Week 204

In Berlin, Alper spent time prepar­ing for an upcom­ing two-day work­shop on-site for SAME. He’s chew­ing on com­pli­cat­ed stuff togeth­er with Sebas­t­ian, involv­ing on-the-job learn­ing in an unfa­mil­iar cul­ture. We’re look­ing at apply­ing prin­ci­ples of self-deter­mi­na­tion the­o­ry and we need to do as much of it with ana­log means. No mean feat.

Mean­while, I most­ly worked on ASARI, vis­it­ing Info.nl for meet­ings with the design team twice, and iter­at­ing on my con­cept sketch­es for game-like inter­ac­tions. I was quite pleased with how after many rounds of revi­sion, a some­what pre­dictable mini-games-based idea has mor­phed into an inter­est­ing mix of info­graph­ics and toy-like interactions.

Even though each of us is active­ly work­ing on one of these projects, we’re get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter at build­ing in time for quick, focused dis­cus­sions that improve the qual­i­ty of our work tremen­dous­ly. You could call it WAT: work­ing apart together.

Besides client work, we are com­mit­ted to pur­su­ing more self-com­mis­sioned projects. At the moment, this is AJI: an inves­ti­ga­tion into play­ful­ly aug­ment­ing civ­il dis­obe­di­ence and “piaz­za plus social media”. I hashed out screens based on the min­i­mal-viable set of user sto­ries we had agreed on after some dis­cus­sion. Alper then sat down to bang out a first pro­to­type, which I will have to take a look at soon…

More extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ty took place in the form of playtest­ing on the cof­fee tast­ing game I’ve been think­ing about for far too long already. Alper had a go togeth­er with Peter at KANT and pro­vid­ed me with valu­able feed­back. I have a list of things I want to tan­gle with, now to just make the time to do so.

Speak­ing of KANT—the new work­place Alper has tak­en res­i­dence in and there­fore also Hub­bub’s new base of operations—a new overview of what all of KAN­T’s illus­tri­ous res­i­dents have to offer has gone up.

In Utrecht, I closed off the week with an excel­lent FRIDAYS AT 7. We had a nice turnout, most notably Joris Dor­mans, who put all game design­ers present to shame by bring­ing not one but three game pro­to­types (one dig­i­tal, one boardgame and one cardgame). Nat­u­ral­ly, we played all three of them and were more than entertained.