Week 165

My streak of talks con­tin­ued last week with a brief appear­ance on Mon­day at Play­ing City, an install­ment of City Think Lab, which has been chart­ing the var­i­ous ways of think­ing about cities over the course of the past year. I dis­cussed our gen­er­al approach for design­ing games for cities, and in par­tic­u­lar on what basis we choose cer­tain tech­nolo­gies. This allowed me to go off on a tan­gent towards the end of my 10 min­utes about tech­nol­o­gy as a mate­r­i­al, and ded­i­ca­tion to all aspects of game cre­ation, with Jiro Ono as my guid­ing archetype.

On Tues­day I had the plea­sure of going over my TEDx­Utrecht talk with speak­ing coach Joni Bais. I have to admit I was a bit skep­ti­cal about what I might gain from the ses­sion. But Joni set me straight, with an hon­est attempt to gauge my per­son­al approach to the sub­ject and tai­lor her advice accord­ing­ly. Very refreshing.

Some writ­ings appeared here over the course of the week which might inter­est you: one, a write­up of Galaxy Tours, a design research project about class­room games for sci­ence edu­ca­tion and two, notes from chief tech­nol­o­gy agent Alper on the devel­op­ment of Beesten­bende.

The week was round­ed off with some work from myself and Simon on Vic­to­ry Boo­gie Woo­gie. Simon pol­ished the mock­ups we’ll show at De Gids anniver­sary gala this Thurs­day. I con­tin­ued to explore some game design direc­tions using Machi­na­tions.

And on Fri­day, I met with Tim Bosje to reflect on our run of Cer­e­mo­ny of Sur­prise at the Hide&Seek Week­ender and catch up over beers at De Bas­taard.