Week 164

At the start of last week, I pre­pared for and deliv­ered a num­ber of pre­sen­ta­tions at TFI’s inspi­ra­tion day about games & her­itage. The first was a short case as part of a ses­sion lead by Valen­ti­jn Byvanck, about ways in which games might enrich a hypo­thet­i­cal car muse­um. This ses­sion was aimed at iden­ti­fy­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties as well as chal­lenges around bring­ing the worlds of her­itage and games togeth­er. I also did a brief port­fo­lio pre­sen­ta­tion, to show­case Hub­bub’s work and vision. Final­ly, togeth­er with Aniek Bax of the Uni­ver­si­ty Muse­um Utrecht I shared lessons learned from our work on Beesten­bende. Which lead to live­ly dis­cus­sions with the peo­ple in the room about such things as: what is the best way to con­nect an exhib­it and a game? To what extent do we still need pub­licly fund­ed projects in this space, and so on.

Speak­ing of Beesten­bende, the game is fin­ished although not yet avail­able on the App Store. We have pub­lished a project write­up, which includes a short pro­mo­tion­al video. I think it pro­vides a good sense of what peo­ple actu­al­ly do when play­ing, in stead of what hap­pens on the screen, which real­ly isn’t the point of a game like this.1

Beesten­bende from Hub­bub on Vimeo.

I’ve also pub­lished the write­up of my talk at the Hide&Seek Week­ender Con­fer­ence. It’s about pub­lic play and the weird. I enjoyed putting this togeth­er, and the thoughts are very much still in devel­op­ment. I hope it’s of some use to oth­ers and wel­come any thoughts or com­ments it might spark.

Work con­tin­ues on the SAKE front. Alper has start­ed set­ting up a first dig­i­tal pro­to­type. Simon is sketch­ing out screens, some of which we’ll show at the Gid­s’s anniver­sary in a few weeks. In the mean­time, I con­tin­ue to fid­dle with the game design. I have a rea­son­ably sta­ble set of fea­tures for a first release but hope to be able to iter­ate on those once we’ve played through them with a select group.

I end­ed the week in the trusty old Bas­taard, drink­ing a few beers with Monoban­da who have just launched their lat­est project, a gor­geous respon­sive audio­vi­su­al expe­ri­ence lay­ered on top of a 1000-year old ship on dis­play in Utrecht’s Cen­tral Museum.

1. We’re work­ing to get it trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish, I’ll let you know when we do. [↩]