Introducing two junior agents and the Learning Lab project

Hel­lo! Intro­duc­tion times: My name is Wieger and I am what I like to call a spel­let­jes­mak­er. Which basi­cal­ly trans­lates to game design­er in Eng­lish, so, there, I’m a game design­er. Admit­ted­ly I’m still in school, sortof, becom­ing one, cur­rent­ly in our (our you say? yessir, Syl­van and me, more lat­er) third year of Design for Vir­tu­al The­atre and Games. Yes, that is real­ly what it’s called. Any­hoe, part of our third year is rock­ing an intern­ship, and so the Syl­man and me are cur­rent­ly interns for Hub­bub! Hur­rah! Indeed!

Intern #2 is my part­ner in crime Syl­van. Togeth­er we knocked on Hubbub’s door for an intern­ship. Last year at school (class­es, all that) we both indi­vid­u­al­ly did projects that had very strong sim­i­lar­i­ties. We’re both dri­ven by inter­ven­tions in pub­lic space, apply­ing rule­sets to play­ful­ly get peo­ple out of their com­fort zone, open­ing their eyes.

Before see­ing Kars on our first day at the Hub­bub stu­dio, we plunged head first into our first project: mak­ing real­i­ty games for the sec­ond install­ment of the Learn­ing Lab. Learn­ing Lab is an extra cur­ric­u­lar pro­gram that hon­or stu­dents at the VU and UvA can fol­low to become more famil­iar with, I guess, how the world works. Stu­dents are thrown into the world to learn through expe­ri­enc­ing, rather than bury­ing their heads in books.

The project is led by Thieu Besselink, a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary edu­ca­tion pio­neer. Thieu had some inspir­ing talks regard­ing his lab with, among oth­ers, Evert Hoogen­doorn (the head of our school). He grad­u­al­ly dis­cov­ered that his lab was very very close to being what one could call a game. He fig­ured if he want­ed to actu­al­ly make it a game, he need­ed game design­ers. Along came Hub­bub, and that’s where we came in.

We start­ed off with a bang. Week one was the week before the lab’s kick­off, and with that the only week of pro­duc­tion time before our first game was to be played at the Nat­ur­al Net­work­ing Fes­ti­val. Cause that’s the idea, one big alter­nate real­i­ty game­like game, Urgent Evoke style, nour­ished (if you will) by small­er games, applied to spe­cif­ic loca­tions, peo­ple, hap­pen­ings etcetera. And thus we made a loca­tion-peo­ple-hap­pen­ing-spe­cif­ic game for the NNF, but more on that later!

OK, cool, nice, chill, aight, blog­gerdi­blog, back to work.