PLAY Pilots is live

We’ve launched a first ver­sion of PLAY Pilots; a web site we’ve been work­ing on the past few months. It is the next phase of our engage­ment with the city of Utrecht on cul­tur­al inno­va­tion through play, which I allud­ed to in this post.1

At this point, the site allows you to see what cus­tom-made live games PLAY Pilots will run at select­ed fes­ti­vals (the first one being an awe­some spring rid­er race pro­duced by Fource­Labs). You can also play an online game which is all about fac­ing off with your friends in sub­cul­tur­al style bat­tles. If you play any of the games you can pick up col­lec­tor’s items at the fes­ti­vals.

We’ve been doc­u­ment­ing the process behind the web­site as well as the live games on a ded­i­cat­ed blog so check it out if you’re inter­est­ed in how this stuff gets done. PLAY Pilots is as much about doing inter­est­ing things with play as it is about shar­ing the things we learn along the way.

Our list of things to improve and add to the site is grow­ing steadi­ly, and we’ll be patch­ing it up as we go so if you have any sug­ges­tions, drop us a line.

I’d like to take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to thank the team behind the web site, who have worked super hard on it this past peri­od. They are Alper ÇuÄŸun (engi­neer­ing), Bernard Vehmey­er (copy) and Simon Scheiber (design). It’s been a plea­sure hav­ing them on board as agents of Hub­bub. Many thanks to Jeroen van Mas­trigt for entrust­ing us with his brain­child PLAY. And final­ly, the city and province of Utrecht for pro­vid­ing us with the means to make this hap­pen.

1. Eng­lish speak­ing friends take note, the project is firm­ly aimed at a Dutch audi­ence so I’m afraid it won’t make much sense to you, alas! [↩]