Things we’re working on (volume 3)

Four months have passed since the pre­vi­ous update on our projects so it’s about time for a new one.

Curating a playful exhibition

The love­ly folk at Storm have asked me to return as cura­tor of the play­ful-slash-inter­ac­tive exhi­bi­tion that will be part of youth the­atre fes­ti­val Twee­t­akt 2012. I did the one this year, had fun, learned a lot too and we got some nice respons­es so I’m keen to have at it again. It’s ear­ly stages so I am most­ly mak­ing lists of inter­est­ing work that has caught my eye over the past year. The next step will be to fil­ter it and try to come up with a cohe­sive selec­tion. Some pat­terns I’ve spot­ted thus far are ten­ta­tive­ly titled Robots and Mak­ing. We’ll see how those develop.

Publishing on Code 4

You may have noticed a new project write­up in the port­fo­lio about Code 4 (pre­vi­ous­ly referred to as Maguro). We’ve talked about it at Chi Sparks and Think Design Play and are now in the process of pro­duc­ing a short video that’ll hope­ful­ly give you a bet­ter feel for the play­er expe­ri­ence. One of the chal­lenges of work­ing with per­va­sive games is that a lot of the action hap­pens off the screen and so there are few arti­facts that we can use to show the game. The game is in fact a per­for­mance that needs to be reg­is­tered, so that is what we’re doing now. I’m work­ing with the great Hein Lager­weij on this one who I first col­lab­o­rat­ed with for the Buta videosketch. Speak­ing of which…

Publishing on Buta

We screened a sneak pre­view of the Buta videosketch at Think Design Play and I think it’s safe to say we raised a few eye­brows. It was inter­est­ing pre­sent­ing work at an aca­d­e­m­ic con­fer­ence where most of what was pre­sent­ed were arti­cles. I got the sense some atten­dees weren’t as accus­tomed to respond­ing to stuff as they are to dis­cussing ideas. On the upside, I noticed lots of com­ments and ques­tions that were exact­ly the kinds of con­sid­er­a­tions we want to stir with this video. I am going to ask for a bit more patience on your side and promise you’ll get to watch the video your­self soon.

Art van Tri­est and Hein Lager­weij at the Vechtclub

Making a game that teaches astronomy

Final­ly, there’s Iru­ka, which is the main project hap­pen­ing in the stu­dio at the moment. It’s me and Karel Mil­lenaar (game design heavy­weight) work­ing with Noord­hoff Pub­lish­ers (pro­duc­ers of teach­ing mate­ri­als for all lev­els of edu­ca­tion) and the Amstelveen Col­lege (a sec­ondary school) to explore the oppor­tu­ni­ties games and play pro­vide in the class­room. Specif­i­cal­ly, we’re look­ing at nov­el teach­ing meth­ods for the ‘gen­er­al nat­ur­al sci­ences’ course which is manda­to­ry for all fourth-year stu­dents in VWO. This course cov­ers a lot of sub­jects, but we’re build­ing a pilot around astron­o­my. That’s right, we’re explor­ing space! We’ve come to the point where a con­cept has been approved and we can start to work out the details and build a pro­to­type. Playtest­ing will hap­pen in the class­room through­out the rest of this year and hope­ful­ly, come jan­u­ary, we’ll have some­thing to share with you.

Any­way, that’s it from me for now. As always, if any of this peaks your inter­est, don’t be shy and drop a note below.