Week 127

It was one of those weeks where Mur­phy’s Law was bound to rear its ugly head. And it did. Luck­i­ly, we got through it with lit­tle more than a scratch.

The stu­dio sched­ule for this week was packed, var­i­ous appoint­ments for dif­fer­ent projects involv­ing a diverse con­fig­u­ra­tion of peo­ple. I also had a speak­ing engage­ment lined up for Thurs­day, at Euroson­ic Noorder­slag. That still need­ed some prep and the plan was to do that in between the oth­er stuff.

Of course, I had to fall ill with a nasty head cold halfway through the week.

Nev­er­the­less, I man­aged to pre­pare the slides while nurs­ing myself at home on Wednes­day and jumped on a train north­bound on Thurs­day. The talk — a romp through var­i­ous rea­sons why I think play is impor­tant, what makes games spe­cial, and what won­der­ful things they can do — went well, but did­n’t get the expo­sure I was hop­ing for. So I think I’ll shelf it for anoth­er go and some rede­vel­op­ment at a next occa­sion.1

I also got to hang out with the fun and clever Matthew Sheret before and after the talk, and saw Monoban­da’s DIY DJ get some well-deserved exposure.

On Fri­day I was still recov­er­ing, man­aged to get some work done but stopped ear­ly. So I am fin­ish­ing up on a Sat­ur­day after­noon now.

Oth­er than this, I worked with Irene on a num­ber of blog posts we’re writ­ing about Pig Chase’s design process. The first one, a brief anec­dote of how the idea for the project first emerged is already up.

While on the sub­ject of Pig Chase, we got anoth­er round of nice pub­lic­i­ty this week, with arti­cles on Boing Boing, io9 and Huff­in­g­ton Post, amongst others.

I also worked with Hanne, Alper and Karel on Saba. It was our first prop­er design ses­sion so there was a lot of hand-wav­ing, dis­cussing the brief, sketch­ing and even a round of the Metagame to flex our game-debat­ing mus­cles. We’ve made plans for some field research, which will hap­pen next week.

Alper’s also look­ing into var­i­ous iOS game devel­op­ment tech­nolo­gies, and helped me out with find­ing a tool to map the WiFi sig­nals in the muse­um, which we might use for indoor posi­tion­ing.2

By the way, Alper wrote a brief note on his move to Berlin and his plans for a Hub­bub satel­lite stu­dio there.

So, cri­sis avert­ed. Let’s hope next week unfolds in a slight­ly more order­ly fashion.

1. My men­tion of how Hub­bub is orga­nized, some­thing we call the Heist Mod­el, did get some nice response though. [↩]
2. It looks like Netspot will do the trick. [↩]