Week 246

A large part of our time these weeks is spent writ­ing pro­pos­als. A lot of things are head­ing our way so that’s good and it’s a wel­come change from mak­ing things, which we’ve been doing for the past months. One fair­ly crys­tallised con­cept, code­named SHIJIMI, is mov­ing for­ward steadi­ly and anoth­er, about Tokyo is in a pre­lim­i­nary stage. They are quite dif­fer­ent but what they have in com­mon is that they both deal with urban­ism. Coin­ci­den­tal­ly Kars was also revis­ing his chap­ter for the Game­ful World which is about urban play and should be out lat­er this year.

Stand­ing saw dra­mat­ic devel­op­ments back and forth with Apple and made its way to the app store in time for a pub­lic launch in two weeks at an event over at Media­mat­ic in Ams­ter­dam. You can read an excerpt from Dirk Vis’s essay on it over at De Gids.

Kars went off teach­ing at Delft Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy with stu­dents of Ianus who are design­ing boardgames for id8. The next day he went to lec­ture in Lei­den on play at the local Studi­um Gen­erale. From what I gath­er fun was had and minds were blown.

I had lunch with Mike Laz­er-Walk­er who was in town, a very inter­est­ing game mak­er from New York. I wrote a retort (full text) on a fair­ly uneven piece on gam­i­fi­ca­tion in Ger­man Süd­deutsche. I was pleased that that got a reply from the author who is also the edi­tor in chief.

I asked around in the Berlin game scene whether there would be a launch par­ty for Sports­friends in Berlin and one spon­ta­neous­ly hap­pened. We took over an event in Berlin’s esports cafe Melt­down and found out that play­ing Joust with­out sound is hard. Thanks to Sjors and Loren­zo for putting that together.

And then on the week­end I got to play Betray­al at the House on the Hill by Rob Davi­au, a game I had want­ed to play ever since I saw him talk at PRACTICE.