Week 171

This week start­ed with a two-day work­shop with Jeroen van Mas­trigt of WLYW for a start­up. We played and eval­u­at­ed their game, and sub­se­quent­ly sug­gest­ed a redesign con­sist­ing of the same parts but recom­bined to be more dynam­ic and generative.

Writ­ing on my Game­ful World chap­ter con­tin­ued. There was a slight hic­cup on Tues­day but I got right back into it on Wednes­day (and have since fin­ished a first draft).

On Wednes­day evening I attend­ed the penul­ti­mate Vis­i­ble Cities, which fea­tured a love­ly line­up. DUS Archi­tects talked about their Kamer­mak­er project—an enor­mous 3D print­er with which they are inves­ti­gat­ing the impact of dig­i­tal fab­ri­ca­tion on archi­tec­ture. I par­tic­u­lar­ly liked their mus­ings on the pos­si­ble emer­gence of a new Ams­ter­dam School and a return to orna­ment. Dig­i­tal­ly fab­ri­cat­ed build­ing mate­ri­als might require more orna­ment for struc­tur­al integri­ty, in con­trast to their indus­tri­al counterparts.

MVRDV pre­sent­ed a cou­ple of future sce­nar­ios for decen­tral­ized, par­tic­i­pa­to­ry urban plan­ning that ranged from the utopi­an to the anarchist.

And Ben Cerveny—finally able to vis­it Ams­ter­dam again after wrap­ping up his adven­ture with Bloom—shared his mus­ings on the impli­ca­tions of our new shared infor­ma­tion­al space for the way we use, per­form and even play the city. I was most struck by his sug­ges­tion to start think­ing in terms of ‘instruments’—essentially tools that allow urban­ites to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly bet­ter see (instru­ment in the sense of for instance a tele­scope) and per­form (instru­ment in the sense of for instance a piano) the city.

On Thurs­day I pre­sent­ed on Pig Chase at Game in the City. This includ­ed the new mate­r­i­al first shown by Irene in Brus­sels. Being at Game in the City was also an oppor­tu­ni­ty to catch up with many peo­ple in the Dutch games scene. And of course I made sure I played some games—most notably Monoban­da’s new exper­i­men­tal audio game Remem­ber­ing, which real­ly does stir mem­o­ries, and Luftrausers by Vlam­beer, which just keeps get­ting more ridicu­lous­ly awesome.

The rest of the week was tak­en up by busi­ness devel­op­ment. We final­ized a pro­pos­al for some game­ful design con­sult­ing with an edu­ca­tion start­up, and I met with an inter­est­ing new prospect for a game instal­la­tion in the cor­po­rate health space.