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Tag Archives: cities

New Planning Methods

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

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The Gameful City, a preview of my chapter for The Gameful World

This year, MIT Press will pub­lish The Game­ful World, a book edit­ed by Stef­fen P. Walz and Sebas­t­ian Deter­d­ing to which I’ve con­tributed a chap­ter. The book will cov­er approach­es in game­ful and play­ful design, how it can be applied to a range of fields and its com­mon issues. For exam­ple, Ian Bogost will expand […]

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Ignite Berlin on New Games and Wild Play

Before I went on my trip to Chi­na and Aus­tralia I had an Ignite to give here in Berlin. To do that I threw all of our think­ing of the past cou­ple of years on the floor (lit­er­al­ly because my post-its would­n’t stick to the wall behind me) and syn­the­sized it into some­thing that reflects […]

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‘The Strange Things People Play’ at the Hide&Seek Weekender Conference

Here’s the blog post ver­sion of what I talked about at Play­ing in Pub­lic, the Hide&Seek Week­ender Con­fer­ence. It’s titled The Strange Things Peo­ple Play, which was an oblique ref­er­ence to this pas­sage from The Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy: “I know that astrol­o­gy isn’t a sci­ence,” said Gail. “Of course it isn’t. It’s just […]

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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 […]

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Six games about architecture

I went look­ing for a few recent exam­ples of games that deal with archi­tec­tur­al themes in some way. I pulled these most­ly from a few of the major street games fes­ti­vals that are out there, such as Come Out & Play, Hide & Seek, Igfest and You Are GO! Just from this small sam­ple size it […]

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“New ideas must use old buildings”

The oth­er day I had din­ner at a radio-sta­­tion that was turned into a restau­rant. My favorite events venue in Ams­ter­dam used to be a print­ing press. And friends of mine are turn­ing a mas­sive sports hall into cre­ative work spaces. The uses build­ings were intend­ed for, and what they’re actu­al­ly used for, vary greatly. […]

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Speaking at dConstruct 2011

I am real­ly pleased to be speak­ing at dCon­struct this year. I’ve attend­ed the con­fer­ence myself sev­er­al times and always enjoy the well-curat­ed pro­gram and the good things offered by the even­t’s home, love­ly Brighton. You’ll find the abstract I sub­mit­ted below. Have a look at the con­fer­ence site for the rest of the program […]

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New Games for New Cities at FutureEverything

Last week I was in Man­ches­ter for FutureEv­ery­thing. I pre­sent­ed on games and how they can be used to improve city life. Below are my notes and a selec­tion of slides. It’s longish, but hope­ful­ly infor­ma­tive. I’ve tried to con­nect crit­i­cism of gam­i­fi­ca­tion with the virtues of open-end­ed play, and show how the lat­ter can […]

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Human desire in the cognitive city

As I write this I am on a train to Utrecht, the last leg of my jour­ney home from Berlin. I was there for Cog­ni­tive Cities, a con­fer­ence on urban com­put­ing, data visu­al­iza­tion and relat­ed sub­jects. It’s been a hell of a week­end — a few minor flaws aside, the con­fer­ence was great and I […]

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