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Tag Archives: urban games

Announcing Camparc – a public space game for STRP

Over the course of the next two months we will be cre­at­ing a new pub­lic space game com­mis­sioned by art and tech­nol­o­gy fes­ti­val STRP. The game car­ries the work­ing title Cam­parc and Hub­bub code­name FUNKOROGASHI. It will be playable Sep­tem­ber 12–14 at Strijp‑S—a Philips indus­tri­al site con­vert­ed into city neigh­bour­hood. Read on below for a […]

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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 […]

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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 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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Slides and notes for ‘Fevered’ at Mob Fest: Thinking Mobile

After speak­ing at an Ignite a while ago I returned to Media­mat­ic’s won­der­ful Arcade exhi­bi­tion last week. I was asked to present at the first evening of Mob Fest, a 3‑day mini fes­ti­val on mobile games in the broad­est sense of the word. Below are my slides and notes for the talk. The evening was […]

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Drifting through the city with a few bocce balls

On a recent sun­ny Sun­day after­noon I took a walk while boulesing through Utrecht. Togeth­er with a group of friends I used a num­ber of streets and squares as a play­ing field. The water-lev­­el walk­ways along the Old Canal, the foun­tain behind the city hall, and the usu­al­ly qui­et Sev­en Alleys. Passers­by respond­ed with amusement […]

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Assumption is the mother of all…

So game num­ber two. What was this game sup­posed to be about? What kind of game could we design to take our stu­dents to the next lev­el? What was our next role? Look­ing at game #1, the big pin­up board game, one of the main things the stu­dents were doing was mak­ing assump­tions about basi­cal­ly everything. […]

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Cheating by the rules in Pirateball and Illuminati

One of the design­ers of the game Pirate­ball describes it as “extreme­ly stu­pid”. I recent­ly ran it at a games fes­ti­val and dis­cov­ered that it’s also craft­ed quite clev­er­ly. Pirate base­ball To poten­tial play­ers I always say that it’s base­ball as pirates play it. Then you get an idea. That’s the first trick: the name […]

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Join us for a game of Bocce Drift

So we have five sets of boc­ce balls lying around (or jeu de boules, as we like to call the game in the Nether­lands). They’re left over from our lit­tle stint at NU Grounds. We were plan­ning to run Boc­ce Drift there, but did not get around to it. So let’s play it any­way, in […]

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Games we ran at NU Grounds

On a scorch­ing­ly hot Sat­ur­day after­noon sev­er­al agents of Hub­bub descend­ed on the Utrecht area of Lei­d­sche Rijn to run a num­ber of phys­i­cal social games at the NU Grounds fes­ti­val. We played a mix of games designed by stu­dents of the Utrecht School of the Arts and games tak­en from the excel­lent Ludoc­i­ty website. […]

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