Week 178

So it’s been a snowy week here in Utrecht—and I’m pret­ty sure it’s been more than chilly in Berlin too. We start­ed the week ear­li­er than usu­al, on Sun­day, with myself plug­ging away at a revised chap­ter for the Game­ful World book—trying to cram in as many ref­er­ences as I could, and gen­er­al­ly clar­i­fy­ing and stream­lin­ing my argu­ment.1 I was joined by Alper who had been in NL the past few days. We paid a vis­it to Plof for some fries—can’t get prop­er Dutch fries in Germany—and The Vil­lage for some cof­fee, and by the end of the after­noon Alper hopped on a train back to Berlin.

Mon­day I’d planned to spend most of the day fin­ish­ing the chap­ter, but I was rude­ly inter­rupt­ed by a Dutch tele­vi­sion news crew, who asked my opin­ion on what turned out to be a real­i­ty game gone awry. Most of these were begin­ner’s mistakes—such as a too-seri­ous theme—that could’ve been eas­i­ly avoid­ed by read­ing a few bits of Per­va­sive Games. If you’re inter­est­ed (and under­stand Dutch) here’s the short item they pro­duced from inter­views with myself and the stu­dents that were tar­get­ed by the game.

Most of the rest of the week was tak­en up with fur­ther work on KAIGARA. Alper pro­duced a tech­ni­cal memo and I cre­at­ed a one-slide pre­sen­ta­tion of the game con­cept. The two togeth­er are used to get buy-in inside the client organization.

Aside from this, I spent some time with Her­man on Thurs­day talk­ing about HIRAME, which is on the back burn­er for the moment but will shift back to the fore­front mid Feb­ru­ary in all like­li­hood. We also dis­cussed the sec­ond phase of KANI, for which you might remem­ber we did con­cept devel­op­ment mid-2012. It took a while, but it now looks like we will be asked to actu­al­ly build the thing.

All of which means the first half of 2013 is start­ing to look busy. Good.

Back in Berlin, Alper also worked on a posi­tion paper that will hope­ful­ly lead to us par­tic­i­pat­ing in a game­ful-design-relat­ed work­shop at an aca­d­e­m­ic con­fer­ence. Being non-aca­d­e­mics this is always a slight­ly painful process for us, but the orga­niz­ers explic­it­ly reached out to prac­ti­tion­ers which we find com­mend­able so we’ve giv­en it our best shot.

Final­ly, and hap­pi­ly, on Fri­day con­tracts were signed for the first stage of FURAPPA, which is con­cept devel­op­ment also, for our very first Ger­man client. This is some­thing Alper has been busy with for some time. I’m real­ly excit­ed about this and I hope it will be the first of many more clients out­side of the Netherlands.

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