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.
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.
- 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. [↩]
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
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. 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.