Week 177

Kars said it was my turn to write wee­knotes, so here I am. I’ll be tak­ing them up more reg­u­lar­ly from now on. At the start of the week we put up a notice about open­ings for res­i­dents at our Utrecht stu­dio. If you’re inter­est­ed in shar­ing the space, ideas and cof­fee, feel wel­come to reply.

Kars spent most of the week doing a game design sprint for KAIGARA after last week’s set­up. We also had to fur­ther elab­o­rate on the hard and soft tech­nol­o­gy frame­works the game will be devel­oped in. The rest of the week it was more calls, more doc­u­men­ta­tion and game design, game design, game design.

Kars man­aged to squeeze in an inter­view with Wired UK about wild play (see ‘The Strange Things Peo­ple Play’) and why we think it is a good alter­na­tive for games that nei­ther want to be casu­al nor instrumental.

To clar­i­fy our alter­na­tive stance, I start­ed draft­ing one page posts for the con­cepts of gam­i­fi­ca­tion and seri­ous games. We take issue with both of those phras­ings but because they do have cur­ren­cy, we think it is worth while to reach out to any­one who does want to cre­ate mean­ing­ful results.

The Dutch Game Gar­den of course also had their New Year’s drinks which were a ton of fun. I trav­eled to Ams­ter­dam on some oth­er busi­ness on Thurs­day and we took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to syn­chro­nize work for what was left of the week.

On Fri­day Kars went to the Hague to test the KAIGARA pro­to­type he built this week and talk more about our tar­get audi­ence. By all indi­ca­tions every­thing went well.

Lat­er that after­noon he joined me at the esteemed offices of the Groene Ams­ter­dammer where we had a meet­ing with De Gids about SAKE. We decid­ed to add some more test­ing because the hol­i­day peri­od had been too busy for most and we now also have a bet­ter idea about the launch staging.

One of the rea­sons why I was in the Nether­lands was to be able to see the final play in the mightyso­ci­ety series. We have an active pro­fes­sion­al inter­est in the­ater that is tied up with our skep­ti­cism about the medi­um’s future in a dig­i­tal­ly inter­ac­tive world. I’ll be writ­ing more about that in Dutch elsewhere.

On Sun­day we had anoth­er work ses­sion ses­sion at the Utrecht stu­dio, aid­ed by the excel­lent cof­fee and atmos­phere in the Vil­lage. Kars con­tin­ued iter­at­ing on his book chap­ter and I was busy writ­ing some odds and ends. I played a bit of the Luftrausers beta on a spare lap­top and destroyed my poor plane in short order. At the end of the after­noon I caught a train back to Berlin from which I am now writ­ing these weeknotes.