Week 191

Last week was the penul­ti­mate pro­duc­tion week for KAIGARA dur­ing which I was present at the Utrecht stu­dio for three days for the very essen­tial face­time that can­not be replaced by Apple’s Face­Time even though it does come close.

Tues­day was a full day of work with the entire team at the Hub­bub stu­dio helmed by the fear­less Kars:

Every­thing is com­ing togeth­er nice­ly and with most of the game already there, we were most­ly busy adding assets and final­iz­ing every­thing else. We also ran a playtest at the stu­dio to explore some future mechan­ics:

Wednes­day was a sim­i­lar day but then with the team work­ing off-site. Kars also got around to pub­lish­ing a bunch of stuff we have been cook­ing up.

First the Beesten­bende movie with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles so we can final­ly share this very nice game we made with an inter­na­tion­al audi­ence:

We also pub­lished an inter­view with Stu­dio Papaver about their game on pop­u­la­tion shrink­age we helped them with. Some­thing like ‘World With­out Peo­ple’ but a bit less apoc­a­lyp­tic. In their words:

We specif­i­cally chose for an alter­nate real­ity game (ARG), because this game type puts an extra lay­er on top of real­ity. The game isn’t only being played in the ‘vir­tual world’, but also in the real, phys­i­cal world. The game ‘Leve de Krimp!’ (‘Let’s shrink!’) enables play­ers to expe­ri­ence their dai­ly lives in a future where nobody antic­i­pated on the shrink­age of the pop­u­la­tion. So: play it before you live it!”

On Thurs­day Hub­bub agent Arjen left for Knutepunkt. Kars and I have want­ed to vis­it this Nordic Larp con­fer­ence for a while now, but nei­ther of us had the time this year to go. Arjen is a main­stay of the Dutch LARP scene so we thought he would ben­e­fit more from the expe­ri­ence and he agreed to be our eyes on the ground. I’ve col­lect­ed his tweets over at Stori­fy and there will be an in depth report here soon.

“The thing about Aragorn is that unless a bunch of hob­bits run­ning away from Nazgul enter the bar, he is a real­ly bor­ing char­ac­ter to play.”

— Hub­bub (@whatsthehubbub) April 19, 2013

Inter­est­ing: the Pales­tin­ian com­mu­ni­ty went on to use larp to dis­cuss taboo’s in their soci­ety, almost like com­mu­ni­ty the­atre #knutepunkt

— Hub­bub (@whatsthehubbub) April 19, 2013

On Fri­day I took the train back to Berlin while Kars met with De Gids about the progress of (Your Dai­ly) Vic­to­ry Boo­gie Woo­gie. The game and sto­ry are crys­tal­liz­ing and it is becom­ing clear both for play­ers and writ­ers how to best play.

Sat­ur­day I wrote my belayed Recess! (the tenth of that already) and Kars played a bunch of games at Joris Dor­man­s’s boardgame week­end. I am incred­i­bly jeal­ous espe­cial­ly of this bit of El Grande: