Week 168

While Alper is still away in the Antipodes, and I am sent the occa­sion­al hol­i­day snap (or #instabrag?) through Insta­gram, work con­tin­ues to hap­pen in the Utrecht stu­dio. When I say work, it appears I most­ly mean meet­ings, because look­ing back that’s what last week main­ly con­sist­ed of. Let’s see:

I sat down with Irene and went over her TEDxBrus­sels talk about our work on Pig Chase. It includes new mate­r­i­al we’ll unveil for the first time at the event. I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing how folks will respond to it.

I ran through my TEDx­Utrecht talk a few more times and tweaked it a bit. It’s become an incred­i­bly con­densed sum­ma­ry of our per­spec­tive on applied games. I guess I’m ready as I’ll ever be.

Will Evans was in Utrecht to run a Design Stu­dio work­shop on Mon­day. I decid­ed to skip the work­shop and just head to the drinks after. Which was good, as I got to catch up with NL’s num­ber one geek mom Mar­ri­je and the mighty Yohan. The next day I caught up with Will over cof­fee, where I had the plea­sure of get­ting a sneak pre­view of the talk he would give at the UX Cock­tail Hour that same night.

That evening, I vis­it­ed my for­mer employ­er Info.nl, chat­ted with some erst­while col­leagues and sub­se­quent­ly head­ed out to catch up with Iskan­der over dinner.

On Wednes­day I briefly vis­it­ed Inno­va­tion Day to attend the Utrechtse Ster award cer­e­mo­ny. Pig Chase was nom­i­nat­ed but lost to Cristal Deliv­ery’s “con­trolled drug release tech­nol­o­gy” which involves clever nan­otech. A wor­thy oppo­nent and deserved victor.

More award shenani­gans took place that same evening when the Dutch Game Awards nom­i­nees were announced. Beesten­bende did­n’t make the cut, which to be per­fect­ly hon­est is quite dis­ap­point­ing. We’ve real­ly tried to show that a dif­fer­ent, more open-end­ed approach with­in applied games is pos­si­ble. But sad­ly we did­n’t suc­ceed in con­vinc­ing the jury this is wor­thy of recog­ni­tion. Oh well.

I got to meet Anne and Zineb of Stu­dio Papaver and Chris Col­laris, who have been select­ed for the third edi­tion of the Stu­dio for Unso­licit­ed Archi­tec­ture. They’re work­ing on some inter­est­ing stuff deal­ing with pop­u­la­tion shrink­age, which requires a rad­i­cal dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive from plan­ners, one not focused on growth mea­sures, but qual­i­ta­tive mea­sures and the inten­si­fi­ca­tion of local net­works. As they are con­sid­er­ing a game-like we might offer them some assis­tance. We’ll have to see.

At the end of the week I wrote some copy for the upcom­ing Hub­bub web­site realign (stay tuned) and played anoth­er game of In a Wicked Age with a mot­ley crew of friends and asso­ciates. The game’s going from strength to strength as we unlearn some of our old style table­top RPG habits and real­ly use its sys­tem to tell balls-to-the-wall Conanesque sword and sor­cery stories.

And with that, we’re all set for week 169.