.

What I found most fascinating about Brown’s talk, but sadly had to be rushed due to time constraints, were three far-future worlds he sketched and subsequently challenged the audience to imagine living in. “The Billion Dollar Show”, for instance, is a world post peak-oil, where we have to make do without any fossil fuels. It’s not a distopia, but something akin to a real-life FarmVille.

Science fiction, as Al Robertson pointed out earlier in the day, has constructive playfulness at its core. What I think Marcus Brown was attempting to do was get us thinking beyond what we know, and force our minds into the unknown, and to get playfully creative with the possibilities. To break out of the future scenarios we know from the sci-fi that have aged and – let’s face it – haven’t aged well.

Making things that dent

However, there is something in Toby Barnes’s call for “making a dent”, but I think it needs to be coupled with Marcus Brown’s demand to break out of the “prison for kids with too much imagination”. And in fact, during the day, some of the talks I enjoyed the most were great examples of constructive playfulness attempting to make a dent – however small – in culture.

Brendan Dawes sung the praises of devices such as the MakerBot, and emphasized the need for each of us to have a “shed” in which to experiment and tinker (even if the thing you call a hacker space is actually just the back room). The fact that this can lead to interesting new products is exemplified by Popa, “a big red button for your iPhone camera”. Which arguably would not be possible without the futurey technologies at our disposal today, such as desktop fabrication.

Both Chris O’Shea and Toca Boca called for more open-ended play in iPhone games for kids – something which I think can be directly traced to Playful’s evangelism over the past years. Chris shared work-in-progress on a digital race car toy, which included experiments with physical iPhone cases that kids could build themselves. Toca Boca impressed us with a large number of digital toys for imaginative play produced in under a year, with my personal favorite being Toca Hair Salon. Who doesn’t want to groom a lion?

Finally, Matthew Ward amazed me with Green=Boom, an installation allowing you to experience the thrill of disarming a bomb, something we’ve seen a zillion times in action movies but have probably never done ourselves. The bomb in this case is a balloon which is popped if you cut the wrong wire. It’s amazing to see how our bodies respond to a seemingly harmless setup like this with high levels of distress. Apparently decades of seeing others go through the ordeal on the silver screen has conditioned us in a big way.

To summarize, what I took away from Playful is that making things is still the best way to complain, wether it’s consumer electronics’s shift to touchscreens, the competitive nature of entertainment software for kids, or the consumption of violent imagery in mainstream media, the future we find ourselves living in today enables individuals to make real, tangible interventions with very little time and means required. Consumer culture has become a playground for makers.

Update, October 24, 2011: added section headers and a few more links.

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Things we’re working on (volume 3)

Four months have passed since the previous update on our projects so it’s about time for a new one.

Curating a playful exhibition

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

Publishing on Code 4

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

Publishing on Buta

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

Art van Triest and Hein Lagerweij at the Vechtclub

Art van Triest and Hein Lagerweij at the Vechtclub

Making a game that teaches astronomy

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

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

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The Transformers at dConstruct 2011

Over two weeks have passed since dConstruct 2011 so it’s high time I post my talk.

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.

Read More »

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Catch us at NPOX, PICNIC or Playgrounds

I’ll be involved with a few more interesting events, so here’s a quick rundown.

  • I’ll be participating in a panel on gamification at NPOX, the annual conference for creatives of the Dutch public broadcasting services. I’ll talk about PLAY Pilots, and offer my perspective on a case submitted by the audience.
  • At PICNIC, I’ll contribute to a session that reflects on – amongst other things – the work done by participants of the VURB workshop Builders at Play.
  • And finally, at Playgrounds, we’ll run a pop-up edition of This happened, as well as some other stuff that we’ll announce as soon as we’ve finished preparations.

Perhaps I’ll catch you at one of these?

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Speaking about Code 4 at Think Design Play, the DiGRA conference

This year the DiGRA conference will take place 14-17 september in Hilversum, the Netherlands. My alma mater, the Utrecht School of the Arts, is hosting.

We couldn’t resist submitting a practice paper on Code 4, the game we made for the Dutch Tax Administration.1 It got accepted, so I’m speaking.

The program is packed with interesting people, such as Eric Zimmerman, Bernie DeKoven and Reiner Knizia. The opening party features the likes of Kid Koala and Copenhagen Game Collective. So this looks like it will be a winner. Our abstract is below. Hope to see you there:

Promoting organizational change within large government bodies remains an elusive goal. The game Code 4 is developed to create a coherent fully mixed media approach to eliciting organizational change effects by employing employees as the primary actors (players) in a game. The Code 4 game is set in an analogous world with a clear cause to action during a dystopian financial crisis and with rules that mirror but also counteract existing bureaucratic processes. The gameplay rewards successful collaboration regardless of the existing organizational framework. In-game player behavior and results from surveys indicate that most players become wholly engaged with both the core game and with the supporting encounters and that the transfer of game effects is successful.

  1. With the help from Alper Çugun, Herman Koster and Marinka Copier. []
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We’ve moved (again)

A year ago we made the move together with Dutch Game Garden to Neude 5. Since then, we’ve had the pleasure of sharing a studio with our friends at FourceLabs. But the 40m2 space we had at our disposal could not contain both our ambitions any longer. So starting this month, we’re in a new space. Still in the game garden, but on the first floor, with a nice view of Neude square, and a lot of room.

A shot of the new studio

I am really excited with this step. The new studio allows Hubbub to continue its journey as a networked studio. We now have plenty of space for both existing and future ‘agents’ to come in and work with us on exciting new projects.

It also allows us to host other activities, such as regular board gaming sessions for inspiration, workshops and other things we might think of down the road.

I’m looking forward to welcoming clients, friends and colleagues to our new studio. If you’re in the area, do drop by.

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